I’ve been crying on and off for the past 5 days.  By the grace of God and some of the most important men and women in my life, I was shown exactly how deficient I’ve been in my man duties.

I’ve written some interesting things over the last couple years.  Writing about getting fired, and learning about my inner tyrant and how I began the work of changing an emotional legacy into a way to help heal myself and the world.  Writing about what I saw when it came to how men were attracting dating partners and hopefully illuminating some patterns there.  Today I write about coasting on “last year’s recovery”, as my friend Hamza would say.

Recently, me and 20 of the most powerful, generous, loving, feminine-supporting men that I know spent 3 days in a house together.  We were there for atonement to the feminine.  Not the eye for an eye kind.  Rather, we were there to be shown that our energetic credit card debits had FAR EXCEEDED our credits, and that if we could see that, REALLY see it, would we be willing to make a commitment to something greater.  In “getting ours”, we had overspent funds that didn’t just belong to us.  These are funds the feminine toils away in the world to deposit into a common account.    We had become oblivious to our impact.  All of us.  We had been using and abusing our predilection to support the feminine as a way to make ourselves feel better about our resentment, our feelings of powerlessness, and our desire to feel superior.

For me, after 7 years of the practice of Orgasmic Meditation and all of the transformation of the work that goes with it, I had started to use what I learned AGAINST the very feminine that I had promised to serve. Similar to the way you can use what you know about someone you’re intimate with to hurt them when you’re fighting.  I began to use the access I had been granted to overpower, avoid or otherwise undermine the feminine in my life.  Mostly for two purposes: One, to avoid being called to be the man I’m capable of being, and Two, to maintain my ability to feel special and exempt from the former. I found ways to justify not doing my practices.  Not feeding my soul.  Not taking care of myself, physically, spiritually or emotionally.  I allowed a sludge to build up.  I was coasting on last year’s recovery.  I was slowly dying inside, endlessly proving to myself and everyone around me that I am special, and that I did not have to do all the things that everyone else had to do to keep my soul scrubbed clean.

And then, when I slow down, I look around and I see what the women around me are creating, able to hold, able to handle.  How they live in their feminine AND their masculine.  They can birth an idea AND manifest it into existence, both through consistent attention on the idea AND consistent attention on the concrete actions to create it.  Plus they are working on their spiritual and emotional growth, keeping their bodies healthy, earning a living, making sure there’s food in the fridge, keeping a todo list in their heads a mile long, which they frequently revisit and reorder and complete items on.  I see them do it all.  Knowing that if they don’t do it, it simply won’t get done.

And then there’s the men.  Well, let’s be honest.  There isn’t the men.

There are boys.  Mostly boys. Boys who like to dress like men.  Boys who inhabit 25 and 35 and 45 year old bodies.  Boys who look like men dressed like boys.  Boys who run hedge funds and have second mortgages and drive too-expensive cars paid with the second mortgage. Boys with gym memberships, sitting around talking about their dating life with the disdain of a unaffected middle schooler.  Boys who still think their INTENTIONS are good enough.  Boys who have become so adept with the language of change and the comfort of inaction that they think buying carbon offsets is the same thing as saving the world.  Boys who have such distorted visions of their rights and those of others that they would rather kill or rape than have to sit in the discomfort of rejection.  Boys with beards riding longboards down the street, one foot rhythmically kicking as though outrunning adulthood in slo-mo.  Boys who have done such a kickass job convincing the world that they just can’t quite GET IT RIGHT when it comes to growing up that the women have all but given up too.  Instead of searching for a man, the women now just get the good job, build the good credit, buy the nice house, lease the sensible car and then go out and pick themselves a nice man-sized boy to take home and care for and fuck.   Boys who have set the bar of expectation so low that a woman is happy if you put the seat down, earn most of your share of the bills, don’t break anything she likes and remember to do something nice on most of the important days of the year.

“Not me”, you say.

Yes.

You.

Me.

Most of us.  Sitting in the false notion that what we’re doing is good enough, and DON’T EVEN THINK about encroaching on our personal sports/craft/armchair/aficionado/artisan/foodie/time.  Except most of what we make important, isn’t.  And most of us are living at about 20-40% of our capacity.  And then we have the gall to complain when we’re asked to do more, be more.  It’s like a teacher is saying, good job, and I know you can do better, and we look down at the C+ and promptly flip that teacher the bird and say, in that feigned tone that only a 13 year old boy can pull off, “You don’t understand, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT I CAN DO!!! I’m outta here.”  and turns on one foot and leaves.

So fellas, it’s time to level up.  It’s time to do all the big and little things you said you’d do.  Without her having to ask every day if it got done.  It’s time to handle what you said you were going to handle, or communicate proactively why you aren’t and update your due date accordingly.  It’s time to look at your behavior, to REALLY look.  Time to look at your calendar with a longer view than that morning.  Time to pick up the food you drop and wipe the counter when you get it wet and the thousand other million things you let go of without doing.  You know.  And if you don’t know, get yourself a mentor, or a coach or a therapist or a sponsor, or preferably all four.  Because the time where it’s okay to not know is past.  It’s not cute anymore.  It’s not endearing.  And you don’t want to attract the woman that thinks it is.  Seriously, knock it off.

That is all. PM me or use the comments to discuss.

Sign Up For A FREE Powerful Coaching Conversation

Okay, so let’s get a few things out of the way.

1) I am a white man who acknowledges and takes care to have awareness of his #whiteprivilege

2) I do not pretend nor endeavor to speak for women.  When I speak of women in the article, I speak about my observations only.

3) I am writing this to open a dialogue around the nature of Affirmative Consent, and for us to look at it closely before it becomes woven into the fabric of our society.

4) I’ve read this and this and this and this and this and this.  Pretty much the first 15 articles that showed up when I googled Affirmative Consent that appeared to be affiliated with a major news organization and didn’t appear to exhibit any dogmatic bias.

5) I have the spent the last 7 years learning feminine communication by exercising my limbic system through the practice of Orgasmic Meditation.  I have around 1200 hours of relationship and intimacy coaching under my belt as of this writing.

First, the good news is that we’re having a conversation about consent at all.  As the author of one of the above-linked articles mentions, it is very recent history where the issue of sexual assault, #rapeculture, and the necessity of consent was not even on the radar of the most important institutions in our nation.  Schools, Universities, Corporations and Government entities were all content to pretend the problem didn’t exist.  Thankfully, due mostly to a group of women who would not be silenced, and who used the power of the internet and social media, that is no longer possible.

Also due mostly to women who would not be silenced, the stigma and perceived futility of reporting sexual assault and rape is waning.  I understand that much more work needs to be done, and that more voices and perspectives and avenues for communication must be opened for the critical mass that is needed to be achieved. And. There are now dozens, if not hundreds, of mainstream examples of women who speak out and whose perpetrators are punished.  This is to be celebrated, not the least of which because it is normalizing the message to girls and young women that it is correct to report being assaulted and/or raped, and to expect justice.  This is a stark contrast to a long history of a culture of slut-shaming and victim-blaming, intended to confuse the issue and keep from having to look at the underlying sickness that creates that culture in the first place.

Now, here’s where I think the idea of Affirmative Consent breaks down, and it’s due primarily to the aforementioned underlying sickness that causes #rapeculture in the first place.  For that sickness to grow and fester, it requires our ignorance of the conditions in which it thrives.  To counter that ignorance,  I’d like to turn your attention now to the concepts of masculine and feminine communication, and how, for some time now, we are trained NOT to use what is at least half of our communication faculties.  Through the ignorance of our feminine mode of communication, we have created conditions that have Affirmative Consent seem like a good idea when it’s not.

And yes, we are hard-pressed to quantify the differences in these two modes of communication. For a quick education on the subject, read this excellent article on Masculine and Feminine, as I won’t cover all of that here.  However, as my friend and teacher(and author of that article) Nicole Daedone likes to say, women are naturally bilingual.  That is, they grow up speaking both feminine and masculine.  Whereas men, on the other hand, tend to grow up only speaking masculine.   This is a serious challenge when you consider that the segment of the population that is linguistically challenged has also held the balance of power for a long time.  How do you get those in power to see that they are deficient in their ability to communicate with the other half?  And even more challenging is the trend where women, being the pragmatic beings that they are, have begun to abandon their own feminine communication mode in order to feel more seen and heard by the half of the population that refuses to learn another language.

Affirmative Consent reinforces this idea that in order for women to be taken seriously, they must move towards a more masculine mode of communication (and therefore, a more masculine mode of consent).  And while I am an enthusiastic proponent of increased expression of desire by women, my experience with the feminine is that greater expression of desire will not automatically mean more concrete expression of that desire.  It may look like an increase in feminine communication in general, and when I am tuned into the communication, I become more aware of her desire.  And this does not usually equate to more specific, granular, easy to understand communication.  And that’s a good thing.  It’s a good thing for men to tune into messages that are communicated in modes that are not simple declarative sentences.

So the biggest strike against Affirmative Consent is that the very nature of adding another layer of masculine communication to an interaction that is inherently AT LEAST 50% feminine communication is naive at best (I mean, how many of YOU understand exactly what your body/soul wants with another human and is then able to clearly and lucidly describe what that is to the other?)  At worst it’s one more subtle message to women (and the feminine in all of us) that they will never get what they want unless they give up all that is feminine communication and get with the damn masculine communication PROGRAM already!

And then we miss another opportunity to teach our young men and women that feminine communication is EVERY BIT AS IMPORTANT as masculine communication.  We have a very complex part of our brain/central nervous system that is extremely adept at non-verbal communication, generally known as the limbic system.  And over the years, as we have placed undue importance on the neocortex, the center for language, reason and complex motor function, our reliance on Aristotelian logic and Broadcast English has become so great that our ability to distinguish nuance, process inference correctly, and otherwise understand someone without them having to spell it out for us has all but vanished from our awareness.

Except it hasn’t.  And that’s where our basic, daily cognitive dissonance comes from.  We are walking around generally confused by our fellow humans, because what we are picking up from them (non-verbal, feminine communication) and what they are overtly saying (verbal, masculine communication) don’t match.  And the rich tapestry of human interaction is being distilled down into boring, stale, lifeless interactions, where fear and doubt rule our receptive abilities.  We have stunted our ability to “hear” each other, because we have stunted our ability to process the information being transmitted, and yet some part of us knows it’s there, because our masculine structures become consumed with wondering “what do they actually mean?” when that cognitive dissonance occurs.

And as we are not taught from a young age to hear the different levels of each communication, including the communications beneath, above and around the actual words being said, that by the time we are adults, we no longer trust in our ability to hear the subtle doubt underneath “Yes”, or the hesitant desire underneath “No”.

Let me be clear, hearing those other messages in the non-verbal communication is NOT a license to ignore the words spoken.  Instead, it instills greater responsibility in both parties to understand each other, because they acknowledge that there is more information being transmitted than just the words being said.

After years of practice (and still many years of practice in front of me), when I hear the hesitation underneath a “Yes”, I have enough awareness to pause, slow down, and ask if she’s sure. When I do that, I create the space for her entire expression. I communicate that I value what she has to say, even if it’s not what I think I want to hear.

Simultaneously, if I hear a “No” that is anything less than definitive and emphatic, I physically back up a little (to demonstrate that I heard her No), and then ask if she’s sure. Again, because I had enough awareness to hear the subtlety of the message. Again, I’m communicating that I value her entire expression, and I help create the space for it to exist between us.

In either case, she has the room she needs to flesh out the subtlety of her communication, and we have both used a blend of masculine and feminine communication to have a fully expressed interaction. [Damn, that bias is EVERYWHERE, I just unconsciously wrote masculine first.]

At this point, now you may be asking yourself how is that different from the Affirmative Consent being discussed in the media? Right? Like, if she says yes and I say how about now and she says yes again, then I’m good, right?

NO.

Affirmative Consent is based on the Savior/Broken-Wing-Bird dynamic that exists between men and women. This model is basically saying: the guy keeps the pressure on, and he gets permission to keep going at each step of the way. And she says yes or no at each stop along the sex escalation path.  At each point the answer is dipolar, and there is no room (nor encouragement of) the exploration of the nuance of each person’s desire.  He follows his training to get as much as he can in the short window of opportunity while it’s open; she follows her training to “give up as little as possible” in exchange for the time spent together.  This is a model that fails both parties.

It is time to train the young men and women of the world that there IS nuance in communication, there IS a way to hear it, and then HOW to use what you hear to create the space between you so EVERYTHING can be communicated.  It’s time to train the young men of the world that feminine communication is real, that it is important, and that it is imperative that they learn to become fluent in it. There are many layers and levels to communication, and we are taught to speak and hear so few.  Affirmative Consent is trying to drive the square peg of masculine communication into the feminine round hole of Desire.

When we acknowledge that Desire (in all its forms, not just sexual), is an inherently feminine thing, and when we acknowledge that in order to communicate it completely and well, we MUST learn to hear and speak feminine communication, only then will we learn to fully communicate what we want and clearly set boundaries that all parties want to respect and adhere to.

Yesterday was my 6 year OMiversary.  I learned and began a regular practice of Orgasmic Meditation on January 18th, 2009.

I’ve been thinking about my 6 years in this practice and who I am now compared to the guy who showed up to OneTaste in SF in October of 2008.

Some thoughts, at random:

– This is the longest I’ve done anything consistently in my whole life (except all the involuntary things like breathing and such)
– I’m still confronting, on a daily basis, many of the same things I was challenged by then.  The difference is, I am actually confronting them.  I freeze less, I isolate less, I am willing to cause messes and wreckage and then willing to come back and clean it up.  I come back to the tough spot over and over again, because I know that moving away from it will FOR SURE not help open it up.
– I am willing to be the cause of discomfort.  That means I am worried less about what you think of me and more focused on what my desire is.  It means I’m here to help people find their freedom in places where they are stuck and that shit is uncomfortable.
– I am a man.  For most of my life, I let my adolescent and my little one drive the car.  I gave up responsibility for most of my life, being knocked around by circumstance and what other people wanted.  These days, my adult drives (most of the time), and when I go unconscious and let the little one or the adolescent drive, I have created enough of a relationship with them to find out what happened.
– I am still a long way from having unconditional freedom (or freedom in all conditions).  And I have created a lot of freedom in my life where there was none previously.
– I still get fucked up (triggered by places where I do not have freedom), and go down into the abyss for long periods of time.  These days, long periods of time range from 2 to 12 hours.  When I was in my late 20’s long periods of time ranged from 3 to 18 months.
– I believe in God.  The thing that lives inside of me, that is connected to everything else, that shows me the way when I’m lost, that speaks, in an ever so quiet voice, the truth, that reminds me that I am not insignificant, nor am I more important.  That is God.  All of the rest is story, myth and ritual.
– I have a lot to give, and withholding it is damaging to me, and forcing it on people is damaging to them.
– Practice is not “The Work”.  Practice is keeping my insides clean and clear and solid so I can do the work.  The work is my willingness to be truthful with myself about who I am and how I’m showing up to my life.  It is my willingness to make small, significant changes and sustain them over time.  It is my willingness to hear people when they see something I don’t.  It is my willingness to take 100% responsibility.

All of this stems from my OM practice, as over these 6 years I have learned to hold and be present to larger and larger amounts of sensation.  Through that, circumstances and events and interactions that would have sent me out of my range, into my unconscious states and behavior, no longer have that effect.  Like any potent meditation or movement practice, the only requirement is that you do it.  And that means staying in practice when it brings up the discomfort of facing parts of ourselves that we don’t like.  It means leaning on community members when our reflex action is to withdraw, isolate, blame, criticize or some other separation behavior.

Ultimately what I have learned is that I love everyone a lot.  And then, finally, I am learning the best way to love myself, so that I stay alive enough to love you all.

photo credit: larryfishkorn via photopin cc