Ep.41/ Kink And The Healthy Lover
The Lover archetype can be constructive and deeply healing or destructive and abusive. Masculine lover energy dictates much of our sensual experience of the world, going way beyond sex and relationship. We all carry masculine and feminine within us. We all have dominant and submissive or active and receptive properties. There is much to be learned from the kink community in how to work with dom/sub power dynamics in a healthy, conscious way, whether we plan to explore the world of kinky sexuality or not. Our mature and immature expression of lover energy, in romance, with family/friends and at work is often a mirror for our internal relationship with ourselves..
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The lover is traditionally seen as a masculine archetype that can be expressed in healthy ways, in unhealthy ways, and is often underdeveloped.
And we all have lover energy within us whether we are in relationship or not. And in archetype, if that is a new concept for you, is an idea coined by the great psychologist Carl Jung. And he observed that there were these patterns or currents of attitude and action, kind of ways of being that we all share as humans.
They come to people through dreams. There the universal language of story and myth. And for me they have tremendous life and possibility of their own that we can approach the archetypes in our own life as if they're characters that we can interact with, and they can grow and develop and guide and inform us and how we should grow and develop.
If we are willing to confront or interact or make friends with them, a lot of my work in spiritual psychology works on the Archetypal plane, working with archetypes. And one of the reasons I love working this way is because we are bringing the non-physical the non-rational, the emotional, the energetic, the spiritual and kinesthetic aspects of ourselves into form so that the conscious mind can interact with them. Once we can conceptualize something in our rational mind, then we can work with it directly in powerful ways that can transform and inform us on all levels. The lover is one of the four main masculine archetypes, the King, the warrior, the lover and the magician. I looked at the King and the warrior in a previous episode. If you want to check that out, it is called the Sovereign in the warrior and I will explore the mystery of the magician that we all hold within us in an episode coming out. In spiritual psychology, as in Union Psychology and many other approaches, we all have masculine and feminine within us, all of us.
In fact, we could understand our desire for a mate being driven by our own desire for wholeness within ourselves,
In fact, we could understand our desire for a mate being driven by our own desire for wholeness within ourselves, whether in heterosexual or homosexual relationships, or something in between. Generally, there are gender currents, archetypal currents within each partner in a relationship, which kind of play along these masculine and feminine lines. There is a big kink community in San Francisco, and I have learned a tremendous amount about healthy sexuality from the kink community. I have not been deeply involved in it myself.
But I have a lot of friends in clients who have and kink for a lot of people really pushes the edges of pleasure and pain. Exploring power dynamics in a really direct and conscious way can be tremendously exciting and beneficial in healing for people. It can also be dangerous, and so there is a need for a lot of healthy communication.
And one of the common aspects in kink and in sex in general, is what they call the Dom-Sub relationship, which means that one partner is agreed to be dominant and the other is agreed to be submissive. And there's a wide range of how that can look and how those things are played out in kinky sex play, but the dom and the sub each holds a particular kind of power. Getting really clear about what that power is, each getting clear about what their intentions are, that they want to give each other a positive experience. Agreeing upon what they each want to bring and receive from the exchange or the encounter.
And a lot of healthy communication about what's OK, what's not OK, and the need for a lot of healthy open communication within the sexual experience or the kink play experience, often so that people do not get hurt, but also so that particularly the Dom can know what the Sub’s experiences and adjust themselves accordingly. I have been very impressed with the San Francisco Kink community's investment in educating people, in how to have these kinds of conversations and agreements.
Sometimes people have written agreements before they interact with each other. I personally think that would be a great idea for dating and in marriage. In fact, when I do marriage counseling with people, I do have them do written agreements and I know from my own couple’s work, when we started to write things down, it moved everything to a different level. Something to bring home to your own relationship.
What do you like? What do I like? What do you want? What do I want? What do you not like? What do I not like? What are we willing to agree on? Where can we come together? And this is the essence of healthy lover and energy, in its relational sexual aspect. I will leave a link to the Aerobie website. That is the Bay Area website for kink classes, events and education in the show notes.
The lover archetype expands way beyond sexuality into the larger sensual experience of being a human. I will talk more about that in a few minutes. But I bring up the Dom-Sub thing, not everybody is familiar with those terms, because this dynamic in kink also relates to a larger healthy relationship.
With the archetypes of masculine and feminine that lives within each of us, that we each have dominant and submissive parts of ourselves. And one way to understand those that is probably a little bit more accurate for the larger masculine and feminine is that the masculine is active and the feminine is receptive. Most of us suck at receiving and the vulnerable receptive parts of ourselves is often where much about wounding lies, and particularly internally within ourselves. The optimal masculine feminine dynamic from my perspective is this healthy interaction with my dominant masculine self is caring for my receptive, feminine self. The feminine part of myself being connected to my deepest experience, my intuition, my desire for connection, meaning, spirituality, that the active parts of myself, the masculine parts of myself that know how to do stuff and create stuff and interact with the world in a successful way is deeply informed by my own needs, my own desires, and the very healthy aspects of what I need to receive from the world. The masculine is like the breathing out and the feminine is like the breathing in and we need both to be a living being.
This is kind of an oversimplification, but for many people the masculine lives in their head. The feminine lives in their heart and their gut is a healthy place where they can meet. In fact, if you think about that in your body that our gut and below that in our genitals and pelvic region, that's where masculine and feminine meet in sexuality.
And so, our gut instincts are usually trustworthy because they are a combination of our, masculine and feminine. The more conscious we can get and live from our gut place; I think the more empowered we are. There has been some talk lately about gut brain, and that is a fascinating subject that actually the flora that live in our gut has influence over our emotional and physical ability to process the world. Fascinating, way beyond the scope of this podcast right now because I do not totally understand it.
One of the most interesting things about Archetypes is the range of expression that they have from really destructive and selfish to really constructive, productive and healthy. Archetypes can be the worst of ourselves and the best of our self. Depending on how we expressed them and their development in consciousness in our life. And there's a really simple question we can ask our self and it has to do with motives and motives are a little bit different than intention for me. Intention is my intellectual ideas about what I want, but my motives tend to include all of it, including the stuff I am unconscious about. And just because I am unconscious about it does not mean I am not responsible for it.
Or that it has tremendous impact on my decisions and my actions in the world. And because my decisions and my actions create my reality, it is a really good idea to know what your motives are.
And motives are often driven by these archetypal dynamics, they are the deeper currents that we bring into the world, and there's kind of a simple question we can ask our self in any decision-making process.
Am I making a decision from fear or am I making a decision from Love? Is it selfish? Is it self-less? And selfless does not mean that my own highest good is not involved in the hoped for outcome, but am I thinking only of my own self-interest or am I considering the highest good of everyone involved. And that is my favorite prayer for guidance, to ask what is the highest good for everyone involved. Again the highest good includes me because I am involved. This is actually a request for wisdom and the highest good does not necessarily mean what makes everybody happy. I had a very intense interaction with the client recently. I have been seeing her for quite a few years and she has been really suffering with disconnection and depression. And because I love her and have her highest good in mind, I have really confronted her ass about her addiction and about her experience of being victimized by everything and it may have ended our relationship. She was fucking pissed, and I do not know if it was helpful. I do not know if it was affective, but if I really have someone's highest good in mind, then I may have to tell them things that make them unhappy, because we cannot always see ourselves accurately. My favorite definition of love is to extend oneself for another's spiritual growth. In fact, I have dedicated my life to that, and I have lost more than one person on the way. In my responsibility is to love them anyway. So,the lover archetype has many expressions and as we're going to talk about it today in its more masculine form. This is the active aspect of the lover, the driver, the dominant one and developing this energy in our self, expands our capacity for wholeness and power in our life, and that doesn't mean we have to be on top in sex.
Although we might try it if we have not before, just to experiment and expand our capacity and have a new experience.
So, when we talk about the lover archetype, we will automatically think about love in sex and of course love in sex are important aspects of the lover energy, but what is really at the heart of the lover is connection. There are some really great books on Warrior, Magician, Lover, King Archetypes. I want to put a shout out to Robert Moore. In a more recent work by Rod Boothroyd and he says about the lover archetype, it is true. Love and sex are important aspects of Lower Energy, but what really lies at the heart of the lover archetype is a desire for connection; connection with others, connection with ourselves and connection with the planet on which we live. And the lover archetype also serves as a container for our great primal hungers around sensuality, food and emotional well-being. In fact, the lover may be the most primal archetype for it springs into life the moment we are born.
And if we cannot connect, we suffer.
And the dysfunction of our connections is the root of a lot of our suffering, and so to be fully open to our lover archetype is to be open-hearted, to be deeply connected, to be vulnerable, to be central. In its mature form, the lover is deeply present with others unconditionally.
Really being with who they are and appreciating and valuing that and reflecting it back to them. The lover archetype is our sensitivity, meaning our ability to sense and feel things; the non-rational, the non-intellectual, emotional, spiritual, energetic, relational, social, and also sensing the physical world; sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, instinct, intuition, our sensory experience of our animal body in the world. A healthy lover is able to love deeply and to let go to hold its own grief, sadness, loss, manage its own emotions as the life force moves on, as children develop, as relationships come and go. As people are born and as people die.
And to be able to love deeply without fear or defensiveness against its own pain, to move deeply and surrender to the life process. In romance and sexuality, a mature lover again is deeply present with the other; selfless, open, connected, communicating physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. The shadow side of the lover is the addict, the needy one, or the stoic who needs nothing, being emotionally unavailable, sexually anorexic, or shut down. Sexual and social anorexia are terms a lot of people are not familiar with, and they point to a pattern of withholding or withdrawing from sexual and social interaction, very much like food anorexics avoid food. That is the underdeveloped lover, afraid to get their feelings hurt or like a hungry ghost who is so needy they can never be filled and wants the other to complete them rather than to show up as a whole person to another whole person and share the mutual mystery of connection in love, the underdeveloped lover hopes the other will do that work for them. There is a really tragic myth in our culture around addictive love and that the other person completes us, and we can easily go from relationship to relationship to relationship hoping to find the right person, believing actually that there is a right person that will complete us, not realizing that the only person who can complete us is ourselves and to actually have sustainable, nourishing deep relationship, I need to be whole within myself and so do you. Certainly, we can interact and help and support and do lots to help each other grow, but no one else can do our inner work for us. No one else can make us whole. Unfortunately, we raise our children with these myths. Disney is a big perpetrator. Most Disney stories, the Princess finds the Prince, and everything is great after that. I chased that for a long time, I have been divorced more than once.
All we need to do is look at our intimate relationships and we can see where the dysfunction is and if the dysfunction seems like it is external, then you are in denial. It is never a coincidence who we are in a relationship with or how those relationships play out. In living color, we get to see our internal lover dynamic in our intimate relationships.
In spiritual psikology we talk a lot about self-parenting and healthy self-parenting. Our own emotional relationship with ourselves can be an expression of the healthy or unhealthy lover archetype.
In closing, I leave you to consider your own relationship with Lover Energy, with sensuality, with intimacy, and to consider and explore where you are mature and where you are under developed as a lover in your own life.
