The Metaphysics of Cheating—Hints that He’s Found Someone New and One Sure-Fire Way to Know (Part III)

Photo by Road Fun; creative commons license
Continued from Part II of this series….

4.       An unusual new sex trick.  If he hasn’t obviously been reading a self-help book to spice up your relationship or searching such advice online, a new trick in his repertoire might be cause for alarm—especially if he seems to be well-practiced at it.  Most first-time tries have a few fumbled attempts. 

5.       The mention of a new person.  A lot of men and women want to be “honest” with their mates so they mention a new love interest, without the references to love or sex, so that they can later say, “But I told you about him/her.”   There’s usually some point of admiration or friendliness that’s described.  I knew immediately that I had competition when a former love interest of mine suddenly told me on a Monday morning about the amazing professional services offered by another woman’s business and that we should patronize her little company.  He was business partners with her competition!?!  The adoration in his voice and the blatant praise for her, using words he’d once used for me, made their connection obvious even though it must have sounded innocent to him.  He caught my inquisitive stare and shut up, but six weeks later, he confessed that this fascinating woman in his life was no longer as fascinating to him but—oops—she was also pregnant.  Conception date?  The Friday night before when he’d missed a party with me to attend an unexpected social occasion at work. 

6.       Unusual tastes in music.  People don’t spend decades hating jazz and then suddenly find it a turn-on.   Betsy was a country music lover with a hatred for anything Top 40 or hip-hop.  Her husband began to suspect something had changed when he repeatedly found her car radio tuned to a particular station, which happened to be a favorite of her lover’s.  Not only that, but she changed her ring-tone to match the station’s top song.  Since when did this “Redneck Woman” like “Candy Shop”?

Watch for  the next three telltale signs in the next installment of this series, coming later in the month.

Now Returning You to My Regularly Scheduled Programming….

I’ve been shying away from talking about certain subjects recently, and I promise I’m going to stop that.  Right now.

I pulled a series of articles/posts because I was afraid they’d be misconstrued by somone they weren’t about and would cause more trouble.  But it really doesn’t matter because I think anything I write about will be misconstrued to someone’s advantage if that’s what they want to do, and I don’t know that my silence makes anyone’s life better, particularly when it’s about them only if they make it about them.

Sometimes it’s a very fine line to keep such a blog as this.  I have written honestly about my life and insights knowing that many different kinds of people read my words–strangers, fans, my children, my mother, my ex-mom-in-law who hates my guts, my best friend, my former friends, my high school boyfriend, people I loved in college, my ex, my ex’s extended family and friends throughout North America, my coworkers, my students, my former High Priestess, my ex-boyfriends, men I’ve dated, the ex-wives and girlfriends of men I’ve dated, people from back home, neighbors, and my ex-husband’s girlfriend(s) before and after they became exes.  Whether people love or hate me, I’ve never really shied away from what I write.  I won’t stop writing about my spiritual insights just because I know someone who might make me squeamish is reading daily.  I write my truth regardless of who reads it, and if they don’t like it, there’s plenty else to read online.  I’m not forcing anyone to read what I have to say, nor am I forcing them to interpret it a certain way.

That said, I was upset that some of my posts have caused problems for certain people who know me and assumed it was all about them.  With strangers, they write and tell me what a coincidence it is that they’re going through the same thing I’ve written about.  With people who know me, they don’t assume a coincidence–they’re sure I know their secrets!

I’ll begin re-inserting the pulled posts this week.  I share some of them with a small group and learned that they are valuable enough that I need to get them out there to the people they really do help.

Happiness Will Have to Wait a Few Days

My apologies to my regular readers, especially those of you expecting a New Moon in Scorpio meditation for October.  I’m in grieving mode right now and need some time to recouperate.  The happiness I’ve wished for will have to wait–there’s a divine timing for everything, as I’ve been shown many times, and right now it’s time for me to curl up, get some rest, and take care of myself.

Proving Your Intuition Is Correct

Photo by Leticia Cruz

I’ve come to trust my intuition more than ever in the past year. And at the same time, there are still the times when I’m unsure. And I like to be sure. I do.

 

 

How do you verify your intuition? If there’s a pattern to follow, then it tastes like it might be right.

Probability of success is there.Your intuition doesn’t come from inside you, I’ve been told. It’s God talking to you.

Okay, great. So if I don’t trust my intuition, I don’t trust God? Now I can feel guilty, too?

I can verify my intuition through discussion with others, whether it’s talking things through or gathering facts. But sometimes, there’s just nothing in advance to say it’s a good decision.

That’s when the last form of confirmation is the hardest on those of us who were born impatient and “out of time.”

Sometimes confirmation of your intuition comes through delivery.

© 2006, Excerpt from The Third Degree Diaries, by Lorna Tedder, www.spilledcandy.com;  The books in this series may be read in any order or, to see the author’s spiritual growth and use it for your on roadmap, start with the first book in the series.

Chakras: The Root Connection Between Survival and Spirituality

Photo by  Robbi Baba

I’m quite sure most people think I look at things quite differently.  I think they’re right.   I hung up the phone tonight after a fascinating one-hour phone conversation of “romantical nature” and thought, Wow, his root chakra’s REALLY active!

For the second time in a row, my weekend plans with Maverick have fallen through, due to emergencies at his Commando Boy job, and this means I won’t get the long-planned-for time alone with him until his deployment’s over–sometime next year.  I’m a little worried he’ll get himself blown up, yes.  He’ll be in Afghanistan, worshipping me from half-a-world-away and probably dreaming up more fantasies of a matriarchal utopia where men under 25 are forced to appear in public sans clothes for the ogling pleasure of older women and how I should choose a whole harem of men if I want.  (Hmmmm…if you insist.)

Like I said, his root chakra is very active right now.  Not that I’m doing anything at all to alleviate the situation.  Maybe NEXT spring. (Talk about denial!)

I like him because–other than the fact that he’s very sexy, ten years younger, and full of poetic delights–he has a tendancy to examine deep psychological questions about sexuality and society and makes me look at the why of many things I take for granted in my personality.  Not many men have that to offer.  I doubt he realizes how affecting his conversations are.  We’ve yet to discuss chakras, but one day we will.

One of his stories that I found interesting was how tense the strumming of adrenaline after returning from patrol.  It’s a daily life or death situation.  Survival.  Very much the root chakra in full force.  But there’s also a tense  strumming of sexuality after that kind of day, just as powerful in the root chakra.   The connection between the two is fierce, powerful, a heightened sense of both survival and sexuality that goes to the most primal needs.

It’s a small thing to be able to make this connectionin this way, yet it is one more way in which Maverick has been a gift to me, regardless of where our relationship goes from here.

Scorpio Moon: Is It Real or Is It Illusion?

Here’s a replay of a previous post about a ritual from 2005, just because we have double full moons in Scorpio with a Taurus sun for the April-May 2008 time frame. This was during my Cancer Scare of 2005–turned out to be a caffeine-induced lump–but I was just coming to grips with starting over and how my past was still influencing my present and my future.

Photo by Old Shoe Woman

The moon’s in Scorpio again. And tonight, it’s a New Moon. When the moon’s in Scorpio, it’s all about secrets and intensity and sexuality. It’s also about fertility—of ideas and feelings and more—and about truth and trust.

The energies of this Samhain season have been intense, even before the moon’s latest transit. I hardly know a soul who isn’t feeling either weepy or aggravated for no reason. For those of us with reason, it’s been even worse. But I’ve made a nervous appointment with a doctor and I’m feeling much calmer today after my own quiet little Samhain ritual last night by a campfire in the back yard.

The evening didn’t go anything as planned. I ended up having to chauffeur both kids to Halloween events so we didn’t have time for the annual feast between my getting home from work and their need to run off to their own social lives. Returning home 30 minutes later to the huge box of candy having been emptied by the first greedy trick-or-treater didn’t help either. And then I had to make separate trips to pick up the girls when their events were over, so I knew I’d get a very, very late start to my own workings.

While driving to pick up Shannon, I asked the Gods to show me something about my relationships this past year as I release its energies and prepare for the new year and what it brings. I started thinking about disillusionment. We say someone is disillusioned and we see how sad they are. But they have been dis-illusioned. They’ve had their illusions stripped away from them. That should be a good thing, shouldn’t it? They should be happy that they no longer have illusions because they can focus on something real. Okay, so my own disillusionment almost destroyed me a couple of years ago.

It’s still toying with me, too. The idea of what’s real and what’s an illusion. This year, I’ve been so intent on keeping away the illusions that I failed to see what’s real. In the past, I’d had some really great things-seemingly-come into my life and I’d thought-I’d WANTED-them to be real. But they shielded and showed only a certain side, knowing that I now demand honesty in my relationships. It takes a lot of energy to wear a façade for that long. And eventually, it droops and the reality shows through.

With that in mind, I’m curious about some illusions I thought I had this past year. Things I couldn’t believe were real. Like my friendship with The Treat. My own kids had told me we had an obviously strong mutual admiration for each other and they’d thought it was wonderful, but I shrugged it off. So I ask the Gods to show me, show me what was real. Was any of it real? Because now it all seems so far away, as if none of it ever really happened and I’ve little or no evidence that it ever did, with the exception of a few text messages I never erased.

 

 

 

Not long before midnight, I light a fire in the firepit. I cast a circle and call the Quarters. I honor my grandfather, Joe, and Anna, and all those I’ve loved who have passed. I honor the past lives that have gone on before me: Brynedd and Dageniam and Thomas and Rita and Alexandros and countless unnamed and unpronounceable ones. I honor the disillusionment of the past few years, and I honor the wonderful things and people who have come into my life in the past year and I honor those who have gone. Jillian, Jeaneen, Almolinumomiae, The Treat, others.

I light a “bleeding” candle, white on the outside and red on the inside, and offer my fervent intentions for the coming year. I sit by the fire and soak up the calm. It’s so peaceful inside the circle, almost as if bugs and blips of aggravation are pinging against the force field of energy I’ve erected around me. Not one gets through. It’s calmer than I can remember in weeks.

And then suddenly something is shown to me, something that soothes my heart chakra and jolts it to life. Even as I see it, I’m thinking, “I used to have so many epiphanies.” But in the past few months, the epiphanies have dried up since The Treat’s been gone. I miss the epiphanies, the revelations, however dark sometimes.

And then I’m shown. My newest epiphany. Things I’d forgotten or didn’t understand at the time. Snippets of conversation. A sideways glance. A lowering of the voice to share an unsure secret, not knowing if the secret would be ridiculed or relished. It was there all along, the reality of that relationship, and I missed it. Something real. And I missed it. Because I had decided that it MUST be illusion.

Only now I see it in a different light, the light of time and distance. Not just piece-parts but the whole. Though if I’d seen it earlier, I’m not sure what I would have done differently.

Maybe not been so eager to discredit the look in his eyes as my imagination. And maybe I’d have picked up the phone more instead of being shy and so damned unsure of myself.

But see, that’s the problem with trying to discern what’s real and what’s illusion. You realize how much of life has been an illusion and you start to peel it off so you can live a “real” life. Only you don’t know what real looks like. And you see something special that doesn’t fit the mold of real, and you miss it or discount it, no matter how innovative your thinking normally is. The mind’s been trained to see reality and relationships a certain way and you think, Good, it’ll be okay when it’s undefined and different, but when it really is undefined and different and wonderful, you have no idea what to do with it. You want something that doesn’t fit, and when it doesn’t fit and it’s just what you’re looking for and hoping for, you don’t trust it, have no experience with it, can’t peg it. If you’re lucky, the best you can do is figure that at least your feelings are real, but if the reason for those feelings is illusion, then what’s the point but to torture yourself?

 

 

So I’m shown the truth. Now. Now when the Moon’s in Scorpio and I’m sitting by a Samhain fire and honoring what’s passed. My intuition was there all along but I was so set on my expectations of illusion that I never really believed it. And what’s to be done about it now?

Nothing. Maybe next time, if there is a next time, I’ll be able to believe in something that’s as undefined and deeply touching as that relationship was for me. And maybe then, there’ll be more epiphanies…good ones.

 

 NOTE:  If this post was helpful to you, please consider subscribing to this blog or visit our main site at www.spilledcandy.com to join our mailing list and receive special sale prices or read our freebies.

 

 

 

© 2006, Excerpt from The Third Degree Diaries, by Lorna Tedder, www.spilledcandy.com;  The books in this series may be read in any order or, to see the author’s spiritual growth and use it for your on roadmap, start with the first book in the series.

 

Tarot: Card for Love and Innocence

Photo by MShades

Twice in the past month, I’ve drawn the Two of Cups. It’s one of the most beautiful cards in my Arthurian Tarot deck. A man and woman stand together aboard a dragon-faced ship, locked in a deep embrace, her head against his chest, his hand curling around her head. They are in love, and-I think-so am I.

 

I step out onto this thought, just bare toes on thin ice, and wait to drop into numbing waters and feel nothing again. I am jittery, hopeful, terrified, and elated, all at once. But I am alive, and I feel…something. Something that isn’t hurt and grief and anger and betrayal and devastation. Something I haven’t felt in a long time.

 

I call my best friend to tell her what I’ve discovered, but she already knows. Apparently, I’ve mentioned this man to her once or twice, and my eyes have sparkled and betrayed what even I didn’t know. She tells me I sound like a teenager, and she just loves it. She’d been afraid I would become bitter toward all men, given my marriage, and she gets a kick out of hearing me describe what I like about this man and the way my voice softens and lilts when I say his name.

 

Thinking this news will make my mother feel more secure about my new and independent life, I tell her I think I’m in love, but she doesn’t want to hear it. Why would I be interested in another man and so soon after my divorce? Would this stop my ex and me from getting back together? Maybe it would be better to let my ex remarry before I fall in love with someone new, she says. Disappointed, I tell her nothing else.

 

I should quit while I’m ahead, but I don’t. This new feeling is exciting and I want to talk about it. I tell two work-friends over lunch because they want to know why I keep smiling to myself. They want to hear all the dirt, so I describe this man and his sense of integrity and the way he makes me feel all shiny and new. They note the lightness in my voice, even a giggle, and then rip into me, teasing me until I have tears in my eyes. They take a happy moment and shred it. I don’t finish my dessert, but I feel stupid and childish, and I cross their company off my list. They tell me I’m being too sensitive and shouldn’t be upset with them.

 

None of it changes the way I feel. I’m totally and completely besotted with this man and didn’t know it. I can’t tell him this, not yet. I have to know if there’s a spark there first or if I’m the only one who’s smoldering. I don’t want to make the mistake of confessing to someone who isn’t ready to hear that I have emotions in his regard.

 

So I tamp down the feelings. I swallow them. I choke on them. Along with so many other feelings I’ve had that I wasn’t “allowed” to have during the course of my adolescence and later my marriage. I’m not allowed to feel anger because, I’m told, it’s morally wrong. I should be forgiving instead. I’m not allowed to feel joy because too many people see that as bragging or selfishness. I should feel selflessness instead. I’m not allowed to feel grief or despair because then I’m accused of needing anti-depressants or even, as one friend hinted, a suicide watch. I should feel calm and rational. And I’m not allowed to be in love because it’s too soon, too childish, too…whatever.

 

I choke and sputter and drown in my feelings, and they settle into my fifth chakra, right at my throat. I swallow them but they stick in my throat and won’t go down and won’t come up. I can’t breathe. The doctor says I have an infected trachea. I’ll be out of work for two weeks, and I’ve lost my voice in the meanwhile.

 

With a raspy, barely-there voice, I talk to my counselor but by now I’m distraught. “I had feelings come up for this man,” I tell him.

 

He laughs at me. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

 

“Yeah, well, everyone else seems to think so. And I don’t know what to do about them, so they must not be good. I’m expected to have all the post-divorce anger and grief and everyone wants to know if I’m having those and well, good, now swallow them and get on with your life. But these feelings are different.” I describe my affections and the reasons for them, and he stops me.

“Aw, honey, it’s okay to have feelings. Feelings are good. And these are good feelings. Just enjoy them. You don’t have to express them to this man or to anyone else. Just enjoy them for what they are.” 

These feelings do feel good. I could get lost in enjoying them. I could want to drag them out and make them last a long, long time.

 

“It’s been so long since I’ve felt this way,” I tell my counselor.

 

He laughs again. “I can hear it in your voice. It’s like you’ve become a virginal maiden all over again. You get all giggly and feel like a teenager around him instead of the calm, cool, and collected businesswoman that nothing fazes. It’s very sweet and wonderful. Just enjoy that feeling.”

 

Before I can say anything else, he adds, “Honey, don’t you see? You might very well have written off all men after your marriage, but instead, here is a man who has touched you deeply and rekindled an innocence in you that you thought you’d lost forever. You don’t have to say anything to him or to anyone else. Just breathe through your feelings and explore them.”

 

And now I have tears in my eyes again because my counselor has pinpointed the revelation for me: that I’ve reclaimed an innocence I thought was dead.

 

I’ve found a part of myself that I locked away a long time ago.

 

And I’ve fallen in love when I least expected it.

© 2006, Excerpt from Life in the Third Degree, by Lorna Tedder,

www.spilledcandy.com

This is Book #1 in the Third Degree Diary series, but they can be read in any order

How to Love Mondays

Photo by gragsie. 

If you’d told me 6 months ago that I’d love Mondays–that they might even be my favorite day of the week–I would have said you were crazy.   For good reason, too–I’ve hated Mondays for my entire life.

Here’s what’s wrong with Mondays…or what was wrong:

1.  The weekends are never long enough.  I hate going to bed on Sunday night and thinking of all the things I didn’t get finished or even started.  How many times have I run into someone in the elevator on Monday morning, five minutes before hitting the threshold of my office, and heard, “How was your weekend?” and the resulting response, “Not long enough.”  No matter how much work I finish on Saturday and Sunday or what a great time I have with family or friends, I need a little extra me-time and by Sunday evening, I’m only just beginning to unwind.

2.  The work environment is always so tense on …

For more of this article, see  The Long-Awaited Honest-to-God Secret to Being Happy, available at half-price to readers of The Spiritual Eclectic.  Click here to download.