Dear Lover

Although anyone may find the practices, disciplines, and understandings in this book to be useful, it is made available with the understanding that neither the author nor the publisher is engaged in presenting specific medical, psychological, emotional, sexual, or spiritual advice. Nor is anything in this book intended to be a diagnosis, prescription, recommendation, or cure for any specific kind of medical, psychological, emotional, sexual, or spiritual problem. Each person has unique needs and this book cannot take these individual differences into account. Each person should engage in a program of treatment, prevention, cure, or general health only in consultation with a licensed, qualified physician, therapist, or other competent professional. Any person suffering from venereal disease or any local illness of his or her sexual organs or prostate gland should consult a medical doctor and a qualified instructor of sexual yoga before practicing the sexual methods described in this book.

Like many women I know, romantic love is either all I want to talk about, or the last thing I want to talk about, depending on the hour. When I’m in the mood to discuss it, it seems huge and important. When I’m not in the mood, it seems almost neurotic. One thing remains constant, however, regardless of how I view it: romantic love is a mystery.

While it’s many things to many people, rarely is romance the caricature we see portrayed in consumer advertising. It is grittier and more potentially painful than a picture of lovers walking the beach would indicate. Romance is more than a melodramatic container for alternating energies of bliss and despair, but to say what it is not is not the same thing as saying what it is. And that, perhaps, is because what it is, is changing. Like everything else, it is finding its spiritual element. It is rising up to meet us at the level of who we really are.

Viewed spiritually, romance is, in its divine essence, a temple space. It is one of God’s laboratories, a mode of spiritual transformation. It is, when held this way, a sacred opportunity for souls to jump past the confines of the narrow self, to take quantum leaps forward into new and uncharted emotional possibilities. There love corners us, putting a mirror up to our faces and demanding that we surrender: surrender the hurt, surrender the past, surrender the walls, surrender the blame, surrender the defenses, surrender the limits, surrender the fear...

Love is not a game for sissies.

Most women I know are convinced by now, that spiritual surrender is the portal to love. Yet knowing that only goes so far. “Surrender?” we say. “I get the concept—but show me how!” For it’s not so easy to surrender to love, when Daddy wasn’t really there. It’s not so easy to surrender to love, when someone we trusted abandoned or betrayed us. And it’s not so easy to surrender to love when the last relationship left us psychically bleeding for months or even years.

It can take a lot of emotional effort to learn how to open the heart when the experience of life has shut it down. What we had thought were merely temporary protective mechanisms can become hardened over the years into entrenched defensive patterns. And we so grieve the ease and freedom of love.

We remember what we lost when we are reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. We remember what we long for, reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems to her beloved Robert. We remember the miracle we most want in our lives, listening to our favorite music late at night, the heart yearning purely and exquisitely for what it most deeply wants.

That yearning itself is a prayer for the kind of wisdom that David Deida imparts. He is one of our new romantic shamans. Deida is outrageous and blunt and sometimes over the top. He howls as well as whispers; he confronts as well as comforts. The fire he carries can either burn or enlighten, depending on our use of it. But if his fiery gift is a gift for you, then I think that you will know it. You will feel the parts of you that need his message, and you will feel yourself eager to receive it. Your mind and heart will respond to the idea that we can learn how to love in a more meaningful way, delivering us from the patterns of pain that have plagued our journey so far.

The journey to the heart of God is always the key to our deliverance, regardless of the source of our pain. But seeing how to apply that under-standing is not always so easy when the pain strikes, the phone does not ring, the agreement is broken, or the hope is shattered. I am a little bit closer to my own love because I have listened to Deida and read this book. My heart is freer; may yours be too.

Now sit back on a comfortable pillow. Dim the lights, except around this book. Say a prayer perhaps, and ask for the truth that lies beyond the veil. Pray to learn about men what you need to learn, that you might learn to love them as you most long to do.

And then listen with me to the wizard of romance. He speaks to us of a long lost promise. He speaks of truth. He speaks of love.

Dear Reader,

I offer the following chapters to you as if you were my lover. Although you may be single or married, I offer these words to you as I would to my beloved. We may never meet, but I want to give you the opportunity to feel your heart through mine.

For years, I have taught workshops around the world, opening with women and men while they share their deepest heart’s desires. It seems we often come to know ourselves most deeply through the heart of someone who loves us, who is willing to open and see us as we truly are, who is willing to listen and feel our heart’s yearning.

To give and receive love fully—this is our heart’s true desire, yours and mine. The yearning you feel in your heart is the same yearning that everyone feels. By feeling your heart’s yearning through mine, I hope you will come to know yourself more deeply through the many hearts that have opened together in trust and allowed these words to emerge.

All hearts want to open to God, or the boundless flow of divine love. You may or may not be a religious person, and still your heart yearns to open without bounds, to be seen and to be offered without limits. This is what I mean by “open to God”—to open and feel everything and everyone’s heart as a divine expression of love.

Sexuality is also a divine expression of love—or at least it could be. As I would offer my heart to my lover, the following chapters are offered to you so your heart may open to God, whether you are alone or in relationship, whether you are making tea or making love. My hope is that by feeling your heart through these words, you will come to know more deeply how divine love yearns to open through everyone’s heart.

And so, recognizing that our hearts flow open with the same love, the following chapters are offered to you as if you were my dear lover.

1

When you feel deep into your heart, you feel love. Most deeply, you
are
love.

This love shines as light, and so you want to be truly
seen.

This light flows as energy, and so you want to
offer
yourself completely.

Your heart wants to give and receive love fully. This is your heart’s deepest desire.

Love is openness. This same openness yearns at everybody’s heart. You are this love. You are alive as love, and your entire body yearns to live open as love. Your heart wants nothing more than to live open as love, to give yourself totally as love—and to be seen as the love that you are. You long to be
claimed,
taken open, surrendered blissfully, so that every moment of your life is ablaze as the light of love’s passion, an offering of your heart’s devotion, and adoration of love’s radiant blessing.

In an effort to create safety and self-reliance in your life and relationships, you may have built walls around your heart and accumulated tension in your body. Although sometimes these walls of protection are useful, they can, over time, act like shells of fear that block your true love. These shells can keep in the love you want to offer fully and keep out the love that your heart yearns to receive deeply.

The secret to unfolding your heart’s deepest bliss is to give and receive love fully, with or without a man. Instead of depending on a man, and instead of protecting your heart behind walls of accumulated disappointment, you can learn to open your body as if it were a big heart, vulnerable and full of love’s radiant life-force. And it is this disposition of openhearted radiance that will gift the world as well as attract and keep a man capable of actually meeting your heart’s deepest desire.

Right now, is your breath textured as love—are you inhaling and exhaling with the same open pleasure you would if your lover’s body were pressing against yours in delicate merger—or is your breath tense with
fearful thoughts of self-survival as well as an emotional sense of separation, desperation, or loneliness?

Whether you are alone or in relationship, your spiritual and sexual bliss require a daily allotment of whole-body pleasure and deep heart offering, or else your joy will shrivel like an unwatered plant.

2

You can surrender open and allow the full love-energy of your heart to flow through your body all day. You can learn to open so your heart’s love can flow fully through your
entire
body. Then, your true heart’s light can shine through your eyes and smile. Love’s energy can flow through the way you move. Love’s openness can breathe you. Others can see who you truly are. They can feel your deepest gifts. You are love, flowing with love, bright as love.

By learning to open to love’s fullest pleasure, your heart can express your deepest gifts through your body all day, and you will naturally attract and keep a lover whose deep heart is capable of meeting yours.

Imagine that you sit down with a bowl of your favorite treat—double chocolate ice cream with pecans. The first spoonful enters your mouth. Chocolate permeates your tongue like a delicious wave of fullness. Your eyes close and you smile. Mmmm! Love’s blissful openness spreads through your whole body. You breathe fully, inhaling the chocolate aroma, the soft ice cream melting in your mouth. Even your toes and fingers may begin moving with pleasure as you swallow chocolate fullness.

If you wanted to allow pleasurable energy to move through your body even more, if you wanted to open every part of your body to overflow with love’s fullness, then you could put down the bowl and stand up. You could give yourself over to chocolate madness, allowing your body to open and dance in chocolaty pleasure, writhing and swaying, moaning in yummy surrender.

You can allow energy to move through your entire body like electricity, opening you to a deeper flow of pleasure. You may even choose to allow sexual energy to move through you, touching your legs with your hands, writhing your hips in a voluptuous dance. You’ve gone way beyond the pleasure of chocolate now, feeling the flow of deeper passion and yearning in your body and heart.

Perhaps you lie on the couch and touch yourself between your thighs, wet with desire, full of wildness. Your tongue licks your lips wanting
more, wanting more fullness to take in, more fullness to receive through your mouth, your belly, between your legs. Your legs open and close like butterfly wings as you touch yourself, surrendering open in the flow of energy and desire.

And then you may feel your heart, aching to be seen, wanting to be entered by love. More deeply than pleasure and energy, you want love. And not just your mother’s love. Most likely, you want to feel a passionate man of true heart-integrity loving you deeply. You want him to see who you really are and desire you, feeling into your deepest heart. You want his tender force of love-desire to enter you deeply, opening your heart’s secret core and unfolding your divine essence of love.

Although you may be reluctant to trust your own love’s yearning, your deepest heart waits to be loved so fully that you are opened more than you are willing to open by yourself, blissfully forced open by love’s deepest claim, revealed open and held in love’s gentle command.

At times, you yearn for
him.
Not necessarily a specific man, but a force of masculine love, seeing who you really are, entering you, gently forcing you open with pleasure, massive love, insisting, persisting, unyielding in desire for you, loving deeper into you and opening you, not stopping. You are filled by his love, taken open by his claim. Breathing more and more deeply, your body undulates, pressed open by his weight, filled by love’s enormity.

Your edges melt. Your boundaries dissolve. Your body opens outward, love radiating from your heart as an unkept offering. You cry as your resistance is melted in love’s fullness, pleasure forcing your body more open. Your face moist, your thighs wet, your belly heaving, you surrender open, as wide as all. No boundaries. All love, all openness, all fullness.

After opening so fully, you feel permeated by love’s ever-present touch for the rest of the day. As you walk through your home or carry on with your work, your hips move as a flower opens. Your belly is full of sky and stars. Your heart is offered ocean-deep. Washing the dishes or phoning
your friends, love spills from your every gesture, blessing all with the abundant radiance of your heart.

Chocolate or a good man can instigate your heart’s surrender, but full-bodied pleasure and overflowing love—opening until you are exposed fully to God as love’s bliss—is the only way to live true to your deepest desire, with or without a trustable lover or a tasty dessert.