Healing ourselves in order to get love has an expiration date. In my “healing journey”, I have had to recognize that the reason I thought of it as a journey (identified with the nervous system) was because I was aiming toward a reward and a specific outcome, which is that at one point I will become worthy and lovable.
It’s no secret that a man who has become more integrated in his masculine becomes more attractive to women. It’s no secret that a woman who has become more integrated in her feminine becomes more attractive to men. And so it’s no surprise that both men and women are encouraged to be motivated by being more attractive.
There will be what appears to be “sacred teachings” around this, promoting a payoff of better sex and the reward of your most desired partner knocking at your door.
Women are pleading for men to be more manly so that they can feel more comfortable, and men are pleading for women to be more feminine so that they can feel more comfortable.
But the whole game is a sham and is promoting the externalization of our safety by using the approval of others as a barometer of our success.
As a man this becomes an especially nuanced issue when oftentimes a woman will provide a very useful reflection for us, whether she realizes it or not, simply based on how her nervous system reacts in our presence.
But that said, her nervous system could also be comforted and reacting to our manipulations where we are “acting manly”, and so it can be a false reading, especially in the short term.
In a longer-term relationship, the reading and reflection becomes much more accurate.
There is a major dysfunction in our reward and punishment-oriented collective psyche, which skews people toward a fear based motive causing “two steps forward and one step back” when we’re consistently looking for evidence of lovability to see if we’re on the right track.
Integrity requires that we must insist on creating ourselves from a place with absolute inner boundary against codependent indulgences.
To be our truest selves and to dissolve our inherited distortions… to express our creativity for reasons that are genuinly conscious to us (or even without reason at all) is the necessary next step.
We can genuinely create and operate from a space inside of ourselves where we can truly care about the experience of another, without it having anything to do with obsession about our own experience or fears about our own suffering, if the other may need to go through a period of suffering themselves. This requires incredible trust and humility that energies will right themselves without our controlling interventions.
The individuation required of us means we must totally question the foundation of our choices and to watch with great vigilance the deeper, honest, fear-based “why”, which has so much shame around it. Admitting the true motives of “self-improvement” may cause us to feel embarrassed, even if only in front of ourselves.
