It is very difficult to live a thriving spiritual and emotional bisexual life with a wounded soul.  Yes, we can try to stay in the moment, but our ego-minds keep dragging us back to past wounds and fears. To live a victorious life we have to come to terms with the ego part of our soul. This means trusting the heart and using its love power to heal the bisexual mind.

I searched my soul and began to trust the feelings from my heart. I knew these feeling would lead me to the true path where I could find peace and understanding. But to get to that place, I would have to retrace my steps one more time, but this time with the creative powers of self-love in stead of the destructive powers of self-hate. This meant going back into my core relationships and into the heart of my wounded inner child. It also meant going right back to my biological make-up, my sense of identity, and my bisexual orientation, and reconnecting these thoughts and feelings through unconditional positive regard for my Self..

During my two years in Costa Rica, surrounded by peace and beauty, I stopped hating myself and began the healing process which immediately focused on my past relationships. I came across this image of gift giving. I did not want to destroy the thoughts, images, and feelings connected to the people I had loved; I just wanted the pain part to go away. I still wanted to give them the gift of my love and receive the gift of their love. I needed to separate the good parts from the bad; I had to destroy the connections to pain.

One of the most powerful tools of healing is imagery. Imagery bypasses the thought processing part of the brain and gets us directly in touch with our feelings. One of the best strategies of imagery that I have found is gift giving. Most of our struggles are related to past and present relationships.  I believe we can best rewire negative social patterns to positive ones by accepting the contributions people have made to life as it is and by thanking them for their gifts and by giving them gifts in return.

In my opinion, there seems to be two sides to each relationship, the negative and the positive. I feel we have to recognize that both are gifts, even the negative. When we allow our feelings of love to mingle with the emotions of rejection and abandonment, we can reroute the fears and hurts of the ego into the positive feelings of acceptance and gratitude from the heart. We simply acknowledge the people involved and thank them for the good gifts they have brought into our lives. Then we examine the negative influences they still have on us, wrap them up into a second gift, and place it on an altar we have prepared just outside the spiritual room we can visualize and create in our soul. We then call on the fire of passion from the heart to burn it up and blow it away. We can visualize the negative vapors dispersing into the gentle summer wind that blows continuously in the spiritual garden just outside the inner room. We need to visualize the burning of negative constructs as an act of kindness, a gift to the people involved, because it frees their souls from the negative bonds we have created.

As we do this a miracle takes place. We begin to become conscious of the fact that we had done our best under the circumstances.  We begin to see patterns of behavior that we had established to survive.  Then we begin to understand that these patterns involved others who may have unintentionally wounded us, especially during the early childhood developmental years when we were innocent and vulnerable. We become more understanding, patient, and even loving with our Self.  We give ourselves credit for having done a remarkable job just to survive.

After giving gifts to some people with whom I had had more intense, intimate relationships, I could almost sense a release of their pain and confusion. I realized that I too had given them gifts, some good gifts from my heart and some bad gifts from my wounded ego. As my ex-wife said to me ten years later, the break-up and dealing with the truths of my secrecy and deception had made her a stronger person.  At that moment, I stopped feeling guilt and shame.  I realized that we were just two souls trying to thrive and grow and that for thirty-three years we had helped each other become powerful human beings. I also realized that our parting, painful as it was, was also a necessary part in that path to self-awareness and Self -actualization, which for me meant accepting and cherishing the gay part of my bisexual orientation. We are now friends once again and we have  rededicated ourselves to working together to make the lives of our adult children and our grandchildren just a little bit easier and a little bit better.