Folding familiar language around experiences that it was not designed to describe can be fun! How could intimacy not be personal? Isn't it the person who is feeling the intimacy? If there is no self feeling close to another thing–another person, cat, dog, flower–how can there be intimacy? Isn't intimacy separate things overcoming their distance? A magnetic pulling of separate parts toward one another, a nestling-in of separate bodies, held in a mutual field?
I went through a very long phase of immense longing for intimacy. There was a deeply entrenched idea that it needed to come through joining with another person in a relationship. But whenever I seemed to have found that it didn't endure. I felt frustrated when anyone suggested that I needed to get in touch with loving myself: self-acceptance had not resulted in any intimate partnerships or relationships like in a modern romance movie where the character accepts her imperfections and then along comes a person who adores her and embraces her as she is. The idea of having a better future out there in the distance, that I might earn through self improvement, came to seem an irritating lie that was not worthy of being upheld. It's a blessing that there was never any relationship that was a match for long, for the sense of "who I am" rapidly passed through many phases. Again and again there was confronting the truth that whatever I was calling "the real me" was only an assemblage of concepts. Self image after self image demanded to be fulfilled, only to experience defeat. Each sense of self that thought it was unfulfilled became too weary, too heavy, to sustain. Over and over there was a conscious willingness to let go of clinging to whatever identity was experiencing suffering. It felt as if each illusory self got smoked out of hiding and burned away.
As well as an apparent absence of intimacy on a personal relationship level, there was also a dissolution of all other forms of social containment, no sense of being able to define myself or find rest and security within any of the social rings. (Picture that diagram of circles within circles, self in the center, intimate partner in the first ring, family, close personal friends, casual friends, colleagues, strangers, etcetera.) No one felt like an intimate friend. I felt as if I could leave all of it and miss no one. No one seemed wiser anymore. No one seemed to have answers for my existential questions. No one had power to provide me with happiness or security. No one treated me as their special someone. No one was helping to "hold me together". Ah ha! Hold "me" together!
I got in touch with the deepest homesick longing and grief, tasting a vacuous lonliness that I never suspected I harbored since I had typically been quite content with (even protective of) solitude. It became apparent that no version of a separate self could ever, truly, feel whole as the very notion of being a separate self was an illusion. Any efforts to reinstate any social containers did not result in the desired effect of security or intimacy or wellbeing. There was some despair about this, but also the intuition that a significant transformation was taking place. In the apparent absence of all containment there was a great freedom to be malleable, to be melted.
Relief was discovered in surrendering to whatever was happening, letting go of searching: searching for an improved life, trying to "follow my passion" or make "my" dreams come true. Comfort was discovered in ceasing focusing on dream fulfillment. The atmosphere of not-knowing what aught to happen–to me or anyone else– became a resting zone. More attention was paid to what was actually happening, the smallest details of ordinary life. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, silence.
Within silence, while meditating, there were flickers of awareness of a warm presence permeating everything. Another way to describe it could be a subtle immaterial intimacy pervading daily life. When I feel it, I have a sense of well being no matter what situation is occurring. I lose awareness of it if I try to make it personal, as if I deserve it or am being recognized and loved as a separate being. It conveys no sense of personal specialness as being loved in particular by a particular person feels. It is impersonal partly because it is everywhere. Now that I'm aware of this and have practiced finding it over and over again, there is no longer a gap in my middle. There is no one I miss or long to be with, an absence of longing for anything, an no more coldness of distance from anything. "All that is" is contained in this boundless presence.
It is also impersonal because now it feels as if "I" am made of the same fabric as "everything else" so there is not so much a sense of being a lonely separate "me" among "others" as much as "What Is." People I formerly judged as not fulfilling a role as my personal partner or lover or understanding friend or wise elder are accepted just as they are, which is largely as mysteries. The "me" at the center of those circles (which don't exist anyway) is like a little wad of table cloth gathered up into a point. That wad is not a little napkin intimately wrapped up in a mother table cloth, it is woven of the very threads running through and as everything else. This is a new dynamic of intimacy. Speaking and writing from and as this is a new experience.
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