I am an intensely needy person.

I am an intensely needy person.  I think that is why my close male friends are scared away.  I realize that as I reflect about those people in my own life whom I feel are wanting to release their fears and tribulations on me.  My presence encourages those around me to release their pain and troubles.  I both feel honored and irritated by that.  I realize that I too would withdraw from their life.  I would distance my self from their neediness.

I wonder if my former guy friends felt that about me? I wonder my need to connect deeply and share myself with another guy scared them away?  I wonder my desire to spend time, to be pals and have real guy time that is safe and fun scared them away? I wonder if they sense that neediness of mine to connect deeply with another guy scared them away?

If this is true then it only came to me just now.  An aha. I crave deep and trusting connection with another. Maybe I do latch on someone when I think that s/he is someone I can do that.  And if so, then I can understand I would drive people away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4Yu9Utdw0

My axiom is that relationships are self selecting, I.e. if it doesn’t work out then there is a good reason why.  I have lost several guy friends.  Friends whom I’ve had a bromance with.  Guys whom I felt safe with and had fun with.  These are the men who ghosted me, who walked away without a goodbye.  Three close male friends dropped off the map in my life.  I mourn that. I am pained by that.  I see that the common denominator is me. So here I am trying to figure out the “why” of that.

Interesting that I come from a family of two brothers and a father but needing to draw around this male energy I felt I have lacked in my life.  I attribute that to my mother was the alpha to the men in my family.

I am open to own my neediness.  I will ponder this.  I will be more mindful in connecting with my own self more, connecting with my own maleness, my own yang, my own masculinity rather than trying to source that from another guy.

Accepting my spiritual journey

I just wrote an email to my former partner who could not accept my spiritual path and practices.
This both dismayed me and puzzled me for my practices are simple, fairly conventional and non-threatening... or so I thought.

I tell people that my spirituality is what the Dalai Lama says, "This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."  My practice is kindness, being in the present moment, integrity and authenticity.

What was not understood was that I strayed from conventional medicine and logic by spending money with a psychic healer and an energy Body Talk worker.

Was this a red flag on my sanity? my gullibility?  my intelligence?  my common sense?  Perhaps, though I do feel that I am pretty grounded on all of those areas.  I point to this fascinating documentary of this "false prophet" who fooled people to follow him despite he telling them not to.
 
I tell people that my spiritual journey is driven by desperation. I seek out the woo-woo because the logical, the pushing hard toward goals was not working for me.  I look in skeptical askance, do some due diligence in testimonial proofs, but at the end of the day it's a leap of faith for me.  But then again, it's that way when I do the logical thing as well.

All this has brought about being viewed as  someone whose life and views on life cannot be trusted.

This pains me for, I work hard on being transparent with my vulnerabilities and open questions about myself known to all whom I share my life with.  Even though I know the risks of being judged and not being trusted as someone who knows how to live their life "well," I open my kimono anyway. I can only be who I am and hiding that does not serve me for I tried that before and did not serve me.  I lived another person's life that way.  This is my practice to live in integrity.

Even though I am not for everyone, it does give me pain to not be accepted by people whom I have felt a heart connection with.  Therein lies the paradox of friendship and what that truly means.  I view those people who I feel are close to me are people who accept the core aspects of me as I do with them.  They understand me or at least trust me enough to accept me without negative judgment.  I believe understanding begets acceptance and it is harder to accept something or someone without having an understanding.

I don't understand this journey myself.  I have made leaps of faith and cannot explain why.  It comforts me that those around me accept who I am despite or because of how live my life.  It pains me to have those who I care for, love, or respect that do not accept this aspect of my life.

I relate to what this author has said here in an article on what she got out of Ram Dass' teachings:
Most spiritual seekers have tried it all. Yoga, meditation, energy healing, psychic readings, shamanic work, plant medicine, to name just a few. These are wonderful tools, mind you. Practices we can utilize to bring us into deeper presence with ourself and our world.
We do need to practice. But, at the end of our lives, all we truly have is our inner awareness and ability to connect to that. We may seek external means to do so, until one day, we realize the heart of the matter is within us. As we connect to the sacred heart, the sacred matter that holds and loves us infinitely beyond the point of our own passing, we more fully know who and what we are, and where we come from.

I continue to practice connecting to my heart, sometime using tools that may not work and look foolish, but my goal remains that I get into my joy and my life's purpose.

Reflections on Communication, Integrity, and Reliability

I reached out to a former BFF guy friend of several years who ghosted me about 3 or so years ago.  The reason why I reached out now was because we both RSVP'ed for the same Christmas party and I did not want to be awkward.

I used the Marshall Rosenberg Non-Violent Communication model of identifying my needs and the negative emotions that came out of those unmet needs with the behavior specific request.  My needs of respect, acknowledgment, and consideration were not met when J stopped responding to my texts and voice mails.  I told him that I felt confused, hurt and angry from those unmet needs.  I requested that he acknowledge his part in this stoppage of communication.  I requested closure. I was not so much looking for his reasons for ending our relationship but more of him informing me that he no longer wanted to be my friend and that he is stopping any more communication with me.

I have learned that more often than not, I have experienced people rather just stop returning my texts, emails and phone calls without telling me why.  This behavior baffles me.  My view of people that I have met is that they theoretically adhere to the Golden Rule.  I brought that up with J who thinks of himself as a moral, honest, kind man who is courteous to people around him.  How would you like it if a friend of several years with whom we have been vulnerable with each other and shared hard and joyful experiences together suddenly drops out of your life without explanation?



I see this from more than one person who has entered and exited from my life.  It pains me.  Sure I deal with it by saying to myself that they don't want to deal with difficult emotions or explain them.  I can see that almost everyone I meet are prone to avoid confrontation which shows itself to passive-aggressiveness and lack of integrity.  I try to deal with my pain and anger by employing spiritual solutions of letting go of expectations for respect and an attachment to people behaving a certain way.  I know the Buddhist view of why we suffer is because of we don't acknowledge the impermanence of things, like friendships.

I also experience people telling me that they will do something, e.g. call me back, do something for me, or follow up on something but they never do.  I come to expect this kind of untruth.  They may have the best of intentions but, well you know the saying about the path to hell.  This is another learning for being attached.  I believe that there is a Twelve Step saying that "expectations are pre-meditated resentments."  It is easier to not believe the promiser in these instances of them telling me that they will do something for or with me.

I define Integrity as practicing your moral values.  I value honesty.  I value that when I tell people I will do something then they can trust me that I will.  I value being reliable, for myself and for others.  I only set goals for myself if I know that I will work on achieving them and have a reasonable chance that I will.  This is being reliable to myself.

This values of being honest and reliable along with communicating with clarity, honesty and compassion are very important to me because connecting with people and developing close relationships are important to me.  I keep being reminded that we are all different, that people have different beliefs and different values and different ways of behaving.  I am reminded that most people do not have the wherewithal to actually live with integrity.  Moral convenience and avoidance of adherence to core values can be difficult and easier to not live that way.

I do not claim to be the paragon of virtue and I can readily admit to my shortcomings and lack of consistency in living according to my core values.  I do know that this is very important to my day-to-day way of living and it still pains me that to expect this in most people who I meet.