The Madness of Shadow Hunting

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The Madness of Shadow Hunting

This article keeps on resonating deeper and deeper.

I've known this for a long time. Perhaps since my first acid trip. Knowing and seeing the presence of Shadow in all humans, it made me (precariously) cocky enough for me to approach it and feel into it.

Our communities of neo-pagan-tribal-hippies are so enamored with beauty and bliss -- as perfectly illustrated by the festival scene and the music scene -- and so ill-equipped with the tools necessary to handle Shadow that a veneer of dogmatic spirituality covers everything as a warm blanket, leaving it up to a few people to wrestle with the Shadow of the whole community, including the demons we create so we can cast them away in the illusion that it will make everything better. At the same time, we cannot ask for each and everyone to always wrestle with Shadow because we feel that they need it. We certainly cannot effectively blame, shame, guilt, belittle, or demonize others in doing so. When we do, we engage them with our own Shadow.

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I LOVE

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I LOVE

I love.

I wish I could say that I love you, but the truth is that I just love and you happened to get in the way.

Now, most people would take offense at this, tell me how impersonal it feels, how if I just love everybody because they happen to be there then my love for any particular person is not special. But you are special before I love you. You are special even if I do not love you. You are unique, and I am unique, and therefore the love we share is unique. If you don’t feel special, it is only because you have learned to define yourself in opposition to others, competitively. You have learned to identify particular qualities in other people, decided that only by matching up to those qualities will you be worthy and important, and then you don’t match up. Maybe those particular qualities are irrelevant to your unique nature and your essence is characterized by other qualities entirely. But you do not recognize your extraordinary and beautiful qualities; instead you have lost in a competition of comparisons. And you have learned to do this and so now you are insecure.

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Attachment Theory: Tools, Articles & Resources

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Attachment Theory: Tools, Articles & Resources

Welcome to my Attachment Theory Resources

Below you will find a variety of resources (tools, books, article, writing) about attachment theory.
You are free to use any of it as you as you give proper attribution to the author.
Now dive and dive deep, as the landscape of attachment theory is a rich new territory with much to explore!

Do you want to learn to become a Secure Attacher?

Truly, the solution to being in better more authentic relating where mutuality and emotional balance are present is to become more secure yourself. But this is a long journey with many pitfalls. Reach out to me to chat about taking the first steps towards happiness and fulfillment in relating!

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The Dance of Anxious and Avoidant Relating

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The Dance of Anxious and Avoidant Relating

Welcome to the Dance of Anxious and Avoidant Relating!

FIRST, here is my resources blog post (tools/books/articles/writings) about Attachment Theory.

In the upcoming days/weeks/months, I will be populating this page with more information about developing your own secure attachment style, which is by far the most reliable way to create solid and stable and authentic relationships. For those of you who are anxious, avoidant, disorganized (with strategies of both anxious and avoidant), this is for you as you will often find yourself in an anxious/avoidant relationship dance/trap, and this is something that has been fascinating me for many years (both for having been —and still am — in them and for seeing others in them too. There are many layers, pitfalls, and challenges that await you, but I assure you, it is possible—and indeed, I could argue that it is what most people seek when they desire “the good life” that philosophy teaches us about.

(click on the title to read more)

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The Journey to Secure Attachment

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The Journey to Secure Attachment

Welcome to the Journey to Secure Attachment!

FIRST, here is my resources page (tools/books/articles/writings) about Attachment Theory.

There are many layers, pitfalls, and challenges that await you on your Journey to Secure, but I assure you, it is possible—and indeed, I could argue that it is what most people seek when they desire “the good life” that philosophy teaches us about.

But beyond philosophy— and morality, ie what is good/better/right as a way to achieve it-- the journey to a secure attachment style has to necessarily begin with the nervous system which, at any given moment, gives us a sense of how we feel about the world, the people around us, and our circumstances. In other words, it’s our nervous system which tells us whether we are securely engaged with reality, moment to moment to moment.

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The Stages of Responsibility

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The Stages of Responsibility

Most people think of responsibility and accountability as something clear and simple, something you assign to someone. But that’s just wishful thinking. We know that it won’t work unless that person has what it takes to make it happen. As such, responsibility can be defined as the areas or life/reality where they ready, willing, able, and informed—to effectively engage with.

Read that one again. If someone is lacking in readiness, willingness, ability, or if they don’t have enough information, they won’t be able to do the job of engaging well in that area.

In other words, they will more likely fail, and possibly hurt themselves or someone else in the process.

In fact, this connects with trust (ie the belief that someone will be responsible): you can absolutely trust someone to be responsible and accountable for the things they are ready, willing, able, and informed enough about. Everything else, however, you won’t be able to trust them because they won’t have what it takes to do so.

Beyond that, there’s 3 stages of responsibility, which, when developed, will lead to what I call sovereignty (ie the ability to make better choices for self and others, in connection and trust). Here they are:

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Deconstructing Subspace

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Deconstructing Subspace

By Om Rupani

There’s no point in defining subspace. It is a particular locale of consciousness. As with all locales of consciousness, you have to be there to know what it is — Love, Bliss, Union, Existential Crisis, Dark Night Of The Soul, Envy, Resentment, etc.

Let’s instead sketch out a rough map that can help you get to subspace more reliably. Here are 3 pointers.

1. LOWER THE SUBMISSIVE’S VIGILANCE

You are asking someone to surrender to you. You are asking someone to give up control. You are going to have to convince them that it is safe for them to do so. Normally, we take care of ourself with our own vigilance. The more uncertain and dangerous our environment is in any given moment, the higher our state of vigilance.

Vigilance is energy consuming. It is exhausting. If you remain vigilant incessantly without being able to take a break from it, you will literally have a nervous breakdown. Paranoid and manic episodes resemble our vigilance mechanism in overdrive.

DOM’S ROLE IN REDUCING THE SUBMISSIVE’S VIGILANCE:

Be steady. Be calm. And become your submissive’s environment. The Dom is a buffer zone between the submissive and the rest of the world. And the Dom’s claim is, ‘Within this buffer zone of my presence, my field, you can relax because I’ve got you covered. I’m vigilant enough for both of us. I’m keeping watch, so you rest.’

Everything that makes you more uncertain or jittery as a Dom will lower your ability to make this offer to your submissive.

Keep your attention on your submissive at all times. Respond to your submissive’s system moment to moment. This will convey to your submissive that it is safe for them to keep their vigilance turned low. The moment your attention falters, your submissive’s vigilance will go up

SUBMISSIVE’S ROLE IN REDUCING THEIR OWN VIGILANCE.

Trust. Give your Dom a chance to hold you. Give up the narrative that nobody is strong enough to hold you or nobody is interested in holding you.

Forgive! Forgive past breakdowns. Forgive the times in the past when you were not held well. Create new opportunities and occasions for your own surrender.

2. SEDUCE/LEAD/PUSH THE SUBMISSIVE INTO HER CHAOS

At the beginning levels of your exploration in D/S, it is sufficient to say: ‘The submissive GIVES UP control. The Dom TAKES control.’ Well and good. When you have done this for a while, and you have paved the path to subspace with your own experiences a few times, you will observe that a more precise way to describe this journey would be to say, ‘The submissive is TAKEN out of control, and the Dom TAKES the submissive out of control.’ This state of ‘out of control’ is the submissive’s zone of CHAOS. The point of a D/S scene is for the submissive to access her chaos. And because accessing one’s chaos is a dicey affair, it’s good to have someone else there who is holding the container and guiding you into that chaos. And it is very much recommended that someone be there to bring you OUT of the chaos when your ride is over. Once you make this transition from the giving/taking of control to the guiding of submissive to and from her chaos, you will more deeply understand what the Dom-Sub partnership is about. You will understand that it is actually NOT about POWER, centrally. At the heart of D/S play is the Submissive’s Chaos.

DOM’S ROLE IN PUSHING THE SUBMISSIVE INTO HER CHAOS:

Don’t be afraid to take control of your submissive’s system. In fact, get off on it. Be present enough that you can take control skillfully and masterfully.

Deal with your own shadow. Be familiar with your own chaos. Taking someone into their chaos is a shamanic act. Would you trust yourself to a shaman who has not done their own work? Taken their own journey? Dealt with their own chaos?

Be prepared for anything. Initially you may come to this play just looking to add fun elements to your erotic life. That is also well and good. But our Eros is complicated and all tangled up. If you really want to dig deep into your partner’s Eros, you need to be able to deal with everything your partner’s eros is tangled up in. Be ready for all the rest. It’s coming.

SUBMISSIVE’S ROLE IN ACCESSING HER CHAOS:

Know that this is the true point of your surrender. Your primary surrender is to your Dom. Your ultimate surrender is to your own chaos.

Be gracious. To ask your Dom for a scene is to essentially ask your Dom to push you into your chaos. If you are making this invitation to your Dom, follow through! Be ready to go. Plunge in. Be courageous. Do your part. Don’t waste your Dom’s time and energy. And appreciate your Dom for holding this space for you so that you can dive and take your journey.

3. SURRENDER TO THE SUBMISSIVE’S CHAOS

The submissive’s chaos is the king of the scene. The submissive’s chaos rules over both the Dom & the Sub. The submissive bows down to the submissive’s chaos; the dom bows down to the submissive’s chaos. The submissive’s chaos has the final word in what any particular scene is really about.

DOM’S AND SUB’S ROLES IN SURRENDERING TO THIS CHAOS:

Listen to the chaos. Respond to the chaos. Dance with the chaos. It’s ok to set intentions and pick a direction for your scene, but your plans don’t trump the chaos that emerges. Do not resist the chaos, she will always win. If you fight her, she will fragment and destroy your scene. Trust that there are greater forces at play in our soul journey, and the pieces of this journey come through the portal of chaos. Birth is messy. Make room for the mess. Celebrate it. See the potentiality in it.

Integrate. Chaos is not the final step, integration is. Don’t leave the submissive in their chaos. Bring them back. Come back. As the Dom, do superlative aftercare. There can be deep love and affection and bonding in integration. This is heavy-duty Oxytocin land. Enjoy and relish the sweetness of integration. As the sub, don’t get hooked on your chaos. You can’t really hold on to your chaos; you can only hold on to false drama of chaos. Shun the drama. Integrate what you have experienced instead. Come back into wholeness. Do what you need to do to integrate from THIS ONE SCENE. If there is more chaos to be dealt with, grapple with it next time. There is always more chaos to deal with. Our levels go on and on.

— Om Rupani

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A Love Letter to the Anxiously Attached

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A Love Letter to the Anxiously Attached

by Crystallin Dion

My dear,

When you meet someone you really like, and when they make it clear that they really like you back, that's one of the best feelings ever (I get it). But if we’re being honest, you can sometimes be a bit quick to get physical, even to get sexual. Quick to be in a lot of communication, to spend a lot of time together, to use the language of “we, us, and our,” and “boyfriend” or “girlfriend." Quick to “choose” them, to call it a relationship, or partnership, or even love, and to peer all the way into a long and happy (imagined) future together.

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Excitement and Boredom in Relationships

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Excitement and Boredom in Relationships

… from an attachment theory perspective

by Maurizio Dreamhunter Alvarez

As I dive deeper and deeper into the world of attachment theory, there's one piece that has been especially intriguing to me.

Excitement and Boredom in relationships. What drives excitement in insecure connection? And why does security appear "boring" to those working with insecure wounds?

Here's some of what I've discovered.

(click the title for the rest of the article)

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Get Stubborn With It: A Relationship Manifesto

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Get Stubborn With It: A Relationship Manifesto

by Paget Norton

“The line between madness and stubbornness is a very thin one.” ~Philippe Lewis

You want your relationship to work? You don’t know if you should stay together? Get stubborn. Stop the whining. Take a stand for your commitment. It doesn’t matter if you made it near an isolated lake with five thousand humping frogs in chorus or in front of two hundred of your closest friends and relatives. You made it. You spoke your word. Is your commitment that small that you would leave now that things have gotten hard? And by hard, I don’t mean, “We’re fighting over domestic duties again. We’re not having enough sex. We wish we had money”. By hard, I mean your soul has been gutted from your body and you’re looking for a triple-soul-bypass. That’s hard.

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Some thoughts on why people hurt people...

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Some thoughts on why people hurt people...

…and what might be done about it.

by Rain Phutureprimitive (reposted with permission)

🖤Nearly everyone has experienced trauma or wounding in their lives. Left unhealed, this can lead to all kinds of behavior, choices, actions, emotional states, unconscious survival patterns and illnesses that end up lowering the quality of our lives and negatively impacting those around us.

🖤Every person on this planet has a different threshold for, and response to, traumatic events. What is traumatic for one person may go unnoticed by another. If it landed as traumatic to the person in question, then it was traumatic for them. Likewise, what can trigger this unhealed wounding is also different for each person. The fact that it may or may not make sense to you is irrelevant to the fact that, for them, they may be reliving unhealed wounding and may not even be aware of it.

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Childhood PTSD is no jokes, regardless of your background

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Childhood PTSD is no jokes, regardless of your background

by Curt Hammer

I’m not sure where to start with this...it’s so close to my heart for many reasons. I grew up in a crazy level of privilege in terms of the race, gender, and socio-economic status of my town and school...and my family was one of the poorest in our town. So I supposed “rich-poor” would describe it.

Watching my classmates have every possible opportunity while I wondered why I couldn’t seem to function, even with a great education and many things paid for just by being a part of the town I grew up in...yet I couldn’t seem to understand why I was so...different. ADHD? Anxiety? Depression? Was I just lazy? After 30 years of bad choices and a few good ones, and MANY mixed feelings, I discovered that I had C-PTSD.

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The Anxious-Avoidant Relationship Dance

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The Anxious-Avoidant Relationship Dance

by Mike Thomas

The non-clinical population has an even amount of male and female people with anxious attachment, as well as those with avoidant attachment. The differences in gender are nuanced, but for the sake of understanding attachment from a human perspective, it’s important to step outside of the need to separate men and women’s differences, and step into the human nervous system free of gender distinctions...from there we can look at differences, but connection must be made first in order to cultivate safety in the nervous systems of BOTH partners. This is an art form that requires tremendous patience, but the payoff is well worth it.

Stan Tatkin suggests a method called “catch and release” for anxious partners who have avoidant partners who seem to be “too distant.”

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What’s Good About Anger?

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What’s Good About Anger?

A different look at where anger comes from, and how to engage with it.

by Mike Thomas

Anger is a neurophysiological state that drives upholding boundaries. This is so often misunderstood, it’s nearing epidemic levels. Rage is unchecked anger. Anger is simply the feeling and impulse to protect when boundaries are threatened.

When anger is suppressed, or when it’s not acknowledged as the subtle awareness of a breached boundary (or about to be) internally, it can easily escalate into rage.

When rage happens, anger has been bypassed unconsciously in lack of awareness, or it has been suppressed, resulting in an amplification of that feeling.

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About Becoming a Conscious Leader

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About Becoming a Conscious Leader

by Philippe Lewis

When we begin to show up as a leader, we begin to have impact. We want to make a difference and we begin to develop the skills of social, emotional, and intellectual influence. This is power.

Many also, by the same token, begin to explore the skills of primal and sexual influence, some of it consciously, some not.

We may not want to take responsibility for it because we didn't ask for it. Because we didn't consent to it. Or perhaps it's because it's not our problem, because it's not something we chose. Or perhaps it's not something our "group" has been known to impact others with.

But we do choose to speak up into the world to make a difference.

THIS RIGHT NOW IS THE DIFFERENCE WE ARE MAKING IN PEOPLE'S LIVES, to speak up and be heard.

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The New Calling Out: Becoming the Leader We Actually Need

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The New Calling Out: Becoming the Leader We Actually Need

by Philippe Lewis

Calling out has been used to get the right people to LISTEN.

It's both a form of social signaling (to garner attention towards a problem) and a way to get attention from the person who NEEDS to listen to the impact they had on the speaker, or someone the speaker loves, 
or a community the speaker loves, 
or an ideology the speaker loves, 
or a philosophy the speaker loves.

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How I Rediscovered Platonic Touch As a Father, and How This Matters for the Consent Culture of Tomorrow

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How I Rediscovered Platonic Touch As a Father, and How This Matters for the Consent Culture of Tomorrow

by Philippe Lewis

This article was also posted on the Good Men Project.

You might have read articles about about how boys and men -- at least in the US if not in the western world -- are deprived of touch because of the scripts that narrowly define masculinity, manhood, what a man does and what a man wants (Here’s three: here, here, and here).

I, too, have experienced some version of it, and this is my story.

I grew up in Canada, a progressive country, in a progressive family. I went to schools that taught morals alongside catechism (students could pick either), personal development, and the social side of sex education (not just the biology). My parents never said to me “Be a man!”, never shamed me for crying (both of them cried in front of us), and never taught me and my sister the scripts of masculinity or femininity. If anything, they taught us what it looks like to be a family and making things work by doing the best we can and getting help when we couldn’t.

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9 Ways To Support Partners Who Are Survivors of Sexual Violence

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9 Ways To Support Partners Who Are Survivors of Sexual Violence

by Philippe Lewis

Sexual abuse and assault can happen to anyone. Most often, we hear about it happening between partners, but what is the best course of action when we hear that our partner was just assaulted or that they reveal to us that they have a history of trauma or abuse? For most couples, this is a challenging situation rife with triggers and hurt. This list is a simple way to begin the support process with a partner who needs it. Each item could be a blog post unto itself. If you require further support, please contact me or any other mental health professional directly.

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How To Show Up For The #MeToo Movement

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How To Show Up For The #MeToo Movement

by Philippe Lewis

It seems like everywhere the #metoo movement is leaving men wondering what to do – which is not surprising given that men like to DO things. Sometimes, of course, the incessant doing of men can get in the way and camouflage a feeling of inadequacy or a need to get attention. However, there are men out there who are truly seeing how much work there is to do and are simply ready, willing, and (hopefully somewhat) able to take action, and just need a sense of direction. Because, while this article may be preaching to a choir of clear conscious healthy men (as opposed to their pale substitute, the Sensitive New Age Guy, or SNAG or other types – and then again, even conscious men are apparently committing assault), there’s a multitude of men who are just waking up and looking to make a responsible and healthy difference.

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Do you wish to Harmonize your Masculine and your Feminine?

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Do you wish to Harmonize your Masculine and your Feminine?

I'm so honored to be included as one of the many amazing experts in this article by my friend Maddy Moon! Together we offer amazing value with these practical tips on harmonizing your masculine and your feminine!

Read the article here.

Here’s my piece:

“Your masculine and feminine energy can be experienced as two different energetic/emotional aspects of you: The Brother, who relates to other men as “brothers”, and the Sister, who relates to other women as “sisters”. Because of how we are socialized as we grow up, one is usually less developed than the other. In some cases — especially those who didn’t engage socially with either boys and girls as they grew up — both need to be developed. The trick is to grow them to a degree that they feel mature and in graceful relationship to other brothers and sisters. Do you have close or best friends from the opposite sex? What about of the same sex? Do you have friendships with those you would normally perceive as “other” such that you can feel into them as a mirror for you, as another you?

This tip is simple yet rich: which of your inner Brother or Sister has the least friendships? Ask each of them. Then, consciously allow the one you picked to engage deeply with others and create these friendships such he/she can develop a more harmonious relationship with itself through relationships with others. This is not about “getting” anything from the relationship, but rather about connecting and engaging. Harmony will come from this practice.”

by Philippe Lewis

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