Seduction and Love

Seduction is a beautiful force, a passionate and playful pull toward something just on the edge, an invitation to say yes to what we really want to–and fully–and the irresistible pull that leads us to let go of our heady blocks and dive all into the dark pool with everything–we surrender it all. We need this force to pull us toward passion and learn to say ‘yes’ to what calls us even when it is a bit fucking scary frankly. That is its appeal.

Yet, it is only one ½ of the dark feminine, to seduce, and when wielded unbalanced leads to ‘using’ or taking. The seducer takes- if it is underground, underhanded, or without permission. As a Jung psychologist describes, ‘The shadow feminine is a mood, and not a feeling, and when mood has engaged us, we forfeit the ability for true feeling, thus we forfeit true relationship and creativity’. 

I have experienced this deep seduction from men, and feeling the sense of being used–seduced but not given also that stayed ‘feeling’, that when a man/woman/being inhabits in themselves, fully brings warmth, gentleness, relatedness, and perception to the other he is seducing. This balance is where the real juicy wholeness of sensuality can exist. This requires a man/ woman to be whole in themselves, and in touch with ‘feeling’ not just their ever changing moods and impulse to take, use, discard.

As a woman who lives her life in ‘feeling’, (and often has to get logistical sense on board to balance that!) I know immediately when my partner or lover succumbs to seduction to draw me in, or push me away, and not being willing to risk or find ‘feeling’ continuously. Suddenly his eyes glaze, he hardens, he withdraws, and as an intuitive woman I know he has left the relational field. It is a painful place of sudden retraction and being unmet. ‘A light switch I can turn off’, as my brother described it growing up, and my 14-year old son concurred last night as we sat with tea, that this is what men/boys are taught.

“Mom, as boys, we’re not supposed to have big feelings. And, if we do and we show them, we’re considered weak, we’re expected to hold them in. And then, if a girl has big feelings, we are expected to hold those too!’. 

Yes, my 14 year old, after watching a documentary on spiritual bypass/gurus who admitted they never had a father/mother who could show them their heart, made this conclusion. Even a boy raised with a mother so in touch with that part knows and feels he cannot ‘feel’ or there are consequences. 

Here, the light switch is taught. And what other way ‘in’ is there but seduction, devoid of vulnerability and transparency, the very things that build true whole relationship. It just makes me downright sad.

Last night, I had dinner with a friend. Suddenly amongst pizza and spaghetti, I saw a vision of our humanity as ‘an organism’ and it brought me to tears unexpectedly. The way the shadow plays underground, how the organism from above looked like a war zone with seduction, greed, control, violence bursting into the landscape and causing large fissures between us all. I felt this deep pain.

And when i returned home, I spotted this picture of Lyric from so long ago, of this same boy, my beekeeper who when a bee landed on him and stung him he cried, and when I put my arm around him and said ,’I bet that hurt’, he said, ‘i’m not crying for me, but for the bee–he’s going to die!’. Holding a rock with a wide smile that understood so purely–LOVE.

We need to learn to deepen the conversation with one another to what is really beneath our fears, our want to belong, to be loved–and when this is brought out in community, the truth, we will start true healing, true belonging, true love. I know this is an idealist view, and it’s my burden to carry in this world. Every day I feel the pain of disconnection around me and feel helpless to its force and my ability as one woman to repair even a slice of the organism. But I show up in my little part of the world here, on the dance floor, in my relationships, and especially with my boys, still standing for that human quality and others I know as a woman of heart to be the healing forces we are all searching for.

Love.