My Way

My Way!

by Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®

If we didn’t have personalities, we would all be transparent nonentities; time enough for that when we die! Seriously though, in being ourselves, our personalities play a colorful role. They give us our uniqueness and some of our endearing qualities as well as our bad habits and our mechanical routines. Yes, if personality is all we are, or rather, if we function as though it is all we are, then we live - hopefully! - with the deep-down feeling that something’s wrong. It’s not fun to live wondering, “What’s wrong with me?”, but the simple fact is that if we spend our life trying to fit into something that others made for us rather than a personality we shaped ourselves to accommodate our real needs, visions, talents and idiosyncracies, there IS something wrong, really fundamentally wrong!

About the idiosyncracies! I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who wasn’t in some way wounded by their upbringing. Perhaps it’s our necessary initiation, the price we have to pay in order to become who we really are. Perhaps we’re all like the butterfly that HAS to struggle out of the cocoon in order to be strong enough to fill out and fly once it’s got free of the shell. Our wounds are integral features of our personality and they add to its uniqueness. There is all kinds of healing that happens as we grow into ourselves, but there are wounds that are simply to be accepted and befriended; wounds that are like scars or impediments or weaknesses that will always be there in us. When we accept them, and this is of course essential work on our journey of self-realization, we integrate them into how we live. They have a strong influence on what makes us happy. Even when we are deeply at one with ourselves, they give us different likes and dislikes and different capabilities, so that we cannot help but seek different ways to live our lives.

All of this is vividly demonstrated in how different are people’s longings in the realm of intimate relationship. It is no use society deciding what is right. All that does is to harass people with the notion that unless they are able to conform, they are wrong. What is right is a profoundly personal matter. Discovering it is one of the great adventures in learning to live the gift of our being. Colored by our inherent nature and all that happens to us from the moment of our conception all the way through to growing up, we are each one of us a mystery seeking its fulfilment. This is ultimately a mystical quest that takes us one day into the spiritual realm, but nothing is going to touch us, excite us, raise us up and sometimes crash us down as powerfully as our love-relationship(s). It isn’t even so that we have to have any intimacy in our lives at all. There are people who find bliss in solitude and seek nothing but seclusion. For most of us though, the adventure is about finding the one we long for, or about opening ourselves to be able to enjoy and celebrate sexual intimacy so that we can, perhaps, find THE ONE.

This perhaps is very important. I see all the time, especially in The Art of Being’s Tantric workshops and courses like Body, Heart & Soul, that some people simply need to discover their innocent, unashamed sexual aliveness, and for all kinds of very good reasons need to be free to play erotically. They aren’t looking for a relationship, perhaps because they know they aren’t ready for that kind of commitment and perhaps because they have spent too long already imprisoned in past relationships that only brought them unhappiness. Perhaps they on their way to learning how to be in a beautiful relationship with their eventual one-and-only beloved, and perhaps they are on their way to discovering something totally different.

And this is the point! On this journey into the full celebration of our being, with all its mystery and the infinity of our spiritual potential, what we need is to find our own way. If we don’t find that, what are we doing here? You are not here to do it my way, nor I yours. If we find that bringing our ways together makes us happy, how beautiful that we found each other; and for sure there will be challenges along the way – yours or mine? Whatever turns us on, we are going to face challenges. They are our teachers. Some of our wounded ways we do need to grow out of because they don’t serve us or anyone else. It’s one of the gifts of being human that the more deeply we learn to accept and befriend our inner life, the more we become free of the petty and ugly characteristics of our personalities. Our way may be like no one else’s, but like everybody else’s, finding it gives us our grace and our beauty.

Understanding this, we can give each other REAL friendship. That can never be, “I know what is right for you.” It can only be my presence beside you when you need a friend to help you keep trusting YOUR journey and finding YOUR WAY. This is the guiding principle of The Art of Being. It is why the sexuality workshops are designed to be a safe learning space for everyone, from those who come alone and open to everyone to those who only want intimacy with their beloved. And it is why there is a workshop where couples can learn how to look after each other, and themselves too, when their ways don’t fit so well together; to learn, that is, how to also be their beloved’s dearest friend. I want everybody to find and value the way that is truly theirs. I don’t have to know what it is. I just have to love it for them until they love it for themselves. That’s my way.