DIAMOND HEART
“Beings are bound by passion and are released by utilizing passion.”
— THE HEVAJRA TANTRA
I LAY ONTO his shoulder. My hand found his heart. His breath deepened and slowed.
“I have to tell you...I have to,” he began. “Mopunga talked about being 110% honest with myself, and that means being honest with you, too. We have to be clean to enter the spirit world. I feel like if this is really going to work, I have to be honest with you.”
I sat up and leaned over him, waiting for this bomb to drop. “What is it?” I implored again, unsure if I could take it.
He sat up and choked out the words, “I was... with ...other women...when I traveled.”
I felt a lump in my throat, like a rock I couldn’t swallow. My breath stopped. “What?! What do you mean? You had sex with other women?”
“Yes.” A knife in my heart. A blow to my stomach. Struck. Sick. Not only had I longed to be with him when he traveled, not only had I been tortured by guilt just for having been touched, but I had also been so neglected. My mind screamed even as my mouth was a gaping, silent, void.
“Just how many women? ” I asked, mouth agape, breathless.
“It doesn’t matter now. I did it. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, love.”
Doesn’t matter now?
We sat up and faced each other. Grave eyes and sunken hearts.
“It was only in the past three years. It started when I started drinking. It would happen when I was drunk.
I didn’t do anything in the first few years, when I was sober—even when it was thrown in my face. I always loved you, baby,” he gushed. “I was still in love with you, only you, even through all of that. I felt so terrible, but it kept happening. It was another addiction. When the heroin started again, I finally stopped feeling the pain. I stopped caring.”
I recalled how I could never have sex with him when he was drunk. I couldn’t bring myself to fuck his demons. They felt so foreign, so different from his spirit. His demons must have gotten pretty lonely.
Drunken one-night stands with numb and eager women probably sated his sensual impatience. Perfect fast food for his ego, said my cynicism.
Apparently his thick tattooed wedding ring didn’t make a speck of difference.
My head spun with scenarios. I wanted details. Details, so I could map the source of the deceit and figure it out and crush it. Why? When? How? Who? How many times? My belly turned with nausea. My love, sliding his cock into strange bodies. All this treachery, between our nightly phone dates.
I thought of the many times that I’d dutifully schlepped him to and from the airport—and what must have been to and from other women. “Who were these women? Where did you meet them?”
I paused, generating the question, “Were they sex workers?” I had to know—everything. I was a primal detective.
He wasn’t answering.
“So, were they sex workers?” I demanded again, seeking all the covert chapters of his life that I’d missed.
“It doesn’t matter!” he howled.
“It does matter! I want to know! I feel so in the dark. I at least deserve some answers!”
“Yeah, OK? A hooker in Tijuana...”
I sat, frozen, looking down, slapped by the truth.
I had served as a sensual priestess for acolytes who complained, conflicted and desperate, that they hadn’t been touched by their lover in ages, for various reasons. But no, my man was not one of those neglected souls. He’d been loved and worshipped whenever I could get my hands on him. So why? Why?
It occurred to me: Our relationship was indeed being uprooted by his excessive travel and workaholic ways. He’d ignored his human needs, all of them, until they screamed for satiation.
He continued confessing. “And art shows. Women at art shows. Some women, I was working on projects with. Groupies. Yeah, I actually have some groupies... bitches everywhere! ” he howled. “They were ALL whores to me,” he said with acidic disdain.
His words were a sledgehammer, leaving me breathless, speechless.
I love whores. Nothing wrong with whores at all. I just mourned the heavy masks people feel they have to wear to worship them—and the misplaced loathing flowing outward from tidal, terrifying, untempered desires.
Did he not realize, after all these years, that he was talking to a proud sensual healer, sex worker rights advocate, and sexual freedom cheerleader? I had long since reclaimed the old slang word to crown free beings making conscious choices to share their bodies. Whores, whether professional sensual artisans or sexually liberated women, held divine status in my eyes as Earth angels. He was slandering my sisters, and he was spitting on me. My heart broke, not only for my sham of a relationship, but for all the women he had disrespected—even as he devoured them.
How could my very own man harbor such attitudes?
I felt the same blow of sadness that I had experienced when people disrespected plant medicines. Indeed, sex is another form of sacred medicine; somewhere between excess and censure exists a realm of potent healing.
I suddenly resented the sexual lockdown he’d had me on—all while he plundered. “Why didn’t you ever tell me? I asked if you wanted to see other people. You said no.”
“This wasn’t ‘seeing’ other people. There were no relationships, OK? It’s not like we kept in touch.”
“As if that made it any better?” I gasped. “‘Seeing,’ ‘fucking,’ ‘being’ with other people...whatever! That’s a cheap technicality! It’s all the same thing! You got naked and had sex with other women.
“I was open to the idea of an open relationship. I TOLD you about Monica. You could have come clean then, but instead you tortured me about it for months! For a kiss! And my guilt for just getting some touch was literally making me sick!” I was incensed. I stood up and paced like a caged animal.
Yeah, I had been naughty, but not nearly THAT naughty, said the little judge in my head.
“I was starving myself sensually, doing my best to honor this so-called relationship agreement, waiting for you and wanting you,” I choked up. I had realized the night prior, after all that fresh passion, just how starved I’d really been. He’d been sating himself sexually with numerous stray women, while I panted and clutched his dirty T-shirt at night. “I was saving my lovemaking just for you, at least.”
I’m such a sucker.
I flashed back to a moment when he’d chastised me for inquiring about a foreign feminine scent on him. “Hmm. What is that, baby?” I asked one night, sniffing his neck. “You smell pretty,” I teased. I figured it was some perfumed product he’d used while traveling. From all his proclamations about me being the only one, I hadn’t imagined that it was from another woman. He erupted, furious. “It’s just my sister’s soap! That’s all! Stop being paranoid.” I laughed. I sniffed him again, pressing his button. He had yelled at me. Loud. “Seriously, Elizabeth. Stop it!” Perhaps there’d been a psychic scent on him, too.
“How many women?” I pressed.
“A lot,” he said bluntly. “I don’t even know. I’m sorry, baby. I was being greedy. I was. And I didn’t want to share you. I didn’t want to change what we had. I didn’t want to change our home. I didn’t want to hurt you. Sometimes I wondered where I’d go if I did go....”
His eyes, desperate and distraught, implored mercy. “I love you. Please forgive me. Please don’t leave me. I love you. I want to marry you.”
I couldn’t even think of marriage or happiness or the fairy tale at that moment. My world crashed down around me, and it seemed as fake and feeble as a Hollywood stage set.
“Did you use protection?” I asked, frantically.
“Yes, I did!” He’d always been so meticulous about using protection the first few months we were dating. Then he paused. “I...think...so?” he said, wavering. He’d been drunk, I reflected. “But we were just tested for everything. It’s over!” he assured me.
“I know I made my mistakes,” I responded, “but sex is just so intimate. It’s so much more than touch. You were inside other women.”
I shivered, contemplating: Beyond the STD danger zone, sex is another level of sharing essence, even when covered in rubber. Creative juices and sweat and pheromones are shared. Bodily fluids carry the frequency of a person. They can be flavored with adrenaline, cortisol, alcohol, drugs, nicotine, grasping, fear, shame, jealousy, rage. Or they can be flavored with oxytocin, oxygen, green juice, yoga, altruism, worship, generosity, vitality, creativity, liberation...love.
When people have sex, they share their poison—or their liquid wisdom, as the tantrikas say. Lovers take on each other’s karma, in a physical and energetic way. It was no small thing. So here he was, coated in an unknown number of other women’s karma.
I tossed one more confession in, since we were on a roll. May as well be good and thorough. “Remember that terrible argument we had, back in San Diego when we were visiting your grandmother for Christmas, that night when I asked you to turn off your cell phone for bedtime? You had refused, so I was going to sleep on the couch. Then you screamed at me like a crazy man and threatened to throw me out in the night, with my son. You really blew a fuse on me. Remember?” He nodded his head, looking down into his hands. “I was so furious. I doubted our relationship. It was the weakest it had ever been for me. I had put you on probation in my mind. When I traveled to Chicago for a work trip just after that, I let a client there take me to dinner. I hadn’t been so intensely attracted to another man since meeting you, and I know it was because I was so crushed and confused and deprived during that time.”
“Did you tell him about me?” Chor asked.
“Yes. I told him all about you. It was really nice to just to talk openly to someone about all of it. He just listened. We kissed goodnight. A real kiss. A hot kiss like I hadn’t had in months. And I never told you. It felt good...too good. But then it felt bad, and I never saw him again. I wanted him. Oh I did. He was intoxicating. But I just buried it. There. Now you know everything.”
We just sat next to each other on the edge of the bed for a pause, our heads hanging low as we both stared at the floor. “That’s another thing,” he said. “I didn’t know for sure what you were up to—if you were having sex with other people—because of your sensual healing work,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was all about it. I didn’t know how far you took things. I wondered sometimes, but I just loved you anyway. It was hard for me, but that didn’t make it right. I was rationalizing my behavior, I know.”
“I TOLD you,” I emphasized, with my spikes up, fighting for my rightness. “Even when I was doing my sensual healing work, I never had sex with them.”
Well, I guess I wasn’t entirely honest either. I scolded myself internally. He could probably smell a lie on me, too, psychically at least.
Still, he had numbed his not knowing in all the wrong places, in all the wrong pussies. I fumed. “If you had those questions, why didn’t you just ask me about my work? Maybe that would have helped me to tell you more—about everything.”
“I tried once, and I said the wrong thing. I stuck my foot in my mouth. I hurt you. I didn’t know how to talk about it.”
I remembered that moment many years ago. I had dropped him off at his studio on my way to work. “Have a good day at the office, baby,” he said. “You gonna make ’em squirt?” My eyes had teared up. Is that all that he thought of my work? He had slandered my secret temple. A tear spilled down my face, and he realized the impact of his words. “Oh baby, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said. He never discussed details after that.
Silence.
“Honestly, you are intimidating to me. You are a beautiful, powerful woman. I was jealous, too. I was acting out.” Maybe he was trying to stroke my ego, but his words just made me even more sick. It’s bad to be too beautiful and powerful, apparently.
“And...I had a hard time with how sensitive you are, sexually. But that’s not an excuse.”
“I need some air.” I said. I abruptly stood up, went out onto the deck, and bathed my lungs in the sweet, clean night air.
I recalled, on the occasions when I was available to travel with him for a work trip, he’d emphasize how he’d need to focus on his work, as if to dissuade me. But all the while he was letting his inner monster out to play.
Of course he didn’t want me there.
I was never very good at suppressing emotions. Never thought it did much good anyway. So I let that cold river of grief cut a path all the way through me. I took deep, panicked breaths that came out sounding like gasping. I gripped the railing of the deck with the same grip reserved for the raft in white water rapids. After a minute, Chor walked out on the deck and stood next to me for a cumbrous moment.
“You are my temple.” I said softly, as I looked out into the night. “My temple.” I felt my eyes spilling over. “It hurts me to think of you desecrating yourself with all that garbage sex.”
“Those times...they didn’t mean anything,” he said.
“Maybe not to you!” I said. “It means something to me! If I told you that I’d fucked 50 men and masked it all for these years and ‘by the way, it didn’t mean anything,’ would that make you feel any better?”
He looked down across the dark land. “You don’t wanna get revenge?” he asked. Revenge hadn’t even crossed my mind. Not for a split second.
“Revenge would be a waste of time,” I said. “I have better things to do with my minutes here on planet Earth.
“Maybe I’m not enough for you,” I added after some somber stargazing. “Or maybe I’m just too much for you.” He enveloped me in his arms, defeating my halfhearted attempt to push him away.
“Do you really want to be with only me ?” I asked. I couldn’t comprehend how or why he would want to be with only me—with a virtual buffet of other women so readily available. “Why not just set yourself free and ravage the world? And set me free, too!”
“I only want to be with you! I do! I feel clean now. You are the one, baby,” he exclaimed, earnestly.
How convenient that you wanna be with only me... now, after you’ve fucked the masses. My cynicism was having a field day.
“I don’t know,” I said, full of sorrow and shaking my head. “I don’t know anything right now. I’m just glad you are still alive.”
His secrets felt dirtier than the dirty acts themselves. I reminded myself: I had kept my own.
Throughout our relationship, I’d explicitly expressed to him, “Do whatever you want, love. Do whatever you really want. It’s your life. And it’s a precious life. You should seek your soul’s true desires. If your desires lead you back to me over and over, that’s wonderful. I love being with just you, but if you ever choose to be with other people, I just ask that you always be real with me.” I didn’t want to be the ball and chain. I wanted to be his queen and his hot haven and his best friend.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I reflected after his confession, carefully replaying all those conversations from the past in which I had invited openness and freedom. “We talked about all this!”
“I know, it doesn’t make sense, but it happened. I understand how you are feelin.’” This was his classic line to calm me down, but it wasn’t quelling the fire in me this time.
“Yeah, this is quite the cherry on top of everything.”
What do I need now? That’s the question of the hour.
I’d been revolving my life around his crisis for a while already, and his fake relationship status before that.
Do I even need a relationship at all?
I don’t need anyone, said my ego.
I could be like a sovereign sexual nun—hunting as I pleased, a well-guarded mystery, owned by no one. This had been a recurring fantasy whenever love had gotten messy and dangerous.
We stood on the deck for a while without speaking, digesting all the broken glass.
“It hurts my heart to hear you speak about other women like you did. All women are goddesses, even if they don’t know it yet,” I said.
“As a great man, you can help every woman to realize her goddess nature, with your noble actions. All those women, that you called bitches and whores, were somebody’s daughter or sister or mother. Would you want someone treating your daughter or sister or mother like you treated those women? Would you want someone even talking about your sister or your daughter or mother like that?” Chor fell silent.
“I forgive you, love,” I said, the words making their way past my inner security guard. The fresh work of the medicine and his freely offered confession helped me to be soft. Anger dissipated. Waves of tenderness washed over me. Sighs of surrender pierced my chest. I could almost feel the night air rushing into the gaping wound.
I understood what it was like to smother a secret, in shame and in pain. I felt for him. Still, touch was one thing. Sex was another. And he had gambled with my life.
“I just need time...to feel. I need to time to wait and watch and see how this healing unfolds for both of us.”
I’d never felt more hurt by him. And yet I’d never felt closer to him. Talk about brutal honesty. At least he had confessed of his own free will, and I respected that.
We curled up in bed. I wept. I shed the tears of 10 winters. Ice melting. Armor breaking. Chor held me and absorbed my waves of sadness.
“I’m going to let the world know that I’m married,” he said.
“Yeah, you better let the world know who your queen is,” I said, “IF we make it through this.” We locked eyes, acknowledging the uncertainty.
“You were hiding me,” I continued. I was perpetually aware and even amused that he left me out of his endless stream of social media posts. He often highlighted other artists, friends, his immediate family, even fans. But I was the invisible other half. I did not expect to be put on a throne every day, but there was a natural dignity in me that longed to be acknowledged. We brought each other inspiration and support daily. We hashed out ideas for paintings and projects. We were shining lights in each other’s lives.
“I was hiding you,” he admitted. “No more. The world has to know.”
“Just hold me. No plans now,” I said.
I shivered in shock through the night, slipping in and out of dreams of him using other women—and other women using him. I saw a shadowy stream of drunken disposable bodies, rhythmic grunting, and empty expulsions of impulse. Secrecy and shame hung over the ambiguous forms like clouds of pollution. I died with grief that night, over and over again.
I woke in his arms. I lay for a moment with my eyes closed, hesitant to greet reality. I released a breath, yielding to the stark, ugly truth of it all. I sensed that my torrid dreams were in part reflections of my own debased actions, when I’d been out of integrity with myself.
“I love you,” he said, and showered me in kisses. I blinked. I lay there for a while, emotionally catatonic.
Finally, I rose and walked outside in a daze, looking into the morning sun. Cattle roaming. Creatures singing. Yes. The same paradise as yesterday.
My heart, shattered beyond recognition, was apparently still beating inside me.
I don’t know what to do.
Is this the straw that’s breaking my back?
What is love?
As I looked out over the land, a bigger picture came into view. In a relationship, every moment matters. Every thought matters. Small actions can have monumental ripple effects. True love demands vigilant full presence, every breath.
I had had so many negative thoughts over the past few years. A mountain of little resentments had accumulated. I kept a quiet tally of what was given and taken. Plenty of moments I had withheld my warmth when the scale was tipped. Devotion had lost out to simple accounting. Plenty of moments, I had fantasized about other people or about the perfect lover that didn’t exist. Where had my own tainted thoughts planted weeds in our love?
I spent the day in quiet contemplation. I could barely eat. I wrote what I could bear. My stiff and guarded body threatened to break as I stretched in and out of gentle yoga poses, but it didn’t.
I felt peaceful and horrified—all at once; the whole truth and nothing but the truth had been laid out on the table. I just knew. There were no more skeletons in the closet to jump out at me.
Chor and I sat together in the hammock, in silence. No expectations, no limitations, no hovering anger. I secluded myself from all the others that day. I wanted to be alone, aside from Chor’s quiet, steady presence. I wanted to avoid their scanning, knowing eyes. A pleasant “how are you today?” would have sent me into tidal tears. I wasn’t up for the public surgery just yet.
Midday, Chor went to visit with the men at the other house for a while. “I talked to Mopunga and Michael,” Chor reported back. He shared with them that he had confessed to me. Though it was stated that no confessions were required here at Iboga Sanctuary, they were still happy to listen and offer counsel.
“Mopunga said ‘Wow, you are really ready, man.’ They said I have to just let you be and let you feel,” Chor said.
“Yeah,” I concurred without any fanfare.
The sunset show came. Chor and I sat together in the bittersweetness of it all. The ultimate romantic retreat in the ultimate pain.
Nighttime descended. We lay in bed, resting, preparing, praying, opening. The suspense of our own personal cliffhanger was grueling. Where would this journey lead us?