I Met God at a Festival

After two years of painful but transformative work initiated by a divorce, a move across country, significant changes in my professional life, and profound philosophical shifts initiated through meditation, I found myself once again on the dance floor of AREA15 in Las Vegas. Over a year earlier, Aubrey Marcus’ Fit For Service had held the first year of ARKADIA, a festival aspiring to bring initiates into a more beautiful world. This world was one made possible through the profound transformation found in therapy, meditation, spiritual exploration of wisdom traditions and indigenous cultures, plant medicines, and community-building. Over a year ago, I attended that inaugural festival, a first for me. At the time, I was undergoing paradigm-shattering growth stemming from a real-life ego death accompanying my divorce, career shift, and self-exploration in therapy. At that first ARKADIA, I experienced profound healing through its morning yoga sessions, evenings of dancing, and afternoon speeches on topics such as spirituality, philosophy, science, and stewardship for the earth. Now, over a year later, despite enjoying a more-centered day-to-day life in my new job, house, relationship, and sense of identity, I felt a sense of diminished momentum. My partner Valentina, who I had met the previous year at ARKADIA, accompanied me as we returned to the desert to again experience ARKADIA.

Healing Community

On one particular evening, Valentina and I grew frustrated with each other. After asking for some time alone to dance, I found myself confronting a familiar feeling of isolation. Ever since I could remember, I had disliked being alone with my thoughts and being my own company. This had gradually lessened with the work I had been doing on self love and shame, as well as with the deep love I felt from Valentina. But once again I found myself feeling alone, despite being surrounded by a crowd of some of the most loving people I had ever met.

I ended up dancing around our mutual friends when a close friend of Valentina, who I didn’t know particularly well, came over to dance with me. With her arms around me, Lilly asked how I was doing. Leaning into vulnerability, an uncomfortable tactic which had nonetheless been proving to facilitate much of my personal growth, I told her of my loneliness. Having talked to Valentina earlier, Lilly shared with me how she and her husband had recently been mending disconnections, using a Hawaiian tradition of apologizing, asking for forgiveness, and expressing gratitude to the other. She encouraged me to try it with Valentina. Quelling the feelings that came with seeking reconciliation, while also feeling my position had been most logical in our disagreement, I went over to Valentina and took Lilly’s advice. This was a turning point in the festival, with us both making a more conscious effort to connect despite patterns from bygone years occasionally springing up in this new healing relationship we had seeded with love.

Valentina shared with me how Lilly’s husband Austin had embraced her earlier, sharing his heartfelt wisdom, and encouraging her to open up her heart to share the abundant love she possessed, and which the world needed. After Valentina and I reconnected, Lilly came up and held us, reminding us that she loved us and was available to help us come together, whenever we needed her.

I had experienced years of conditioning from religion and society, with flawless relationships idealized, coaching or therapy carrying a stigma of failure, and seeking support from friends and family often done at the expense of the partner’s dignity, or not done at all in favor of putting on a brave face. Now, I found myself in a relationship supported by community. After experiencing severe damage in past relationships from the counsel of religious leaders, our counseling now came, not by religious leaders calibrated to a set of dogmas and doctrines and lacking real world training, but by new friends younger than us, who were doing the work themselves. Instead of feeling like a burden, we were held by friends who found fulfillment in supporting those they love, and who themselves relied on that same community when they needed support. I met God at a festival, and they taught me what it meant to be in a community that truly bore one another’s burdens.

Learning to Trust

Later, Lilly and I came together to dance. Once again I was face to face with deep programming hindering my ability to connect, a confrontation I’d become accustomed to over the past two years as I underwent what Carl Jung called the process of individuation. Up until seven years prior, I had been a devoted member of a high-demand religion with an acute focus on sexual morality, “modesty,” and the importance of being vigilant in the face of relentless temptation from the adversary. I was taught that sexual sin was next to murder, that it was paramount to dress in ways that minimized temptations from the human body, and that impure thoughts should be ushered off the mind’s stage with tactics like humming a religious hymn. Married individuals were not placed in church responsibilities where they’d be alone with those of the opposite sex, and many followed this practice throughout all aspects of their life. In my previous marriage, I had avoided two-armed hugs with women, and averted my eyes from those, in person or in the media, who weren’t following what I had been taught were the standards of modesty.

Since leaving religion, I had made some progress deprogramming these teachings. I awkwardly tried to communicate clearly with the new friends I found myself making, so as not to make them or their partners uncomfortable. Valentina and I had employed healthy communication to respectfully share with each other what we hoped for in a partner on these topics. Yet, I still found this space difficult to navigate. After all, it had been very complicated for my marriage years earlier when my friend’s wife shared that she had developed romantic feelings for me, despite my vigilant adherence to the guidelines above.

Here I was, dancing with Lilly, without knowing her or husband very well. I’d seen them both freely and intimately dance amongst their group of friends, regardless of gender. I had no problem with Valentina, who had enjoyed an upbringing free from purity culture, doing the same. It was evident how committed everyone was to their partners, and I felt the same commitment to mine.

After thanking her for her help earlier, I expressed other vulnerabilities, that I really didn’t know how to dance, and that I found it difficult to calibrate to this new way of relating amongst partnerships. She addressed the first concern, the easier of the two, playfully poking different areas on my hips and sides, and instructing me to move “here, here, and here.” Then she moved on to to the weightier concern. As we danced, she taught me, rather, she showed me how to relate from a place of love, maturity, and trust in oneself and others.

Buddhism teaches a way of non-attachment, that the only way to attain what we desire is by letting go. Suffering is caused by a thirst or craving for things to be a certain way. By surrendering in trust, we center ourselves in our very beingness, no longer at the mercy of fears and desires. So it is with partners. In my previous relationships, I had learned that the most sure way to stifle love and wallow in jealousy and mistrust, was to have a relationship based on fear. This often manifests as fear of being accepted, or of your partner being unfaithful, succumbing to this slippery slope of immorality I’d been told the adversary had laid for each and every one of us.

Truthfully, it’s difficult to describe what happened next. Maslow, famous for his concept of the Hierarchy of Needs, is less known for his work on “peak experiences.” These are transcendental experiences that, while not rare, are not widely known. This is in part due to their infrequency, but also to the incredible difficulty capturing these ineffable experiences in words. Recent research in the mental health field has led to an increased awareness of these mystical experiences, which are often experienced after the use of psychedelics in an intentional manner.

These experiences exist on a wide spectrum, presenting anywhere from spiritual feelings or as moments of awe in nature, to full-blown transcendence of space, time, and a sense of one’s individual identity, often described as a union with all of existence or with “God.” Additionally, while research has now shown that psychedelics are a very reliable method for achieving these states with the proper setting and intention, these same exact experiences are experienced endogenously, meaning without any substances, in a wide variety of activities. These activities range from those religious in nature, such as contemplative prayer or fasting, to non-religious activities; meditation, exhaustion, experience in nature, dance, or creative projects, to name a few.

After 37 years of existence, thinking I understood much of the range of what it felt to be human, I’d begun experiencing these states for the first time, starting two years ago and coinciding with the deep work I was forced to undertake with my life changes, and with the intense pain that often accompanied this process. I’d been completely unaware of peak experiences, which made them all the more bewildering, especially given that mine occured endogenously, without any external help or expectation. I also had little-to-no context of various states of consciousness, due to my religious background and abstinence from most substances or practices that generally elicit milder changes of consciousness. My experiences were not as profound as the accounts of religious mystics throughout history, and always stayed relatively grounded in time and space, though even those constructs were experienced differently, like an extended flow state. The visuals I experienced revealed nothing that wasn’t “really there,” but rather consisted of a radical intensification of clarity, color, and beauty. In these moments, it was as if life shifted from 720p to 8K, 256 colors to millions. While I’d never experienced this clarity before, it felt like it had always been there, just inaccessible due to a conscious experience constrained by layers of mental energy being occupied elsewhere.

These experiences were profoundly beautiful and spiritual, unlike anything I had ever experienced in religion. To be fair, they held the same feeling tone as the few moments when I had really felt moved by religious devotion, but these were of a quality and purity that differed from those by orders of magnitude. So much so that there was no true comparison. I had no choice but to abandon the pathway to atheism that I had recently resigned myself to. Yet, to call myself a theist felt as poor of a label. I immediately understood “God” to be a descriptor for the entirety of the universe, of which I was a part. Each and every one of us reflected the entirety of the universe, just as one portion of the fractal reflects the whole. While beautiful, these experiences were also very difficult to grapple with. I had no prior similar experiences to provide adequate context to these, not even in the spiritual experiences I had experienced as a devoted adherent to religion. At this point in my transformation, returning to ARKADIA, these peak experiences were no longer happening, at least not with the same frequency or intensity. However, they had left me experiencing reality fundamentally different, with more clarity, equanimity, and purpose than I had ever had from religion.

Now, holding a friend who had moments ago guided me back into connection with my partner, and was now helping me learn there was a healthier, more loving and trusting way to be in partnership and community, I felt the same love, gratitude, and connection of those peak experiences. My mind is heavily analytical, something I now recognize as an adaptation to keep me emotionally safe and somewhat dissociated from underlying feelings of loneliness and lack of connection that began in childhood. But in this moment, all thinking quieted, leaving the stage of my awareness entirely to the act of being. Being is a place beyond the constructs, labels, or the boxes we draw around things in order to make sense of and digest the world.

The visual and auditory background of the dance floor started to fade, with the newly liberated bandwidth of awareness being reallocated to deepen the fidelity of my experience with Lilly. The past and future, realms which exist solely in our thinking mind but are never directly experienced, similarly retreated as we danced in a more significant Now. I experienced a deep sense of reciprocal love. While recognizably similar to what's known as love, this was Love, the perfect form, which we generally only experience indirectly. I recognized it, as I'd felt this heart-opening before, once in a dream during college, and then not again until the transformations of the last two years. This was the energy that blossomed when I met Valentina, knitting us together. While Valentina and I express and experience Love romantically, its most fundamental nature exists beyond the constraints or labels of the human world.

In that moment with Lilly, there was no compulsion or need to experience it as romance. It was just Love. This was not the slippery slope I had been warned about for years. This was not an emotion you fall in, but rather a state you find yourself remembering you are always in, and from where your existence is a manifestation. This, I recognized, is our true nature, only dimmed from the contraction and layers of trauma we've accumulated on our pathway to what we call the present. Being seen by others and loved unconditionally, not because you've followed some religious or societal rules, achieved some accomplishment, or exist in some way, is what is needed to allow those layers to fall away. When they do, Love remains.

I embraced Lilly, telling her how healing this moment was. She let me know that this was healing for her as well. This was another realization I had made through my transformation. The work of healing is synergistic. Coming together and healing as a community is an act of fusion. We've already learned to harness fission as society, through the atomic bomb and nuclear power. But, as fission creates energetic release through division and separation, it comes at the cost of radioactive byproducts taking eons to heal. Social fission works just like its nuclear counterpart, leaving scars in society that persist over generations, culturally and epigenetically. Fusion on the other hand, is the way of the sun, releasing energy without enduring radioactive waste. It is the primal source of all energy on earth. It is the Prime Mover, the driving force behind the Big Bang. But just as its nuclear counterpart, fusion between souls requires an environment and investment more difficult to set up and stabilize than fission, as evidenced by our achievement of nuclear weapons and power plants almost a century ago, but our continued pursuit of sustainable fusion.

On the outside, Lilly and I were two people dancing at a festival, dressed and holding each other in a way that went against everything I was taught was godliness. I had been taught that this was the path that numbed souls and disconnected one from God. Yet there, in the embrace of friends, we healed. I found God at a festival. She showed me how beautiful it could be to partner and relate in a healed community.

Connecting as Men

With my thinking mind back online, the background levels of awareness came up and balanced with the foreground. The scenery of ARKADIA returned. Time and space were once again the base filters through which I rendered reality. I returned to Valentina and danced. Then I told her I wanted to dance with Daniel.

I barely knew Daniel. He and Valentina had shared a deep connection, similar to Lilly and I, during last year's ARKADIA when they partnered for an eye-gazing activity. They'd kept in touch from time to time since then. She had told me the connection was Love, but not romantic, and that I shouldn't worry. I didn’t. I treated her the way I wanted to be treated. I trusted her. This, I was learning, was how healed people relate. You trust your partner, because you see God in her, rather than seeing God as some ethereal entity you hope your partner continues to follow. Partners aren't kept through clinging, but through freedom and trusting. Those partners that are given freedom and trust, but are lost, weren’t the partners you deserved anyway. The growth from those losses, which you risk missing out on by clinging to those unaligned partnerships, feed back into your transformation to become the partner you want to become, that you need to become. Ultimately, I wanted a partner who’s desire to be with me was driven by Love, not by fear of abandonment or curated through tight adherence to rules I felt would keep her from falling into the adversary’s snares.

Ever since I was a young child, I'd had difficulty connecting with male friends. While some of my emotions were kept at bay with my heavily rational mind, I was more in touch with my emotions than most men I knew, and as a result forged deep connections primarily with women. I had male friends, but the ones I grew closer to generally mirrored my disposition, more in touch with the feminine archetype than the average male. Yet, there was always a barrier of discomfort I bumped into when approaching a certain depth of connection. I enjoyed hugs with my female friends, but when I hugged my male friends, I felt myself contract at some level.

The roots of this discomfort reach back into my childhood. Around the age of five, I had a formative experience that would remain unaddressed until the beginning of my transformation 32 years later. In what I now, as a father of two boys, recognize as a normal stage of development, my best friend and I had once been found by my mother being innocently curious about our anatomy. Despite her best intention, I remember the shame I felt when she tried to teach me that we don’t get naked around our friends. This was the genesis of an underlying worry that I was gay, something I was taught by my religion was a sin against God, with sexual sins being next to murder in severity.

It is painful to think about the role religion played in the formation of such a destructive belief and worry, especially for such a young child. I consider burdening innocence with an emotional of this gravity a direct violation of Christ's reported admonition against offending such children. It's been heartbreaking to recognize how much mental pain I experienced over the years as I needlessly carried the shame from this experience. Despite holding no romantic feelings toward other boys, the severity of this sin coupled with the religious belief that natural man was an enemy to God, meant that I would only unpack this burden from my mind at the age of 37. With my marriage having already collapsed, I found myself with no other option than to search out the root of this shame that pervading my sense of self.

As a result of this burden, there was always this unconscious contraction keeping me from experiencing deep connections with other men. While mine may have been deeper than those between average males in society, owing to the greater connection I had with emotions like love and empathy, this programming always lurked beyond my conscious awareness. I would hug male friends, but at some point I’d break the hug or feel like I should pat their back, unaware that I was actually worried my affection would be construed as anything more than friendly. I no longer had questions about my sexuality, but that egoic programming that dutifully worked so hard to keep me safe as a child from such a scary thought of unworthiness, still operated behind the scenes to ensure that other men would never get the "wrong" impression. Despite finally feeling peace as I left religion and was able to intellectually let go of any moral judgment of homosexuality, my body lagged in understanding. I would interestingly still contract at the idea of kissing or being romantic with another man.

I had been thinking about this contraction for a few weeks prior, as I saw men at the local weekly local ecstatic dance interact with each other freely. I was curious about what went on inside me every time my older boy, the same age I was when I installed this programming, gave his baby brother a kiss on the lips. I wanted to overcome this blockage that kept me from enjoying deeper, unencumbered connections with the men in my life. So, buoyed up by the loving experience I had just shared with Lilly, I went up to Daniel and awkwardly told him I felt like I wanted to dance with him. He wrapped his arms around me, pulled me in, and we started to dance, just as I'd seen him do earlier with Lilly's husband Austin. As we held each other, I awkwardly explained this stumbling block I was trying to overcome. Just as Lilly had done earlier, he held me, we danced, and he guided me through healing decades of disconnection with men.

Just as before, the dance floor dimmed in my awareness, along with the past and future. Thinking quieted, allowing me once again to be fully present and experience this moment with a man confident in his expression of Love, no matter the recipient. I again experienced this deeper-than-romantic connection that I had enjoyed earlier with Lilly. The song ended, but we still held each other. I later learned Valentina had snapped a photo of this moment. The healing Daniel had done on behalf of men, who are currently suffering an epidemic of loneliness, alchemized the pain I'd experienced in a life absent of deep, intimate connections with the masculine.

This healing persisted through the festival, as we shared future embraces, kissed each other on the cheek, and as I held, and was held, by other men embodying the healed masculine. I left ARKADIA looking forward to the future connections I would now be able to unlock with the men in my life, and to the healing I'd be able to facilitate in other men carrying similar programming from religion, from society, and from the absence of fathers who were taught how to love in this way. I met God at a festival, and he healed my disconnection with men.

Healing the Father Wound

I grew up without a connection to my father. His struggles and wounds were too much for our religious institution’s limited ability to hold space. While the religion had deeply mystical and esoteric roots, teaching the divine potential of humans and personal access to continued revelation, it had always been plagued when personal revelation deviated from the doctrines codified by the leaders of the church. The revelations the leaders felt they had received conflicted with those my father felt he had received, revelations on both sides shaped by men and their desperate struggle to have their inherent divine worth validated. Unable to be a safe place for my father’s process, the church excommunicated him. Like Pilate, the church wiped their hands of the complications posed by my father’s wounds, leaving his family to be swallowed in the wake of destruction that would ensue.

My father’s struggle with being loved, accepted, and feeling worthy no longer played out in the halls of our church, despite its claim to have access to the ultimate source of love, acceptance, and worthiness. Excommunicated from his religion and community, those most equipped to facilitate his healing, his wife and kids were now left to try and fill those basic human needs. However, wounds as deep as these require a community to heal. They require men who love themselves, who believe in their own worth, who are not shaken when another man’s pain presents as grandiosity or pride. They require men who have done enough of their own work to hold space for other men as they heal from childhoods with absent fathers, dissociated fathers, fathers whose only way to love was often to provide monetarily and to just get by, keeping it all together by pushing emotions down. The god of that religious institution had not done the work, and so I now found myself left to heal this wound before it festered for another generation in the lives of my two boys.

But this work can’t fully be done alone. At ARKADIA, I danced with other men. I was vulnerable with other men. I heard a friend share through tears about how plant medicine healed his relationship with his late father. After one set of dancing concluded, Austin, Daniel, and I hugged and held each other. While both younger than me, they embodied the fatherly strength and love I remember longing for as a kid. I can still remember now, sitting in church, imagining what it would be like to have the any of the other men I saw there as my dad, to give me the priesthood blessings and ordinances that only a man within our religion could give. These fantasies always ended with the realization that at the end of the day, these men, deemed worthy by the church, would go home to their real families.

At one point Austin wrapped me in his arms, sharing the wisdom he’d learned from his marriage with Lilly, in order to help my relationship with Valentina grow. He counseled me to embody the masculine, to cherish her passionate emotions, to help her feel safe to express them, so that they can be honed and harnessed for our sacred union. Interestingly, the needs I was to provide for her, were the same needs that I desperately sought for as a child, to feel safe and loved, despite the tornado of emotions that arose within from the chaos of my family. Now I was to provide that for my partner, my inner child, and my two boys all at the same time, a daunting task. Now at least, I knew I wasn’t alone in this journey. I met God at a festival. He held me, counseled me, and loved me as only a healed father can, so that I can be one for my family.

Judging Not

There were moments at ARKADIA that felt utterly surreal. How had I ended up here? Just a few years ago I was a strict adherent in a high-demand religion. I went to church every Sunday, studied my scriptures daily, prayed daily, kept what I thought were God’s commandments, right down to the letter. I averted my eyes from women showing more of their body than my religion taught was modest, trying to drive any intrusive thoughts out by humming church hymns. I avoided coffee, tea, and even things flavored as such, as it wasn’t clear what the prohibited ingredient actually was. My eye was set on spiritual things, and I was not about to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.

My childhood had taught me that there was safety in the cold world of logic. This was a place that kept me from feeling the pain of the emotions threatening to rise up inside, and allowed me to model others in my mind and avoid eliciting strong emotions in them. This adherence to logic at the expense of emotion, meant I excelled at obeying. Since the scriptures taught that obedience brought the blessings of heaven, I was going to call in those blessings with this superpower. And yet, despite my exactness, the spiritual manifestations never came. The blessings never came. The peace and love never came.

How did I now come to find myself at a festival, in Las Vegas, the modern Sodom and Gomorrah? Yet it was here, amidst the driving beat, the lasers reflecting off the haze from the artificial fog and occasional vape, amongst men and women dressing in a way that unapologetically embraced the bodies they were born with, regardless of size or shape, that I finally felt that peace, love, and unity. I learned to lose myself to the rhythm, allowing myself to be subsumed by the tribal beat, as humanity had done for millennia before we went to church in suits and ties, using dictionary definitions from the pulpit to learn about humility, or grace, or whatever term we were using that Sunday to describe the divine. This was communion with the divine, partaking in a oneness with those around me, both in heart and mind, a state of existence my previous religion had called Zion. Here I was, amid what I would have judged a few years ago as the moral depravity that results when the carnal man is left unchecked, yet I had never seen men respect women more. People were largely dancing with themselves, not seeking to seduce one another. They hadn’t dressed this way for attention, but for expression, to accept the parts of themselves they’d shut down. I chuckled to myself as I remembered how much more hormone-fueled my middle school dances were than this festival. Ironically, far from the chapels of religion, this felt like a community of people that had integrated Christ’s admonition to judge not. The more I was able to let go and confront the absurdity that others were judging how I was dancing, realizing that no one cared about how I looked, the more this experience deepened.

At times it was messy, but it was a beautiful mess. There were moments I still felt shame, felt alone, felt disconnection. Some people were finding their healing path using plant medicines and other substances, the same ones being shown in research to have healing effects unrivaled by other modalities when used intentionally. I heard people talk about the profound shifts these tools had brought them. I also heard and saw people stumble along the journey with these same tools, but they were supported by a community, all focused on growth and healing. All my life I’d been taught that these tools would dull one’s sensitivity to the spirit and rob one of their agency. I had been told that the arbiter of whether a substance was sanctioned by God, ironically, was the human government under which one lived, its laws, and the decision of a prescriber granted power by said government. While I personally had more in common with the attendees that had meditated their way to ARKADIA, by following Matias De Stefano or Joe Dispenza, I learned to respect and honor the people that arrived at the same place through different paths. I understood why some took matters into their own hands, tired of waiting for a ceasefire in the war on drugs, tired of waiting to heal, no longer willing to be pawns in the game Western psychiatry and pharma had created.

After leaving religion, I was surprised to learn that alcohol was not a guaranteed slippery slope to addiction, but also, disappointingly, not the hedonistic elixir I was led to believe it was. Instead, I learned it was something I didn’t care for, but which I could also appreciate that others enjoyed. It was surprising to see that some people’s casual use seemed to have a net positive effect in their life, and to see that others had naturally gravitated away from it without any religious dictates, but rather because they didn’t enjoy it. Most importantly, I learned that I could trust myself and my choices, something I’d never considered before. I had been so worried that my moral character would collapse after religion. For a while I had kept holding my breath, waiting for this collapse to happen.

But now, I had learned, I could trust myself. I was good because I was me, nothing had made me that way. In fact, I felt myself becoming more aligned, ethical, and loving. When surrounded by love and support, and allowed to make my own choices, and most importantly allowed to make mistakes, I came up with the choices that led to happiness, to healing, to love. I didn’t always figure it out as quickly as others. In fact it was often odd navigating these spaces, oftentimes more awkwardly than my peers had, not to mention two decades after they had navigated these same spaces with the benefit of a peer group to support them. But even though my journey didn’t always match those that started from a different place, I ended up in the place I wanted to. I learned that my stone rolled down the mountain and was often polished in ways that others did not experience, sometimes paradoxically so, but that was only due to the fact that we each start this journey with our own spots to polish. The direction and end goal of all journeys was the same.

So, I learned to trust the process of others. The world was filled with beautiful, divine people, that when supported and loved, inevitably proceed towards the light. People need love, trust, and support. I felt a beautiful peace, the culmination of a release of decades of anxiety, of worry, of judgment, of a need to determine what was right or wrong for another person to do, to believe, to feel. I could trust myself to find the way and heal. The more I engaged in my inner process, the more I was able to love and support others in their own process. I met God at a festival. She wasn’t ministering to the publicans or sinners. She taught me that there were never any in the first place, only those I had judged as such from my limited capacity to love and feel loved. It was her I was judging all along, but that was okay. She was so glad I could finally join the dance.

Sacred Union

ARKADIA ended, and Valentina and I parted ways with our friends. Weeks later I would propose to her, days before she flew back home to Italy. I had learned to no longer act out of my head, out of a place of trauma and fear, from the patterns of the life that I had lived, a life that had now died. I was to find coherence between my head and my heart, to face my fears, to create the life that I wanted to live. Logically, marrying Valentina made no sense. We met at a festival a little over a year ago. She lived in Italy, had never been religious, was a spiritual coach and Reiki master, all things which would have triggered a roll of my eyes just two years prior. I had two kids, came from a very religious upbringing that I was apparently still unpacking, and had only recently been on the road to recovery from self-righteous intellectualism. Marrying me would mean uprooting her life, blending a family, blending our cultures.

Despite how little sense it made, Valentina gave me something I had never experienced before. She loved my true self, not just the current iteration. She saw me as another expression of her true self, the One consciousness from which everything emanates. While most of the times things felt so synchronistically aligned between us, there were times we felt like a comically bad zipper merge. Over time, we learned that the rough spots we still had were perfectly lined up to connect with those of the other, so that we could polish them out. So many patterns presented in our relationship, and in our personal lives, that echoed our histories, personal and ancestral. Time and time again we were presented with the opportunity to get things right this time, to carry the baton further for the next generation. In this union with Valentina, I experience the divinity I had always sought, the divine masculine and feminine, Shiva and Shakti, finally coming together after a long journey of healing.

Embedded in our union is a respect for the complementary nature of the two gender archetypes, combined with an understanding that we were never just one or the other. As a society, we delude ourselves into thinking we are things we are not. We consider ourselves members of the species Homo sapiens, rather than instantiations of the collective consciousness made possible by the ecosystem of trillions of more bacterial cells than human cells. The former are involved in creating the majority of the serotonin, the neurotransmitter that tightly correlates with the nature of our conscious experience. Without one, there would be no other. We’re less human than we are a symphony of bacteria, playing out on the stage of Homo sapiens. We’re living a story of Pinnochio where we’ve cut Gepetto out of the plot.

Similarly, many of us have deluded ourselves into thinking we are one or the other of these two binary gender constructs, and that the goal is to retreat into one of two corners, or to ignore them all together, rather than balancing and integrating both of these archetypes. We’re here to participate in a transcendent dance of complementing one another, integrating the archetypes we haven’t yet integrated, waking up from the spell of constructs under which we’ve slumbered, and getting curious about who we really are and how murky those boundaries are that we’ve drawn between us and others.

The union of two people in love follows this same arc of consciousness. We won’t find coherence becoming lost in the other, codependent to their will. Nor do we find it through being fiercely independent, quickly drawing and enforcing every boundary we can. While we cannot expect another person to complete us, we can recognize following the arc of consciousness involves exploring the fractal nature of reality, a journey only possible by connecting through relationships with the world around us. We find the love of the universe in interdependence, an appreciation of the individual, just as much as the collective. We are not one, or the other, we are both. We are all things.

In a few months, Valentina and I will continue to chart our way together, slipping away to Costa Rica for a private ceremony between the two of us, officiated by Ana, the lawyer recommended by our destination. In Ana’s first email to us, she shared her own spiritual journey as the product of a Jewish-Catholic family, one which took her through an Ashram in India and a Kibbutz in Israel. This is a fitting way to end one chapter of our individual progression and open another chapter together. I met God at a festival. She showed me how beautiful Love can be. I’ll be marrying her soon.