Entering the Second Gateway: Love

Last month I wrote about the First Gateway of Spirit and how it has transformed my life. This month I want to share with you about the Second Gateway of Love.

Love is a word with sooooo many meanings and powerful associations–“Love heals all wounds”–”Love conquers all obstacles”–”Love is a many-splendored thing”. I was always confused by these statements, because for me Love was full of jealousy, drama, and tremendous highs, lows, and drama. This was often followed by years of boredom, unhappiness, and a need to control or fix the other person.

I wasn’t really practicing love in my life, but rather more a kind of dark emotional dependency. All this intensity in my relationships kept me occupied and created connection that soothed my fear of being alone. True Love was something completely outside my experience, even though I had pledged myself to serve the Goddess of Love in all her forms and had taken vows to be her faithful vessel on this Earth.

Birthing my son didn’t change any of this. There was no new ability to feel love as I held him for the first time, just fear and anxiety and overwhelm. Deeply worried, I wondered why I wasn’t feeling this ecstatic experience of motherly love that everyone was talking about.

When my son was one, I experienced a “nervous breakdown” and it became clear that I had some very deep wounds to heal. I worked with a therapist, did yoga, meditated, and began learning to connect even more deeply with the Spirit of nature. I learned all I could about the subject of love, and how to create more love in myself. Many teachers gave me various pieces of the puzzle, but I still felt stuck. My second marriage of 10 years started to fall apart, and I became chronically ill with bronchitis. In this physical illness I started to experience a spiritual cleansing of my heart, and it began to open in a new way. I reconnected with an old lover, and experienced for the first time the fullness of kundalini fire moving through my body and healing me. As I healed I began to have powerful dreams, and one dream in particular shocked me awake to write it down.

In this dream I saw the face of a man I did not know, who would be a priest, healer, and teacher in my life. The exact words he said to me were: “Now you’re ready for me”.

Three months later I met Steven, the man who co-founded Yabyummy with me, and my life has never been the same. We fell into a romantic, business, and spiritual relationship with each other. We practiced tantric meditation and lovemaking together, and we started a business to help other people learn the amazing things we were discovering together. He became my entire world.

In my relationship with him I finally experienced the real meaning of Love. Discovering that Love means that you love another unconditionally, that it creates a feeling of freedom in the heart, was a revelation. And yet it was far from perfect. I had more lessons to learn.

In my connection with Steven, I was given the opportunity to heal and purge some of my darkest wounds. I was wracked with the most painful jealousy I’d ever experienced in my life, as well as the greatest love. I experienced powerful healing as almost every jealousy and abandonment button was pushed in this relationship. I raged at him, I berated myself, I let go, I worked with my mentors, I continued to heal. Spirit reached down and began to teach me, bit by bit, about love.

Loving someone so much that every word, every movement, everything about them was beautiful and made me love them more? That was new for me. Receiving every touch on my body as welcome? That was new for me. Finding myself ready to make love with him at any time or any place? VERY new for me. I spent hours watching him sleep, and made myself always available to him night or day for support. I was obsessed. But I didn’t care. For the first time I was with an incredibly handsome, smart, funny, trustworthy man, who shared my excitement about my spiritual purpose. The sex was out of this world. For four years I struggled to find a way to stay in relationship with him because I loved him so much. In the end it came down to this: he loved me, but he wasn’t “in love” with me.

And so we parted ways. It was the hardest parting of my entire life.

When one door closes, another door opens. And so it was with the ending of this very intense relationship. Spirit gave me the incredible gift of Love. Shockingly, I began to feel love in my heart even though I was no longer in relationship. I discovered that the love that had awakened in me was mine, even though the relationship was no longer part of my life. What a gift!

At first the waves of love in my heart came in only during my second gateway meditation practice. But as I practiced, my ability to feel this love in my heart increased. There was this cold, expansive tingling sensation that would come over me–that I learned to define as love. In my next several relationships, this new feeling awakened again and again. I was finally changing.

Just the other day I went to see “The Secret World of Arrietty”, and I cried because the animation was so beautiful. It takes so little for me to feel love, joy and beauty these days, and I feel so amazed at how powerful these feelings have become. And in my relationship? Powerful. Enough love to move the world.

Loving those who are different from me has also become easier. Practicing the second gateway has helped to mend fences with my Mother, my former lovers and husbands. Even now as I write I can feel this love–it’s getting stronger.

I’ve discovered that love is like a muscle. The more I exercise it, the stronger and bigger and more beautiful it gets.

For more info about the second gateway, see Kypris’ book: “Journey to Sexual Wholeness: The Six Gateways to Sacred Sexuality”