Being an aficionado for collaboration, so much so that I've created a job for me being a Collaboration Ecologist, recently more often than not I've come to inquire into the question, "If, as seems to be the case, many if not most people and organisations in the world seek collaboration and want to become communities of mutually aided flourishing, how come it is not the greatest hit on Earth?"

Or as my friend Doug who's profession is coaching CEO's, among other things,  tells me, "In the US now all companies want to collaborate. They just don't know how."

Remember New Year's resolutions? Remember, what you wanted to change in your life this year? To be honest, I never make any resolutions on New Year anymore, since remembering them later on is such a pain. The reason is most likely the same that keeps all the good willing people on this planet, including the businesses and organisations, from collaborating to change the course of the planetary commons - we don't like to face the deeper challenges that need overcoming. Actually I think the are the stuff out of which our advances are made.

So here are the challenges as they show up on my radar:

• Challenge # 1: Probably the mother of all challenges to collaboration and community - Trust, patience, 'deep' listening and heartfelt connection.
  Looking at my experience in life, business and relationships, and of course at many, many theories of what community and collaboration is really based upon, these 4 'values' seem to be the most persistent ones.
• Challenge # 2: If #1 is the mother of all challenges, # 2 is the father - walking in somebody else's shoes.
  People do not only have different characters and views, convictions, beliefs, theories and opinions, they are also on different levels of evolving towards what we could call "wisdom", something that doesn't come with age (as any acute observer of world- and human affairs has already noticed) but with developing all kinds of skills, lenses, and intelligences (heart, mind, gut, social, relational etc.). On the way to some wisdom, for a long time, people live in a land where they wouldn't know what it means to "walk in somebody else's shoes", leave alone that they would actually be able to do so. Yet, it is prerequisite to anything that resembles true collaboration.
• Challenge # 3: This one is centered around the question of leadership.
  Community and collaboration are situated far beyond democracy - which is based on quantity, counting the number of voices, and not quality, what these voices are saying. The challenge is to find ways and means to govern ourselves so that the good, right and beautiful things are accomplished.
• Challenge #4: In the famous words of the Clinton Presidential Campaign in the USA, "It's the economy, stupid!"
  Collaborations and communities, on top of being simply a good and soul-nourishing thing to participate in by and of themselves, often also produce goods and services, and a commons that is recreational, inspiring, relaxing etc. (a source of aliveness; something like that, and also something that can be marketed). Who gets to share what of the communally created revenues is the fourth major challenge that needs facing, if communities and collaborations are to be more than a hype.

If you thought that I have the answers and that I'm going to give them here, I have to disappoint you. Not that I don't have a number of very good ideas, processes and experiences around them (as many of my readers do as well), but if I were to tell them here, at maximum we would have a very interesting exchange of ideas and stories, and maybe even beliefs and convictions.And, so sorry, but I'm not really interested - mostly, because doing that will most likely lead to trying to make technical change out of the needed adaptive change.

There is a world of difference between technical change and adaptive change. A technical change you can manage using the given instruments and procedures. Often these revolve around a more effective use of the given instruments. You get long and wonderful To Do lists, that basically you need to check one after the other. Adaptive change asks you, on the contrary, to leave behind the old instruments and develop new ones. It requires you to adapt to a situation or process that you cannot yet analyse, and as such adaptive change is an "emergent phenomenon"... simply put, "Something is happening, but you don't know what it is - and you cannot control it either."

Sure, regarding myself as a Collaboration Ecologist I've got quite a number of processes and interventions up my sleeve that I can use in situations where people want to collaborate, and want some help. Often, I cannot do without them, yet these are not the secret of creating great ecologies in which collaboration and community flourishes. The real secret is this, "Find whatever helps the people present face the above challenges co-creatively, and go with what emerges in this group." If you've got compassion, experiential knowledge, a working intuition and some intelligence you will, most likely, empower the people to squarely face these challenges. Then, and so far I can speak for 100% success, what comes out of that process you will advance into the Fields of the Future where Collaboration is Natural again.

Some days ago my son and l participated in the cremation service of my father who died on January 20th, at approx. 9am. That was 48 hours later then he wanted, really. As he had done in his life so he did in dying, trying very hard to have things work out exactly as he wanted it. And he got his way, more or less.

Sunday 18th, around 4 pm my half-sister had called and told me, “This is it; they gave him one of the special rooms in the hospital. Tonight, most likely, our father is going to die…” And then she passed the phone over to him. I was crying, my heart breaking, saying, “l love you, Dad. I want you to know. Whatever might have happened in the past, there are no hard feelings left. Nothing hinders what is between us anymore. There is just this love.” He reassured me that he had had a wonderful and fulfilling life. “I am really happy that I can finally go now, and I want you to be happy too…”
In dying as in life he couldn’t tell me directly what he felt – about me and about everyone and everything, really. In all of the life we shared he only expressed feelings indirectly, except when he was cynical, ironic or angry. This inability to express most other feelings has been family-tradition since time immemorial until, l think, it finds its end with me. But then again, who am I to tell?
At the cremation hall, where the casket was adorned with flowers, candles burning, behind the curtained windows, half invisible, cars drove by fast in the medium distance on a highway. – Later, sitting there and listening to some of my brothers and sisters, and 2 of my Dad’s friends, I was imagining the people in these cars, driving somewhere fast, knowing nothing about what went on here and what we felt.
The close family had been ushered in to have a last look at my father. Stepping up to the open casket I cried, my hand on my mouth which, when I noticed the shock that expresses in this gesture, I let drop again, weakly, and crying. Yes, this was indeed his body, but he was gone, my father was not there anymore. Being almost a week dead his eyelids and hands had weird colors, the rest of him very pale.
Yes, this body had been my dad. And as I went to take a seat, through my tears I saw one after the other stepping forward when they felt ready to greet him one last time.

Mourning is an amazing happening, and for those of my step-, half and brothers and sisters I’ve shared this with, it was very similar. Big waves of sadness and sobbing leaving us almost “not of this world” in its wake. It is easy to do manual tasks, but intellectually demanding or creative work is not possible; there is a feeling of the brain and mind being in a mush. The inability to do much of anything seems to cover all things mental. And I have been amazingly tired without being able to actually sleep much, and then, once I slept, I slept long whenever possible.
Mourning is an out-of-control bodily/feeling happening, something totally natural, overwhelming the person with a sound sadness that feels very much in place.
Is there emptiness where my Dad once was? Maybe, but it doesn’t seem so (yet?); maybe because the relationship with my father had not been too tight, even though in his last year I visited him more often than ever before – not because I believed he was dying soon, but just because there was opportunity. It has been fated.

And then, after my step-brother had started up the ceremony with a song of one of my father’s old friends, a singer-legend in Sweden, and after he had read my sisters letter to the 100 or so people gathered in his honor, I was to say something. We had agreed on possibly 10 minutes and I honestly don’t know how much time it took; there was a deep quiet in me as I stepped up to the pulpit and microphone.
Just a few things I remember of what I said. As I was speaking freely – there were a couple focus points for me on a piece of paper – the flow came; and then I hardly remember anything. I had considered, for once in my life, writing down what I was going to say – wouldn’t want to choke in tears – but I thought that here, as every place I speak publically, it was best to let what is required flow from my heart and presence into the field of us.

I remembered the one and only time my father ever asked my advice; it was about restarting a relationship he had broken with some years before.
I also said, “I think, my father – being a non-believer in these things – will be in for a big surprise when he wakes up from this life to find a welcome committee waiting for him. Matter of fact, I think there is a welcome committee specialized for people for whom waking up in the next dimension is a big surprise.” Something like that.
I also remembered that he was a man with many mistakes, just like me, and spoke about how I felt only love, just like everybody in the family that could be present during his last days and hours. All our wrong doings and mistakes in the end can be washed away by the love between us. It’s unreasonable, maybe even unjust, but it is true nevertheless, and most of all it’s beautiful. Everybody was full of sad love and no grudge held against it.
No matter what goes before, in the end what counts is love.

Afterwards some of the core family stood shaking people’s hands and hearing condolences – looking into all these people’s eyes with the clarity of a love-bathed sadness I could see what the confrontation with the passing away of our close ones opens up: the soul shines through, colored and filtered by the many facets of a person’s character – but, it visibly shines. A blessing.

During all this time my son had been going through his feelings; not being too close to his granddaddy he could be safely sad, the distance cushioning his sadness. To me it was great to have him by my side. Once there will be a time when it’s my time to go, and he might be part of a ceremony honoring my passage. As parents, we not only give life to our children and educate them to be able to live a happy life, we also give them the most intimate taste of death when we go in the end.

The way my father left this world has been an inspiration to me. May I be able to – in the end – go in a similar way; a way where we all feel that we can let go, were actually, letting go is quite natural to us. Passing away like this is a blessing, as is giving life.
It’s amazing, shaking so many hands and/or kiss left-right-left, as is customary with people of a certain proximity in Holland (mostly inter-gender, and not so often with men; with them kiss-kiss-kiss is close relatives only). Some people were holding up the people cueing up behind them. With some people you don’t mind at all, with others you see that they do this because they need the comfort of special attention; this takes some energy but it is a natural part of such things.

Finally my father’s last wife, the mother of my youngest half-sister (4 wives, 6 children, that’s the patchwork my Dad created, 4 of them present + many of the children that came into the family with their mothers), took us all to a place for a drink with closest family and friends. Is it wrong to say that we had good fun? Maybe, but we had. It was good to see all of them in good cheer.

Some time in Spring we will be putting ashes of my father under the tree he used to play under and climb around in when he was a young boy, joyously, so joyously that he was imagining, he told me when we spoke about this a year or so ago, “When my life is over I want to be put at his roots…”

Woman is a masculine apocalypse, or can be - actually, she really is.

Once I started to open up to the area of feeling into the world as it is - which obviously means, as I feel it to be - I find that women, and my beloved is the closest woman nearby, know this 'terrain' much better. Actually it is almost their home ground. From the very beginning they're into the games of relationship and seem, in my eyes, much smarter at playing that game: and if it is playing that game to win, woman wins, hands down.

"Anima" - the term C.G. Jung used to designate what I would call soul, or the innermost being - is a female word, it is what animates us, makes us move and be the way we are in the rivers of life.
The first woman a man meets, the first woman I met was Mother, the source of all life - but as a baby I didn't care about life, I cared about food and kisses and stroking and cuddling and all that. Mother was the source. That is a broken relationship for most of us, because as all women, my mother was limited by, well, her own limits.

Woman is the giver of all good feelings. No, not all - the blessing for a  man is to find a whole realm that is not really women's territory; it's a man's world. And I don't mean soccer, beer and lusting. I mean measuring up occasions, accessing one's own strengths and courage, and deciding: "I will conquer this."
I know, conquering is really "out" these days, laying a claim to this, that and the other is really spiritually or philosophically incorrect, using one's power and might to get what you want is totally out of whack, but it is part of being a man, as is pulling things apart and putting them back together, and being proud of being able to do so.

Crossing over in women's terrain is dangerous, and really, I wouldn't advise anyone to do so unless his "anima" forces him, and there is really no choice. It is dangerous because, since winning and losing is an important happening for a man, you're going to lose most of the time. If a man's mastery is playing the game of heroics in some form or another good enough to be proud of himself, than a woman's mastery is playing the relationship game in such a way that she ends up in the center of a relational vortex, where being close to her is the prize.

To put it rather bluntly (a masculine 'thing' I guess), a women's game is for closeness to her, and a man's game is to being the top of the heap. Both places offer a sense of great security.
Ooops. I'm sorry, if I tread on some toes here. Being paradoxical, crying out of nowhere, almost dying because of the feeling's strength that one encounters, being shaken by a scene on the street, endlessly mulling over how this relates to that... that's become a major "new" part of me and all of these seem 'female'. And I'm just beginning to study this first hand (including the f...ing feelings). Doing so I find that the women around me are expertly wielding the little knives and chisels, are in possession of all the tricks and arts that are so very necessary when conflicts arise - and arise they must. So, again, why is it dangerous 'here'? That's easy: woman has all the weapons in a conflict, and you don't (if you don't want to take back on your male armour etc.)

Well, why I write all this?
I just lost another battle - and in the end got an honorable settlement in which I could put out some claims and be heard. It's not that women fight better or worse than men, it's that they fight using different means. And if you have started to develop opening up on feeling levels, which means you cannot really hit the table with a fist any more and play the conflict in the way you know best (loudness, restrained violence, mental fitness, maybe)... you lose.Which means that it's now up to her to 'make up', because that's what the winner does; eitrher 'take the cup' and shit on the loser or draw the loser in and make him/her part of the reconciliation.

Apocalypse means revelation. The revelation is, woman is expert in feeling-field, or the feeling connection to relationship and life. Woman is expert in 'being the womb', in 'holding the space'  in 

So, being a man, this is what I do: I turn a lost battle into a great lesson that then I write about. There is, of course, an interesting feeling dimension to this - a dimension that is typically overrated by woman and underestimated by man. The soul is an apocalyptic teacher, to a man like me...

We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects. For words are persons. This aspect of the word transcends their nominalistic definitions and contexts and evokes in our soul a universal resonance. -- “A Blue Fire” by James Hillman

What, if we own every feeling?

Standing on my balcony this evening I was feeling this slight tinge of irritation creep up on me. As I realized that I own this feeling, that this is indeed my feeling, a deep breath happened upon me. I stood upright. "This too is me, this is mine," I thought.

Looking a few inches deeper the idea of possession became strange. What could I possibly own? Where could I store what I own? Do I own a memory? Is this memory about the day of today my memory?
We say these things but more often than not, when my mind can freewheel, they lose a lot of sense just a few inches below the surface. Nevertheless, owning that feeling of irritation I was nourished and strengthened. Making this feeling mine made me stand tall. So the idea of ownership my be strange a few inches deep into the realm of the soul, the process of owning makes very good sense.

What reveals itself in thinking about the relationship between me and what I own is static thinking. As if I was something permanent that could have a relationship to something else, that is permanent, and that relationship is a one-way street in which I own whatever-it-is. When my thinking goes a bit deeper still the flow of "I" and "it" is more apparent, and from that view "owning my irritation" is as if I would take in something of myself that was externalized.
I differentiated myself from the irritation - which is a good move for a child needing to come to express predictable and reliable behavior. I externalized my irritation and placed it with the cause. Now "it", whatever "it" is, irritates me; it is irritating me - I become the recipient of irritation, its victim.

Growing up, being 'adult', over time "I" was insulating myself from my feelings and impressions, and finally also concepts, ideas, whatever it was - I was not that. I was the "eternal witness" disengaged from life in many ways (even though often enough not really, because I behaved like many other men in situations with a strong emotional load), or I at least aimed for being/living That.
Going through periods of softening up to the other(s), discovering we-fullness and the amazing energies and being that can unfold and come into being between us, in critical times a critical ripening happened.

Coming back to re-internalizing what I have externalized over the last 50 years or so might take a while :-) But it is maybe not so much a goal as an orientation. Owning my feelings is a practice, not a goal; it is something that becomes part of the way I live.

Static think believes in things, and relationships between beings and other beings and beings and things. In this constellation of people and things there is more or less rigid limits between everybody and everything. In this scenario you can make me feel things, you are the cause of what happens to me. Or also things and situations are the causes of how I feel, and think and last but not least behave.

More fluid thinking probably out of the practice of owning what it feels and sees and hears leads to much more respect towards others and things and situations. O yes, feelings and thoughts and behavior can still be triggered, but the triggering event itself or the feelings triggered are a much more fluid affair. What happens is much more happening within processes which do have a mysterious end; this end does have a name but in itself is another process: living.

The irritation that the child externalizes is not the same irritation that I re-internalize, or own. Both the irritation and I have been passing through a great number of processes - and yet we both are still recognizable. Re-internalized irritation is - most likely - a driving energy behind this investigation that turned into a blog post.

With the fire is gold tested. -- Alchemical saying

Looks like I'm asked to look at the next steps in this destiny that I find myself in. There has been today a tinge of desperation. I talked to my father who was just returning from hospital. Important people in my family believe that he doesn't stay with us for very long and I should go make my peace with him.
Talking with him he said, he wouldn't have minded dying. I said, I understand this but that I want to come visit him early next year and that he has to stick around for that. "Can you manage to do that for me?" I asked. And he said that he would do his best.

I'm asking myself if I can bear this now at this time. Just having gone through a very intense period of which the Experiment was an important and enabling part, I felt that some rest would do me good. So I'm asking my father to just hang in there a little longer. Because I need to tell him that I've made peace with my destiny and that he can go knowing this to be so.

No wonder, kids tell me that they don't want to grow up. We all will arrive at a point were we'll have to face our character. This basic pattern that navigates our destiny and how it apperas to us at the time. For at what stage of development we are determines for a large part how we face our destiny - that part of life that is given through our habits and the behavior we expressed in the past.

Intimate relationship and life and death.
My father is going to go for good in the next months, if I am to believe my family's expectations. And the relationship in which I am embedded will go through this with me. I am blessed, and also I have to take care of my strengths, to keep them awake but not under stress. Destiny is giving me a chance to prepare, and my partner's love helps me move on the soul's level.

Presently I'm reading "The Reflexive Universe" by Arthur Young that portraits and demonstrates a developmental physics/evolution/life science which interestingly has a U-shape; it's a process of light losing its freedom and "falling" through 3 stages and turning on the 4th, the molecular level to start what we call "life": plants, animal, men?; each level up the second half of the U having more freedom again.
What I have understood so far is inspiring - and most inspiring I find Young's ideas about the animal "group-soul", and then that with man the evolutionary jump to an individual soul is made.

Group-souls being on the second level up the 2nd half of the U are resonating with the first stage of the "fall" of light into "matter" as particles: photons, electrons that on the next stage, where atoms form the 3rd kingdom (light being the first realm or kingdom, particles the 2nd, atoms the 3rd, molecules the 4th, plants - 1 level up te U on the 5th, animals on the 6th and man on the 7th). Particles are in space but not in time. they are eternal, as eternak as are the group-souls on the opposite side of the U.

Individual souls in this cosmology are eternal; they interact with matter by what can be described as a non-vsible force-field - creativity being a matter of the right timing of the soul. I was gladly living with the possibility that after death - nothing. Life being forever the place for the living.
John Heron's experiences and now what Young writes makes me change my perspective. This book falling into my hands, making such a convincing case for an eternal individual soul (as an evolutionary development!), and at the same time learning of my father's health...

Looks like alchemy has a point when it talks about refining the matters that go into the laboratory. Life, as it unfolds and flows, is the labratory and my feelings and intelligence, my experiences are the "matter" that is being refined.
And sometimes you have to let the Work rest...

Your life is always working, whether you know it or not. Sometimes it works to bring you what you want, and sometimes it works to keep you from what you think you want. -- Neale Donald Walsch; Tomorrow's God

This is the last entry I'll be writing within the framework of the Experiment - because it's finished, and it's turned up enough of a practice for me to let go of, satisfied that it has carried me this far, and that it has been a teacher beyond anything I thought was possible.

An important lesson came to me yesterday on my birthday. Thinking about being 55 and what that means it became clear that now I'm ready to accept my destiny as it is. All of the life that I've lived so far - leaving traces that co-determine what the present is for me and those around me.
Today learning that some of my family believe that my father is very close to the end, I think this is the one 'thing' I can give both my parents. And I'm thankful that they're still around to be able to have me give it to them. If I were to formulate what the essence is of what I have to say, it would be this, "Thank you for giving me life and doing what you could to raise me. What you might consider your failings have influenced me making choices in my life that were not always in the best interest of everybody involved. I have hurt others and myself out of lessons from my childhood were I misunderstood what went on.
Where I stand now - at the beginning of the middle of my life - and where you are - drawing closer to an end - I need you to know, that even though I have behaved far from perfect I have been blessed by gaining an enormous richness of experience. I cannot know what would have been possible without you and what you co-created my life to be in the first 16 years of my life.
Whatever may be the case - and there are also movements that are very much beyond me - I have accepted this destiny and I pledge myself to live according to the deepest love, joy and beauty that is in me. You have co-created this moment in my life, thank you. Thank you."

When I think about how I would call my practise then it's Intentional Vulnerability. The vulnerability is a fact of life. To 'plug in' to the feeling-field I need to be vulnerable. I can either be vulnerable or I miss that whole area of unfolding life and not feel vulnerable. The strange logic I now have makes me see that vulnerability is a fact of life, as I said above, and it doesn't care whether I feel it or not. Derestricting myself on the feeling level, the practice that evolved during the Experiment, I plug in to the feeling-field and am connected on the non-rational plane. Many, if not most, of life's flow is happening on that level (today I found out that there is actually a tribe that lives within that 'region of existence' by the grace of their language), and being vulnerable, I am connected. This actually is not a choice, it comes with accepting your particular destiny as it unfolds.

When intentionally vulnerable I hold the space that all emotions need to unfold. Holding the space I do set a limit; the perimeter of the 'sacred space' in which I can hold space, where I actually am open to what unfolds in the inner and outer between-us', where I can be with whatever comes as the host, the caretaker of the guesthouse.
So what about all the guests that visited me during the last month of this Experiment?
They have indeed "cleared me out", and in a way "for some great delight" - not an ecstatic delight, more of a deep "This is indeed the way it is. And it is good."

I might still analyze the blogposts that went before, but I do not feel that it is needed to come to a proper conclusion and rounding of the Experiment. I think the basic lessons are recorded; whatever else I might glean from the former posts, it is what moves me in the present and almost naturally that truly counts.

The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made. And the activity of making them changes both the maker and their destination. -- John Schaar

There is a healing quality to bitter tears. When we're moved into the depths of our despair there is a space for the traumas of the past to surface. One of these has surfaced yesterday.

Like every child under a certain age experiences the parents break up; I felt when my parents did separate that it was all my fault. My parents behavior towards me didn't convince me otherwise. You could say they left me to believe there was something utterly wrong with me. Parents have to go out of their way to make a child accept his or her innocence. Mine didn't.

Doing a lot of Hellinger-type family constellations I learned that children will often want to prove that their parents were right. From my present perspective I see that I proved my parents to be right by recreating difficulties, or by enacting what I think I inherted from my father, who in turn inherted it from his father - and who knows how many more generations.
When situations became too emotional he either turned cynic, sarcastic, aggressive or he withdrew in an inpenetrable castle of arrogance. There is a lot to my dealings with highly emotional situations that I seem to have inherited. 

Coming from another perspective one can say that my father, by leaving, was the "doer" in my parents divorce, and that out of misinterpreting the reasons for that divorce I started to manifest behaviour in line with the larger pattern of the masculine family line.
But whichever way I have come into following a destructive tendency at important junctions of my life not only I but others as well have reaped the consequences. I needed to go to deep despair to come to realize this. I am not guilty of my behavior, nevertheless the consequences are here, and I accept needing to respond with the expanded life I now live.

Accepting this freely and willingly is obviously the most "reasonable" thing to do. Having come to be the way I am now, through now almost 55 years of intense living and experiencing a character has formed. Denying and avoiding feelings, repeating the ancient stories from my family album doesn't seem like what I'd want to be doing.

By the grace of the experiment so far, which is turning into a practise,  both an understanding and an expansion into what I call feeling-field have occured. This is far from stable and it needs continual care so I can establish a new type of relating. Being feelingly open and at the same time authentic. Part of that is being open to the consequencesof all of my behavior and manifestation, knowing that I'm not guilty but responsible.

This enables me in a more compassionate and maybe also powerful way to participate in life more fully; regaining trust based on deeper and more naked realities about myself and others. Participation, trust and surrender, as much as clarity, penetration and courage have been the qualities that have carried me through an eternity these last weeks - for as much as I have been destructive, a nuisance to myself and others, for as painful and horrible all of this has been, the qualities I mention above are probably those that played a role in getting me this far; the alchemical essences that started a transformation on a level I have no control over, whatsoever.

And having told so much about myself you might ask, "But what about those people around you? What about your partner?" I can only express my deepest gratitude for when it really, really mattered she and my friends have given me the support I needed to be able to come this far. 
And I want to thank those who've commented showing their own heart and soul. This is the world I want to live in. To see and be seen on that level is wonderful, it nourishes the soul.

It may be that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. -- Wendell Berry; Collected Poems

Today I'm in the frail kingdom, the space where you feel raw, as if your soul's skin is all raw and anything and everything has the tendency to "hurt a little bit". You're looking for signs that would indicate which way the wind blows. After all, you went through a co-created hell where the heat was provided by the voluminous breath of your own fear of separation. You couldn't see anything much, except the dark smoke coming from the cinders of your hopes.
You can see, now that some of the smoke is lifting, that drawing lines can be done without the fire and the brimstone. You accept your own limitations - the pattern of behavior and thinking and feeling that forms your character is now finally more or less OK with you. You come to accept that you're far from perfect but that, if you keep on adapting to your deeper self, you'll be as open as you need to be to flow with life, and as clear as needs to be to accept your limitations.

You can't, no, you would never want to deny again your trans-and-ir-rational nature, your malleable and stubborn character. You have found some center, frail and promising, a space from where you can live an openness that before you had no idea of.
The chaos of your imagination's darker regions need the balancing force of a brighter imagination to become acceptable in the constellation of what it means to be me,

And then there is the other One. And there is the dynamics between, the uncontrollable and utterly free forces that choose their own path - this is the kernel of vulnerability: that you don't know what is going to happen. Life-changing forces are afoot and depending on where you are in this constellation, you can open to the other participants in the constellation.
In Hellinger's vocabulary one of the primary forces in our life and character is the "Hinbewegung", the "movement towards"; and what troubles us in these constellations is a "Movement toward" that is "broken" - the "unterbrochene Hinbewegung."

To be vulnerable is to be aware of many of these "movements toward". In the course of this experiment I have come to be in resonance with many, many of these "unterbrochene Hinbewegungen." Maybe I'm still a romantic after all (I thought, I wasn't), but I believe that in close and intimate relationship this one-on-one relationship itself is a "movement toward." Maybe what I got a taste of recently is the promise of just such a possibility in my life. But the "Hinbewegung" is an utterly free movement - which doesn't mean that it is not bound to circumstances, but rather that it is free to go with it, be neutral or go against it, but "it" is beyond control.

All day I feel vulnerable.
And I'm moving my attention from going in too deep.
Let me, vulnerable, stay near the surface.

I'm a hero and a coward
While I courageously go, I shiver inside considering possible consequences.
The longing for that space of intimacy with you, with life, with destiny is strong.
I accept that longing.

This longing makes me vulnerable.
Living vulnerable is part of me
Part of the whole.

All day I feel vulnerable.

I think I finally know what the basic vibration of jealousy is: It's fear, the fear of separation of the one you love most. It's an utterly irrational fear fed by the demon of distrust, a mind that can easily imagine bleak futures, and - if it's not pure paranoia because there is no other lover - supporting circumstances. So maybe saying that it's utterly irrational is not true, since there is a significant connection to reality. It is this fear, this jealousy, that has me confess that for an important part I must declare the experiment a failure. I do not want to allow this fear to "be my guest". And maybe my resistance, my focus and awareness that went into "being with it" has made it as big as it is now. It's now easy for me, almost autonomously, to imagine all kinds of disastrous futures in which everything failed and I'm all on my own again. It is somehow much harder, to find the trust to imagine a bright future.

You could say that imagining anything is the real disease, imagining a future even worse. But wouldn't you then also say that hope is the real disease? Because hope imagines a future, or is the manifestation of the faith in a bright future.  Is despair - hope reversed - that comes from images of a bleak, pain-filled future the consequence of a hope gone sour? Maybe so. What I do know is that I cannot stop my imagination from imagining, just as much as I cannot stop my heart from feeling hope or despair, fear or joy, love and beauty. So what can stop me from replacing the images of 2 hells - the fork of choices that I'm facing - with 2 possible bright futures, where both options let me become a more loving, beautiful, joyful, authentic, rich and deep human?

I now see, and it is late at night and I got up to write my blog for this day, I now see that on top of the practice of "unrestricted feeling" I have to practice also "imagining light and bright futures" with all the people that are also in my "despairing visions".
I now also see how big a part my imagination played in co-creating the utterly challenging situation I find myself in. Never mind how real the base of my imaginations, more and more it served in an escalation of catastrophic feeling. So much so that opening up intimately became more and more difficult. The only possibility in such a situation being the forking of the way, the choice between 2 hells.

Should I respect my limits that have become apparent in a situation that I feel I have been forced into? Even if I have co-created it by imagining 2 hells where I could imagine 2 brighter futures, it feels right to do so. The basic question is, "What are the minimum needs, what are - right or wrong - the basic conditions that are needed so that a much deeper level of relationship is a realistic possibility? And what, if anything, can I do or not do to lift my bit of the weight that needs shifting?"

I've, feebly but truly, started to imagine a brighter future instead of 2 hells tonight. At first glance its clear that accompanying the fear of separation is the fear of imagining that as beautiful, for I might make it happen that way, and then (imagining that as bright) I might not have enough energy to not totally break down if it becomes real. And there is the fear of imagining a bright future for the relationship because it might hurt so much more if it doesn't get a real chance.

Yesterday, for some time, quite some time, I was full of hope - today despair, which I'm responsible for myself by inviting it in around noon letting my fears move me to ask questions that reflected distrust and fear and fueled visions of a dark future. So it's about time I invite trust, and beauty and brightness to come and visit this guesthouse more frequently!

Addendum: I find that if I set myself out to use my imagination in this way, I can. And the brightest future I can imagine is the one where I say, "I'm so thankful, happy and once more: thankful for you to have gone into the depth of intimate living with me and that we mastered all the challenges on our path together to have this rich, true and peacefully satisfying life."
I will carry this image into my sleep now..