warms a heart
WE long for love, to share our hearts, minds, and bodies with others. It is easier with the head and with the body, we are less adept with the heart.
Invariably, even within our most intimate relationships, it's the heart that holds back, which is tentative, tight, constricted, and not fully able to open, reveal, and release itself. In most intimate relationships this is the frequent complaint: "You only share ideas, you never reveal your heart!" "We have sex, but our souls never met!" "Your heart is not really in this, even though you claim it is!"
Confronted with this, the temptation of our own age is to look for an answer in sex. Our age would have us believe that the way to de-constrict the heart is through sex.
The complex human heart is, to today's mind, set free by sex. Small wonder that sex is paraded as salvation, used to sell virtually every product, and becomes the make-it-or-break-it item in so many relationships. We see it as the key to intimacy.
But sex doesn't automatically, nor easily, do this because the release of the heart has less to do with sex than with blessing.
Let me try to explain with an image: among many mammals, the mother de-constricts the baby after it is born by licking its entire body, thus stripping off the membranes which, in the womb, had helped cradle, that new life but which now bind and paralyse It. In doing this, the mother opens the new-born to life, sets it free to walk on its own, to romp in the sun. In the mammal world, this Is primary blessing the mother setting her young he — the elder giving the young its birthright . Now imagine a man and woman standing before each other, able to relate to each other sexually and intellectually, to share both their bodies and their minds, but one (or both) of them Is frustrated because the other's heart is not open and is not a part of the relationship in the same way as is that other's body and mind.
What is needed in this relationship is not more sex, but a blessing (which, often, the couple cannot give to each other.) The tightness in the heart that is making it more tentative than the body and the head often has less to do with that particular relationship than It has to do with lack of Mewing from "elders" in the other area of life.
The heart is set free by blessing from our "elders". This is symbolised primarily by the
mother licking the afterbirth of her young. It is concentrated when somebody who is our "elder" (because something about them puts them into a position where we need them to set us free, where we are dependent upon them in such a way that their affirmation or curse either binds or looses us) affirms us. They, figuratively and really, have power to lick is free of constriction afterbirth or to leave us thus paralysed.
What all this means is that the cure for the man who stands before his wife unable to relate to her with his heart as he does with his head and his body has less to do with his sexual and intellectual relationship to her than it has to do with lack of blessing elsewhere in his life.
If his father would one day affirm him in his marriage and in his work, if his mother would one day make it dear to him that he should feel free from all her expectations well, that night his wife, whose constant complaint is that he never talks about his feelings, would find that she would not be able to shut him up. His heart would be bubbling over and she would suddenly notice a vital new dimension, the heart, in their relationship.
The same holds true in reverse. If a woman were one day to receive the unconditional affirmation of her father or mother, and then, on that same day, be made aware by the dean of her department that her work is valuable and he does not perceive this as a threat but as II joy to be shared well, she would find her heart suddenly and joyfully de-constricted and her lucky husband wouldn't know what hit him.
The way to de-constrict the heart is more through blessing than through sex.
Once we know this, we might be more understanding of each other, and we might, as we get older, look more for a younger person to bless than for a younger person to sleep with!