of these relationships was balm to my battered psyche. One of these new friends was a scientist/naturalist/artist that I met while meandering on my favorite canyon trail one twilight. I came upon her and her dog only moments after I’d felt a wish for someone to play with.

We walked together for a while that night, sharing stories about our connections to wild places, to solitude and to the never-ending magic of Ojai. She was living and working in Los Angeles on weekdays. On weekends, she would come to replenish her soul in a little cottage that she was renting in the East End of Ojai. The cottage was just around the corner from where I was replenishing my own soul. We were both recovering from complicated long-term relationships that we had recently ended. We were both still talking with our former partners, both trying to sort out how to navigate the shift from relationship to friendship with these former lovers. We were both very consciously engaged with our spiritual journeys. The parallels in our lives at that moment were striking.

We began spending time out on the trails together when she came to Ojai each weekend. As we hiked, we shared tales of hope and frustration. We reflected on the differing styles with which we were approaching our similar struggles. We were both working to disentangle ourselves from our enmeshed, over-involvement with trying to save our now ex-partners from the unhappiness of their problem-filled lives. We became a support group of two for this life transitioning time in which we each found (and were finding) ourselves.

While we were both committed to our spiritual journeying, we had very different paths and very different ways of being on our paths. She was immersed in a Buddhist tradition, very formal in her practice and study. I, on the other hand, was involved in a much looser, free form and intuitive approach to my spiritual evolution. I let my self be guided by the energy of the deep feminine that I found in the wild places: by the voice of Spirit/the Great Mother/the Grandmothers that spoke in my heart as I wandered in those places. These quite different approaches and the richness they held for each of us were, in the early days of our getting to know each other, a source of ongoing dialogue.

I was exploring the Field of the Sacred Feminine. With mind and body I found my self questioning what the essential nature of female eroticism might be. I was captivated by imagining the possibilities of a feminine erotic nature that hadn’t been, for millennia, co-opted and confined by male images of female sexuality. I was awed by the vibrant erotic energy I felt in my connection with the natural world. The Great Mother was my teacher. I shed my clothes wherever I felt safe to be naked in the wild places. Sitting in the little waterfalls on the river, cuddling with or napping cradled in trees, curled into or wrapped around boulders, I was letting the energy of the river, trees and boulders resonate in my body and being. I was absorbed: feeling the radiant erotic flow connecting me and the river, the trees, the boulders; feeling the expanding openness of erotic arousal, the dissolving of boundaries, my self melting into the all-that-is.

My sharing about these experiences and experiments were a part of our ongoing dialogue about spirituality, relationship and life. And, after a bit, we explored playing together with erotic energy. At the start it felt like a safe and natural extension of our sharing. We’d already been, for a while, exploring and playing with psychic energy, trying to send and receive images to each other over distance.

Erotic play and exploration wove in and out of another friendship I was involved in at the same time as Anita (not her real name) and I were experimenting together. I was open and clear in both friendships about being not at all interested in creating a partnering/romantic relationship with anyone, then or possibly ever. I just wanted to play on as many levels as were safely available with anyone with whom I was engaging. It seemed at the time that everyone understood and accepted where I was coming from.

Around this time, the owners of Anita’s cottage needed to reclaim that space for their own family. At the same moment, one of the other two cottages on the property where I lived became vacant. Anita was delighted with the synchronicity and readily made the easy move. Her greater proximity felt, at the start, quite fine with me. Our separate commitments to our solitude, my openness about where I was vis-à-vis relationship and her Ojai presence being limited to weekends seemed to promise clear boundaries at a time when I was involved in several very nourishing and interesting new friendships.

Not long after her move, she gradually began spending more time in Ojai. She left her job in Los Angeles. She found another Ojai living space that provided her with reduced rent in exchange for caretaking the property she’d live on. She found a job in a nearby community that was in her scientific field. As she spent more time in Ojai, she began meeting new people. She also met some of my friends and developed her own relationships with a couple of them.

After a bit, things started getting complicated. Several times she’d made plans for us with my other friends, speaking as if we were a couple. She was taken aback by my sensitivity to what she saw as something insignificant or merely semantic. I’d explain further. She’d appear to finally get what I was taking exception to. Then it would happen again. I’d be furious. She’d refer to me as her girlfriend and I’d call her on that. She’d always seem surprised by my objections to her proprietary language. I began to realize that she actually didn’t hear that it wasn’t a matter of semantics for me.

She started becoming impatient with our erotic energy play, pushing verbally for what to me felt like just plain sex. I was upset by and angry at her attitude and tried to re-clarify what I was available for. She’d seem to understand. Then she, just back from a trip, actually became physically pushy about sexual touching. It felt abusive and invasive to me. I immediately left and went home, furious.

As I walked the quarter mile back to my own cottage I realized that dialogue was no longer even possible with this person; that something had radically shifted from where things had been earlier on in our sharing. What was going on now was entirely unacceptable, toxic and, for me, not open to negotiation. I was done.

Once home, feeling shaken and outraged, I wrote a letter telling her that it was clear to me that she didn’t or couldn’t hear me in my own terms no matter how I tried to explain me to her and that I experienced her behavior as unacceptable and abusive. Since this was what was so for me, I wrote, I saw no point in attempting any dialogue about my reasons for – or my making of – the decision that I was completely done with our sharing. Still shaking with rage, I left the note in her mailbox in the middle of that night.

Late the next morning, she arrived on my doorstep in a towering fury. Though I had nothing more to say to her, I felt that I ought to allow her the opportunity to respond to my letter. It also felt much safer to allow this than to refuse her the opportunity to have her say. So, I stood there holding one hand over my heart and one over my solar plexus to insulate my self from her rageful energy. I made sure, too, to stay far enough away from her so that my body was outside the range of her swirling energy field.

She stalked back and forth across my studio for quite some time ranting at me, reading-my-beads, telling me what a “manipulative, malevolent, spiritually fraudulent, people-user” I was. One of my most vivid memories from her diatribe was of her telling me how despicable I was because I “used people and when you’re no longer getting what you need from a relationship, you just callously crumple it up and throw the person away like a used candy wrapper!”

It wasn’t easy to listen to her litany of complaint and her condemnations of me. Nevertheless, I felt no need to defend my self against her accusations: I could appreciate how she might come to see me those ways and could acknowledge to her that I got the sense of her experience. I could allow her to have her own perceptions of me, both when they differed from my own perceptions of me and even when they resonated with the venomous accusations I’d often received from my own inner critic.

At some point her rage was spent and she left. I was exhausted by the experience of holding my self safe and centered in the face of her livid storming. Yet, I also felt exhilarated. I’d stood solidly in the middle of my own acceptance of my self even as I fully comprehended how infuriating and reprehensible my way of being in the world was for her. I could see me through her furious eyes and still not change how I saw and felt about my self.

It was a significant milestone in my life. I felt sad for the fact that my being me had contributed to her feeling such pain. But I knew that I hadn’t intended to cause such pain. I had tried my best, repeatedly and obviously unsuccessfully, to communicate to her both what I was available for and the depth of my devotion to taking the best care of my self no matter what. It was clear that there was no way that she would ever see me as I saw me. I was amazed that I could allow her – without argument – to have her negative perceptions of me and still be absolutely sure that her treatment of me had become unacceptable to me.

Both before and after this milestone, I’ve had several experiences of needing to leave friendships or relationships that have stopped working for or stopped feeling right for me. What Anita accused me of is actually true about me: When a friendship or relationship no longer nourishes or grows me, I do leave it. Usually, I try to do this with some amount of grace and caring, honoring what has been. Time already shared and the depth of that sharing are not, for me, reason to stay or to continue in a relationship/friendship that no longer feeds my soul.

Before this threshold experience with Anita, I would feel anguished and be harshly critical with my self whenever I would come to that place of being done wanting to relate with someone who’d been an important part of my life till then. I frequently stayed longer than I wanted to in order to postpone having to cope with the person’s and my own negative opinions about me, about the quality of my friendship or about the authenticity of my caring. I often felt distressed by the fact that the delight and completeness I feel in my own solitary company makes interpersonal relationships generally less essential to me than they seem to be for other people. The reality that I can and do leave when being with another ceases to offer me more than I can offer my self makes it not a level playing field.

By the time I’d arrived at this experience with Anita I had come to a fuller acceptance of who and how I was/am in the world of relatedness with other(s). I had come, as well, to appreciate that it did not matter whether where I was/am had/has to do with my woundedness or my wholeness. I’d accepted that it just was and is how I’m wired. I’d also realized that even when I do full disclosure about my self in the early days of developing a friendship, people do not necessarily understand or get the full implications of what I tell them about my self. And, I’d recognized that sometimes there is nothing for it but to allow others to have their own readings of me while I stay centered in how I see/feel about me.

I’ve learned to accept that some friendships, while they can be rich and intriguing at the start, may only be right/nourishing for a season of my life. Others start in the same way and then continue through countless and varied transformations and seasons. There’s no knowing which are which at the start. I now have my own permission not to continue in any connection beyond the season(s) in which it grows me. No matter what the person may think of me for letting go of the ongoing sharing.

As we practice and learn to fiercely, protectively mother all of our little and big selves, we become unconditionally accepting and loving of our whole, imperfect, still evolving, not-always-shining selves. Since our own good opinion of and love for ourselves doesn’t any longer depend on how anyone else sees us, we become more willing and able to allow others to have their own visions/versions of us. We become less susceptible to others negating views of us. Keeping our own loving, good opinion of our selves doesn’t require that we invalidate or argue away another’s less loving experience of us. But, we may certainly choose not to be close with people whose views of us are unloving, negative or very discrepant from our own.

Consider loving and accepting yourself no matter what anyone else thinks or says about you.

P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!

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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.

If you'd like a deck of your very own to support you in your journey, click here to download Order Form.

Please feel free to e-mail me at rposin@hotmail.com. to share your reflections and responses to any or all of what you find here . I'd really like to hear what touches and nourishes you!