For a long time I believed I was living in polyamory until I was shown the difference between polyamory and non-monogamy.

They look very similar in some ways but are fundamentally different.

Polyamory means someone who erotically loves and is sexually intimate with many people—it means many loves. People living in this way place their central interest in many lovers and actively seek out more lovers and much of their energy and time is devoted to these relationships and to making love.

What is interesting about polyamorous relationships, and what most people do not know, is that they usually have a far greater amount of rules, boundaries and conditions than monogamy.

The rule of monogamy is simple: you will love only me. Whereas polyamory is quite complex: Yes, you will love me and you can love others under these conditions (see Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 with Sub Sections a, b, c, d, e, etc). A nice example of this is Kamala Devi’s relationship agreements.

It may seem at a glance tedious or over thought and over done, but when one has lived in this new paradigm for some time, it can become abundantly clear why these rules can be very helpful.

But that is not what I was doing—and I am not sure if there is a name for it.

Non-monogamy simply means not one love, which in tantra becomes a method. As you dance inside the method of not one love, you may eventually find that everyone is love—not a dream soul mate, but rather all beings are one love.

But, what I am doing is living in the insistence of truth and the spontaneous moment to moment—no rules, no boundaries, no conditions.

It is not focused on many lovers. For example, I may not tell you when I will be returning home nor what I have been doing, even if it was a simple walk in the park.

It was about coming home to my sovereign dhamma nature of being. It blew the head off all my ideas of love, friendship and erotic partnership. I entered into a space of deep and profound seeing and understanding and, at other times, profound agony, trauma and into a nightmare of sorts that I was unable to awake from.

What do you call that?

Some may say stupidity or wonder why I would do that to myself. The answer is simple and not so simple.

Why bother?

Because, sometimes it takes a bit of doing to untangle yourself from the crap you were given from the moment you were born.

Why so harsh and full on, without any rules?

Well, basically the idea of rules never entered my mind. I wished to break from the authority of the parent, the priest, the government, the husband and having little rules simply did not feel total in my being.

I was about all or nothing and once one goes down the slippery slope of rules where does this end?

I began to see that the contemporary romantic relationship, whether it be marriage or living together, is a mini-version of having parents. People seldom go out to the shops without informing their partner and often give more information and ask for more permission than they did as teenagers from their parents.

I started to see relationship structure as a form of deep immaturity and the need for safety and boundaries as the continued unconscious relationship of the child seeking out the perfect mother and father.

I wanted to know love that was beyond being told what to do or who and how to be or asking permission or checking in or feeling safe. I am no longer five, and if I am to know love for what it is, I must leave behind the ideals of the child and parent and meet love as she is in the raw moment now.

I have grown now. Love grows, too, if we have the courage to allow it. If we do not, love vanishes.

I remember a scene from the brilliant Chinese movie Hero where the assassin is telling the story to the King of what brought him there. He tells different versions of the same story. In one version, he speaks of a conflict that arises between the great warrior lovers Flying Snow and Broken Sword as a consequence of Broken Sword taking in Moon as a lover.

The King instantly dismisses this version as fabrication as it is too unimaginable that great warriors with total awareness would live in such an immature manner and move to conflict over a lover.

But, our teachings of love are upside down. We are taught that if you truly love someone, you own each other; you own the love that runs through each others bodies and this love must be controlled and not shared with another.

You own the rights to the love energy that flows through the being.

I needed to find out what the fuck was going on, so I stepped into the minefield of love and found I was snared inside a nightmare. But, understand, the way I chose to live in love did not create the nightmare, but revealed the nightmare. A nightmare in which it became very apparent that this is where most people live and suffer day by day.

This nightmare is what I have come to see as the basis of misery on our planet.

There is an energy moving through called love. This energy is sovereign and follows its own divine and exquisite intelligence beyond the small understanding of the personal.

We are not allowed to follow it. We are not allowed to love what love loves. We are not allowed to love.

This is the agony and you will only fully understand what I speak of when you, too, have taken the journey through the agony-nightmare and home to love.

And the nightmare was not that my beloved loved others, but that I could not find the doorway out of the mind dream which said over and over that this is not love and I am not loved.

That is the doorway I sought and that you will seek. Perhaps you will also discover that the act of loving someone—god making love to god—is a moment in time, without intrinsic or real pain to anyone, but your thoughts about it can be a nightmare you may live in for years, and many people do.

In the time of patriarchy and ownership it has been man’s greatest quest to seek foreign lands, conquer them and kill or enslave the inhabitants of this land.

And so it has been with our heart.

Lovers conquer the heart of the other, plant their flags in our dark lands of the soul waters, claim our heart as their own and kill or enslave the being that lives within.

Love flees and the beloved flees and we are left impoverished and alone, seeking that which was ours from the one who vanquished and claimed our hearts as theirs.

I notice how I gave this heart so freely. Feeling this is the way to love, I let him have my heart—my one true treasure, my connection to all, love, joy, self.

This is what I believed love was.

And so came the seeing, as the man that I had loved in almost freedom for five long years left and withdrew his claim and flag from my heart land.

My heart belongs to nobody—no man, no woman, not even me—but only to love and the beloved.

Dakini Shima immersed in the ways of Tantra from schools across the globe until she she created a tantric commune where she cooked the false away in the fire of love. Now her passion is to awaken truth and bliss in fellow travelers and birth stories of Tantra and the feminine from her film company Existence Films. Her first full length Tantra feature, Lalla the Buddha, will be released any moment now. She founded the The Opening Lotus Tantra School and accepts invitations worldwide to speak on and teach Tantra and co-create films on awareness and truth. Connect with Dakini Shima on Facebook, her website or email her at [email protected].

 

 

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Asst. Ed: Amy Cushing/Ed: Bryonie Wise

{Photo: via Amanda on Pinterest}