Finding Intimacy With All That Is
Lessons from the Goddess's Earthly daughters
The hermitage gives one a lot of time to think. It’s a good place to find yourself when you’ve gotten lost.
I have had the honor and privilege of loving and being in partnership with two of the Goddess’s fairest Earthly daughters. Both began as my dearest friends and confidants. In each case intimacy bloomed into love, and we entered into partnership with the best of intentions of loving one another and making a home.
My first partner was a Goddess of earth and fire. We met in our early twenties, attracted to one another by our shared strangeness in a world that felt cold and indifferent.
We came together in our mutual loneliness to make a family of two. We both bore the scars of similar upbringings and came together to heal and love one another as best we could.
She taught me how to love someone more than I loved myself. She opened my heart and wore away my selfishness through the selfless devotion of her love.
She taught me how to love, which opened all other spiritual possibilities in my life.
For a time we were happy together in our little family of two, with our cats as children. But over time the cracks in the foundation of our relationship began to show. Unhealed trauma reared its ugly head, and we began to grow apart.
Dissatisfaction and disconnection began to take hold. I committed to the practices I hoped would set me free, which included yoga, meditation, spiritual study, and ultimately medicine work.
I tried to include her in these things, but she was not naturally inclined. I realized early on that my pursuit of them might cause us to grow apart. But I resolved to do it anyway because I believed our commitment should first and foremost be to our own evolution and healing, and that companions on the path will either follow or fall away.
Our coming apart happened in stages. It happened painfully and slowly. There was deep love between us, but increasing dissonance in our values, interests, and how we chose to spend our time.
It took nearly ten years for that cycle to play out from entering into relationship, creating a home, ending the romantic relationship, and moving out. Each stage was drawn-out and heart wrenching.
We lived together for years after the romantic relationship ended. I moved out when it became clear that continuing to live together was doing us both more harm than good. That parting contained all of the ugliness and pain I hoped to avoid by remaining in place after we broke-up. It was an inevitability I had tried to avoid.
I left that home to form a new one with my long time friend and new partner. There was ugliness in that which I am not proud of. I ended the romantic relationship with my former partner because we had grown apart and I was developing feelings for someone else. But I didn’t have the courage to leave. Instead we spent years in an in-between place, living together but apart, while I grew in love with another. That wasn’t the right way to do things, and I regret doing it.
After I committed to leaving the home I came into relationship with my second beloved, a Goddess of wind and water. We came together, then a few months later moved into a home to form a new partnership and family.
We came together in middle age, more fully formed than either of us had been in our previous relationships. We had similar spiritual frameworks for interpreting the world and many shared practices, and had a firm foundation of years of friendship and trust.
Over the course of a year of living and loving one another she helped me find my voice and step into my power. Most of that year was heaven on Earth.
But after a year the cracks in the foundation became gaping mauls and the depths of intimacy we had once shared found its opposite in disconnection.
The cause was the same as last time - trauma that was unready to be healed.
Within 24 hours of gaining that clarity we came apart and I left our home. Thanks to our shared practices we achieved in a year what had previously taken a decade.
I’ve now retreated to the hermitage to reflect on the part I’ve played in all this suffering. My most frequent refrain has been that I wish we had known ourselves better and could have avoided making such a mess. But that would negate the entire purpose of our human incarnations.
We came into these bodies to learn the lessons of wisdom and love. We are drawn into relationship by our unmet needs. In trying to meet them through one another we come to know the self more fully, and find the limitations of our capacity for love and intimacy.
As this most recent chapter comes to an end I am grappling with the reality that I may be unsuitable for householder life. The path I have chosen is one that requires me to live and die by the grace of God. Which isn’t something I can ask anyone else to do.
I am committed to following my own path and seeking ever greater intimacy with the Creator even at the expense of my dearest and most intimate relationships. This too feels at odds with partnership.
I had hoped to have it both ways. These things are not necessarily at odds. Yet each time I have tried they have proven to be irreconcilable.
The love of a good woman is a gift of infinite worth. The feminine helps ground the masculine into physical reality and orient him toward service to life. Intimate relationship with a beloved opens a doorway to greater intimacy with the entire creation.
A man comes to love and know the Goddess first and foremost through her Earthly daughters.
To walk this path alone without the intimate other feels daunting and lonely. I got lost in relationship. But aloneness holds its own perils of losing touch with the human condition, and forgetting what makes life worth living.
I am committed to truth in love. I’ve had the blessing of finding my soulmate twice in two different guises. We loved and grew one another in beautiful ways. But ultimately we were unable to maintain the bonds of intimate connection. The veil of maya was too strong for either partnership to last.
Perhaps it is time that I honor my monastic calling. It has always been my place of refuge when householder life has felt incompatible with my path.
It is time to explore this calling, even if it is to determine once and for all that it isn’t the way. I’m not making any lifetime commitments, and I’m not renouncing anything. True monasticism cannot come from a place of renouncing the world. I simply hope to live in integrity with what now feels true. I have entered the hermitage to find myself, and in so doing I hope to find greater intimacy with all that is.
I will have to find some balance between the aloneness I need to remember who I am, and meaningful friendships that keep me connected to the world and remind me of what makes life worth living. I hope to do this through my ministry.
Thank you for being a companion on the path. I do not know if our journey together will be long or short. But if we part I know we will meet again. Know that I love you, no matter how long we remain in one another’s sight.
RAMAKA KRIYA
At the behest of my lineage I have started teaching yoga through the vehicle of Ramaka Kriya, which literally translates to "Rama's Spirit in Action." Ramaka Kriya is a path of self and god realization dedicated to restoring Dharma through the use of effective spiritual practices and the righteous use of energy.
It is universalist in the sense that it honors the perennial wisdom tradition and seeks ever greater integrity with truth. While truth is an endless exploration, the key pillars of the tradition are based in mystical Christianity, Hinduism, and indigenous Earth based spirituality.
SATSANGS
I have begun traveling and teaching Ramaka Kriya to raise funds for Ramaka Temple. If you would like to sponsor an event please reach out.
MEDICINE COUNSEL
I offer mediation services and consultations on entheogenic law and integration coaching through Medicine Counsel.