Insecurities and Mindfulness

Reddit Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mindfulness/comments/1rdvqyy/comment/o7ablxa/?context=3

Not advice or guidance, just sharing some observations on the path, and hopefully provide some thoughts for you:

So I spent quite a long time in my teenage years and my early 20s fixated on this fear of not being attractive, wanted, physically desirable, etc. Girls would avoid me or reject me. I would feel very small and experience my reality like I was a desire -less hunk of flesh. I struggled to be in the presence of beautiful women. Like you, I attempted to meditate my way through it.

I eventually met the woman who would become my wife through luck and circumstance. But strangely, this issue of being not enough became worse, because now I am with this person who is free to reject me in every moment. There were good and bad times, but fundamentally I still retained this inner sense of not being physically wanted. And it became rather crippling, to the point where in the last few years of our marriage, there was no intimacy.

The irony is that even when you’re with someone and have lost your virginity, it doesn’t necessarily fundamentally solve the internal view of self-rejection. You are still at the mercy of that perspective, but now the person you are with is an even greater mirror for that disconnection you have with yourself.

But this is all in the container of having continued the practice. Still going. Still working through. Years and years. Hoping that the practice would pull through. Ten years later, still going.

Until my mother died in a car accident. And then the clarity came. There was grief and pain, but there was also now this sense of something. The practice allowed me to almost invert that energy, and use its intensity to shine on and scatter the fetters and tensions within me. The ones that were holding the psychosomatic sense of not being enough, not being secure in my being.

And for months afterwards, in the evenings, I would just sit and watch. Sit and watch. Meditation after meditation, waking up in the middle of night. The grief and pain coursing through and breaking down the internal structure within. And all it all came to a head when I decided to separate from my wife.

Because I wanted to see something. I needed to know something.

It turns out, the experience shattered the insecurity completely. At first it seemed rather small, like speaking with an attractive woman had no hangup, no fear, no sense of clinging. And then it became like a flood, and the fearlessness led to an abundance. I had experienced with a lover. I became very emboldened and could feel the sexuality restored back into my being. And I realized, I was the one who was holding myself back.

And then I had a brief ritual where I meditated and called into myself compassion and love for myself, for all the insecurities and fears, the rejection of physicality and my sexuality. The ways in which I had told myself I wasn’t enough in this way. And the emotions poured out, with tears streaming down. And suddenly I could feel it all in my heart, my gut, my genitals. I could feel the sense of compassion and love pouring back into these spaces that had been numb, neglected, forgotten.

I eventually returned back to my wife, now because I chose her consciously. And the intimacy has returned, in a way that is hard to describe. Some have described it as if we were in our second marriage. Like, I know I am wanted, but in a deeper core of myself that is unshakeable. And my presence with other women, it’s like, and I say this almost flippantly because it’s not the story I told myself or that I grew up with at all. but it does feel like I am the “hot” person in the room, so to speak. And there’s that sense of sexual abundance; the craving and rejection are gone. I literally cannot remember or re-experience what that was like in the past anymore.

Even the other day someone was telling me they feel like they’re falling in love with me, and I had put up boundaries around it.

And now it’s all just a sense of mindfully letting go, of the grasping and the desire and the need to be seen as enough. Because I’ve given it to myself; no one can ever “give” that to me externally or take it away.