BWM – Big White Male

I just had a huge a-ha!

I was speaking my spiritual focus out loud, and added a few words to it repetively.

I CULTIVATE COMPASSION FOR MONEY AND MYSELF.  I HEAL THE SPLIT WITH MONEY and myself (just added.)  I ENGAGE DIRECTLY WITH MONEY and myself.  I BECOME A SIGNIFICANT INCOME ALLOWER.

Oh my god, money and myself.  How are they the same?  How does money reflect me?  How is money me? Is money me? Are they connected?  Money as a mirror for me?  Really?

Literally moments before I had the thought that I split from money when I got married.  I split from the masculine because I no longer had to carry it in me.  I was now married to it. Masculine became external.  I split from money, power, and the masculine in me when I married Steve, the external masculine.

I stopped making money, earning money, generating money when I got married.

OK.  Got that.

How is money me?  I was so glad to get away from it.  Money had been so mean, bullying and arrogant.  How does that reflect me?

Oh…it is that part of me that criticizes me, sabotages me, tells me how wrong, stupid and bad I am.  It is my inner bully, my most vicious saboteur.

When I got married, I married into the illusion that I was now so loved by another that I would no longer have to deal with the inner critics and berating inner voices.  I was now so loved that I wouldn’t have to deal with the inner bully.  My husband would take care him…and me.

I had earned and saved enough money before I got married to travel and work in England for a year, travel and work in Australia for a half year, and work at a yoga retreat center in Montana for 6 months.  I always had enough to do what I wanted to do and to manifest my dreams.  It was pretty simple before I got married.

Then, I got married.  I stopped earning money.  I gave away my masculine power to earn money.  I gave it away, just like that without even realizing it. I gave it away unconsciously.  I gave it away out of buying into crazy, archaic, disempowering beliefs about how marriage is supposed to be and who I am supposed to be as a “wife.”

I gave away and split from that part of myself that was not only masculine, but also the critical, vicious, arrogant masculine the Big White Male in me that loved to keep me small, safe and inferior.

I grew up around BWMs.  I went to college with lots of them.  It seems that the places I have chosen to be have lots of BWMs.  I have learned over the years how to navigate around them.  I stay quiet, wary, alert, and for the most part, invisible. Their energy is very familiar to me.  I find them self centered, shallow, single minded, arrogant, not intelligent, disconnected, heartless.  They are partiers and players, who live as though life is one big game or party and the next conquest.  They reflect the worst of the masculine attributes.  They are willing to go to war, to start wars, to act superior, to use people, to use (up) people and resources.

When I was first married, I found Women’s Reality – An Emerging Female System by Anne Wilson Shaef.  I was so excited.  I found a book that spoke what I was feeling and what was my intuitive truth.  Yes, yes, yes.  I shared my enthusiasm with Steve, who immediately reacted to Schaef’s descriptions of the White Male System.  He took it as a personal attack.  After all, he is a white male.  My response to his reaction – I shut down.  I put the book away and eventually got rid of it.  I couldn’t ever read it again.  Steve was right and I was wrong.  (Notice the either/or split here.)   The craziness here is that Steve may be white and he may be male, but he is not a Big White Male.  I couldn’t have, wouldn’t have been with him or married him if he was.  Still, the White Male System is the water he swims in as a white male. 

I am really struck by that I have been looking at these issues now for well over 20 years.  You can put stuff away, repress it, hide it, dismiss it, and yet…if it is truly a part of you to explore, to wrestle with, to engage with, to come to terms with, to integrate, you will…at some point, somehow.  We think that we can control these things, but one thing I’ve learned is that our soul’s mission is bigger and stronger than we are!  If you close one door, then guess what…another window opens.

Four years ago, I unexpectedly fell in love with a BWM.  It wasn’\t  love – it was the deepest and most profound attraction I have ever experienced in my life.  I had known this man in college – I actually went out of my first college date with him.  We only went out that once, but when I saw him at our 25th college reunion, I was magnetized to him like a bee to honey.  He was the most gorgeous, sexy BWM that I had crossed paths with in a long time. When we reconnect, it was so unexpected and thrilling that I honestly didn’t know what had hit me.  Our mutual attraction was so delicious, mutual, and intoxicating. I felt alive, awakened, ignited and passionate.  All this with no sex – not even a kiss.

This experience was the catalyst I mentioned in an earlier blog.  Catalyst with a capital “C”.  It felt like a fire had come in and swept through my body, my life and my marriage.  There was a part of me that wanted to see him again, connect with him sexually and explore those parts of me that had fallen asleep over 20  years of marriage.  We stayed in touch via email and texting, yet it wasn’t about getting together, having an affair, or anything like that, but it was about the mutual attraction and connection we shared. 

I was in my life, but not of it.  I felt as though I had been ignited, but I didn’t know what to do with it.  Steve and I went through a very intense time together.  And yes, I told him about this very soon after returning home from the reunion.  Why share all of this?  Because this experience has been the most intense, transformational, unpredicted catalysts for me.  My life changed forever four years ago, and I knew I had a choice to make that only I could make.

I could have made it all about him.  Believe me, I was tempted, sorely tempted by the illusion, the power of the sexual feelings, the fairy tale of being rescued by my prince, the BWM who was so gorgeous and wonderful that I let down my guard, let go of my judgments, and totally justified my fantasy view of him.  A part of me was not above this.  I felt like any other pathetic woman who would give up her life and soul to be with a man.  Ridiculous.  Thank God I was held by close friends and protected by Spirit.   It was not about me being with this man. It was about me waking up to who I truly am.  It was about me experiencing the fires of passion to cleanse my cells, awaken my Spirit, and to question what I had created and the complacency I had fallen into.

What’s really wild about all of this is that I had a powerful dream a few weeks before going to my reunion that I was making love with a man at my reunion.  I was totally enjoying it too.  Then I woke up with a start, and sat straight up in bed.  What?  That is not why I am going to my reunion.  No way.  I am going for…blah,blah, blah.  I got really clear, and went back to sleep.

I did not make love with this man, or even kiss him.  But the way I felt even being around him I might as well have.  Honestly, from the second I first saw him I felt as though I was riding a divine wave that simply was carrying me.  This was so much bigger than me.  I felt as though I was experiencing a synchronicity on every level and at the same time, an ancient reunion with a part of myself I had long forgotten.  I am aware of this only now.  At the time, it felt like a reunion with my divine complement, my twin soul.  The whole experience was so familiar and totally new and exhilarating at the same time.  It was the paradox.  It was, no question, the highest high, the biggest peak experience of my life.

I have been making sense (oh, there that is – making sense) of this experience for 4 years.  I have explained it, processed it, from every angle.  I have even had intuitive readings about it!  There are so many blessings and gifts, and I am so grateful that I got to have this peak experience without the messiness of an affair or an ongoing relationship.  I received the benefits and the lessons without the drama, loss and total destruction that often can accompany an event like this.  I knew all along that this was an opportunity for me to look at myself and my life from a higher perspective, and while I was very sorely tempted to just respond with only my second, sexual chakra, I also knew that this was about something much bigger. 

BWM was the catalyst for igniting my passion and waking me back up to myself.  It was not about him.  It truly was about the catalyst it has been for me.  I am not sure how it affected him.  I had hoped that I was a catalyst for him too, and that he would come into his heart and melt away his rigidity and need to be right.  I have seen him as a polar bear, standing on a piece of ice that was getting smaller and smaller.  His world was getting smaller and smaller, and while scared and not knowing how to change himself in the rapidly changing world, all he had to do was come home into his heart.  Then, he could swim in the cold waters for as long as necessary. He would be okay.  Actually, he would be more than okay.  He would be alive, thriving, loving, and connected.  As far as I know, he has not chosen that.  He is still the same, stuck in his resentments and being right.  This is both very personal to him, but also universal to the Big White Males, just in case you missed that.  Bless him and his choices.   

Yet it took that BWM energy to be the catalyst for me.  I am curious why that energy and how does it relate to money?

BWM energy is money, for me.  It is what is familiar and what I grew up around.  I am attracted to it and repulsed by it at the same time. Push – pull.  The split.

There is the preppy, East Coast,  Middlebury side of me.  There is, as much as I hate to admit it.  There he is.  I have chosen to reject that side of me, and focus on the spiritual, Boulder, granola, organic foods, Colorado side of me.  Either – or.  How do I love, accept and have compassion for the BWM side of me?  Really?  How do I heal the split with him?  How do I engage directly with him?

I get kind of a sick feeling in my throat as I sit with this.  Yet this is the crux of it.  Without him, I cannot and will not be able to generate income, receive income, earn income, allow income.  It’s that simple.  So I need him.  Damn it.  I need him.

And he needs me for his own healing.

It’s a two way street.

Sitting with the questions. OK.  My intention is to cultivate compassion and acceptance for Money and myself, to heal the split with Money and myself, and to engage directly with money and myself.  Ah ho.

Thank you.

Suseya!
Sahara