Hanging On, Letting Go
Sometimes a guy will come to Touch Practice once, send a note that says “thank you, that was wonderful,” and that’s the last of our communication. Others who met me initially through Touch Practice have, over the course of years, become close friends, people I see every few weeks. And I never know, upon that first meeting, where things will go. In fact, it cannot be known.
One of the many useful things I have learned from Touch Practice includes the awareness that all relationships have unknown futures. One aspect of this, for me, is the understanding that people cannot be held close by clinging to them. The minute I begin to cling to someone, it inspires in them an urge to escape me. If someone has ever given you a hug that is “clingy,” too tight, too long, too close, too whatever–you know what an escape instinct this triggers.
I have had some wonderful encounters in first Touch Practices with men where I’ve spent the rest of the day thinking, “wow, what a great guy he is. I hope we will meet each other again some day.” I always try to catch that moment, and breathe into it, and sit with it, as uncomfortable as it is sometimes, and allow for the fact that the one hour we spent together might be the last time I ever see that guy. He may wish it to be that way. I may not.
I try to mindfully release my grasp, my grip, to bless that person and allow him to come and go freely, to move closer to me, if he wishes, or to take a step away. That is the only approach that works in Touch Practice, and, increasingly, it’s the only approach that works in my life.
One of the great miracles of my life, which I appreciate increasingly with each passing year, is my marriage. Over the past 19 years it seems we have grown closer and closer by relaxing our grip on each other more and more. The more people we include in our circles of deeply intimate and emotionally connected relationships, the more clearly defined we seem to be as a “couple.”
Now it’s true we put a lot of time and energy into our relationship, including a daily morning time which we consider to be “sacred” time together. We do have something we build only with each other. But it is also not uncommon that we will attend a party or group gathering where several hours will pass before some people figure out, with surprise, that we’re a couple, because we’re in different parts of the room, with different people, having different conversations.
We increasingly hold each other with a very light grasp. The miracle, for me, is that we continue to return to each other every day, not because we’re held in a death-grip, but because we choose to. The freedom to move away and the ability to move closer are the same skill. As I’ve said before, our ability to say “no” in establishing boundaries is directly related to our ability to move closer to someone.
Lifetime relationships are rich and interesting and valuable things to explore. They are also relatively rare. Many relationships which are equally rich, and often educational and even pivotal in our lives, last for a shorter period of time, but are equally valuable, in my experience. And in this same non-dual way, the ability to say, “this relationship has run its course; we have done our work and enjoyed the fruit of this particular tree, and this is finished” is related to our ability to move closer to relationships which nourish us, in the same way that winter and spring are related.
In Touch Practice, I always leave it up to the other man to decide when our relationship has run its course. I stand still, and allow him to either move closer or move away; it’s the way I have structured the practice. Others tell me when they’re finished with the work. In friendship and real life, not so easy, and not so clear.
Sometimes I am the one who must make the decision to step back. Sometimes the relationship has run its course for me, or I no longer find it productive or fruitful to continue. And because there are so many trees in life, it is essential that I be conscious about which ones can bear fruit, and which have ceased to do so, despite our best efforts.
I try to carry the principles of Touch Practice into this (breathe, stay grounded, and be kind no matter what) but it is often more difficult for me to step away from someone else than to have them step away from me. For me the key is kindness, and the work ahead of me, the work I understand for myself, is “whatever needs to be done, be sure to do it. As it is always possible to do that work with kindness, be sure to do it kindly.” That’s usually the part where I learn that I need to keep practicing.
I have very little difficulty opening my arms to hug a new friend without feeling I am committing an act of kindness, but it is more of a challenge for me to let go of a poorly functioning friendship or professional relationship as an act of kindness. Ultimately, it can be just that, for myself and for the other person, making time, energy and space available for more fruitful and productive encounters with others. But it’s not something I’ve mastered yet, and it’s certainly not something that always feels easy.
For many, it is often easier to let go of someone in anger than in kindness. Anger is a defense mechanism which keeps us from feeling the loss and grieving the relationship; whereas kindness invites compassion so that we can feel what both persons are letting go of, and what we have built together. The ability to get comfortable with loss is directly related to the ability to feel comfortable being close to someone. You can’t get one without the other; you have to be able to sit with both. (Easy way to remember that? Breathe in; breathe out. You never get one without the other, ever. People come into our lives, and people go out. Whatever we take in, we must ultimately let out.)
For me, life, like touch, is a practice. We keep trying to do it better and better, without ever getting it perfect. I’m off to practice; I wish you well in yours also. May you have blessing, health and happiness.
Have thoughts you’d like to share?
Touch Practice is a sacred practice for me, and part of that is keeping confidences sacred. While a name and e-mail address are required to post a comment, feel free to use just your first name, or a pseudonym if you wish. Your e-mail address will never be seen by or shared with anyone. It is used to prevent spam and inappropriate comments from appearing in the blog. I’d really like to hear from you!
Something I must say, having found a place I can feel comfortable saying it: I literally ache to experience something like the practices you are describing in this site. But I live on the West Coast, in a smaller, somewhat isolated community, with little in the way of options/resources to reach out beyond where I am geographically.
I too have tried Craigslist, so far unsuccessfully.
I must also admit, reading your descriptions makes me aware of some contrasting desires I have for something less formal and wordless than you seem to be describing; I also feel a great need to verbally explore thoughts with another man to the point where each can, with utmost honesty and wholeheartedness, tell the other that he loves him.
As far being able to let go: I know I must have been at that place a while ago, having said almost the same words in a CL ad about if the experience were just right, I might need to have it only once and never again, not have to see the other man ever again because what I felt with him would be carried in my heart in a way that nothing could break. With the fulfillment of anything even resembling that being deferred for so long, though, I am now more in a place of envisioning a man who could be regularly in my life, not always to physically hold, but to at least be able to see in one anothers’ eyes undisguisedly how special we are to one another, in gazes that are held spontaneously and often and supplemented by warm and sweet words of genuine agreement, encouragement, playful enjoyment, and occasionally, just plain love, as much as possible without becoming too routine/forced or cloying.
Of course I certainly don’t rule out being able to get back to that “letting go” place, either.
But I would sure appreciate any help you could offer toward finding something similar to what you are doing out here near where I am, posted here in response to this comment. And whether or not you know of anything like that, I would also love to hear (well, read) your thoughts in response to what I’ve said about my desires in this part of life, whether you’ve seen/felt similar or not.
Dear Jeremy: wow. Thank you for your comment! The topics you raise are so complex and so numerous that I can’t begin to address all of them, but I am going to respond to your query about “finding something similar” for yourself.
In fact, your comment inspired my Blog for this weekend, which should be up in the next few hours. I’m not sure I can answer all of your questions, or even answer this one question in a definitive way, but I’m going to do my very best to respond in a way that will be helpful.
Stay tuned, and thanks for writing. I hope you’ll keep in touch with progress reports. Take care! Kevin Smith
Kevin, thank you very much for your response, and even more just for the efforts you have put into this site to create a prominent place to promote the re-union of masculinity with kindness, of mental toughness with a freely-given, tender and caring regard for others willing to be expressed in the most simple but extraordinary way, through physical closeness.
I don’t know if you have ever seen the documentary that was released shortly after the twin towers fell, but the moment in it when one of the filmmakers thought he had just lost his brother in the other tower, and a firefighter was comforting him, was something incredibly powerful that I have often mentioned in describing what I am looking for, feeling like I have felt that kind of sense of loss all my life, but it has always been sensing the loss of someone who was very much alive and who I would see every day, but the connection was broken and always had been, and I couldn’t put it into words or even conceptualize what I was missing, at first, because we were going through all the right motions that you would list to describe a loving family relationship (including physical closeness, but it often repelled me because of feeling unaccompanied by understanding, as I now realize–which is why I place such value on the language and eye-contact of love, and am at the same time so inhibited in it), and nothing patently wrong or terrible was going on, either.
During the day I first commented, wondering what the response might be, if any, I looked at some more of the things you wrote, and the process of just imagining possible responses already was leading to a lot of transformative ideas hitting me, some new and some being refreshed in me whose impact I had thought unrecoverable, having been lost to past disappointments–ways that simply meditating on your descriptions of certain interactions you have had, and your testimony of the effects they have had, could help me to put my finger on ways of expressing myself that could simply break me out of isolating patterns in my relationships with the people already in my life, that could lead us to a healing closeness without the need to reach out to a stranger at all (but might make us into people that touch the lives of strangers positively a lot more often anyway!)
It’s strange how in the pursuit of emotional satisfaction, the focus, as far as what to actually do about it with body, mind, and speech, can shift around so mercurially, like on this issue of whether I need to seek contact with someone new in order to make better contact with those already with me, or the other way around, and in either case, exactly how best to go about it.
Don’t know if any of this has a specific enough relationship to your experience for you to productively respond in this format, but I do feel it does me good to just put it out there in a place that is so focused on this subject, and laid out in a manner to give it the weight that it has in life–at least as I experience it, anyway!
Thanks again,
Jeremy
Just thought I’d add the link to that clip of video. Turns out I was mistaken, the moment happened as an expression of relief, though still with grief over the tragedy experienced by others. If only it did not take something like this, you know?
http://youtu.be/q9jsjdFn3Xo?t=1m
Jeremy: what you see in this clip is the capacity men have to be tender, affectionate and supportive of each other (which we ALWAYS have) which is manifested publicly because we have an “excuse” (facing tragedy together, in this case) to do so. It is a mistake to think that the event created the capacity to be with each other in this way; it just allowed the expression of it.
This experience for these men was a kind of initiation experience. In many cultures which live closer to the land, initiation experiences are created. They are intentionally designed and invoked (dropping young men off alone in the forest at night after offering them hallucinogenic food or drink, for example, to face their deepest fears, survive them, and make the transition to manhood.)
In our culture, many of our initiation experiences are accidental, because we undervalue loyalty (tribe) and undervalue experiences that create that, such as initiation and bonding experiences. But when nature (earthquake) or men flying planes into buildings create those initiation experiences for us, we see the power of tenderness and affection and loyalty manifest.
That power is always there. We can choose to manifest that every day, if we value it and believe it plays a necessary role in our life together.
Yes, that was how I understood that; it’s just that it can be so difficult, especially for someone like me, to tap into that underlying potential, which most men seem to have enough ability to subconsciously discern in one another to be satisfied with minimal overt expression of it, most of the time, only allowing it to surface at times like that.
As for initiation, it doesn’t seem to me to be any more desirable to deliberately provoke a crisis in order to form bonding experience; it seems to me that life naturally has its own ways of making us face our fears, and artificial induction of that process, however ancient in origin, seems to have proven to be mainly a powerful force for conformity at best, and a tool to produce extreme in-group/out-group orientation at worst. It all hinges on the values of survival vs. the meaning of each individual to another.
I think it’s true that we have suffered losses in our values of loyalty in our modern pursuit of the value of individualism, but my hope is for it to be an opportunity to learn to consciously balance the benefits of individualism with the pursuit of the bonding experience, so that as much as possible, the mind is engaged voluntarily and not forced to engage through the bodily ritual, which seems to me to be what you are achieving through the importance you place on personal boundaries.
Hi Jeremy, thanks for responding. My vision is that we all have initiation experiences, but that we become members of one tribe, the same tribe, the tribe of all men, everywhere. My vision is that we all become part of the in-group because there IS no out-group–because our vision of how big our tribe is expands to encompass what it really is, which is all of us.
I could definitely see how that could work, as long as the only initiation were the touch practice itself as you are doing it; from your stories about it, sometimes it does induce a bit of a crisis for men in regards to those boundaries, but I’m gathering that you do not promote to anyone the idea of forcing themselves into anything uncomfortable, and in fact encourage them to slow down if they’re showing signs of proceeding with more than they are ready for. If this way of experiencing touch were the only initiation, and no one felt pressured to do it before a certain point in life or shamed if they hadn’t felt ready yet even until late in life, but were led to the experience only by the attraction of observing its positive effects, I can see how that would make it something truly, just naturally universal.
Hi Jeremy: Touch Practice is not an initiation experience of any sort, at least that is not its intent. Touch Practice is gentle, slow, relaxing. It is yogic; it involves careful and mindful engagement of stretch. There is no forcing of any kind. There is no deliberate movement into anything uncomfortable. It is not intended as an initiation experience nor am I aware that it has ever functioned as such for someone. There is no pressure of any sort; it is exactly the opposite of that. It involves creating a space into which someone can relax.
Hey I’m sorry I wasn’t more clear on the intent of what I was saying; I was just trying to ask, could it be that all of those non-forceful, relaxing, opening-up qualities of touch practice might be something that, though not intended as initiation, could fulfill and transcend any need for any other kind of initiation, because they are so universal and so transformative in themselves that they could produce more of the unity of purpose, mindfulness of community, and strength in the face of adversity than any type of induced-crisis-type initiation could?