This Is What David Bowie Taught Me About Sex, Love and Work
I had a fling with him in my dream last night.
If there is one thing I’m a true master at in life, it’s dreaming.
I have mastered using my dreams to understand my reality and also to create the life I want.
For example, I’ve found answers to medical issues in dreams that doctors couldn’t solve. I’ve seen scenes from my future which helped me make better decisions in the present and as a former psychotherapist, I’ve relied on the power of dream interpretation to help me resolve unconscious patterns keeping me stuck in life.
So you better believe when David Bowie shows up in my dream and we are exploring the nature of sexual chemistry, I’m going to dig deeper.
His simple question about what creates it is turning out to be a deeper lesson on sex, love and work and how these sometimes competing aspects of life intertwine.
The Dream
I’m with a forty year old David Bowie in a white room on a small yacht. We are lying down on a bed of white sheets making out. After awhile, however, we both start to hesitate.
Something has interrupted our flow.
This leads him to wonder out loud about the nature of sexual chemistry and what creates it. I wonder the same given our hesitancy.
Is there a lack of chemistry or is some kind of fear playing out between us blocking our flow?
And what are the special ingredients for the big love story where two people have chemistry on all levels: emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical?
Before we come up with an answer, I wake up.
The Exploration
I feel I have really been with David Bowie and this gets me curious.
Because for one, I’ve discovered men with whom I have amazing sexual chemistry with come few and far between. In the past four years only two men made the cut.
One was a beautiful love story of unconditional love.
I was with someone 16 years younger. We met in Thailand on vacation and then decided to live in India for several months. We went through almost every possible emotional challenge and somehow, despite the age gap and our short time together, managed to communicate from a place of such deep and compassionate understanding, it felt as if we had been together for a century.
Due to life circumstances, the timing wasn’t right for it to continue and after four short sweet months we went our separate ways.
He would start his new life in Australia having just completed his service in the Israeli army and I would give birth to my life as an artist in Berlin after just having left my career in NY.
The second one, a super soulful young dude who I met in a furniture store in Berlin with a friendship, that would after a couple of years, turn sexual. With him I wasn’t interested in a serious relationship, rather exploring the beautiful and intense sexual chemistry we had.
As our sexual dynamic was unfolding, he was also for the first time discovering his life calling. Feeling the intensity of our connection, he became scared he would get lost in me and do what he’d done in the past: forget himself.
His dedication to his life mission became the stronger energy and alas, I found myself, after only three sexual experiences with him, alone again and frustrated, with my sexual desire not fully met.
Two stories that, like my make out session with David Bowie, felt interrupted and way too short.
I suffered through the question of why these beautiful connections had to come to an end so quickly.
These two experiences, in particular, made me wonder about the relationship between my life’s work and romantic love both of which require at times my undivided attention.
I’m an artist moving towards the center of my creative vision and wonder how/if committing to a serious relationship fits in this moment. In other words:
When can a serious commitment to both work and love coexist harmoniously and when must we choose one or the other?
Being a highly passionate person, the task of figuring out where and how to direct all the competing energies can get overwhelming at times.
So I asked myself:
Since it could’ve been anyone, why has David Bowie, in particular, showed up to help me explore these questions I often think about?
I begin to wonder about his sexual life, what kind of romances he had and how all this connected with his prolific career.
With a timing that couldn’t be more perfect, a friend of mine several days later reminds me a documentary on him has just come out.
We see it.
I listen for what resonates. A day later, I’m on YouTube immersed in his interviews.
I get answers, not just about sexual chemistry.
I get answers about life chemistry.
The ingredients for having that epic affair with life.
On Work, Self Expression & Purpose
Over five years ago, I left a 15 year long career as a psychotherapist along with another business I created in NYC.
During the process of leaving behind something that at one point felt like a massive life calling, I started to feel that the actual concept of “a purpose” or a “life mission”, while important, was also limited.
So one day while in my Brooklyn apartment, as I was exploring the purpose question, if in fact I had any at all, the answer came unexpectedly to me.
Softly, but with a bang that stopped me in my tracks.
I had a small chalk board hanging on my door. I picked up a piece of chalk and found myself writing these two words:
SELF EXPRESSION
Self expression is my purpose, I heard myself say.
Self expression. Period.
Not self expression with writing or painting being the sole vehicle or practicing as a psychotherapist or whatever else.
Just self-expression in whichever way that wanted to manifest in the moment.
Being myself is the purpose and having the courage to do that being the ultimate creative act that would free me.
This was a massive epiphany, one that unleashed a wave of freedom I would continue to ride out as I left everything in New York I spent so much effort building.
A wave, which over time I would begin to resist as my ego kicked in pressuring me to be somebody important and do something unique.
David Bowie: the creator par excellence
David Bowie was an artist, musician, writer, human who constantly reinvented himself. He expressed what was moving through him without caring if it conflicted with what he created before.
He would struggle in a phase of his career, as fame crashed over him, with the conflict of creating art that was solely for him rather than as a response to what his audience expected.
But that’s human. None of us will escape riding out the wave of that conflict if authenticity is our main goal.
He said in one interview that his art had no point. He didn’t think it was political nor was he trying to get people to embrace a particular concept.
That right there was his superhero power.
He expressed himself as he was. In that, he taught us we also can express ourselves as we are without so fiercely committing to one thing, one profession, one look that we get stuck in one identity forever.
And this is why people fell so in love with him.
He gave the world permission to be free.
We can taste it all and be it all if we choose…(even if for one day)!
This, however, doesn’t mean we stop focusing on a vision we have or we get lost in five visions at once with the end result being creating nothing at all.
It means even within one role or one vision, we give ourselves permission to step outside the box, allowing our eros rather than our egos to be the creators of our work.
David Bowie is the definition of a creator, par excellence: he expressed all the angles of his creative energy with rare inhibition through a form we could all digest.
How did he do that?
On Romantic Love & Commitment
David Bowie had several relationships throughout his life. Angie, being the prominent one in his early years.
Nonetheless, for quite some time, he didn’t really want a relationship. He said in interviews he wasn’t up for the task commitment to a serious relationship required nor was he really ready for love. He also went through a heavy drug addiction during this period.
Seeing the body of work he created, it’s clear up until his forties, work was his big love.
His creative/sexual/erotic energy was therefore taking form primarily through his artistic vision. To create what he did, sharing it wasn’t an option.
That being said, having space for both also isn’t impossible.
Marina Abramović: On Love and Work
Marina Abramović and Ulay are an example of two artists with a big love story who simultaneously created influential works of art. They, as a pair, were the art form and perhaps that’s why their relationship and work could harmoniously coexist for a time.
Marina says in her autobiography, her time with Ulay was unforgettably beautiful, even though it crumbled in ways that were deeply painful.
And/also: Marina went on to do her best and most influential work when they split. She admitted what she accomplished wouldn’t have been possible if they had been together.
In some moments, we must choose one or the other.
That is, if we really want to create something that is burning deep in our souls, whether that be a big love story or a creative vision, we may need to focus on one path first.
Having an epic relationship, for example, requires me to understand my work won’t be the single most important thing and nor will I.
When Bowie was 40 years old, he met Iman. They were together for 15 years and their relationship is one they both describe as a big love. Bowie stopped using drugs and it’s during this phase of his life he would say if he had to choose between his family or work, he would choose his family.
His epic career: he would give it all up.
There is a time for everything.
The question I have been asking lately is:
What needs the most attention, in this particular moment, for the good of myself and the good of all?
In other words:
Which act of love serves all of humanity?: Diving head first into the relationship or deepening the creative vision?
Or both simultaneously?
Sometimes we need to give birth to ourselves first, before we give birth to the epic love story. And, sometimes the big love story, helps us give birth to ourselves and our creative visions.
I’m not suggesting a formula, only that it’s a beautiful thing to be able to own what one needs, even if it seems at odds with what one wants.
So What’s Sexual Chemistry Got To Do With It?
Our sexual energy is our creative energy.
We make love, babies, relationships, art, war, anything under the sun with this dynamic life force.
Sometimes our sexual energy shows up as a one night stand, other times as scientific discovery.
If it’s not manifesting in the body or finding another body to express itself with, it may very well be looking for some other form of expression.
It hit me then!
Could this be the meaning of the hesitancy that unfolded between David Bowie and I while we were making out in my dream?
I reflected back on my short relationships and all the worrying I did about my inability to find a long lasting sexual/romantic match.
Could it be that those small doses of intense romantic and sexual love were the perfect ingredient for my perfect unfoldment?
Could it be that, without the interruption, I would have taken my focus off what I ended up giving birth to in these four years: a creative vision that is now beginning to massively take hold and empower me?
Time to get radical, I thought. I am going to trust my process.
Every ‘mishap’ in life does not need to be a pathology.
Hesitancy or slowness in one aspect of our path rather than showing dysfunction or a state of being stuck, is instruction about the pace we require to unfold as a whole being with all aspects of ourselves working in harmony in their own time.
With his question about the nature of sexual chemistry, David Bowie got me to see I can indeed have it all, but not always all at once.
He helped me abandon my black and white thinking and the overanalyzing and embrace the beauty of life which is and always will be a multiplicity of forces at play sometimes in competition with one another and sometimes in a dance of divine harmony.
There is no one way, just our own unique way of navigating and comprehending our needs and callings.
Epilogue
A few months ago on a trip to Croatia with my best friend, I discovered this:
Despite all the convincing I’d done with myself over the past two years, I’m not ready to fully give yet.
Meaning even though the epic love story is something I want, I don’t want, in this moment, to show up emotionally for another person; that is hold space for their unfolding as I simultaneously hold space for mine.
Thanks to my fling with David Bowie a month after that trip, that reality sunk in deeper.
(No wonder we were on a yacht on the sea!)
Shit, I thought, I’m really not ready.
That on one level feels sad but on another feels extremely exciting.
What wants to be born first?
I’m excited to give more attention to what’s brewing inside of me, to give that baby the attention it deserves.
I’m also equally excited for a future reality, grounded in trust, that when it’s time, it’s time.
Because when it’s time…
We will come.
*This article was originally published by Elephant Journal & republished by Illumination.
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Much LOVE,
Danielle