Limerence & the big bang birth of suffering
Two years ago I spent four days and nights water fasting in solitude under a tree in Alentejo, Portugal. A treasured breather. Some space to feel through the living history in my belly, hips and thighs.
When I came home though, boomshakalaka! This is what happened to me:
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Waking up in the mornings white light was moving through my limbs dissolving every subtle entanglement, leaving me experiencing myself as a field of light unified with the space and furniture in my bedroom.
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Golden rays were visibly (to me) coming out of my hands and I could direct these rays toward any tension I held in my body and sense it dissipate.
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I was so drenched in vibrating ecstasy that I had to lock myself into the bathroom at work every ten minutes just to dance.
During the vision quest I had decided to end my romantic engagement with a man I was dating at the time. I loved his brain and he’s a beautiful dancer, but our worldviews wouldn’t marry, I’d concluded this is not sustainable. Different opinions – fine. Different maps to orient our meaning making – woof, a lifetime of nobody feeling seen?
I went to meet him at a coffee shop where we would sit and read together. On my way to break up I was skipping, innate bliss sprouting out of my toe nails. Allowing the lush bloom of our bond to float off into the horizon seemed a great privilege.
In his embrace though, the vista was different. The golden rays previously fused with my hands were now cascading between the two of us at an earth shaking pace and intensity. I didn’t get around to breaking up that day. I was in love.
As we parted ways something weird happened. My field of vision was inverted – the park he left me in literally (!) turned grey. The luminosity that had just pervaded asphalt seemed to have walzed off in his shoes and left me aimless. I went home and stayed flat on my bed for the rest of the week.
At a Circling gathering I was at the other day, four of the women in the circle (including myself) were distraught. We had independently found and crawled into the same fresh rabbit hole and self-diagnosed as addicts – love addicts. Unexpected, as you’ve never seen me with anyone? This is a symptom. (Btw I reserve the right to forget all about this diagnosis tomorrow. It’s my chosen sport to try on pathologies, wear them hard and whack them off. In engaging identity this way I’m also a big believer – lavishly make subject object so that the next new subject may emerge. Identify to disidentify and identify again with more, people! Back to my diagnosis.) I dismiss the boy next door, electing to stay loyal to a sea of sultry daydreams at my work desk, by my altar, lying on the moss in some forest, listening to Leonard Cohen’s I’m your man melting away in my bathtub.
The men I have loved:
1. Live abroad.
2. There is some kind of Romeo & Juliet hindrance between us. Steep crooked mud piles to cross.
I insist, they’ve been dying to be with me. And – same. But X, Y and Z means he’s not here. And I’m in my bathtub, soaring in the subtle realm, untethered by my frumpy humanness, not bothered by his. No place for the flaccid, the letdowns of life don’t apply. No matter, no drag! And our bond is mine to invent and mine only. I am a fairy feminine supersex and he is a dragon mastermind powergod. In real life of course, I could not confine myself to this mere sliver of my multi-headed frame. In a dream body though, anything goes. (To the men I have loved, if you read this, sorry for being glib. It’s been real, truly. Spanx.) I’ve had several, in my world, deeply committed love stories spanning years with people that I have Never. Even. Kissed.
The women in the circle were all in the same place in our process: Gut-stabbed by the newly adopted narrative that throughout our lives we’ve confused intensity for love, recreating a samba of merging and alienation – obsession, dread and a candyflip bliss we could not decline. One woman spoke for all of us when she said:
– The hardest thing about this is that she has to die. The one in me who is an addict. I don’t think I can do it. I’m not ready for her to go.
A love addict is driven by two central fears: The fear of being left (which we’re often aware of) and the fear of being intimate (which tends to be unconscious). These fears blend to create a self-defeating dilemma – we long for intimacy yet resist healthy closeness. To bridge this we must unconsciously choose a partner who can not be intimate in a healthy way.
According to the book Facing love addiction by Pia Mellody, a love addict is someone who:
1. Assigns a disproportionate amount of time, attention and value above themselves to the person to whom they are addicted – often obsessively.
2. Has unrealistic expectations for unconditional positive regard from the other person.
3. Neglects to care for or value themselves while they’re in the relationship.
At the heart of love addiction lies the tendency to make another person a higher power. The road to lasting sobriety involves cultivating a relationship with an appropriate refuge – a higher power if you will – that can genuinely provide solace through the hellfires and inertia that all people face.
I have created quite the exquisitely dynamic polarized yumzum rating the men I’ve loved as superior – not only to myself but to all the beings of the universe on all the planes. Giving these men more power than they actually have – their power plus my disowned projected power plus plus plus – is sexy, and it comes at a price. Once we’ve traversed the steep muddy mud piles I expect dragon supergod to pick me up and free me from myself. I expect him to love me so fiercely, so relentlessly that in the light of his undivided attention I will dissolve into a permanent state of union.
The crime on my end is that I’m so preoccupied with the Zion of my interior – which in truth does not have much to do with him – that I don’t see the man in front of me. I’m enthralled by the deity I’ve created, intoxicated with a fabled entity which is probably a mix of myths born in my childhood and something I’ve seen on tv. And I want him. More than anything. No one else but him! Hence, even a glimpse of the dude in front of me makes me mad. Once euphoric, I am now disappointed and angry – still alone – in my bathtub. I am in the grips of a cycle of craving and repulsion. Underlying it all, of course, ignorance.
To make a swift and obvious comparison between myself and Siddharta Guatama Buddha – he too sat under a tree, the Bodhi tree, when he saw the truth of suffering (we suffer), the cause of suffering (desire), and the path of liberation leading to his enlightenment. He saw that the source of our unease with the fact of existence is that we want something we don’t perceive we have. This creates a separation between ourselves and what is occurring, generating tension in the nervous system. Where there’s division there’s creative potential, and there’s also tension. We can’t come to peace. And where there’s desire, there’s naturally also aversion. The base of this is ignorance – we are convinced believers in our sense of separation from all there is. Two morphs to three, thus the Buddha’s realization can be formulated as the three poisons: desire, aggression and delusion. Attraction, aversion and ignorance.
This runs deep. Any stimulus of the nervous system and our bodies will respond with moving towards or moving away. We’re often intolerant of ourselves, applying a moralistic perspective on what we’re drawn to – but this runs deep. In fact even prior to biology, all the way back to the big bang. The physical universe came into existence through these forces. First there was light, suddenly differentiation. At the most fundamental subatomic level it comes down to attraction and aversion. Combinations and non-combinations.
Philosopher and metatheorist Ken Wilber speaks to attraction as the power of love in the universe. Quarks emerge out of nowhere and cluster – attracted to one another – and through this attraction complexity emerges. Evolution unfolds. Quarks become atoms become cells become organisms, thanks to attraction. Big forces. The Buddha is describing something fundamental – and so to work with life means to be aware of desire, my teacher Diane Musho Hamilton says:
– The power of desire is very much a part of our lives. It is not going away. But it can absolutely be clarified.
Variations of the three poisons in Buddhism are found in the Vedas of Hinduism, in Stoic philosophy and in modern psychology with discussions on dopamine, fight-or-flight-response and biases – as well as in the emotional cycles of a love addict as we:
1. Meet someone and experience an intense emotional, physical and mental high cos the fantasy of a savior is triggered (attraction). Usually we’re drawn to someone strikingly seductive who swoops in hard, which is apparently a sign that we quite possibly:
2. Have chosen a partner who is not capable of fulfilling the fantasy. When this starts to become apparent and denial crumbles intense anxiety, fear and anger is triggered (aversion). In place of the savior we now see an abandoner – still, tragically for everyone involved, blind to the flesh and blood architecture of light in front of us. This then sucks so terribly that we:
3. Go back into denial and begin to fantasize all over again about the dysfunctional or simply phantasmal relationship (attraction).
Cycling through this process, it becomes increasingly venomous. Pia Mellody suggests caution when we experience love at first sight, as it may well be a sign of addiction at first sight.
I found myself weeping at a spoken word event this week when Charlotte Manning read a poem of hers called The greatest love is lukewarm. She spoke to the vicious volcano she’d once been and of her husband offering a kind of love that makes her spine grow just a little bit taller.
I never knew there was such freedom
in submerging in the lukewarm
I never knew there could be such steady lightness
whether I feel cold or hot, beautiful or broken,
powerful or possessed, wild or worn.
