The Father-Lover Paradox

Last night Max shared with me that he had opened up a direct communication channel with a significant male business partner of mine. My business partner and I are co-founders of a start-up that has all the signifiers of being able to scale quickly and robustly, should we play our cards right. We have incredible resonance, yield massive results, *and* have a bit of a sticky ideological kerfuffle in terms of our individual dharmic expression in the world. Said tricky bit has led to several recent long conversations to see if we can arrive at a place of deep and true convergence.

Max has seen & heard bits of these meetings and has ‘casually’ asked a few surgically-precise and at times, confronting-ish questions. I should also say that he and my business partner (whom we will call Tony) have warm rapport and Max joined us for a Zoom strategy sesh several months ago, where he contributed greatly to driving us into further clarity.

So, while Max has indeed had a bit of a line of sight into this particular venture, learning that he and *my* business partner had entered into a private man-to-man dialogue intentionally *not including me* was, lets just say, a MOMENT.

When he shared this information with me, I could reflexively feel my cheeks sting with heat, and my righteous feminine feathers immediately get ALL puffed up. From way up on my instant “how dare you” High Horse, I heard and felt the stories of all the ways that this was invasive, infantalizing, and a violation of my boundaries.

I heard and felt all the loud decrees of the 'Feminine empowerment' teachers, as well as the voice of my own mother and dauntingly successful women friends.

It all came pouring forth: a sharp-toothed crescendo of all the ways that this was violating, discounting my own capacity to negotiate, and that Max was wayyyy ‘out of line’.

As I let those stories sear into me for a few moments, branding me with the rightness of my anger, I suddenly became aware that there was a deeper feeling arising in me, beyond all the egoic prattle. In this moment of witnessing my thrashing egoic self, I knew I had choice. I could CHOOSE the ride I was about to go on ~ which in reality, is an entire timeline.

In that moment, I *chose* to feel the whisper of a feeling that was arising within me:

I *chose* to feel LOVE.

More precisely:

I chose to feel primally, wildly LOVE-D.

As that feeling opened into me,

I recognized that there was an even deeper, more dimly lit feeling; its long arm reaching across place and time to a very young aspect of Self, almost like a phantom limb of the psyche.

I could feel the unwinding, like a psychic cranial-sacral session deep within my limbic system. The feeling was wildly archaic and stained with "I should not ever let myself feel this way" and in so many ways, was and is of the opposite frequency that women are being taught and celebrated for embodying in the world.

I could barely let myself receive the submerged awareness that was rising into consciousness, because the the deeper truth was highly problematic to my sovereign sense of selfhood:

I FELT FATHERED.

All these little Fathering receptors that had been inadvertently vacated by my personal father in important states of Little Girl Feminine Creatureness lit up and I CHOSE to love this now moment of ME enough to let all those little rusty dusty Fathering receptors be poured into, each of them filling with the warmth of the solarized molten GOLD of the archetypal Father.

I know that some women will read this and overlay Freudian interpretations (I originally trained to be a psychotherapist so I too can readily analyze my own experience from a metallic psycho-analytic POV) and others will diminish this to some sort of distorted Daddy/Daughter outpicturing.

And yet, neither is complete.

Neither touches the deeper archetypal truth of Erotic Love which is that Cosmic Lovers ARE ALL THINGS to one another.

Max IS my Father

I AM his daughter.

I AM his w*hore and his Wife and he IS my Sun/Son.

He IS my King and I AM his Mother.

I AM his Consort and his Queen and he IS my Husband and my Brother.

We are *ALL* ALL THINGS to one another.

In the soul journey, we ALL have literally already been all these things to one another, so of course they will reconstellate in the chthonic depths of the primality of our erotic lives.

And so I went from a 2-minute 'mad as a hornet' egoic huff & puff of all the ways he had diminished my authority, treated me like a Damsel in Distress, and 'wrongly' infantilized me TO recognizing the SUBLIME GENIUS of his outreach and the RIGHTNESS of his involvement to mediate and map a complex situation-- not just on behalf of the business venture, but his rightness in doing so FOR ME.

In his brilliant KNOWING, in no way did Max's choice to get involved in my business situation preclude my initiation....because this initiation wasn't yet another initiation into "Feminine power", which is my/the more customary initiatiory encounter du jour.

This was an initiation into the deeper stratas of Love, of loving MYSELF enough to be deeply, primally supported at root level and to be LOVED BEYOND MY PREFERENCE....and YES: in this case, beyond my overt consent, which was RIGHTFUL.

Said the hard way:

Max's knowing to energetically penetrate me BEYOND MY CONSENT was sublimely RIGHTFUL.

About a year ago, I read a quote on Instagram that Jay Electronica said about Erykah Badu:

"Erykah belongs to me.

She’s my daughter… Fix your face, don’t play with me on this Instagram..... She’s my first daughter, she’s my wife, she’s my baby mama, she’s my spiritual healer, and she’s my porn star. " ~Jay Electronica

At the time, I found this quote to be so offensive and over the top. I was all up in my clinical and overfunctioning psychoanalytic assessment and had ALL THE THINGS to say and feel about this quote. It actually quite repulsed me.

(AND YET: this damn thing has lingered within me this entire time. Hello: 'what you resist persists' )

And now, I get it.

ITS REAL.

When you are in a partnership architected in soul codes and are committed to each other's AWAKENING and CONSCIOUSNESS (which is a hella different ride than being committed to the human), these codes drop in.

They have to....because they are real....and the recognition of such changes the Rules of the Game.

Its not so much about the personal, identity-level reactivity to 'what the other person does’ or what they say or don’t say. To me, that’s boring, false intimacy, and full of weighty matter. It’s a lower level of the Relational Game.

The question I choose to live into is how can EVERYTHING that Max does (or doesn’t do) BE *FOR* ME....even when its way outside the gilded cage of my preference, way beyond my initial sight of understanding?

Living into that question has opened me more to the Truth and Reality of Love and catapulted me into realms of the unimaginable more so than any righteous ego-level dualistic approach to right/wrong.

Right/wrong dissovles.

And so does the form of this relationship, over + over again.

In the same moment that Max is deeply, primally protecting me, he is also driving the stake of the Light of Consciousness deep into my heart, ecstatically killing me over and over again. This is what my Soul has hired Max to do in and through this Love because it’s FOR ME.

37 seconds ago:

MAX: Alright, I just finished sending off a detailed email to Tony synthesizing the various points of difference and proposing structures and next steps to address the remaining interfaces of non-alignment.

ME: I see. May you please send it to me or read it to me?

MAX: No. That's not the way this works right now.