She Doesn't Want Your Worship

Don’t you dare worship Her. It won’t do you or her any good.

I remember looking at my lover and telling her with absolute sincerity “I worship you...I adore everything about you.”

She looked at me calmly, placing my hands in her hands, looking at my green eyes with her brown eyes, and breathing out slowly. Then she said something I’ll never forget: “Don’t you dare write me off that easily. Stop making me into a fantasy. I’m real.”

It hurt. It stung. In that moment, I realized she was more interested in a real connection and real relationship than I was. She had observed that I was pedestalizing her. I was in love with an idea; one that she could not carry forever. She was reminding me that she was in it—and needed me to be also.

The masculine is the holding container for the feminine. While the feminine is the aliveness of the moment to moment reality, the masculine is the consciousness of all that is alive. The masculine tends to be objective and stand at a distance—witnessing, observing, and noticing. However, the feminine is subjective. She is in the flow, moving constantly with the ever shifting nature of the present.

When we are in our masculine we are mesmerized by the feminine. Standing at a distance, we desire to drink in her beauty and encounter her radiance. While she twirls and spins and dances through the mundane moments of life, we sit back and enjoy this sight. She embodies participation and the masculine embodies observation. The intertwining of these two embodiments is the source of divine union. However, when the masculine is sufficiently underdeveloped something problematic occurs. We can just as easily objectify her in the process.

Anything we objectify ceases to be real to us. It becomes an abstraction. “She” becomes an image that we project onto her.
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There’s an old jazz standard that talks about “When a man loves a woman she can do no wrong,” and we’ve all probably felt that. But the sad truth is, if that’s the experience, she is no longer a real person to him, and he is actually no longer loving her. Love may be blindness, but awareness is not. In fact, that kind of love isn’t really conscious at all. It’s the re-enactment of trauma, its the engagement of conditioned thinking and familiar patterns.
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REAL love between REAL people doesn’t obscure the truth for a fantastic vision of an idealized image. It rejoices in the truth.

We need lovers committed to doing the work of truly seeing one another. We need men and women who look at one another, not beyond each other to the idea.

These days people begin and end relationships for the roughly the same reason. We want an idea, and then we realize they’re not ideal. Or they adored us, but then we realized it wasn’t us they adored—it was the idea.

Not too long ago a dear friend of mine told me that they were getting a divorce. I asked why, and the response was simple: “She didn’t love me. She wanted to change me.” It’s easy to do. We feel it most when they’re eager to change us. That’s when we notice that maybe its not really US they’ve loved, but rather the idea of us. But it started long before that. It started when the chemicals kicked in, and we stopped listening to what they were actually saying. Had we truly heard, had we truly listened past our own vision of desire, we might have noticed who they were.

Love doesn’t minimize conflict, it works through it.

Love doesn’t hide the flaws, it radically accepts them, and seeks understanding

Love isn’t blindness, it is truth and beauty.

Love isn’t only a many splendored thing—it is also character defects, and muck and mud, and struggle, and the endless tussle, and tragedy and the ins and outs of schedules and difficult conversations and lost connections, diving deep and then stopping short in fits and bursts

Love doesn’t make one person the arbiter of all things holy and good—it takes an honest look at the WHOLE PICTURE, and doubles down on commitment and connection

If you worship Her, she’s ceased to be a real person. She’s just a projection you’ve put on a pedestal. Don’t worry, she’ll topple down at some point. Because under the false idol you’ve crafted her to be, there’s a real person. She can only carry the weight so long. Hopefully at some point you’ll get to see her. And love her for that