Shine As Loves Light
From Bluetruth
Light is what love looks like.
When a person falls in love, she becomes radiant. She shines with love. Her eyes sparkle. Her skin glows. This is because love is what light feels like. Love is the feeling of light. Light is the appearance of love.
The feminine in everyone is identified with love-light.
If you have a more feminine sexual essence, or if you are, in the moment, identified with your feminine, then you want to be seen as light and felt as love. Does gold or silver jewelry bring out the shine in your eyes today? Does a red or blue blouse most magnify your natural radiance?
The feminine is excruciatingly sensitive to the way adornments can serve to amplify or diminish your whole body’s openness to energy and your heart’s display of light. Wearing one pair of shoes or another pair—which may seem almost identical to a more masculine person—can mean the difference between a tawdry and a brilliant day for the feminine.
However, nothing releases the natural light of your feminine heart more than love. A person with a feminine essence can be a successful CEO, a great scientist, or the leader of a country, yet seem drab and unhappy unless love is flowing through her open heart.
The masculine heart responds most fully when aligned with a mission to advance freedom, including financial, artistic, or spiritual freedom. The masculine heart often opens deepest when facing death, or when yielding open beyond what can be known, beyond all things, opening as the freedom beyond all form.
The feminine is form, the light-appearance of all things, all life-power, alive as love and showing as every shape and texture and relationship. Thus, the feminine heart is moved most by all that is alive, by the coming and going of bodies, by life’s dramatic ebb and tide, by the living flow of love in relationship.
Success, direction, mission, achievement, insight, clarity—these things are important to all people. But, right now, which prospect opens your heart more: Donning gorgeous dress and wild jewelry and dancing with your lover and closest friends to your favorite music, or sitting in a room alone without moving for many hours, practicing “ego death” and contemplating emptiness?
Danced by music’s fullness, heart and body surrendered as love alive, the feminine is availed the same “oh” of openness that the masculine is afforded during moments of insight into no-self. Communing with the blissful taste of fine chocolate can be as overwhelming to the feminine as a football team’s sudden death playoff can be for the masculine.
Feminine spiritual growth is about opening to receive all—all people, all situations, the massive presence of the entire moment—deep into your heart, surrendering open to breathe and move as the full force of love, aboundingly alive, appearing as all. Whereas the masculine grows by realizing identity with emptiness, boundless consciousness, the unchanging ever-present witness of life, the feminine grows by realizing identity with ever-changing light, radiant love, or the very love-fullness of all life and every moment.
The masculine craves unchanging nothingness—if not as eternal consciousness, than at least in post-ejaculative peace or zoned out in front of the TV. The feminine is drama, volatile passion, an ocean of tumultuous and ever-fluid light, changing shades, dark and dazzling, concealed and exposed, longing to be seen, felt, entered so deeply as to be overflowed beyond fullness.
Emptiness and quietude are masculine obsessions. The masculine often wants to resolve feminine turmoil and conclude in unadorned openness, the one taste that feels like home to the masculine. But the feminine opens as cinnamon and garlic, as salty, sweet, and bitter, as every possible flavor.
The feminine has no motive to resolve emotions as if ending life’s drama were a goal. Feminine love-light is life. Friendships, love stories, dining, shopping, the intimate theater of hurt and joy, of love lost and gained—the feminine is at home in the fullness of emotion and sensuality, not the empty, unborn void from which the masculine witnesses life. Rapturous devotion, ecstatic dance, wrought-up song, sexual revelry in light’s bliss and love’s tides—these are among the idioms of feminine openness.
Brief pleasure, however, is not the same as deep openness. For instance, the masculine can drink a beer, watch TV, or have an orgasm, and the vacuous pleasure is fairly short-lived. Likewise, the feminine can talk on the phone with a dear friend, go shopping, or dance outrageously in the kitchen, and the feeling of vivacious fulfillment won’t last for too long. Brief pleasures might provide a doorway, but then you can practice to sustain and deepen openness. If you love to dance, for instance, you can use dance as a spiritual practice. Perhaps you can remember a time when you were dancing and felt wide open, as if you were surrendered to the force of love and life as it was dancing you. How did you move? What did you feel in your heart?
As love dancing alive, how do your feet make contact with the ground? What do you feel in your legs? What do you feel between your legs and in your loins, sexually, energetically, as you dance open as the force of life? How do you feel in your belly and chest as the music enters you and moves through you? What expressions show by way of your face and arms and hands? How does love move through and radiate as your entire body?
Enjoy dancing as a true spiritual practice by discovering this: How to dance now so that your heart beams open and your entire body breathes alive as love’s fullness? How can you dance now so your body and heart open to receive every moment deeply and your life shows as love all day? How could you dance through the years so that even as your body ages and withers, your heart opens ever more full, as wide as the moment, shining as love’s radiance to all?
Feminine spiritual practice—sacred dance, for example—requires the same discipline as does solitary meditation. Although openness is who you are, closure is what you tend to do. Sacred dance, like meditation, is the undoing of your habits of fear and closure so your life blossoms open as a blessing of love. As you dance, notice how the shape of your hands and the position of your fingers affect the openness of your heart. Where in your mouth does your tongue rest, and what shape are your lips—smiling, frowning, relaxed, pressed tight—so that love’s energy flows most freely from your heart throughout your whole body to open as the entire moment shining as all?
Opening to receive the full moment and radiate your heart’s full light, how do your feet make contact with the ground when your heart loves the earth through your legs? How do your feet touch the ground with angry love? Sweet love? Yearning love?
How do you dance when you remember someone you love, moving your hips with the sorrow and joy that has moved your heart? How does the back of your neck open when you remember your ancestors? How do your knees and throat open when you remember all those who need your love? How do you dance as a devotional offering, opening to receive the pain of all others, dancing their suffering, offering your deepest heart-blessing as you open? If you were dancing as a divine goddess, how would you dance?
Although sacred dance can open your body to great bliss, you will also discover how you close to love’s fullness. You will come upon ways you hate to move and postures you hate to hold.
Feel through these movements and postures that you hate. Perform them over and over as you practice to open so that love can flow through your entire body and outward to all. Allow love’s energy to tickle your closures, warm your stiffness, and gush you open. Together with your feminine-essence friends, you can oblige each other to open as love, to gently press love through your fear and protection, to feel each other and love each other—especially while you are doing movements and postures you hate.
Just as you can dance your own body open as love, you can practice dancing your friends’ bodies open. You can feel their closure into your body, so they have the opportunity to feel you dancing their unfoldment.
Stand in front of a friend and actively open to receive her into you. Breathe her shape, her guardedness, her darkness, deeply into your heart. Take her qualities into the form of your body. Breathing as her, move as her. Feeling her love and her fear, dance her open.
Allow your friend to feel you opening as her. Writhe your pelvis to open as love through her shape. Feeling as if her body was yours, practice opening every cell, from your toes to your fingers to the top of your head, and every part in between, especially the parts that feel dark or closed. Receive your friend’s shape as yours and dance open as her, exposing your hearts, unlocking love for the sake of all.
As you dance, with practice, you can feel yourself alive not only as one friend, but as all. Breathe in all pain, all closure, all tension. Feel your body as love’s body, your heart pumping the blood of all, your breath receiving and giving for the sake of all. Feeling all, breathing all, open as all. Dance alive as every dark and bright shade of light, moving open as every fearful and lonely body. Open as every texture of love, rageful love, worshipful love, bitter love, yearning love. Open as all, as every, as love.
Sometimes you will feel divine life coursing through your open body. Other times you may feel clogged with black sludge, making you want to curl up in the corner and puke. Either way, practice to open as much as you can. Breathe deeply, and do your best to stay open with your friends in loving, eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart feeling-contact. Or, if you are alone, breathe and feel open, staying in touch with the love that wants to flow through you. No matter how closed you may feel, you can practice breathing and surrendering open, offering yourself to be moved by love as an offering in every moment.
Practice opening while you dance and also randomly throughout the day. Moment by moment, with or without music, breathe all pain and pleasure through your heart in and out, allowing love to open through your closures—through everyone’s closures—offering your body open, full as the moment.
Practice this fullness especially when you would rather not, when your body is closed down, when you would rather withhold your love from everyone, from someone, or from yourself. Don’t just give yourself permission to be full; oblige your surrender as love’s fullness, through your entire body, breathing and moving and living open as love’s all.
You can practice this way anytime, not only when you are hurt, but also when you are full of pleasure. As chocolate melts on your tongue, or while your lover kisses your lips, allow love’s pleasure to fill your body. Notice if your pleasure-energy stops anywhere—if your belly is tense or your womb feels numb or your toes aren’t wiggling—and breathe your body full open. Stay open and feeling-connected with those who may be around you, looking into the eyes of your friends or lover as you practice breathing and magnifying and overflowing as love’s pleasure.
Allow chocolate pleasure to soften your tongue and open your throat and fill your belly, while receiving into your melting heart the sweetness of the living moment. Breathe pleasure-energy through every inch of your body, allowing love to radiate abundantly from your full heart to all. Give chocolate love through your entire body—through your smile, your bright eyes, your happy thighs, and yummy sounds—to your friends and outward to all.
As your lover kisses you, receive love’s pleasure deeply, breathing your heart open, receiving the kiss pressed into you by the very lips of the full moment’s presence. Kissed to love’s depth, offer your undulations and moans as heart-gifts to your lover and to all. Breathe as your body, breathe as your lover’s body, and breathe as all bodies, feeling all and opening alive as every form, full as love’s pleasure.
Since every person embodies both masculine and feminine, every man and woman can benefit from opening themselves as both emptiness and fullness. Sitting in the open silence of meditation and surrendering open as love’s dance are useful for everyone. Nevertheless, observation, insight, meditation, and solitude always have and always will characterize the masculine approach to openness. And, to some degree, these practices always have and always will be a source of great boredom for the feminine.
The feminine moves and breathes as life. Shines as every shade. Opens as every flavor. The feminine is unbounded as life. Alive as love, dancing as all bodies, the feminine opens as all.
