Dear Lover by David Deida

is a reflection of the sacred.
    Sometimes your own body and mind won’t be able to sustain the openness necessary for your deepest heart to be offered. Your attention, and thus your energy, will go to superficial pleasures, sweet foods and nice caresses. You can intuit a much deeper yearning, but you may settle for less.
    Also, those around you may not be able to handle the inherent demand of your deepest offering. Many people are afraid of opening, so you will frequently be met by their closure.
    Therefore, your deepest heart will want more love than you or others seem capable of sustaining. You may constantly wish you were able to give and receive more love—and that your lover were more capable, too.
    How you respond to your heart’s wish for love depends on how deeply you are willing to feel and express your yearning without closing. Are you being a needy woman, grasping for security by manipulating others with your superficial charms? Are you being a hardened and independent-acting woman, suppressing your irresistible shine and keeping your heart unsurrendered despite your love’s aching? Or, are you being a divine offering of love, gracefully articulating love’s deepest light and yearning through your unique art of feminine devotion, offering your love even through a heart that may be open and hurting?
    Offer your feminine sexual energy through your deepest heart’s yearning. The radiance of your deep heart’s yearning is the beacon that attracts men of integrity. Not your neediness. Not your independence. Rather, deep men are attracted and inspired by your heart’s acheful offering, your blissfully anguished heart-plea to be taken—and the fact that your heart’s light won’t settle for anything less than total claim in divine love.
    Throughout your life, continue to intuit and offer your heart’s deepest longing, while you are touched sublimely and callously, while your children come and go, while your lover withdraws from you and while he shares your heart’s openness.
    The light of your heart’s deepest longing, offered through your whole body, is your deepest force of attraction. Your surrender and offering of love’s divine light is also the source of your life’s art, your devotional gift to all beings, and the only way to live open as your heart’s deepest pleasure.
    Would you rather live any other way?

17
Your Man Is Your Choice

    Dear lover, I don’t want you to give up. I know the men in your past have hurt you and that sometimes I am unable to meet you. But please don’t settle for less than your heart’s most deep desire. I have seen so many women give up and settle for a mediocre relationship that doesn’t open them to God. I have also seen women try to bypass the often difficult practice of two-bodied devotion by trying to love themselves.

    These women learn that by loving themselves just as they are, and by loving their man even with all his human limits, then they can feel OK. They can feel warmly OK with their own humanness and their man’s. They don’t need things to be perfect anymore. They are able to love and accept things as they are.

    But I would be disappointed if you settled for this. Loving you and me as we are—loving your own shells and loving me even with all my imperfections—is a first step. Yet a greater gift is allowing your heart’s deepest expression to illuminate my life so I can see more than I can by myself. And if you will choose me—or another man—who you trust to open your heart deeper than you can by loving your own human limits and shells, then your heart will flower far beyond simple OK-ness with the way things are.

    The first step is to love yourself, me, and everyone with all of our imperfections; we are divine and OK just as we are. The next step is to open in the fuller illumination of two-bodied devotional trust. Then, we can see more and offer our love more profoundly than we could without each other’s loving reflection and