Love Without Expectation

Two years ago I wrote a blog on this topic. It was titled Giving Up Hopelessness. It was about that despair one has when they are disappointed. And I felt at that time, that I had seen that look on my husbands face too many times. I was over it. It was about his expectations on our relationship. I was over his look of constant disappointment when I didn’t fulfill his expectation for sexual quantity informed by a 3X-a-week-is-normal urban myth. I was also missing something. Something that felt deeply empty in our marriage but I didn’t know then exactly what it was that felt lacking. I just knew that more of what we had wasn’t what I wanted.

I wanted the freedom of no expectations. I invited him into this new paradigm where we loved one another without expectation. I invited him into intimate exchanges of energy and new ways of relating. I’ll save all the drama of back stabbing and betrayal that unfolded and just say, he wasn’t able to enter into this new paradigm with me. And so we’ve been in a two year journey of consciously uncoupling that is now nearly complete with legal documents and agreements ready to file, the children at peace with the decision and a new space lease for him to move into his next chapter with a new girlfriend who apparently is very interested in living the old paradigm ways a little longer.

And for me I’m figuring out how to close the wounds and cut the cords and find my sense of wholeness. Making peace with my long lost inner divine masculine. I’m learning to be in love with me. To connect with others in ways that include intamacy and vulnerability and no expectations.

As the solar eclipse of 2024 approached I found myself on a plane traveling with my daughter back to her school after Spring break. We landed in Cleveland and were very fortunate to experience the April 8th solar eclipse in totality. It’s hard to put into words how the energy of the eclipse was experienced except that it was a moment of serenity and calmness during totality. The sky darkened and the temperature dropped before the sun shone again like a new day had dawned within the one day. The feeling aligned with my experience of the totality point at the end of my separation. Two days later it was my birthday and I noted the Sun Chiron conjunction in my birthchart was also reflected in the Sun Chiron conjunction during the eclipse. A week later I was flying to California to go into retreat in the desert near San Diego. Although with all the rain California has had this year the desert was more like rolling hills covered in grasses and tiny flowers than the composted granite and stones that I’m used to there. Jupiter conjunct Uranus supported by mars conjunct Venus were in the window of eclipse energy on the heels of a full moon in Scorpio. It was obvious that something beautiful is aligning in the universe. A new paradigm for love. A spotlight of sunshine on the wounds to be healed with Chiron and a resurrection of the divine masculine that has been lost in the distortion of the old paradigm aided and abetted by the complicity of the divine feminine. In a codependent and narcissistic dance fueled by toxic sexuality that became perverted in a paradigm plagued with war, greed and depravity. Are we done yet? Are we all done yet? No. Not all of us. But some.

This weekend I stepped into ceremony with a dedicated man who has been leading this work for over 30 years along with three women who help hold space. And as I’ve been working with them as a participant the last 8 or 9 years, I am always in awe of what we are able to accomplish. This time though it was notably different. For the first time in memory there were equal number of men to women who signed up. 11 men and 11 women to be exact. And a fully evolved man who has participated many times before stepped into a facilitator role as one of the women who usually is holding space was not well. All gathered in a minimalist Zen Buddhist retreat space. Committed to a process called dyad meditation where we make eye contact with another for 40 minutes. Most unknown to us. And we take turns in 5 minute intervals contemplating an unanswerable question to communicate what arises from our depths of consciousness and in turn listening silently for those communications of the other with plenty of long pauses, tears, frustration and by the end belly laughs and more tears and pure love of one another, strangers without names. 32 dyads and 4 days later. We sat in a circle and unpacked what had come forth through our mostly silent and profound experience of ourselves and the other witnessed and witnesser. We spoke of the desire for love without expectation. We felt the hate of betrayal and how that was hate for the self on some deep level. We cried tears for humanity and people suffering in far away places. We shared the reverence for the work. We welcomed the masculine presence within each one and as a collective represented by so many men in the circle. We shared about our experience in the women’s bunk of menstruation. And lactation. Even women over 50 and 60 were menstruating in the days leading up to the full moon. We collectively experienced an awakening in the consciousness of the divine masculine. A polarity shift toward a paradigm where women are not complicit and take equal ownership of where we have come. Where the divine feminine can forgive the divine masculine and the divine masculine can own his ways and commit to the deep work of taming monsters and protecting children. Especially inner children who were raised by societal norms and mothers that did not nurture them.

It’s been a 9 of cups experience of wholeness for me. A validation of why I am here. To heal myself because as within so without and in healing myself I heal the world in some small and significant way. The consciousness of each one shifts the paradigm. Drunk on love I emerged still high on meditation. Reveling in the process and the glow of what we have done and who we are. Spiritual beings having an earthly experience remembering and peering through the veil of forgetting who we are. Enlightenment Chasers, Meditation Junkies and Tea-aholics.