#playing with your identification because people are complicated? radiant!!!!

[dumbbutchmutt]

I like don't keep this in my pinned cause this is a nsft blog amd my main is more for stuff like this but I support bi lesbians because honestly as a butch lesbian who uses he/they I understand far too much about what it means to have people assume things about my labels and hate me for it. So if you keep in your beliefs that bi lesbians don't exist you probably shouldn't interact with me lol.

Not mad since I've never said anything, but I've got an increase in blogs that say dni interact if you believe they exist or support them and I definitely do. 🧡

[lachalaine]

🔮 i love tarot card readings!

Tarot Reading with Lady J🔮

not accepting

1. THE PRESENT MOMENT / THE PRIMARY CONCERN

Card: TWO OF SWORDS - REVERSED 

Summary: Inner Conflict 

Meaning: There is a conflict between your heart and your mind, and the strategies you have in place are unsustainable, strained and precarious. You are managing skillfully but will soon be exhausted. You must do something, it is not a position that one can hold indefinitely. Though a stalemate may appear better then defeat, the issue can no longer be ignored. Pause, take inventory and find your way through this struggle. 

Position Meaning: A stalemate concluded, trickery, deception, dishonesty. 

2. THE CAUSE OF THE CHALLENGE AFFECTING CARD 1. A BLOCK.

Card: FIVE OF COINS - REVERSED

Summary: Precious Misfortune 

Meaning: There are times in life when we are in great physical need and our egos get embarrassed. Two people huddle in the cold, hungry and cold and afraid. They sit close to refuge but they do not receive it. As challenging as it may be, you must remember that adversity and exile are opportunities to accept your current reality, center yourself, and find strength. From a place of quiet, you can reassess what is truly important, learn what the moment is teaching you, and determine what resources are actually at your disposal. 

Position Meaning: Renewed courage, impending opportunity or change for the better, peace of mind, evolution in spirit. 

3. SUBCONSCIOUS INFLUENCES. UNKNOWN INFORMATION. THE DISTANT PAST.

Card: THREE OF CUPS - REVERSED

Summary: Rejuvenating Love 

Meaning: Three cups glow in the radiant warmth that can only be created by hearts that share a past. The Three of Cups is a spontaneous celebration - in the past, present, or future - that honors the bonds of family and intimate friendship. Though your solitary achievements have been many, now is the time to acknowledge your community and revel in the love of those who know and support you. 

Position Meaning: Overindulgence, decadence, ingratitude, termination, lost contentment 

4. THE RECENT PAST. A SITUATION THAT HAS COME TO A CONCLUSION.

Card: SIX OF COINS - UPRIGHT

Summary: Giving and Receiving 

Meaning: At some point in our lives, we all need assistance. The Six of Coins speaks to the relationship we have with others surrounding our prosperity – or lack of it. United in an endless knot of connectivity, we must learn to give without judgement and receive without shame. Like a living thing, this balance requires nurturing. Pay attention to where you are in this equation and make space for what is needed. Harmony can be restored through awareness, action and a generous heart. 

Position Meaning: Reciprocity, a change in circumstances, generosity, gratitude, stability, a gift, return of a favor

5. THE PRESENT. CONSCIOUS BELIEFS. CURRENT EVENTS.

Card: NINE OF COINS - UPRIGHT

Summary: Individual Accomplishment 

Meaning: The Nine of Coins exclaims that for now, “life is beautiful”. This card represents the ever increasing challenges you have mastered in life, and the steps you have taken towards accomplishment. Nines are powerful cards of completion; it took time to cultivate this level of success. Through discipline and hard work, you have gracefully and independently crafted a cherished environment and a stable life, filled with unpretentious style and quality. Take time to enjoy it and reflect. 

Position Meaning: Independent success, self mastery, discipline, safety, a rich life, fulfillment

6. THE NEAR FUTURE. A NEW PERSON OR EVENT. A SHIFT IN ENERGY.

Card: WHEEL OF FORTUNE X - REVERSED

Summary: Unexpected Change

Meaning: Wheel of Fortune reminds us that life is never predictable and that change is inevitable and necessary. It is impersonal; sometimes we are summiting the mountain and sometimes we are trudging through the valley. Either way, it is simply life. When Wheel of Fortune shows up in your reading, you are about to have a random encounter with chance and the outcome is unknown. Take it for what it is, without judgement or evaluation. In general, when this card is upright, the odds are in your favor. When reversed… not so much.

Position Meaning: Bad luck, a harmful pattern of behavior, unexpected disturbance, reversal of fortune, failure

7. YOUR POWER ( OR LACK OF POWER ) IN THE MOMENT. HOW YOU SEE YOURSELF IN THE SITUATION.

Card: FOUR OF SWORDS - UPRIGHT

Summary: A Quiet Space

Meaning: The Four of Swords is often known as the meditation card. It indicates that you have ( or have just gotten over ) a difficult time and you need to rest, reflect and reconnect with yourself. When we are troubled, our minds play tricks on us, imagining hopeful escapes or tragic demises. Quieting your mind is an act of humility which allows you to enlist divine intelligence - your true voice. It won’t make the problem go away but in the space of stillness, you can bring fresh perspective and invite new ideas to appear.

Position Meaning: An increase in stress, harmful persistence, busyness and activity.

8. THE EFFECTS OF PEOPLE AROUND YOU. HOW OTHER PEOPLE SEE YOU IN THE SITUATION.

Card: TEN OF COINS - UPRIGHT

Summary: True Riches 

Meaning: From the green grass of youth, through the bricks and stones of the middle ages, to the garden of maturity, the rhythm of the years reveals the varied expressions of abundance in our lives. In the Ten of Coins, the raw energy of the Ace has been thoughtfully cultivated to completion: a manifestation of prosperity in all things financial and spiritual. It is a moment for both gratitude and reflection. 

Position Meaning: Abundance, prosperity, stability, devotion, family matters, a legacy or bequest

9. YOUR HOPES OR FEARS.

Card: TWO OF COINS - UPRIGHT 

Summary: Precarious Balance 

Meaning: In the midst of a swiftly flowing current, a man juggles two desires successfully, but his solution is temporary and unsustainable. Submerged under the water, his clarity is questionable at best. For now, he still has both coins, but neither of them is securely in his palm. The Two of Coins invites you to look at where you are maintaining balance in your real-world affairs but getting exhausted. You can keep it up for quite a while but it might be time to consider relinquishing one of these goals for now. 

Position Meaning: A struggle for balance, need for clarity, an impending choice, juggling instead of handling responsibilities, determination, cloudy reasoning, inefficiency

10. THE MOST LIKELY OUTCOME.

Card: TEMPERANCE XIV - REVERSED 

Summary: Listening Within 

Meaning: We often look at options from an either or perspective, but Tempernce invites us to consider that all things are possible, even when they appear to be at odds. Life is not static and neither are our needs – they vary across a lifetime and across each situation. Through listening and awareness, the universe reveals what your soul truly needs, not just what your ego wants. It’s not as complicated as you make it. If you can put your perceptions and impatience aside, you create space for alchemy. 

Position Meaning: Confusion, disharmony, polarity, excessive caution, competing interests, forced decisions

BONUS CARD: THE CARD THAT PLAYS A ROLE IN THE ENTIRE SITUATION.

Card: ACE OF SWORDS - UPRIGHT

Summary: Powerful Clarity 

Meaning: As the root of the swords, the Ace brings a great deal of raw power and energy. A sword cuts through the web of scaffolding, holding up all the cloudy pieces of our identity: perceptions, conversations, facts, dreams and ideas. When the Ace of Swords appears in a reading, it means that a rare opportunity for clarity is near. It will cut through these subjective realities, revealing a truth, an insight or a new approach for which you have been waiting. Pay close attention to your words and thoughts. Knowledge does give you power, but without a little reflection, it can quickly turn into delusion. meaning 

Position Meaning: Mental clarity, a great force at work, a fresh approach, long-term success, determination, ambition

Card: THE FOUNTAIN - REVERSED

Summary: Be

Meaning: The Fountain exists outside and beyond the cycles of birth, death, time and form. It is the nameless, changeless source of which everything is a part. It is the waking from the dream of separateness and identity, and the recognition of one’s Self as not only connected to all things, but all things — divine nature. When The Fountain appears in your reading, relinquish all illusion of control, and remain quiet. It invites you to observe, master less, and to just be — effortless and indistinguishable from life. You are the voice and the breath of universes. 

Position Meaning: Identification with a role or personality, fear ( of being alone ), mind-obsessed, separation from source, resistance to ( or denial of ) reality

LADY J READING:

There’s something that’s troubling you very heavily right now; something that’s keeping you at a crossroads between what you ideally want and desire, vs what reality actually is. You are attempting to find means and ways to achieve such desire’s, but it’s hard. It’s heavy on you, exhausting on your entire being, and trying to keep things up the way you plan just won’t cut it this time. You are deceiving yourself, and running away from the truth, and it’s gradually getting to be too much. The biggest reason for this problem seems to be mainly because something bad happened, and rather then ask for help trying to fix it, you choose instead to try to forge ahead, hoping you can figure it on your own. You’re hopeful for change. You’re hopeful that things will get better and you’re ready to do what you need to make it happen. But you’re going about it wrong. Primarily, I think the biggest thing this entire reading is telling me is that more then anything, you need to take a step back and allow yourself to come to terms with whatever has hurt you, because if you continue to push it aside the way you have, it will only get worse. 

What the Five of Coins tells us however as well, is that your troubles are a “Precious Misfortune”. In the end, the pain and heartache will give you strength – it will give you what you need so you come out the other side better then ever. Maybe a little bit bruised and battered, but in the long run, it is for the best. 

The subconscious / distant past is the Three of Cups, which showcases that you have a support system, I believe. You’ve been working very hard this whole time, but try not to forget that you aren’t alone. You are loved, and people care for you, and no matter how much you wish to work your troubles out on your own, it’s important to remember that the people that surround you only wish for your well-being. They are a source of warmth, and of healing, but perhaps in your single minded focus to take care of yourself, you have pushed them away just a bit, judging by the reversed card. Their being there wasn’t giving you as much ease as you would have liked, so for a moment there, you stood apart from them, not realizing the distance that had crept between you in the process. However, perhaps you have decided to open up a bit again. The Six of Coins shows that there is someone most recently that you’ve come to trust – enough that you can let them in. A confidant that you haven’t shied away from, someone that has given you some form of peace. They’re important to you, and they’ve helped you a lot. You should nurture that relationship - it will help calm your troubled heart. 

The present moment states that despite your troubles, things are momentarily and perfectly ‘okay’. Whatever strategies you were employing have worked until now, and it’s an achievement for sure! It took a lot for you to reach this point, you’ve done amazingly well, so you should be proud! But again, whatever strategies you’ve employed – they drain you, and it’s just not sustainable in the long run. Which is why I think the Wheel of Fortune for your future is Reversed… because this moment of stability doesn’t seem like it will last. Something is going to go wrong if things proceed the way they are, and things won’t be okay :(

However, not all hope is lost. For your power ( or lack of it, depending on how you proceed ) is that you do have the capacity to take a step back and breathe. Meditate, be at peace, and just reconnect with yourself. Whatever troubles you is also feeding you realities that are far too severe; in other words, you’re overthinking. Try to find a space where you can regroup and think over your strategies again on your own. There’s something wrong with your current method of doing things, but it doesn’t mean it’s a certain failure. Just change your strategy, and things will be okay. You’re more then capable of achieving success, you just need to figure out a new way to manage it. 

I think the Ten of Coins indicates the effects of those around you, and how they’re affecting you. More then anything, their presence is helping stabilize you. Though you have that concern hanging heavy over your head, the support factor from your friends and family are giving you strength and keeping you calm. Try to gather whatever hope and light you can from them, it’s helping you more then you think. 

Your fear with reference to the Two of Coins indicates that you’re afraid - that when you finally reach a decision to choose between one path or the other, you’ll never have the chance for the other road again. You worry you need to give one aspect up to gain the bounty of the other, and you’re doing your best so that doesn’t have to happen. But again, like the Four of Swords states, you need to take a step back to breathe, and then decide. It’s remarkably difficult to continue as you have been until now, something has to give. Please do what is best for you, for your own sake; even if that means giving up something else.

Finally, the most likely outcome – is Temperance. As it states there - it invites you to consider that all things are possible, even when they don’t seem to coincide. Though it lays Reversed, which indicates your fear of having to choose, and eventually making a choice you don’t want, being tugged in all the directions with no idea which way to go – remember. Deep breaths, a step back, and try to center yourself and just Be. Which coincidentally is the summary of the bonus card of the Fountain. It coincides, because Temperance wants you to understand that things aren’t as complicated as they seem, really, and all things are possible if you can just look at it from a strategy that would be more beneficial for you. The things you want are possible, but as is the case with the Fountain Card, you won’t find that winning strategy the way you’re going right now. You’re focusing too hard on the wrong things. Let it go, for just a bit. Let reality come to you, recognize it for what it is, accept it, and then - when all the facts have been taken into account, meditate again. A different strategy this time. Let it flow, much like a fountain does. You are capable, you can change things, all hope is not lost. But let life happen as it will, you will find a way to achieve your goals. It is within You. 

And to end this reading is the second Bonus card – the Ace of Swords. In the simplest sense, it means one thing: prepare yourself. Whatever it is that you have built up in your attempt to avoid, the shaky concepts and ideas that you’ve hoped to achieve by continuously forging forward as you have – the reality of things will come, breaking down all imaginary concepts until you have nothing the truth laid bare before you. This is a card that affects your entire reading, this is a card that is good. Clarity is coming, and with it brings a new reality. A better one. You will gain the success you so dearly desire, you will gain the insight that you’ve been waiting for. Please keep an open mind and don’t turn it away when it comes – it may just be your golden ticket to your goal.

// @44003xx

[spiritualesoterichighlevel]

Enlightenment Issues

In 1974 Hans Burgschmidt was sixteen years old, living in the Canadian Prairies, working in a photography studio darkroom, elbow-deep in chemicals all day long. "Is this what life is about?" he asked a high school friend. "You need to meditate," was the reply.

Not long after, Hans attended a lecture at the local library, where a man in a suit spoke about the scientific benefits of relaxation. He pressed Play on the industrial-sized U-Matic video player and there was Maharishi Mahesh, the Indian yogi who initiated the Beatles into the mysteries of Transcendental Meditation (TM) and launched the meditation careers of thousands of Western devotees.

"An infinite ocean of peace and love and happiness awaits you," said the radiant Maharishi, with his flowing hair and his garland of flowers. "What's not to like?" Hans thought, and got in touch with a local TM chapter.

Soon after he began his meditation practice, exactly as advertised, he found himself transported from his parent's basement into a shimmering inner space of light and colour and bliss. "Eventually you get so expanded and the mantra becomes so refined that you are taken to the silent source of thought – it was wonderful."

Hans was hooked. Next, he enrolled himself in advanced courses and in the late 70s he left for Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, hoping to become a teacher.

But somewhere along the line Hans became disenchanted. Maybe it was the dubious "levitation" training, or the dogmatism of his fellow teachers, or the "almost abusive" way the school administrator overworked their staff. "The discrepancies between what was promised and what was really happening kept growing," Hans told me. "Eventually I had to move on."

Thus began Hans' long career as an itinerant spiritual seeker. He hit all the New Age mainstays: Osho and then Da Free John in the 80's, trance channeling and primal scream therapy and past life regression in the 90's.

  But the same pattern of finding the limits of the guru or the practices kept repeating itself. Finally in 2006 he met a teacher he could trust – one of my own teachers, in fact – the Buddhist scholar and future neuroscience-consultant Shinzen Young. "No BS, real down to earth, just an ordinary guy teaching a well-crafted version of techniques that have been tested by Buddhists for thousands of years."

The technique was vipassana, one important – and increasingly popular – aspect of which is known as "mindfulness."

"I found it invigorating," says Hans. "It was much more active than other techniques I had learned, I could feel the power of it."

The Shadow Side of Meditation

Everything was fine, until three weeks after his first retreat, when, in Hans' words, "something changed." My sense," says Hans, "is the technique precipitated something that was already there. I mean I had done a lot of meditating in other traditions by then. They softened me up. Whatever the case, I don't think it could have turned out any other way."

Hans was at home making his bed, when the room suddenly appeared "very far away." But the room hadn't changed; he had. The part of Hans that had once looked out at the world, the core we take for granted as the "self", had without any warning disappeared.

To understand what happened to Hans, you need to understand something about how meditation works in general, and vipassana in particular. Most meditation techniques are designed to shift a person's orientation from a limited personal identity to the broader ground of their experience.

Vipassana does this by deliberately and systematically untangling the different strands that make up our sense of self and world; in the Pali language (the ancient Indian scriptural dialect of Buddhism) the word "vipassana" means "seeing into" or "seeing through."

Practicing vipassana, you have more space to make appropriate responses, and more space, too, around your looping thought-track, which can dramatically reduce stress and anxiety as well as raise a person's baseline levels of happiness and fulfillment.

This is one reason why mindfulness has become the technique of choice for thousands of clinicians and psychotherapists, and there is now a considerable body of scientific research demonstrating these and other benefits.

Yet most of the clinicians who so enthusiastically endorse mindfulness do not have a proper understanding of where it can lead. The fact is that mindfulness in large doses can penetrate more than just your thoughts and sensations; it can see right through to the very pith of who you are – or rather, of who you are not.

Because, as Buddhist teachers and teachers from many other contemplative traditions have long argued, on close investigation there doesn't appear to be any deeper "you" in there running the show. "You" are just a flimsy identification process, built on the fly by your grasping mind — a common revelation in meditation that happens to be compatible with the views of many contemporary neuroscientists.

In fact, the classic result of a successful vipassana practice is to permanently recognize the impermanence (anicca), the selflessness (anatta), and the dualistic tension or suffering (dukkha) of all experience, which may sound like an Ibsen play, but this is the clear empirical understanding that many otherwise sensible practitioners report.

For most people this shift is the most profoundly positive experience of their lives. In the words of Shinzen Young, "it allows a person to live ten times the size they would have lived otherwise, it frees them from most worries and concerns, it gives them a quality of absolute freedom and repose."

But once in a while, something goes wrong. In Buddhism this is known as falling into "the pit of the void." Young is more modern: "Psychiatrists call it Depersonalization and De-realization Disorder, or DP/DR. I call it 'Enlightenment's evil twin'."

For Hans, what began as confusion and disorientation led within a few hours to extreme panic. The emptiness was ominous – in his words, a "deficient void." One moment the world seemed far away, the next it was too present, a "barrage" of overwhelming sensations. "It was like I had no protective filter or skin – sounds and sights became incredibly abrasive.

Hearing the phone ring was like someone running a thousand volts of electricity through me. I also had feelings of being stretched and twisted inside out, like I was morphing into some kind of animal. I had no idea what was happening – I thought maybe I was getting premature Alzheimer's."

Over the next few months Hans spent hours with Young on the phone, but despite the counseling, none of his symptoms went away – if anything, he says, the selflessness, the rawness of sensations and the associated fears became even more disconcerting. One by one, all the meaningful parts of Hans' life dropped away: his love of photography, of art, even his sex drive.

"I lost my will to do anything – none if it had any meaning. You could say that I no longer understood existence. I would wake up in the morning and go 'OK, this is my body, this is me, and I guess I'm doing this but I no longer understood it. I no longer understood agency, what makes other bodies move, what animates life.

Sometimes there was a wondrous quality to this bafflement – I felt the awe and the mystery – but most of the time it was aimless and tormenting."

Was Hans experiencing a slow-motion nervous breakdown unrelated to his meditation practice?  Or was the experience of depersonalization triggered by meditation?

He was able, just barely, to keep working, although he says he has no idea how he was able to do this since, in his words,   "I often couldn't understand what people were saying – all I would hear is the weird texture of their speech patterns, there was no meaning to any of it."

His own responses, too, came as a surprise. "At times I would hear myself speaking and I had no idea where the words were coming from or what they meant. I felt like an imposter."

The Dark Night of the Soul

Hans is not alone. If the very real benefits of mindfulness add up to the good-news mental health story of our time, then, like so many good things, there is also a shadowy seam, an experience known popularly as the Dark Night, after the writings of the famous Carmelite mystic St. John of the Cross.

More meditators and practitioners are beginning to speak openly about the challenges associated with practice. The importance of this cannot be overstated, for there are those in the scientific community who believe that taking these reports seriously may one day provide key insights into both mental illness, and the mystery of contemplative transformation. They may in fact be very different expressions of a single underlying dynamic.

Some researchers are already studying this. Willoughby Britton is a meditator and a clinical psychologist at Brown University. After encountering some of this difficult territory herself, she began an ambitious research project to document the full range of phenomena that can happen as a result of practice. The initiative is called "The Varieties of Contemplative Experience".

Over the past three years, Britton and her colleagues have conducted detailed interviews with over forty senior Buddhist (and some non-Buddhist) teachers and another forty or so practitioners about challenges they've either experienced themselves, or, in the case of teachers, seen in their students.

The study's current research design cannot answer the question of what percentage of practitioners run into problems, although Britton did tell me that serious complications that require inpatient psychiatric hospitalization probably affect less than one percent of meditators. "Milder, more chronic symptoms," she says, "will be higher – but no one knows how high."

The full range of symptoms, from mild to intense, include headaches, panic, mania, confusion, hallucinations, body pain and pressure, involuntary movements, the de-repression of emotionally-charged psychological material, extreme fear and – perhaps the central feature – the dissolution of the sense of self.

But, as she reports in a recent interview, the most surprising finding for Britton has been the duration of impairment, which she defines as the inability of an adult to work or take care of children.

"We've been deliberately looking for worst-case scenarios, so I expect this number will go down as we get more data, but right now we are finding that people in these experiences are affected for an average of three years, with a range of six months to twelve years."

Britton has found that two demographics seem to be affected more than other: young men aged eighteen to thirty, who, in the way of young men, go for months-long retreats in Asia and pursue hardcore practice and log ten to twenty hours of meditation a day. "We had to create a "Zealotry Scale" says Britton, dryly, "it was such a major predictor."

The other large group, she says, is middle-aged women. "These ladies have been going to, say, Spirit Rock Meditation Centre for last ten to twenty years, have a nice hour-a-day practice, and then seven or ten years into it something happens."

The situation is complicated by the fact that a period of difficulty is actually a perfectly normal part of many meditation practices. A well-meaning therapist might label this pathological, when what might be more helpful to the "patient" is guidance from an experienced meditation teacher.

Within vipassana traditions, some classic texts talk about the "dukkha ñanas" – challenging stages that are actually a sign of progress. These are a natural response to the layer of mind being exposed; with a teacher's help, the student can move through their Dark Night in a matter of days or hours. Indeed, some teachers argue that the skills practitioners acquire in coping with these passages are often the very ones that allow them to progress to more liberating stages of the path.

Shinzen Young writes, "It is certainly the case that almost everyone who gets anywhere with meditation will pass through periods of negative emotion, confusion, disorientation, and heightened sensitivity to internal and external arisings. The same thing can happen in psychotherapy and other growth modalities. For the great majority of people, the nature, intensity, and duration of these kinds of challenges is quite manageable."

According to Young, the real Dark Night occurs when, as in Hans' case, a practitioner has difficulty integrating insight into selflessness. This is something he says he has only ever seen a few times in his four decades of teaching.

Perhaps surprisingly, Britton's research has so far not revealed any clear associations between meditation-related difficulties and prior psychiatric or trauma history. Problems can occur in individuals with no identifiable red flags; conversely, individuals with multiple red flags (bipolar disorder, trauma history, and so on) can do intensive retreats without any difficulties whatsoever.

"We have to be careful," Britton told me, "about jumping to conclusions and excluding people prematurely from meditation's possible benefits. My personal opinion is that the place where we need most help is not in identifying at-risk people so much as improving support systems."

Britton gets two to three emails a week from people looking for help, so this is something she thinks a lot about. "Just talking about the experience with someone and hearing that none of it is new … this has a hugely positive effect on people.

That's eighty percent of what needs to happen. Just normalizing the experience." To that end, she has already founded both a space and a website to provide resources for practitioners in need, and also to educate teachers and clinician about the full range of meditation' effects.

"Length of impairment is directly related to how much access the student has to a good teacher. Many of the people I've spoken to have been through dozens of therapists and meditation instructors and most have no idea what to do."

Young has his own techniques for helping meditators work with Dark Night phenomena. Hans adds one more: serious fitness. "Pilates, weight-training, yoga – I now do it all. For me, I finally figured out that I needed to integrate these changes into my physical body. Ultimately this is what turned the corner for me."

Seven years after his drop into the pit of the void, Hans is arriving at a better place. Not a normal place, mind you – and here his laugh is a bit hysterical: "What's normal? I still live in emptiness and wake up every morning with no idea who I am."

But he no longer gets panic attacks, or feels ten thousand volts of electricity irradiate his senses every time the phone rings. His sex drive has returned, and with it a new longing for a relationship. He also has a strong interest in helping others manage similar problems.

"So much of it is about patience," he says. Over the past seven years, the words of one teacher kept circling around in his head: "If life gives you nothing you want and is not on your own terms, would you still have the generosity to show up for it?"  There's no easy "yes" to that question.