29 posts tagged “queer dharma”

The path unfolds with its own perfect and appropriate timing.  Things are tracking themselves, but intuition indicates a recent acceleration and intensification.

Quite recently, as heralded in a conversation with fellow queer dharma practitioner, the flashing-green-eyed beastie has been making her appearance in my life, feeding me the rough, ragged, dry, raw, choking richness of her offspring for my practice to digest.  My friend's sage advice, which I readily heed: be gentle with your heart and honor the necessary pain of its vast opening.  I sat in the Padma room, seeking to work with the subtle capacity for discernment that underlies/runs parallel to the confusion of overwhelming energy.

Yesterday, I meet with the graduate advisor of the Religious Studies department -- I am practically a shoe-in for the Indo-Tibetan Buddhism master's program -- there's just the formal processes to finalize.

This morning: I call Rising Tide, to schedule a consultation with Phil Bartell, the dharma-practitcing tattoo artist who was recommended by dathun friends and acquaintances whose skin wear his work.  This morning: I slip over to the library to pick up a copy of Vajrayogini: Her Visualizations, Rituals and Forms, so that I might study some of the form that will someday be in appearance on my left arm. I'm still waiting to hear back about a particular tattoo design-in-progress.  Ideally, it is my first, but I know not its status. 

I chat with a coworker about tattoos and their meanings and suddenly remember some of the content of my dream last night/this morning:  I was wandering in a dream landscape reminiscent of Boulder's most conventional of settings: Pearl St.  In the dream, I noticed that everyone, simply everyone had tattoos--noticeable, bright, colorful, fluid, artful, striking.  As I remarked upon this noticing (either to the invisible audience I usually talk to or to an unseen dream companion), a flowing, dancing, leaping, gorgeous archetypical woman came leaping into view.  The visual texture changed to a field of pastels.  Across her round bare abdomen were the brightest zigzagging lines of color, tattooed in vibrant, lush green and flaming, furious orange.  She embraced me. 

I woke.

Do my dreams prime me for my waking life?  Or does my waking life provide the content for my dreams? 

Of late, I've been noticing something familiar in the texture of my emotions and energy; its consistent patterning seems to bear relation to where I am in relationship now, and what that evokes for me in memory, in habit, in what is familiar from experience.  I note that what comes to the fore is familiar in the sense of how I react to it, not in its content.  It's like: I learned how to do this like this, so I'm going to do that again.  It worked before, right?

To even articulate it as such is to give it too much consciousness and structure.  It's something I'm feeling my way though, feeling myself in, feeling the subtle influence of in how I reflect on my experience and understand myself in this space, this place, this vis-a-vis-the-other-ness.  I notice the familiarity of it and realize that I can bring a little more consciousness to my relating.  There are more tools in my kit this time.

Again, I will not make a place for the other as part of the firmament of narcissistic construction; I will not integrate her into my cocoon; I will keep meeting the place where there is hope and fear and willingly stay suspended in the moment of their arising.  I will simply allow myself to feel and ride the fullness of it, giving it no name, keeping no reference point firmer than the ebb and flow of breath.  I watch my mind try to make sense of it, I follow interdependent and intersecting threads of thought; all dead-end.  There is no what is happening to name, although there may be in the daily, mundane sense something which can be clarified and noted as a sort of reasonable containment.  One must take care not to confuse the relative with the absolute, nor relate to one over the other.

Each moment of connection and separation arises fresh, unnamed and unborn from the previous.

This time, I will not sink into sleep, nor trust what I think is wakefulness.

"...true bliss and true happiness, perhaps even more so than pain, are a negation of the human ego." --Reggie Ray

Today, I applied for the MA Indo-Tibetan Buddhism program @Naropa.  I hope everything falls into place.  Here's my statement of intent (aka application letter):

Student: Do you think a new kind of tantric tradition might develop here in the West, if it's being practiced by Buddhist meditator artists, so that a new imagery, based on personal experience might emerge?

Chogyam Trungpa: I very much hope so. In fact, what we are doing right now [at Naropa Institute] is to inspire such a situation. Only American Buddhists, who are inspired and who have their understanding together, can work with the Western world. That is necessary. There is only so long we can live on imports. There is some point where we had better manufacture for ourselves rather than borrowing from somebody else. Otherwise, we will be in enormous debt.[1]

        I want to create and articulate a comprehensive understanding of what may be named Queer Dharma.  This Queer Dharma, as I understand it so far, is heavily based on my personal experience; now I seek to develop it further through study.  In order to do so, I must integrate my spiritual practice, academic learning and contemplative engagement with the world with the rigor of my effort and the mindfulness of my intent, all within the context of my personal experience and through the lens of Queer Theory.  I do not know yet what form it will take, but I am and have been deeply inspired by this seedling idea since I first came to in the fall of 2004.  I see the Indo-Tibetan Buddhism program at as the most fitting next step in this larger movement of which I find myself an agent: the flowering of the Dharma in the West.
        Thus far in my academic career, I have only begun to skim the surface of postmodern theories, which contain the subset of Queer Theory.  However, it is deeply relevant to my personal experience as a woman, as a lesbian-identified queer, as an ally in the lives and struggles of people of color and the transgendered.  My understanding comes from an intimate knowing of myself and facing the boundaries of self and other within the power and privilege structures of human society.  I do not expect that I will be able to concentrate within this particular arena of study while at Naropa, but I do wish to continually inform my learning of Buddhism with the insights of postmodernism as I study it on my own.
        I come to Naropa for the Dharma, as it has been revealed in the East and taught to the West by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche.  If there is one thing I am certain of after my three years at Naropa is that this university stands firmly planted at the crossroads of not just those two broadly-sketched systems of thought, but also the crossroads of popular understanding, misconception, genuine transformative practice and spiritual materialism.  Naropa is at full boil with a ever-mixing, self-reflecting, co-contributing soup of creative contrast.  Our differences in every angle of origin and our willingness to engage that difference, over and over, are the vital heart of this little school.  I can find no better place to study the Dharma as an American Buddhist.

        In order to move further in the trajectory of my academic career, which ideally will be a PhD program in Rhetoric at University of California at Berkeley with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality, I need solid rooting in the more scholarly piece of Buddhism, as well as a deepening of my practice.  I’ve compared Naropa’s program to similar programs at other universities, only to find that practice is de-emphasized, if it is  mentioned at all.  I cannot see how one can possibly study Buddhism without a genuine attempt at its methods, and so I am glad that Naropa excels in this regard.
        Likewise, I cannot see how one can study Buddhism and engage its methods without truly grappling with the content of the self who is the practitioner.  Western academia is largely unprepared to address the unquantifiable nature of subjectivity, but I know from personal experience at Naropa that I can expect to receive space to actively work with and integrate the friction between myself as practitioner, myself as scholar, myself as no-self and myself as all possible manifestation into a more comprehensive understanding, whether in meditation instruction, the classroom, or in related discussion with classmates.  At Naropa, I feel the full spectrum of being is openly invited to participate, to learn, to contribute.
        Without this particular angle of education, of practice, of engagement, as offered at Naropa, I am certain that any further attempts to create a comprehensive Queer Dharma will flounder and fail.  Likewise, my intent for future study will be fall short of the measures I set if I cannot study gender, sexuality and postmodern theory with the insights of a Buddhist perspective.  I have begun with developing a method for personal discovery of what Queer Dharma might mean for an individual, as can be seen in my BA Contemplative Psychology senior thesis (submitted with this application as my writing sample).  I seek entrance to this program to take this much further, to discover and address the shortfalls of my thought, to discover new views and insights, and to craft the rough method into a consistent approach.  I am inspired to create a new kind of tantric tradition; I want to pull my understanding together so that I might articulate it in a way that outlives me.

In my recent offline musings, I've been contemplating my personal responsibility to the other in regards to the ethics of seduction.  My framework so far has been: insofar as I am intentionally engaging this queer ethics as a life path, as dharma, I have the same responsibility as any practitioner to continually develop lovingkindness and compassion.  I must treat the other with such care.  However, I've been realizing that I've gradually setup a subtle hierarchy: I, as the queer dharma practitioner, know best, and therefore can make some decisions about the other in a way that is in line with my expectations. Granted, all of this is happening in theory/in my head, but it's a form of judgment and valuation based entirely on what I think, which is not necessarily true of what I sense or feel.  It's a subtle idealism for what I'm looking for in my radical intimacy.  It's also profoundly disrespectful to the other, to whom I am committed to meeting where she is; not where I expect her to be, think she is, or want her to be.

Last night, while having a lovely home-cooked dinner on my patio with the oh-so-fabulous Miss Elena, I started fermenting the understanding for this area of my developing sense of queer ethics.  Actually, Elena, genius that she is, pointed it out to me: It's not up to me to manage the other's understanding and feelings. It's not up to me to manage their expectations.  It's not up to me to guess their intentions.  If I'm honest, if I put it all out there, if I keep up my end of communication and am clear about my intentions, involvements and aspirations, then I'm done.  It's all I can do.    It's not for me to project/decide what might happen if.   It's entirely up to the other person as to whether she wants to pursue me and get involved with me (if it's mutual interest).  It's entirely up to the other person to analyze her motivations, inquire into her needs and wants, clarify and state her intentions and expectations to me, etc.

However I may relinquish my attempt to take on responsibility for the other, it doesn't absolve me of any responsibility when we do become involved, but I am not responsible for her reactivity when it comes to things that push her edge. 

It's just like how I'm responsible for my reactivity -- when I get triggered, it's for me to own, examine, sit with, explore, take to the cushion, etc.  I can talk with my other about this, but it's still my shit to own, regardless of whatever triggered it.  Together, we can take care around triggering issues, but not by trying to avoid it--instead, we must engage it directly, either when it's happening, or later after (or while) decompressing.

In my previous musing on the ethics of seduction, I was really concerned with my end of things vis-a-vis my motivations.  Now I'm concerned about how I might subtly try to manage the expectations and feelings of the other vis-a-vis me, my motivations/intentions/activities, etc.  I must again keep an eye on the role of privilege and power in relationship.  I'm always going to be in a different place emotionally/developmentally/spiritually--it's a given.  I must take care of my too-frequent assumption that my different place is necessarily better or more advanced, regardless of the age of those who walk into my life.

And so, when I say, "This is where I am with this queer dharma that I am attempting to create via living it as best I possibly can, it's a work-in-progress, it's necessarily messy, but I'll be honest with you and try to state as clearly as I can what's true for me," then it's up to you to pursue me, to make your intentions known.  If we meet there, perhaps we might explore the mutual curiosity and interest together, see where it takes us.

This weekend I spent most of my time packing, but I did make it to the Boulder Creek Festival for a while, long enough to remember that I hate crowds and to sit by the creek and watch the rubber duck race.  I also went to a dinner party on Friday and to a play on Saturday, and attempted to go to Trilogy on Sunday to dance, but Trilogy is temporarily closed due to liquor law violation.  Bummer.

Tuesday start of the week at work feels a little off.  It sounds really busy here at the office, but I don't know what that means.  My workload is consistent with Spring 2008 scheduling, which is rather refreshingly mind-numbing, compared to the challenge of learning to co-facilitate a committee and get back into chairing another one.

Space and the awareness of space; this is my job.

I have therapy later today, which is promising.  I'm going to look at what productive change might be wrought via attempting a new processing style.  On one hand, how I process is just how I process, but on the other, trying a different style is nothing more than a methodological shift.  If the method gets me to right view/understanding, right intention, right speech/action, right effort/mindfulness/concentration more quickly, then all the better.  I learn best from making mistakes, but I don't have a lot of time to make mistakes, nor do I want to sow chaos in my wake.  So, let's try a new method of self-engagement.

I want to do this right, this queer ethical thing I'm trying to do.  And as much as it's a project, I want to avoid too much of a goal/teleological orientation in my practice.  Oy, it's tricky.  But it's worth it. 

In other news, I'm taking Friday off to begin my move, doing SPAN training on Saturday, and finishing my move on Sunday.  I think I might have at least one night (Friday) on the couch at the mountain house, for the sake of my cat, who does not need to spend a whole day (Saturday) alone at the new place.  No need to freak her out more than she'll be already.

Tues/Thurs nights, plus all day all Saturdays, for the next month, are absorbed by SPAN training.  Oy.

Incidentally, during my SPAN volunteer interview, I was asked what my definition/understanding of critical thinking is.  I came up with something relatively brilliant on the spot:

For me, critical thinking is a multi-layered thing.  The first layer, both outermost and immediate, is a self-skepticism.  In any given situation or circumstance, I'm going to react to what I perceive within the scope of the influences on my life and understanding.  When those influences are things such as: family-of-origin, the religion in which I was raised, my white privilege, my socioeconomic privilege, my gender, my level of education, and so forth, I need to keep a sharp eye out for perceptions which are framed within those views, rather than what is actually happening.  My first thought may not be my best thought, in other words.

The second layer of critical thinking is the process of honing my view and examining my perceptions/thoughts through the lenses of theory as I've learned it so far, particularly feminist theory, but also social theories which emphasize the intersectionality of oppression. Does my understanding of theory inform my view? Is the theory consistent with what I see, or is it something new/different?  Am I looking at it too much through the lens of theory without seeing what is occurring?  Am I too much in the details of what is occurring and ignoring the broader view?

The third layer of critical thinking is the deepest: what am I actually feeling in a given moment of perceiving/experiencing/thinking?  How does my heart inform?  Am I open or closed to this person/situation, and why?  Am I breathing?  Where is there tension in my body in that moment, and is it relevant?  Can I relax more, open more gently to that moment, and make it welcome, regardless of its content?

As a queer dharma practitioner, I must keep mindful of the sort of agency I exercise when willfully engaging the edge: what are my motivations, where did those motivations come from, and what are the emotional/mental/somatic processes involved in translating these motivations into actions?  (creds to Knobe & Leiter's essay The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology).  While this is certainly a broad method of self-observation and intentional engagement that can be applied just about anywhere, I'm going to look at the idea here vis-a-vis the ethics of seduction. 

Why the ethics of seduction? It's on my mind, as a part of processing a tangent of recent conversation with a beloved friend: something along the lines of full embodiment versus motivation being carried in specific areas of the body.  Also because: casual sex is one of those hot button items of debate in most communities, but particularly, for my concerns, the queer community.  Also because: I think this is a critical thing for women in particular to come to their own place of relationship to and opinion on.  Women in this culture are, broadly speaking, presented with a certain hyper-sexualized-while-simultaneously-hyper-virginal expectation, and sex is, for women, again broadly speaking, not something we're supposed to want.  I call bullshit on our cultural norms, and hereby invite all women of consenting age to become the sexual being they have every legitimate right and desire to be, in whatever way they want that to look, in whichever way is truest to their hearts.

But this blog post is a drafty musing (i.e. it's full of holes), so please take it salted.   Perhaps even with vinegar.

An ethical self-inquiry vis-a-vis contemplating seduction: when desiring an other, what's my motivation? What drives me?  Does that motivation arise from a specific area of my body?  Is it rooted in psychological complexes derived from family-of-origin and culture?  Is it related to aspects of identity, such as self-image?  Is it related to interpersonal (in)security?  Is it in any way about leveraging power and privilege in a relationship?  What is my goal, if any?   How do I self-criticize and self-judge regarding said goal, and is that level of critique a form of internalized oppression, or to what extent is it a valid ethical self-examination?

Let's start with the thin line between an ordinary guy and a rapist.  I bring this up because it's an excellent summary of the of the sort of "ideal type" we (queer dharma practitioners or otherwise people who want to develop and practice a non-normative sexuality which is still highly ethical) want to not only avoid creating, but refuse to participate in and seek to eradicate.

His approach to sex is based in manipulation, and coercion, not about mutual flirting and seduction and fun. Maybe he’ll luck out and not hurt whoever he has sex with; maybe she’ll have wanted it just as much as him, maybe she’ll tell her friends “I hit that.” But maybe not. Maybe she didn’t want it, maybe she was manipulated, and maybe she’ll be left emotionally hurt and appalled by the whole relationship.

He’s a misogynist because he was willing to take that chance. He didn’t care enough to make sure it was the former, not the latter — and in that utter indifference to what the woman wants, he’s on common ground with rapists.

Frankly folks, while sex is a central feature of the ethics of seduction, sex alone is not the motivation.  I think that when sex itself is the motivation that it is actually a nasty combination of internalized social values (men are supposed to have as much sex as possible with as many women as possible in order to really be really real men), interpersonal insecurity which is part of an inability to achieve intimacy in any form other than sexual contact, and a sense of self-worth and identity based upon attainment and/or conquest.  This kind of sex is not joyful, not fulfilling, not mutual, not intimate.  It's not what I'm looking for.

I feel myself slipping down the slope into a kind of sexual morality, and so I must take care here.  I don't want to line up any particular kind of sexual scale of good to bad.  I think it's entirely possible to have sexual affairs which are both casual and intimate, for example, as well as freed from the bondage of internalized "morals" and the expectation of conquest.  But what I'm looking for is something that is, while not precisely committed to exclusivity, of a deep and genuine intimacy--a relationship between two beings which has the space for the full range of human emotion, laughter to tears, sexiness to silliness.

Actually, for me, sexy and silly are not always or necessarily or opposite ends of a scale from one another, and some of my favorite moments with a lover are when we are being rather silly together in the most intimately sexy of spaces.

In the ethics of seduction, I believe the motivation needs be: to make a real, heartfelt, embodied connection which is sexual in nature but not in its entirety. This motivation is, as I've experienced it, a full-sweeping expression of my body, from the tips of my toes to the ends of my hair.  Some regions of my body are more involved than others in a given moment, such as: where my lover's lips and teeth meet my neck, where my hands grasp her waist, and so forth.  Some moments of contact are so rich as to overwhelm all senses and I am spinning in and out of my sense of self, dissolving across the lines of bodies, into and of her, until I wear her flesh like her scent on my skin the next morning.

When seducing my lover, I keep mindful of what I have internalized as the core values of sexual congress: frequency and variety.  I discussed this particular feature with a male friend and classmate of mine the other day: he too is dating multiple women at the same time, but we differ in that I am forthcoming about what I'm doing, and he doesn't talk about it with his lovers at all.  He seeks frequency and variety; I keep mindful of that false universal when it pops up in my mind (it does not manifest in the craving of my flesh, which is always particular, specific, never broad-sweeping and generalized).  When seducing my lover, it is never about tallying numbers or seeking difference and novelty--it is about her, only her, and what the thought/touch of her evokes within me.

When seducing my lover, I keep mindful of old patterns of relationship which were, for me, means of securing a portion of my identity and stabilizing my self of self-worth. I also keep mindful of what may possibly emerge as a new pattern for me, with my younger lovers: my relatively greater age and experience, and how that is a factor in intimidation (and also my appeal).  I don't know how that's going to show up in the near and long term, but I note that as a) a top and b) the older woman, this does setup a power dynamic I wish to be mindful of, and not ever leverage as a way to speed my lover up to my pace, my risk-taking.

When seducing my lover, it is more about her than me, despite the range of my self-exploration and examination within the context.  How might I please her?  Can I, by careful observation, discern what she likes, what she wants?  Might I ask, and encourage her answer past the timorous uncertainty about what is so fresh, new, unknown?  How may I, with gentle fierceness, evoke her cries?  How might I elicit her fierce self-confidence, invite her into the joy that I experience as her body?

The hardest part for me, in all of this, is the self-criticism which is in no small way rooted in the internalized oppression of the female sex: I'm not supposed to want sex, it's not supposed to be that important to me, it's not something I should pursue, to want/pursue sex means I'm a slut or whore, to actually want sex enough to pursue it with a specific woman means I am evaluating that woman's worth to me solely based on her body and availability and deriding her numerous other qualities, to be giving it out myself to more than one woman at a time means I'm a slut/whore.  Gah, it's a mess. Sometimes it's a wonder to me that I can go beyond kissing.  Thanks, Catholicism.  Thanks, modern American christocratic "morality".  Thanks, misogynist patriarchy.  Why is it that men are never sluts or whores?

Another hard part, which is truly the dicey/sticky/challenging point I truly desire to engage is: staying with the intensity and not tipping past the edge.  Meeting as flesh sliding against flesh, tongues, lips, teeth, hands, fingers, skin; weaving an increasing arousal together until near frenzy, and then backing off.  Meeting there again, and backing off.  It's so easy to jump past that edge, in my past experience, which leads to sex becoming something somehow more rote in subsequent encounters.  I'm not sure what it is about that precipitous point, but I want to keep exploring it for so long as I can without going completely mad (and losing sleep) with wanting.  I want to know myself/her/us in those moments of near-overwhelm--what draws us together, what drives us apart?  What is total readiness?  What is the highest point of arousal?  At what point am I completely, fully, wholly capable of receiving her, wanting her touch with an unimaginable intensity which erases all the world save for where skin meets skin?  Where is that point for her?  Might we meet there in the same moment?

At the beginning, end, and throughout, what I want to know most is her heart, and to offer her mine.  This exchange of two lovers occurs in each moment of all forms of intimacy.

This past week and following weekend, I had several occasions to be in the company of friends, whether helping them out with something or other, or just hanging out.  When I would find myself in a moment of relaxation, basking in good company with a full belly and a nice glow from red wine, I kept noticing this background tension, undercurrent of anxiety, slight clenching in my chest, habitual knotting in my shoulders, and otherwise any symptoms of being tightly wound, prepared to spring. 

When I inquired into it, the answer that leaped to the fore instantly was "What the hell am I doing sitting here relaxing!? I NEED TO BE WORKING ON MY THESIS!"  Of course, I finished my thesis already, and turned it in over two weeks ago.  I've graduated with a 4.0.  I'm done.  I'm done done done.  But my body has been carrying this anxiety all semester long, and has not yet let go of the habit.

When I talked with Brenda (the benevolent queer dharma practitioner) about it yesterday, she said something keen about there always being a storyline there.  She's right.  If it's not my thesis, it's another thing.  What could I possibly otherwise be carrying anxiety about, if it's not my thesis?

• sorting my things apart and packing up all of my stuff and moving out in less than 2 weeks
• my financial scenario with my college loans and my very limited income and my need for furnishings and a new computer (my TiBook is 5 years old)
  
• starting a 50-hour training with Safehouse in less than 2 weeks, which will eat up all of my Saturdays and Tues/Thurs nights for the whole of June
  
• the trickiness of dating and the ever-open-and-unending questions regarding queer dharma and how it may or may not intersect with ethical sluthood
• seeing just how open my heart is, how fragile, how at-risk-for-wounding, how fearless
• whether my cat is going to hate me for moving her out of the mountains
• whether any of the women I'm dating (or hoping to date) are going to end up hating me, whether I'll hurt them, whether they'll hurt me
  
• whether I can hold it together enough to negotiate that razor's edge of appropriate self-disclosure-in-relationship and appropriate containment-regarding-other-relationship
• whether I'm going to lose anything in the move, such as: my sanity

Whenever a story inserts itself in my inner dialogues, I should treat it as suspect, no matter how real. 

The truth is that my heart is open; all else flows from and back to that.

There is lots of room to make mistakes. That's true, absolutely true. But such room for mistakes cannot be created unless there is surrendering, giving, some kind of opening. It cannot take place if there's no basis for it. However, if there is some basis --if we can give away our aggression or attempt to give it away, if we attempt to open up and strip away our territoriality and possessiveness -- then there is lots of room for making mistakes. That doesn't necessarily mean there is room for dramatic mistakes, but lots of little dribbles of mistakes can take place, which usually occur in any case -- we can't avoid it. We have to allow ourselves to realize that we are complete fools; otherwise, we have nowhere to begin. We have to be willing to be a fool and not always try to be a wise guy. We could almost say that being willing to be a fool in one of the first wisdoms.
--from Dharma Art by Chogyam Trungpa

"I don't want to be that jackass," I've said often of late, in conversation with friends and lovers regarding the complications of trying to date multiple women simultaneously, while being in full integrity, honesty and coming from the heart in all of it, with everyone.  Why am I doing it?  Because I've made a commitment to myself to not get into a significant and mutually exclusive relationship for a while.  (How long this "for a while" is something I trust myself to know.)  How am I doing it?  I'm making it up as I go along, relying on what I've learned of the Dharma from teachers, from my own practice, from living and working in the Naropa community, and synthesizing that with what I learned of Queer Ethics care of a course of the same name, and my integration of it. 

For my speech and activity in all of this, I'm relying on my heart to tell me what is true, within the context of what the whipsnap quickness of my mind can discern, what my senses perceive, and what comes through intuitively as a gestalt or a tiny detail or anywhere in between.  I'm also continually nudging myself along the edge of what feels like slightly risky or potentially embarrassing self-disclosure because the only way to make any of this workable is for ongoing and open communication to be the ground of relationship.

"I don't want to be that jackass" means that I want to do all of this right; I want to be true, I want to be real, I want to be a living breathing expression of what a queer ethics is, in practice, not in theory.  But the thing is, I'm going to screw up.  Sometimes, I'm going to be that jackass, whether out of ignorance or perhaps even the best intentions.  And sometimes, you're going to screw up.  We're going to hurt each other.  There's no guarantee of not getting hurt in committing to one-to-one relationship either.

I don't think this will ever work without the room to make mistakes.  Without the chance to just blurt it out, saying the wrong thing, or saying the right thing poorly.  We can always go back and edit later.  We can converse, we can discuss, we can debate, we might even argue or fight.  We may reach agreement, or at least an understanding.  Wounds can be salved, bruises kissed.  I cannot promise to be perfect.  I can't even try to be perfect. I can only promise that I will be true to my heart and as real and as present with you as I have the capacity to be in any given moment.  And that I will tell you when I'm shutting down and checking out.  And that I'll come back.  And I'll work with my shit, your shit, and our boundaries. And I can avoid the major deal-breaking blunders and other jackassery.

I am completely willing to be a fool.

However, I realize that not everyone is willing to be so foolish as I.  Regardless of my clarity about interpersonal queer ethics, theory is not the same thing as practice. This is not a game, regardless of how playfully I may engage it.  This is not an experiment, although this practice is, due to its newness, rather experimental (I have to develop my ethics into a method, approach, or way of being, which is always going to be a trial-and-error process).

This is me seeking the fullest bloom of my heart
...
or something romantically foolish like that :)

Through destabilization practice, Queer Dharma methodically churns up and chews through the burden of karma.  But what is destabilization practice?  Meditation, just sitting, can be regarded as a kind of destabilization practice: through repeat practice, you come to the realization that the central “I” or “me” who you believed to exist, is not as central, solid, or real as you believed, but is instead a process, always in transition, an approximation, a relationship.  However, meditation is the ground practice to which you must continually return.  Queer destabilization practice is a more intentional contemplative activity which involves exploring the boundaries of self and other.  The most visible and visceral of these involves desire and sexual intimacy.

-- from my senior thesis, page 32.

I realize that I cannot summarize any part of my thesis: it is itself a summary of an introduction to what will be a multi-volume work.  And therefore, I'm going to try to unpack this idea, but I will only scratch the surface.

What is destabilization practice?  Contemplative practices with the intent to disrupt one's sense of self as separate and contained, and to engage that disruption with mindfulness, and to integrate that disruption into an expanding sense of self.  It's a little teleological insofar as growth and change are held as intent, but it's more of an exercise and a process than a goal-oriented activity. 

Destabilization practice is not necessarily sexual in nature.  For example, examining and exploring my white privilege is definitely something that disrupts my interpersonal container.  Speaking the thought "I am a racist" and looking at how I react to that (viscerally, emotionally, mentally) does decidedly reveal the inconsistent and unstable nature of my sense of identity.  For, however open-minded and kind as I may like to think of myself, part of my dynamic of interacting in the world when encountering people of color is to Other them in a way that comes directly from my white privilege. Working with and countering my self-constructing and self-stabilizing (i.e. ego) beliefs, whether true or false, is part of a destabilization practice, and therefore can take a variety of forms.

Queer destabilization practice intentionally explores the boundaries of self and other along the lines of sex, gender and desire. Therefore, for the sake of the rest of this unpacking, I'm going to try to give a concrete example of destabilizing practice that is non-sexual and works with an ego belief, and then develops into an engagement of self/other along the line of desire.  It always makes the most sense to myself and others when I write from my own experience.

Polyamory: according to Wikipedia, polyamory is the desire, practice, or acceptance of having more than one loving, intimate relationship at a time with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved.

A burden of karma: Eight years ago, I made a sincere effort to attempt a polyamorous relationship with the woman who was to become my partner, and her then-husband.  Suffice to say, it didn't work out.  For my part, I was not yet mentally/emotionally ready to be with such a relationship in full health and consciousness.  In the intervening years, my partner remained poly, although we practiced a monogamous relationship.  In time, I grew to despise polyamorous relationships, and was harshly judgmental of those who engaged in them. For example, I once wrote, "Polyamory is a lie that the emotionally and sexually insecure tell themselves to create a false sense of comfort against the intimate isolation that is, ultimately, the human experience."

In some cases, I still believe that holds true.  But mostly, I was projecting from what was my self-judgment with regards to my actual capacity to be in multiple intimate relationship at the time I was trying to practice it. 

The irony is, of course, that now I am intentionally attempting to practice such a practice of relationship -- being open to fearless intimacy.  At this point, I cannot say that it's a good idea, nor that it works, nor that I'm sure that I actually want to do this.  But I'm trying it because this is what is arising in my life as an opportunity now, and I now have, I believe, the capacity to be this fearless, this open, this alive, this in love. 

The destabilization practice part of this is: working with myself (alone, and with my therapist) on the very topic: how can I be in and pursue relationships of fearless intimacy when so much of my personal shit about being in intimate relationship is about:

• stabilizing my sense of self/identity in that relationship 
• finding and relying on emotional/mental security in that relationship
• using that relationship as a buffer against the vertiginous effervescence of life
  
• using that relationship as an excuse to ignore the truth of my heart

And yet it also sings of her.  And her. And her.  And myself.  And my friends, all of them.  And my ex-lovers (even with the pain that lingers).  And my ex-partner.  There's so much love in this heart, and so much room as that the whole world can be (potentially) held without the least crowding.  I find that the more I sit in meditation, the more I practice, the more love I have to give.

I have so much love to give.  It sounds like .so. .much. .bullshit.

The practice is: critical self-examination, which is to say, really looking at myself.  Finding the sharpest edge of my experience and pressing there, until I am cut by the truth of what I see about myself, or what is pointed out by my therapist, or what reveals itself in meditation.  The truth is:

• I can't rely on relationship for my identity, sense-of-self, emotional or mental security
• Life is always arising with an exuberance which cannot be denied, ignored, or suppressed
  
• The truth of my heart is that it is always open, unconditionally, to all that is arising.  The filters exist only in my head, but my heart always already knows what the mind cannot grasp.
• All that I long for may never be mine, but what I receive in each moment is what I need for the next.
  

What occurs in my life now, this moment is: the love and the pain are one.  With a mind torn between the two but a heart that knows them as not-two, I return to the cushion, to sit, to sit with, to breathe.

And I wonder if I might ever let go of my desire for her to simply just breathe with me and let the breath take us where it will.

. . .

this is still a work in progress...