Blogs

Version 2.0 March 31, 2010

© 2010 Howard McQueen

In Michael Brown’s Books, the Presence Process and Alchemy of the Heart, integrity, authenticity and intimacy are an important trinity in his process vocabulary.

As I reenter and apply the Presence Process for the second time, I have been building a working relationship with this trinity.

Integrity is the ability to recognize and honor our work-in-process, unprocessed emotions, no matter how raw and/or unsettling. We do this by feeling our emotions in order to begin the healing of our past discomforts and trauma. Connecting to our integrity allows us to become aware of our manufactured belief structures, how these fuel our reactive behaviors, and how we keep ourselves entrapped in mental confusion and delusion. By practicing integrity, we learn to insert a space of silence, of not doing anything other than witnessing what arises within us. What has, for so long, been automatic and reactive, begins to come into our focus and awareness. We see that our manufactured beliefs have created blind spots, black holes of emotionally charged memories that arise and come alive as others “push our buttons”. We literally become unconscious during these emotional hi-jackings. The space we uncover and create as we connect to our integrity sets us up to consciously challenge our ingrained habits of blaming / shaming, playing the victim or perpetrator (victor).

Authenticity is the process of discovering and learning to discern that these habitual, reactive behaviors of protection and aggression no longer serve us. Authenticity offers us connection to our inner landscape and our inner resources and we begin experimenting with the wealth of inner capabilities and insights to be @choice, i.e. to tend to our own garden. This allows us to begin disempowering and surrendering the belief structures triggering our reactive behaviors. We learn to choose the pathway of reflection, to become responsive and compassion with our self and others.

Intimacy is the clear-seeing, the piercing through the fog of our manufactured conflicted, in-resistance beliefs and behaviors. As we become intimate, we truly feel comfortable and connected with life as it unfolds, accepting the ever changing maelstrom of life’s forces without judgment or conflict. Intimacy is being consciously connect to the inner intent (peace, love, joy, acceptance) we wish to manifest into our world. We take full responsibility for experiencing life, on life’s terms. Even though others, including our birth family, may still be sleep-walking and deeply conflicted, we allow them and the external world to just be as it is. We share our open heartedness, joy and compassion with the world, infecting the world with our radical love and appreciation for life, by being more fully open and vulnerable to all of life and to the full spectrum of emotional feelings life offers us.

© 2010 Howard McQueen

What part of our self are we not willing to give freely, and place into the service of sowing, cultivating and harvesting love?

What are we holding on to that believes we put ourselves at risk by loving?

My own journey of awakening to love reveals that the more conscious, consistent, respectful and trusting I imbue the love I give, these same qualities seem to be magnified and reflected back to me through another.

Love is unconditional.

Love does not try to play it safe.

Love does not seek counsel in holding back.

Love does not behave or conform to human concepts, such as quid-pro-quo.

I choose to open to this radical, transformational love,

a love that celebrates vulnerability,

that acknowledges the hurt, pain and disappointment,

the unpredictability and seemingly limited duration of love within human form.

Emory and I applied and received a marriage certificate yesterday.

The clerk genuinely wished us the best when she handed us the certificate.

The three of us spoke for several minutes about the nature of marriage as a door that swings both ways, that the probate court, on any given day, receives about as many marriage applications as it does divorce
applications.

I am again opening and bringing everything I am to bear in a partnership centered in love. I am much clearer as to the conditions and constraints that have obscured and diffused my prior attempts at love, both for my self as well as my relationship with another.

May the courage arise in you to embrace love, over and over, again and again.

~~~ ... ~ ...

This posting completed less than one hour before Emory and I are to be married.

This posting written from St. Marys, Ga. the southern-most coastal Georgia
town, camping in the Crooked River State Park. Version 2.0

© 2010 HOWARD MCQUEEN

Intimacy, this experiential journey with self

is accelerated and articulated

in the depth of connection,

the relationship space,

shared, occupied and felt with another.

There is only so much self-discovery work

we can do by ourselves.

We need the reflected surfaces,

the reactions and responses of another

to make our way into reconnecting

and discovering our human interiors.

We need to experience

our depth of separation

to come face to face

with our core, manufactured identity.

Much of what we have accumulated as identity

is destined to die, to burn up in our heightened,

over exposed re-entry

into our true home world atmosphere,

this trinity of integrity - authenticity - intimacy.

Our long postponed journey into intimacy,

this awakening of awareness,

this courage arising in the heart and gut

to send forth expeditions into the hidden pockets

where our discomforts fester.

At first, we don’t so much navigate as flat out

stumble, fall and succumb to the contents of our pockets,

these triggered traps of reactive pretense,

safeguarding and protecting long-held traumas,

dictating habitual behavior,

bullying about, spreading fear,

choking out freedom to be conscious and @CHOICE.

The dark shadows and fear arise and overwhelm … momentarily.

Deconstructing and un-doing identity,

the mentally ill-born, manufactured beliefs,

the passive-aggressive strategies of identity underpinning our hurt.

We learn to unwrap and decipher our human evolutionary capacity

to give ourselves the gift of learning to process,

to power-down and surrender

that which we hide and hold back

from becoming truly intimate

with our Self.

WOWCH!

Part of the gift arrives with the personal will of commitment to do whatever it takes when the journey into intimacy leads us into our blindness, our unconsciousness. In truth, it is as much your partner’s matching
contribution to do “whatever it takes” to show you your demons, despots and despairs, to unwaveringly guide you into your discomfort and discord, to shore up and invite into relationship the encouragement to dive into stuck, energetic kinks and knots, to hold the sacred space as both step into the overwhelming journey
into intimacy.

Know how blessed you are to be with a partner willing to process their own work and be a clear enough mirror to guide you inward, towards your hurt and ouch and ultimately transform this discord into a harmonious,
unifying WOW.

My partner, Emory Cortese, last week coined this full circle experience WOWCH! You don’t get to experience and harvest the WOW without doing the work to feel into and pierce through all the
OUCH.

"The FORM changes, but the CONTENT remains exactly the same as it was
created in the beginning. Love is changeless. LOVE IS ONE. Love is
patient and kind and perfect." ---Lisa Natoli

Conversations with Yin and Yang

© 2010 Howard McQueen

YIN, on her very first, inaugural leg of her Journey, offers an outpouring

It was not very long ago

that I was hospitalized and sedated,

all the inner pain and confusion.

A dreading, a deep sense of ending my life felt so near.

A memory of the kindness,

my husband keeping me company,

deep into the night

till in my exhaustion,

I would slip into blessed sleep.

I’ve been a nourisher all my life,

nourishing two children,

now my mother …

I felt a deep connection with a male friend.

I sensed flirtations and urges within him

that caused me to close down.

I felt like I was muted, gagged, unable to utter a word.

He then, without any notice – disappeared.

My hopes for continued connections with him, gone,

seemingly dashed on the rocks.

Threatened – withdrawing – presuming rejection – depression.

This is the cycle, the pit of despair I often find myself stuck in.

I was sexually abused in my childhood

by my father.

I told my mom and in her fear,

she left him.

My dad took me, just us two, for a car ride

out on a solitary sparsely populated country road.

He urged me to recant my story -

I would not.

I thought my life would likely be forfeit during that ominous car ride.

Instead,

In the police station the following day

My dad’s life was forfeited,

taken away by his just after dawn

massive coronary heart attack.

The only life I’ve known thus far

is to be a heads-down nurturer of others.

I dearly want all those I love to be well

AND

I know,

for me to become whole,

I must continue this journey

to now somehow get a handle and nourish myself,

to call forth deeper parts of myself to awaken.

I am fearful of so many things,

as I take this set of baby steps forward into the unknowing.

YANG pauses to take a long sip from the well

YIN, you are now sipping from a straw,

this journey is revealing to you.

It dips into new dimensions of spirit, of freedom, of trust.

What you are not yet aware of

is that this straw has penetrated deep into you,

connecting your being into the infinite well of spirit.

Your mind, cynical and seemingly bruised,

obsessing over painful memory fragments,

will, on its own accord, never have a clue,

will never understand straws or spirit wells.

Your heart, however, intuitively knows

that it has found

Its headwaters for the soul,

the unconditional source for cleansing and healing Self.

The mind, always distracted,

unable to fathom spirit,

by itself,

only knows to focus on asking its

ongoing nervous-generating questions:

How will I ever make my own way …

The heart, connected through the well of spirit,

KNOWS.

Has vision to see through the darkness

and shadows and fears.

It intuitively senses

LIFE WILL

resolve and manifest each day

that you stay

present to your divine journey,

intimate with nourishing

and integrating

these emergent aspects of yourself:

- Your child self,

the child self you know,

intuitively,

how to hold in unconditional, loving embrace.

- Your intuition,

the inner parent, nourisher and guidance counselor,

that the journey is constantly queuing into arising,

like the fully empowered sun peeking through

its slow-motion sunrise.

You are warming,

your hardened shell of past held pain-trauma cracking,

allowing the infinite love of God to work its way inside

all the way in, and to shine all the way through,

cleansing every aspect

of all you’ve ever defined as you.

As you now begin to accept

full authorship for your story,

it shifts from a plot of

me and my inherited pain

and nourisher-of-others,

to this unbelievable ever-expanding love story,

this sacred,

humble,

human rite-of-initiation and passage,

this rising above the pain of the world,

to radiate an intoxicating love,

organically grown through opening to

everything and everyone on your journey,

seeing pain and suffering present

in virtually everyone,

knowing in your heart

that others will awaken,

and like you,

take up their own journey.

Many will radiate the new found vitality of spirit,

learn to unconditionally love

and share their compassion

for a world bathed in inherited pain and suffering.

Perhaps this is the training ground,

the ideal conditions for humanity’s awakening,

for the golden age of spirit to be born.

Yang does not know all the answers,

but knows to trust his authenticity,

to live in the heart,

radiating and expressing love and compassion

and leave the rest up to the great unfolding.

Dear Yin,

know through every cell of our body

that you are,

have been

and will always be

unconditionally cherished, adored and loved.

© 2010 Howard McQueen

Don’t presume you can gently explore intimacy.

Intimacy will flat out overwhelm you,

exposing your hidden,

long incubated

fears.

A single word spoken

can draws open the flood gates,

drowning ourselves and those we love

intimately,

in our hidden reservoir

of waiting to be reconciled,

yet to be named

invited to be felt and received

human emotions.

Such are these avoided emotions we label "wounds",

stored in resistance to the unrestrained, unconditional heart.

Clenched closure, shutting down our aperture

for receiving all the gifts life brings to our threshold.

Intimacy transforms the hardened walls of defense

holding at bay the fear held in the human heart.

Walls become again

malleable,

translucent,

permeable

membranes

for the youthful vim and vigor of life to re-enter.

The heart opens, disgorging that which hurt and was hidden

in the hijacked intimacy of childhood.

In awakening,

we are invited to truly feel these hidden emotions,

to navigate and dance with these seemingly blocked demons living within.

As this intimate inward dance progresses,

we are gifted with the name

of these “I can’t handle it” emotional energies

and their energy, with a fullness of capabilities and capacities

are gifted back, returning to us.

Our personal stories,

seemingly etched deep in store grooves,

are seen merely as charged preferences

now rapidly dissolving into the freedom’s clarity.

Thus we come full circle,

face to face

with our authentic nature,

once crimped musical instruments,

now nimble dancers

Our judging and sentencing life dramatically lessens

Our manufacturing resistance to life shifts into decline

and more light enters this world,

as Love.