I am both a kind and rather a wise man. I have always wanted to be a good human being, to do unto others as I would have them to do onto me. And still I just about killed both my wife and the divine feminine within me. This is how it happened.

My beloved and I had just got our first child. A little jewel of a daughter, her first child and my first daughter. I have four sons from two previous marriages. I was happy with the little one, but not always with her mother. She didn’t always understand things the way I wanted, she didn’t understand me. She was just like all of my wives!  And that made me sad.

My companion had had a little lump in her left breast for some years. It had been examined and found benevolent. While she breastfed our daughter something happened to the lump, its shape changed, and when she showed it to a nurse when our daughter was six months old she was immediately sent to hospital for examination.

A couple of weeks later a for her unknown doctor phoned and told her that she had cancer and that her whole breast was scheduled to be operated away the following week. What a chock! And what a manner to deliver it! She could not accept the proposed operation, which was slung upon her without warning. She had had no time to prepare herself for it nor for a life with just one breast. ”My soul is running a thousand miles behind my body”, she said to her surgeon.

The operation was rescheduled, first one week forward and later several times again. We started our odyssée to gain better understanding of what this announcement of cancer in my wife really meant for her and for all of us. We traveled far and widely and met many specialists of both conventional and alternative cancer treatments.

The challenge was that all the alternative specialists said – independent of their particular method of treatment – that whatever my wife had it did not behave like a cancerous growth usually did. There was something strange about it. And all the conventional cancer specialists were united in seeing cancer in her breast, which should be operated away as soon as possible.

The doctors’ attitudes reminded me of President Bush’s argumentation in preparation for the Operation Freedom, which should have cut away the nest of terrorists supposedly existing in Iraq some years back. The evil should be annihilated as soon as possible, so that peace of our mind and body can  be restored. The Operation was a success; Iraq was annihilated, but those terrorists-cells continue to spread all over the world just like cancer-cells keep on spreading even though they have been thoroughly bombarded with chemotherapy and radiation.

The wisest of the alternative experts saw cancer as a sign of unresolved emotionally traumatic experiences. That which has not been faced on it’s own level – in this case as an emotion – needs to express itself on the physical plane, it needs to make itself visible. For only that which we are conscious of can be treated and changed. Some of these experts had been able to heal cancer solely by supporting the healing of the emotions that had caused the cancer in the first place. Even some of the nurses in our local hospital had observed that most of the breast-cancer patients had had a seriously traumatic experience some 18 months before the cancer had been diagnosed.

It was a demanding time for my beloved, who finally after a delay of over a month  succumbed to the press and accepted the proposed operation.  All went well – and she dared to say no to her doctor’s kind offer of a ”full house” of hormone-, chemo- and radiation -therapies. She hoped that she had come long enough to trust her body to heal itself. And I could feel that I had been her supportive partner, even though I sometimes felt overwhelmed by her needs and by her strong will. But that was just a passing emotion – something to press down…

My companion became a one-breasted mother who breastfed our lovely daughter for two more years. By then we had lived together six years and I had gained courage to get married once more – it was my fourth time. We were married on a glorious day of autumn in a temple-like opening of a leafy forest by the sea.

Our Iranian friends were both the only guests and the official witnesses for the ceremony. They initiated us with some of their own wedding customs, which were complemented by bride’s song and my speech. The ceremony was rounded up by our daughter who invited all of us – even the civil servant who officiated at the wedding – to a merry ring-dance in the middle of our natural temple. That was the best marriage ceremony I have ever participated in! And I do have something to compare it with…

The wedding was on a Saturday and on the following Monday new cancerous lumps were found in the remaining breast. We had been happily married for two whole days!

A new operation was proposed – this time around my wife quickly accepted to become wholly flatbreasted. She wanted to have the operation as soon as possible in order to participate in a choral-show she together with her choir had created and worked with for a whole year.

The theme of the show was ”The Arabian Nights”, more precisely the central story of Scheherezade who dares to marry a sultan who has killed all her wives after the first night of consummation to avoid being hurt again. His first wife had betrayed him with another man and thus wounded him deeply.

Once again the operation was a success, but there was a little extra lump on her skin that was difficult to extract. That is why the operation was long and the surgeon looked worried after it. But everything was OK and the tests afterwards were satisfactory.

The day of the choral-show was near, and my wife recuperated rapidly during the two weeks after the operation. She was strong and the show was wonderful. The women had together reformed the story into a compilation of modern songs and their own intimate stories bound together by colorful danses and lively choreography.

I happened to get a seat in the focal point of the whole ensemble. I sat there enjoying and crying, these women touched a cord deep inside my soul. I myself had been just like the sultan who killed his wives. I had not killed mine but left them after I had felt betrayed by them. None of them had been able to fulfill my dreams, to be what I wanted them to be. To be betrayed had been the theme of my life, to be betrayed by my mother, my wives and by my world. Nobody understood me the way I wanted. Nobody really loved me. The women of the choir touched me, they woke me up from the mists of my betrayals, but only for a moment…

One day I caressed my wife and found a little lump by her shoulder blade. It turned out to be another piece of cancerous growth. It meant that the cancer had now spread from the breasts and could now be anywhere in her body. The lump was operated away and the doctors were united in their view that the only thing that could help my wife was a dose of chemotherapy. It would not cure the cancer but would increase her chances of survival by 50 %. That felt hazy and became ever more so when we understood that the figures came from a statistical increase of life-expectation from 2 to 4 percent. What a reason to live through the pains of the therapy itself!

My wife was afraid. She would need to choose between pest and cholera. She was utterly alone as I became more and more chilly towards her the more fearful she got. I had great difficulties to be emotionally supportive and present for her. I withdrew and felt that if she only understood what I meant, that cancer was solely an expression of unresolved emotions, she could heal herself. But she was not ready for such an understanding, she betrayed me by not understanding herself as I wanted her to.

We were both enormously lonely in this situation, which for me was exactly the same damned feeling of betrayal I had suffered from with all of my wives. How could I always choose so wrong!  Or could my fate have something to do with guy making all these choices? For I was actually the only common denominator for all of my wives. When will I ever learn my lesson?

Also our wonderful acts of physical love faded away. We had been able to roll in the cradle of love for hours in a shared meditation. It had been our simple garden and a meeting place even in the midst of serious storms. But now also this gate was closed, my wife’s body was so wounded and her soul was so afraid, and there were no forms to see nor to hold for my masculinity. Life was flat and empty, desolate.

My wife and I both felt deserted, we both felt let down in the moment we most needed each others support. We were both utterly alone. She found other persons to whom she could turn for support and advice, and I felt all the more misunderstood as somehow I knew that I could help her – if I just got her to listen to me. But it was not possible as all of my approaches triggered her strong defenses, there was no way for me to reach her anymore. I felt powerless and helpless. We were both shrouded by the deep darkness of the autumn.

One day I bought a magazine. I found in it an article about singer-songwriter Nick Lowe. One of his song texts touched me.

I Trained Her To Love Me

Do you see the way she lights up
when I walk in the room,
that’s good

And the skip in her step
when we’re both out walkin’
in the neighborhood

This one’s almost done,
now to watch her fall apart
I trained her to love me
so I can go ahead and break her heart

If you think that it’s depraved
and I should be ashamed, so what
I’m only paying back womankind
for all the grief I got

Was this a text about me? Could I really be so cruel even though I was so good and kind? Why would I have a grudge against women? So many of them had loved me, but none of them had truly fulfilled my dreams. That is why I had left them all. They had not loved me and understood me the way I wanted, the way they should.

A healing woman said to my wife that she should leave me in order to survive. She meant that I carried the cruel male heritage that creates and maintains her cancer. I was framed as the cause of her suffering. ”Damn, I can’t be responsible for her illness, it’s only hers! We are all responsible for our own decisions, we all create our own life. I can’t release her from her burden, specially not when she doesn’t even want to listen to me!”

My sons came to visit us at Christmas. One of them had her girlfriend with him. One day he was depressed and angry with his world. I recognized something of myself in him and heard his girlfriend describe it with the words ”If looks could kill”. I heard and remembered it.

Our Christmas was gloomy. I loved and cared for all of my beloved children, but could not face my wife with the same ease. I heaped my darkness upon her because she did not understand me. We were both utterly lonely, suffering in our cocoons of protective thoughts and attitudes. Life was about to come to an end.

I noticed that I already planned a life without her, thought of how she would die and I would live on to take care of our lovely daughter. My wife was already so thin, her hair was falling down in great tufts and she was filled with fear. She had not understood, she would die – and I was right. So cruel were my – almost – unconscious thoughts!

I noticed also that at the back of my mind I formed a vision of a faceless woman, round and soft with big breasts. That was my unconscious order for my next woman.

I realized that this had happened before. When I had got tired of a woman I had started dreaming of a quality that had been missing in the present relationship. I had always got what I had dreamed of, but curiously enough the same quality has always also become a reason for me to get tired of the same woman.

First I got fed up with the earthly and the practical, then with the ambitious and strongly sexual and later with the solicitous and intuitive. What was I now getting bored with? And what was that I wanted to get instead?

What if all these yearned for qualities could actually be found in me? Maybe my women had just mirrored them back to me to make me conscious of them? What if it was time for me to become the gorgeously loving being I so dreamed of? For is it not that the gorgeous big-breasted woman symbolizes for the still yearning unsatisfied child within me?

All of this also reminded me of my father’s inability to meet my mother’s illness. She suffered from mental troubles as long as they were married. After they had separated she had no more need to hide herself behind the heavy walls of a mental hospital. Was something of a similar nature taking place with me and my wife? Was my attitude towards her one of the reasons why she developed her illness?

One night after New Year I woke up early in the morning and felt that now was the time to finish this up. My wife had shown me a letter she had got from our friends in USA. She had written back to them by writing in between the lines. All that she had written had something to do with me, with my shortcomings. It felt as if everything would be alright if only I could be changed, turned into her prince of deliverance. I felt that I could not go on as the reason and a caregiver for her illness, I needed to leave her and to let life go on. I sat down by my Mac to write a letter to her.

Before I wrote that letter I glanced through some letters that she had written to me earlier on those many occasions when I had been ready to finish our relationship. I read quite a few, read and pondered. I read some more – also letters from our friends – and never wrote my final letter to my wife. Something happened deep within me and in the morning I was able to look into her eyes for the first time after a long pause.

Maybe the following text she wrote to me quite recently made me think otherwise, maybe something else.

”I do not know how I can ever get a grip of the whole without once again talking about you. I have strong feeling that you carry an aspect of your parents’ relationship, which makes you both hard and governing (like your father) and vulnerable and compliant (like your mother) – said very harshly. You keep on falling in both of their patterns. As your father you run your own race, are lacking in humility, you may even hate the word, and are incapable of expressing empathy,  and you make decisions about matters important for my life without ever involving me in them – all of this you try to make good by being submissive to my needs. As your mother you feel that you are powerless. And you are not happy with neither of those roles. That is why you need to get rid of your feeling of dissatisfaction. Right now I feel that I receive your projections, which make me weak and almost desperate. I become governing when I feel that I try to keep up my self-respect and learn to be explicit with my thoughts and needs. I become the totally helpless who can’t live without you – which I have  actually done for 35 years before I met you. Everybody needs help sometimes, both practical and emotional. That’s what I’ve got, but I have mostly been able to take care of myself. I have been conscientious…”

The last thing I read from the web that morning was a little story about newborn twins. As premature they were both placed in an incubator of their own. As usual one of the twins was stronger than the other. A nurse came upon to think that maybe the babies could be helped by having them lie beside each other. Against all the rules of conduct she placed them in the same incubator, and soon saw how the stronger of the twins placed his tiny arm around his sister.

Life took care of itself and they were both made stronger by this embrace. A picture of those two made my smile with love and empathy –  this was just what my wife had dared to
ask from me, and I had not been able to give. I went back to our bed and stretched my arm around my wife.

These openings have come and gone. We have both seen something deep and wonderful, lived for a while in a peaceful calm only to fall back to our old pitfalls again and again. Yeah, here is an opening, life looks calmer and more joyful, but something more is needed.

My wife finds an alternative clinic in Germany, where a doctor combines discussion therapy with hypertermi, which means raising the body temperature to fight the cancer-cells. She decides against the proposed chemotherapy and books a flight to the clinic in Germany. She would stay there for a week. It sounds good, she has made up her mind.

Somewhere deep inside my soul I can discern a desperate voice of a child, who wishes that my wife would die. She has earned it, she has not understood nor loved me as I have wanted. This child in me is a poor bastard that has been imprisoned by its own vengeance after somebody near to it – mother or another – has failed to fulfill all of its needs, has failed to love it. All them should die! All those that have betrayed me should die! That’s what this poor devil in me has been screaming for so long. Screamed and screamed – and formed my life.

I have not dared to listen to this child, for his message has been so clear and cruel. And for this very reason this wounded and suppressed child of my unconscious has been kept alive to run my world and my relationships. I have actually killed and killed, taken the life of all of my relationships – and not only with women – for I have always found some proof that persons near and dear to me do not really love and care for me. I have been very successful.

Right now I am killing my wife, not so softly draining her of all life-energy that she desperately needs to meet her cancer. What is that for wisdom? What is that for love? My bloodthirsty devil is unveiled! This forbidden hate is the ground out of which all wars and all violence of our world arises. This violence of a desperate child is the cause of all misery that we create while trying to love each other. We all need to win, to know that we have got it right – which means that somebody else need to lose, to have it all wrong. And the ones who have it wrong have no right to live. Isn’t that the way our world with all of it’s Johnssons, Smiths, Hitlers, Bushs and Putins is run?

And I as a good, almost holy, person do not differ in the slightest from all the crooks of my world. How about you, my friend?

The same devil lies at the root of our relationship towards our dear Mother Earth. We use her, we exploit her and we rape her just like we use, exploit and rape our women, our children and our neighbors. As long as the hidden devil lives within us everything and everybody around us is seen as a means of filling the black hole of its endless demands for love and annihilation. What if our wretched yearning for death and annihilation arises from the yearning of the black hole itself, it naturally yearns to be annihilated and thus resolved for life to go on?

The moment I unveiled the devil in me I was free from it. And the moment I could tell this to my wife our new life started. The sun banished the clouds and the whole world vibrated in a new and loving way. We were finally really together! I had seen and taken me through my history and could now see also my wife as she really was behind her wounded form. We had both fought and been wounded in our mighty and mysterious battle of Harmagedon.

I had won over myself – I had beaten the ancient devil that had run my life – and been rewarded with my love, with my own greatly loving embrace. It is now time for me to love on, to always remember my true nature as a loving Creator in the forever new moments of now. This is what I am, this is what my wife and all the people around me are. We are all here to become lovingly conscious creators of new worlds and universes to come. We are all here to love all and everything as ourselves. That’s what God is, what you and I are – forever and forever.

Thank you my dear wife for you have helped me to see and unveil my poor hateful devil, the release of whom from the prison of my own mind was long overdue. You have lost your breasts, but that which you truly are now shines even more. For truly you are none of your body parts, you are the invisible and invincible energy or spirit behind them all. You are Life itself – that’s what we all are!

I have now pulled up the nails with which I had nailed you on your own cross. It is now time for you to pull up the nails you yourself have driven in. You yourself need to climb down from your cross of victimization we both needed to unveil our unconscious programs of destructive co-dependency. It’s time to go on, time to live on as the loving lights of love that we all are.

That took place some time ago. A hopeful end for a miserable dance with our shadows. But unfortunately it was not really done with that. We were not yet ready for the world of our dreams, we were not yet ready to leave our emotional entanglements, our identities as human beings. We both needed some more time with our past.

Many times we have found ourselves in the same landscape of desperate doubts and accusations. And many times have I hoped and believed that now it is all finished, one way or another.

Just the other day I was again ready to leave my wife, we would both surely be better off without the pain that we were for each other. I could hear this voice in me, but as I had already followed its advice several times without any true success, I could now take it easy and just observe myself in this recurring situation. – Maybe there was another way to react in this repetitive experience?

I woke up at three o’clock in the morning and went out for a walk. I have a habit of discussing with God in the darkness of night, that’s when he/she hears me and I hear it. Out there in the darkness I realized how my sick dance with my wife has its roots in my childhood.

My mother was often sick during my first years. She traveled back and forth between our home and a mental hospital. She had troubles enough with herself, and thus could not attend to my needs, it actually became my instinctive job to keep her happy. Otherwise I would lose her again, which I still did time after time.

When she felt better and tried to find a form of natural nearness by hugging me, I had already closed myself for her, and felt her attempts as merely embarrassing and disgusting. It was not my job to love my mother, it was my mother’s job to love me. I felt betrayed and disappointed, I was alone. We were both that.

This time around my wife was sick, and needed my love. In the shadow of a child’s suppressed hate, I do not know how to love my wife when she is in a desperate need of it. I punish her for what my mother did – or didn’t – when I was dependent of her. The anger of a wounded child for the once experienced betrayal makes me dumb and reserved in the face my wife’s suffering. I am bound to a shadow of my past which makes me cold and insensitive. I am a past person.

When I dare to see all this, when I turn my focus upon this darkness within me, when I just observe it, when I am with it without judgement, I can finally take my first steps out of this trauma, from this ancient pitfall. When I focus upon it without any attachment, any memories of the past, it gradually fades away, evaporates into the nothingness out of which I had once called it into my life.

In that pure moment I can choose something else, something other than what the wounded boy within me has made me choose for so long. That poor bastard of my own being has lived in my adult body for ages, eating up its vitality as well as the vitality of people around me. It’s time to bury the past, to let it go. Right there behind the known misery of my past has always existed the unknown universe of unlimited future potentials. That source of all life exists also within me, it is what I truly am. It is time for me to trust it, to let the unknown grow to become new joyful futures for me to create in.

It is not accompanied by great fanfares. No, it is rather a slow and sensitive opening of a delicate bud which has waited for so long under the shadows of my past for the right moment to flower. Slowly this exotic flower opens from its slumber. Its growth requiring empathy and proper nutrition, love and the rare waters of Life. I need to take care of this flower, I need to love it. This flower opens up towards my future creating new models and possibilities, new worlds to live in. The flower of my mind is delicate and simple, full of Life itself. The flower is what I have always been behind all of the illusory, but ever so tempting, shadows of my past. The flower is what I am, my life within the Oneness of it all.