A lifetime of tears

I went to bed in need, the old school kind that can’t form words but is desperate for just the right touch and just the right gaze. It’s young and alone, yearning turned to wild hopelessness in a rather loud, yet silent plea for rescue. Fears of being left there forever. When I woke up in not much better of a state, my attempts to reconnect with my beloved remained flat. The depth of my sorrow pulling me beyond my capacity to climb my way out. Sometimes, during times like these, time is on my side and these moments, caused by trigger-response, subside on their own. I imagine my own demons walking slowly backwards into the night, not quite healed but slightly less intense than the last time they were seen breaking dawn. Even though I laid in bed hoping for this morning’s retreat, I knew more direct handling was needed.

I know after years of deep trauma work that surgery is sometimes necessary to release pockets of trauma; energetic abscissions of which I am in the role of both the surgeon and the patient. Today was a surgery day. I’ve found that trauma healing is both bloody and beautiful, as if there were really a distinction. Tragedy and perfection in every bit of unfelt pain, usually followed by a flood of relief. In the past, I’ve used humiliation as a surgical tool, cold disconnection as a method of retrieval, and various other injustices that I’ve told myself are only further traumatizing when, in fact, they’ve each held a key of freedom that only that particular instrument could. And then there’s pleasure, which has little distinction from the pain felt above but is usually more palatable against the flesh. It, at least, promises some enjoyment.

This morning, my tenderness needed warm tenderness, not a cold, blunt object. It needed lightly intensified touch. It needed to look into my beloved’s eyes. It needed a loving rope thrown my way and a gentle tugging back towards my boat.

We often don’t talk about the power of sex beyond its reproductive contributions and its pleasure-giving possibilities. But it’s a doorway that is wells deeper than sensation and spawn alone. A lifetime…lifetimes…ions…live inside us and are best accessed through coming together sexually. In the world of tantra, they’ve long known how using sexual energy makes it possible to realize new states of consciousness and find union with the divine. Somewhere, in the slightly more murky in between, is where the power of divine meets the vulnerability of our human nature. We get healed as they meet.

Making love with my beloved often brings me to tears, sometimes in ecstasy and relief and overwhelming states of love, and other times, like this morning, the dam of the past breaks by the power of our embrace. Just looking into his eyes bursts the gates, the incision that commences surgery in what is relatively gentle yet irreversible in its impact. This morning, the first tears came without bliss. They were painful agony to feel, contentless and full of old stories just the same. The past and current pain of being misunderstood and harmed for it. The cries of innocence and yearnings for truth. The wet roars for a new way of being and relating.

I’m lucky, my beloved can hold these cries without being drowned by them himself. In his receptivity, I’m given the ultimate gift of presence and relief. What starts out as pain quickly, yet no less painfully, transforms into equal parts clarity and embodiment. A voluntary emergency surgery for the heart, made possible by each of our very human tools of love. The experience of coming for the sake of coming home, hopefully with one less unmet need to contend with in the future.