LS Harteveld

Message from a Rock Star Yoga Teacher

Published on July 22, 2019December 16, 2023 by LS HarteveldLeave a comment

Sara is my creativity coach.
Before our calls I always update her by email.
Sometimes without mentioning sex, men and Nikki Sixx. But this time I was doing great.

Hi Sara,

I look forward to our call tomorrow, and although on the surface (read: money wise) nothing has changed,
below the surface everything has changed.
And that’s a weird thing for me to say, because I m still crushed by guilt I didn’t do any of the things I had set out to do:
I did not organize my first rock star yoga classes (group). And realized I don’t want to.
I did not update my finance, which is behind for months
I do have all expenses automated so it’s not like things don’t get paid.
And I also did not go looking for a job.
But maybe that’s because I know none of those things matter as long as I don’t have the full vision of what it is I m aiming for.
And that’s the big news:
I got it.
I GOT IT!

First other good news:
Two days after our last call, the second and only other employer to whom I had sent an open application, responded to my Facebook message!
I wasn’t counting on that anymore.
This really would be my dream job, because it’s sexy , creative, it works with peak experiences, and performance art.
I knew he was really busy at the moment so I wasn’t surprised when he asked me to send him a normal email, so he had my address, and that he’d contact me after.
Saying No to the non-creative job earlier, which had been a difficult decision, seemed to be immediately rewarded by the Universe.

Last week I had my big break under my pen name, which is starting to turn into a stage name, LS Harteveld.
As you have once suggested, I m beginning to see LS Harteveld as the workshop side of things.
It’s extremely important that I don’t put any strain on that with regard to whatever it needs to be, and to go fully with what I want to do.
Last week this resulted in two in-depth Bon Jovi analyses which in turn lead to the most clicks I ever had on a non-sex blog post. The articles were appreciated by many fans.
Even men! 😁

And I got the format for my erotica as well.
Do you remember I told you my autobiographical erotica 2019 was going to be an offline thing?
That I didn’t want the erotic diary writing to haunt me, now that I was going into the real world, either with my message under my real name and LS Harteveld, and/or because I was working for someone else.
But I also noticed that the offline writing of the erotica wasn’t exactly taking off. No aliveness.
My notes were still in their rudimentary form and I couldn’t even be bothered to write them out, in my diary.

Oh!
Before I can tell you how I hacked that erotica problem, I forgot a very important element:
Somebody sent me fan fiction.
Now I have no idea if you know what fan fiction is?
And especially (you know I m the girl for the big guns) slash fiction?
It’s erotica, but you could also say pornography, based on existing characters or, apparently, on rock stars.

I spent a day and a half in a totally different Universe, where even Christian Grey would have had no idea what hit him – and after this binge reading I had not finished it.
But I quit reading and ideas how to incorporate fan fiction into my work started taking shape.
I also kept wondering: Why had I let myself go that way?

And I noticed that one of the story’s antagonistic heroes, Nikki Sixx, had stuck to me like spe- I mean glue.
It was his dominant male energy (have you seen him current day?! Suffice to say he aged well!), combined with my 36 hour smut brainwash and all the things that had been bothering me writing about my own sex life, that gave me the idea for:
“1994”: fanfic inspired erotica
click here for episode 1

It’s about a young Lauren, who turns 22 this month and she’s living in her apartment with her cats, a Master’s degree, a yoga diploma, and without any clue as to what to do with her life.
By mail she receives fan fiction, from a seller of a Bon Jovi VHS tape, where she falls for the Nikki Sixx character.

The story and Nikki Sixx’ role in it, make her wonder about her own love life. Her lover Bear does date other women, but has been her sole lover for the past 4,5 year.
What does she need to do, to get their exciting sex life back?
Or should she find her own Nikki Sixx?

So in one week I had that part of my creative work entirely up and running.
The Bon Jovi Metas (those are deep analyses at meta level) made me realize that my true magic still is, and always will be, in writing.
And the retro-erotica series gave me the perfect hook!

Then today I also did The Thing I Should Have Done Weeks Ago, under my real name:
I finally started Rock Star Yoga, properly. The whole shebang.
I was kind of doing it, have been for months. But I wasn’t owning it.
But now I have it all:
A Rock Star Yoga website, a blog, a Facebook page, YouTube.

It’s all about owning your practice and not taking shit eh I mean directions, from anybody.
To fully create your own yoga practice.
And this IS what I will be known for.

The Rock Star Yoga blog is meant to be a mixture of sharing my own yoga practice and stories with regard to Rock Star Yoga mentality.
I want to create those blog posts into a book(s)
The Rock Star Yoga Series part 1 to…?

So now I can connect the dots:
My art and my yoga, my work under both names, are artistically free and do not include business models that make me do things I don’t want to do.
Ultimately, revenues will come from Rock Star Yoga books and lectures, one-off events, and so on.
And under my pen name income will come from books and maybe lectures or something;
But I don’t intend to push that.

LS Harteveld needs to spend as much time as possible inside her own head, unavailable for the outside world.
My work as “LS Harteveld the Mistress” feels behind me.
Lauren Harteveld is now the 22 year old, figuring out life and Nikki Sixx’s sex appeal, in 1994.
That experience will be the workshop where the wisdom of Rock Star Yoga comes from.

Until I have my income from books and talks, teaching yoga could my income. Mostly private yoga.
Or another job, preferably a steady one and even better, a creative one. So that I know that I have a baseline income.

So those are my findings!
I m a Rock Star Yoga teacher but I am not aiming for teaching private yoga to be my ultimate business model.
In the end teaching private yoga will “just” be a hobby. Just like my current low-key group classes to former students.

My purpose in the real world, is to be a public speaker and author, a Rock Star Yoga Teacher.
My purpose in my inner-world, is to be the performer and author Lauren Harteveld.

It took us a year of working together, but I think we can say:
We finally nailed this.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

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New books will be added.

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A letter from a stranger | “1994”: fanfic inspired erotica episode 1

Published on July 19, 2019February 12, 2026 by LS HarteveldLeave a comment

Lauren immediately understood no one could ever read this letter.
Or letter?
Dozens of double-sided photocopies from a handwritten story.
A story she had said “Yes” to when a call to the seller of a Bon Jovi VHS tape, had unexpectedly turned into an hour long conversation on Guns N’ Roses versus Bon Jovi.
A topic Lauren knew everything about, since she had deliberately been ignoring Bon Jovi for the last five years.
It wasn’t until a Bon Jovi day on MTV that she’d been inspired to get back on the Jovi train.
And then the woman had asked if Lauren would like to read some of her fan stories.
Lauren knew those!      Back in the eighties her two friends had taught her.
She didn’t really have anything in common with them, but was accepted into their friendship as a third wheel because she liked Bon Jovi too.
It had been a strange, uneasy friendship for many reasons.
But what had struck Lauren, and what she had also found refreshing, were the romantic stories the girls would write about the band members.
Lauren could not remember if she had actually ever participated, but she knew she was witnessing something that the girls in her higher education (the girls were not from her school) would never do.
That her other friends would never have those types of feelings for celebrities and if they did they’d be too embarrassed to express their love for these idols so openly.
The two friends dreamed up entire scenarios, for no other reason than that they were pleasurable.
Lauren had liked that.  So when the woman asked her if she cared to read what she called “fan fiction”, Lauren had said she’d love to.
Hoping these stories too, would connect her back to her time with Jonathan, the boyfriend who had looked like Jon Bon Jovi, sung like Jon Bon Jovi, and wrote romantic songs for her on his guitar.
Just like Jon Bon Jovi.
Until the ground was swept from underneath her feet, and he had left before they had real sex and she could lose her virginity with him.
And he with her.            She had appreciated him, not for being inexperienced but because he had been a wonderful lover, probably because he had been sexually active with oral sex from a younger age.
He had won Lauren over, playing songs on the piano at a high-school party she had been attending, from yet another friend from another school.
It had been the month after her Bon Jovi concert, and she had still been on her Bon Jovi high, which by then had already lasted for two years and had been intensified seeing them live.
And then she met Jonathan, her own Jon Bon Jovi.
She was convinced she had a competitive advantage over the other girls, since she had been looking at posters of Jon Bon Jovi for two years.
She was used to being with that kind of beauty.
But because things had ended so sour with Jonathan, she didn’t understand why she was so eager to regress back to her 16 year old self.
And her life was directionless as it was.

She had her Master’s degree, a yoga teacher certification, her own apartment, and she owned two cats.
Without any clue on how to support them or what she wanted to do with her life.
This was her first house to herself, the first where she could have cats.

For four years she had been living in a strange student house, in the city center.
The top floors of all the cafes and bars below had been connected to each other, creating a labyrinth of hallways and staircases.
Although all thirty students technically shared the same address, since there was only one front door, they had been living in ten different buildings.
The chaotic building, with the fire escape balconies and ghostly alleys below had been no place for cats, but her room had been one of the larger ones.
She had been taken care of by her mother.
Lauren’s father had passed away in the early 80s, shortly after their family had returned from Africa.
No one had been sure what had caused his sudden passing, but in hindsight Lauren believed that his unexpected death at the moment when the first reports of aids came out, were the cause of her sexual education going wrong.
She was phobic to get aids, and the only one who understood what this meant was her lover Bear.

It wasn’t that Lauren had been trying to hide it from other people.
Not at all.
Her anxiety attacks had been so violent that they often needed an explanation, and she wasn’t shy about any part of her love life.
At least she had not been until she actually started sharing it.
That’s when she realized she was all alone on this one.

Responses to her aids phobia fell into two categories.
Either they were of the brush-off variety, stating that if she would get tested, she would have peace of mind.

Or they were of the worrying kind, and this included her mother, her doctor and even the therapist she had been referred to.
Lauren had been very frank with the therapist.
She had told him that she was so phobic of contracting hiv that if she had oral sex without a condom, she would get an anxiety attack.
First she would start feeling really cold, and then the trembling would start.
It could last for days.
She told him that this was a problem because she really liked oral sex, but was ashamed to ask for a condom just because she was phobic.
She also told the psychologist she liked gay men, or bi-sexual men, and that they liked her back, making her fearful condition even more problematic.

The only thing she didn’t tell the therapist, but that was because he proved to be so unqualified that she had not gotten the chance to get to that part, was that she was also very interested in anal sex, but that she knew that was particularly risky because the condom could break.
Before Lauren had been able to share that part of her concern over how she would ever get this ambitious love life back on track after virgin-clean Jonathan had left, the therapist was already trying to convince her that she had no phobia at all.
Because it made sense to be so careful.

She had been terribly disappointed with him and decided she’d solve it herself.
That’s when she hooked up with Bear, a boy her age who had a reputation for being a womanizer.
She had laid her cards on the table.
That she had not been having a normal sex life since Jonathan, the boyfriend who looked like Jon Bon Jovi, had left her and with whom she was going to lose her virginity.
Jonathan had stayed in touch for a while, and had been hinting at picking up their oral sex, but Lauren just didn’t want that anymore.
He had betrayed her.
And she could have forgiven him any misstep, in fact she had found womanizing one of his most charming characteristics, but to walk out on her, and crush her dream of having a condom-free first time with someone she was deeply in love with?
That was unforgivable.
And one year after the piano party jam where she had met Jonathan, she found herself in a cafe talking to Bear.

They had not even been friends, and Lauren had been surprisingly business-like about it.
She told him sternly that she needed to get rid of her virginity, but that she was getting nowhere because she had not been in love with anybody and she had panic attacks after oral sex.
She was the world’s worst single.
Bear had listened patiently, and had asked her a few questions.
He’d also made her laugh multiple times and there were other signs that Bear was the right man for the job.
Recruiting him was still something Lauren was proud of.

Over the years she had gotten attached to him, although they never held family introductions nor did they know each other’s friends.
Bear had stayed in his hometown for his studies just like she had, but they had managed to avoid each other and had no overlap in their circles of friends.
The impersonal living space with the 30+ student rooms and the endless changing of its inhabitants, had definitely helped keeping their affair a secret.
And Lauren had plenty of male friends who visited her room because her study was almost entirely male so no one thought much of Bear being there every once in a while.

And if they did, if they heard that they were having sex or if they saw him in a bathing robe hitting the shower, they still didn’t know they had been doing this since December 1989.

Sometimes she didn’t see him for months and she assumed these were when he had a girlfriend he was faithful to.
But she didn’t ask and he didn’t tell.
All in all she had been very happy with their arrangement.
Not only had Bear been extremely concerned for her safety, both physically but in particular mentally. But the best thing was that Bear had turned out to be a true sexual asset. He was a full match to her sexual taste, although she assumed he was a full match to any woman’s sexual taste.
That this was his skill, to mirror exactly what a woman wanted.
But whatever it was, it worked.

Initially Lauren didn’t really appreciate it as much as she did later, because she didn’t really know that her sexuality demanded a particular type of partner.
That 99% of men, scouted in the role Bear had, would never have been able to make it so enjoyable or last that long.
It wasn’t until Lauren started to share her sexuality, in terms of what she liked, and really just in casual conversation because to her it wasn’t a big deal, when she discovered other people didn’t think that way.
Her curiosity for anal sex and all other acts that dangled somewhere on that delicious spectrum of pain and pleasure, were either brushed off or met with disgust which was only slightly more pleasant than the worrying her aids phobia had been met with.

It had all been annoying responses. And the year she started speaking openly about it, which must have been 1990 their first full year together, was also the year she quit.
She would never speak to others about her phobia or her preferences ever again.

With Bear things had kept evolving.
She had lost her virginity with him, and her anal virginity too.
But her favorite thing were their shared fantasies, of domination and abuse.
He actually became her favorite sexual fantasy himself, which she thought had kept all other suitors out of her life.
She had not had any feelings for any man ever since Bear had been in her life.
His adventures with other women only made him more attractive to her, and gave her a sense of almightiness.
Especially because she had heard rumors of the hearts he had broken, and girlfriends he had betrayed.

Although she had no formal status, and did not rule out that he would lock himself up in a marriage in order to be saved from himself, she felt their bond had become almost unbreakable.
Because they had to conquer each other time after time, and there were never any rules or guarantees when they were together. Aside from their only rule which was an unspoken one.
That they always had full attention for each other.

She was convinced it could not end.
The option that they would start again, at another time and most likely the same place, would always stay there.
Lauren had been convinced that Bear and her would make the transition from their student lives to their working lives, and that nothing would change much.
Although she did realize that by opening up the can of memories of Bon Jovi, she was pulling the door open for Jonathan to come back in.
Maybe she wanted that, maybe that was what she was looking for.
She didn’t know.

But she knew a hell of a lot more, when she read the countless A4 copies the seller of the VHS tape had sent her.
A hell of a lot more, about the direction her life was going to take.

The good news was:
It wasn’t Jonathan.

Reading the fanfiction stories made it clear to Lauren that her Bear was a lot closer to what would be her ideal partner, than what Jonathan had ever been.
But the bad news was, and maybe that was good news too Lauren didn’t know, was that although she didn’t know precisely what the fanfic story was telling her?
That it was dark.
Darker than she had ever thought of going.
And that the fanfiction story had brought her on the brink of disgust, an emotion she had only felt once when she had picked up a discounted copy of 120 Days of Sodom from Marquis de Sade.

It had been in the first year she and Bear had been together, and he had given her an erotica book by Anaïs Nin, which had been an epiphany, and they had read from it to each other in bed, frequently.
Hungry for more, Lauren had picked up the classic work on what she thought would be a form of sexual play. But there was no play, it was just murder and torture.

The fanfic story she had received was not that brutal, far from.
But it had a deceptive build up, where you became so invested in the vanilla, overly romantic story line, that it became almost unbearable to read the bdsm scenes.
If these scenes had been in 120 Days of Sodom, Lauren would have stored that book next to Nin and keep it forever.
But after the romantic scenes of Part 1, which ended in a breakup, the rough sex of Part 2 and 3, were so hard to take.

At one point part 2 did begin to make sense to Lauren.
She overcame her first impulse to stop reading, or even to throw the story out, and she saw how these scenes had something to tell her.

First of all, the protagonist. Or maybe “antagonist” was a better word here.
This was Nikki Sixx, the singer from Mötley Crüe.
The writer’s taste for rock bands had apparently not been limited to Guns N’ Roses and Bon Jovi.
Lauren had never been into Mötley Crüe, but even she could see this Nikki character was a priceless one.
Nikki Sixx, as the story wrote about it, was like Marquis de Sade done right.
Yes, he was a cruel dominant who used knives, whips, ropes, and most of all distance and a played or not-played disinterest in the sub’s well-being.
All things Lauren despised in bdsm.

There had been a time where her fascination for rough sex with Bear had made her curious about local sex events and bdsm.
But she had soon discovered she didn’t like it there.
The moment things were outspoken as dominant or submissive, she stopped wanting them.
What she wanted was Bear’s full attention, and him making bold suggestions, or gently setting up a scene where she would be abused, but he would have such a good way with it that she never had to ask anything.
Hell, she didn’t even have a safe-word.
He was so with her, there on that boundary of pleasure and pain, he knew what she wanted before she did.
And what she didn’t want.

In the brief period she had been a visitor in the bdsm scene, the people there had tried to convince her that what she and Bear did was unsafe. But she had found their dressed up plays and especially the Yes Master stuff, repulsive.
She liked Bear’s intimate mental presence, as he was “doing stuff to her”.
The bdsm terminology had something called “subspace”: a mental state of being where the submissive only has the pain to concentrate on.
And all other thoughts are forgotten.
Lauren didn’t want subspace.
Instead, she and Bear created a reality together, and were never apart.

After a few conventions and local parties Lauren gave up looking for connection there.
Maybe that flawed experience of trying to name her sexuality by bdsm and reading De Sade, had made her extra sensitive to yet another disappointment that despite the first part of the fanfic being absolutely compelling, in part 2 and 3 Nikki Sixx came to fuck things up.
And yet, this time something was different.
It really was.

First of all because the fanfiction reminded Lauren of her love for seeing male-male pairings.
In high school Lauren had read as many gay literature as was allowed, and she had found it exciting.
She felt that inside her female body, there was obviously a gay man, because it felt like it was all written just to please her.
Lauren had forgotten this strange preference, and the fanfic reminded her.

But there was more here, that made her realize this piece was not another bdsm scene adventure gone wrong, nor was it another book tossed in the trash can.
And that was because she realized she liked Nikki Sixx.
She liked him a lot.

She, who had only been the submissive one, the play-raped one, the one who had been blessed with a dominant lover who carried full responsibility for their time together and who watched her well-being like a hawk;
She was falling for the cruel and unpredictable Nikki Sixx.
Especially because the writer had put in enough scenes that explained that ultimately Nikki was just playing a game.
That it was about the pleasure of his sub.
The same way Bear had always taken care of her.

Lauren folded the A4s with their explosive content back into the envelope.
No one would ever be allowed to see this.
Part 1 had been her cup of tea.
That reading about male-male sex turned her on was not that much different from simply liking porn.
But it was part 2 and part 3 that she just didn’t want to have to defend to anybody.
She didn’t want to take the fall for something that had not turned her on.
Except for the black haired rock star it featured.

It started to make her think about Bear.
She appreciated that he had stayed within her limits, all those years. But at the same time she was the first to see that her limits had been severely messed up from the start.
A frightened virgin, who had managed to get herself a lover in the midst of having been dumped and suffering from anxiety attacks no doctor could cure.
She was proud of herself, for having picked up her sex life, for sure.
But the sadistic rock star with his knives and his cruelty, had sparked a fire inside of her.

She felt like she had been lulled to sleep by how careful Bear had been with her.
Rough sex dated years back.
She wondered if he had other women with whom he was doing that.
She wondered if he had fantasies of his own, where he dominated her. If he had been aching to get back to taking her so rough, just like he had done in their first two years.

The final year of their education had been taking its toll on the relationship.
They had even been living abroad, as he did an internship in London and she did one in Australia.
But the downfall had started earlier, much earlier.
The last thing she heard with regard to other women, was that he was currently dating a woman, probably in her thirties, who had children.
Maybe this was the time when she would lose him to mundane family life.
At least for a while.

She felt awake and sexually restless.
She had been placing her fate in his hands for too long and wondered if the time had come to put herself on the market again, in order to get the type of sex life you could write fanfiction about.
Or you could have, if it had been a celebrity.
Or had she already hit the jackpot with Bear?
And was he then ready to do the things Nikki did?
Share her, abuse her, rape her, hurt her?

Or did she need to go out and be her own woman?
And find herself a Nikki Sixx.

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living.

A letter from a stranger
takes place on Friday 19 July 1994

This series is currently being updated, and will be published into

A letter from a stranger
diary 1994 – 1996
including book 2, Dear Nikki

Expected Summer 2026, in the BOOK SHOP
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Secret Update 2026

I have a deal with myself:
Once I finally get to publish “A Letter From A Stranger”, an erotic diary set in the 90s?
Only then I am allowed to remove these blogposts from this website.
As I have done with my other highly personal book, Big, as well. (which you can find in the bookstore now)

So these updates, where I insert the final versions of these posts, corresponding for 99% at least, with the chapters of the book;
And adding a customized Canva picture to go with it;
Well, they’re not shared.
They’re not posted to my social media.
‘Cause I don’t want them out there!

But now that you’re here, my dear reader, well now that you’ve found them on your own, I want you to read something good. And not to find the old posts, among which some of them were in shatters after a layout massacre caused by a WordPress update.

I hope you enjoyed this read.
And you’re welcome.

~Lauren
2026
—
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My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.

The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.

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Nederlands blog:
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The price of cross-out how to live in peak experiences

Published on July 3, 2019July 4, 2019 by LS HarteveldLeave a comment

God I m so easily fooled.
Who are these people?
The moderate, every-day-is-planned goal-getters who believe life is a set of healthy success habits.
Who?
And more importantly: Why do I feel guilty for not being able to do that, when I know:
a. That artists don’t work that way.
Managers work that way, people in regular jobs work that way. To an extend even entrepreneurs work that way.
But artists?
No.
They just have to unleash whatever is inside of them.
b. I know my real art, requires abstinence from ALL the things, when I m working up to it.
My coach Sara has said it for a long time:
My real art are the hours I am with my lover.
When I am a secret mistress.
Where I can only show up because of all the preparation and mindset work I do.
And since the Bon Jovi concert this truth became amplified:
The build up was months.
On the day itself I didn’t even look at my phone, after 2 P.M.
And it took me almost three weeks to process it, and also to get all the pieces of my life into (a new) place.
If I learned one thing from that concert, it’s that peak experiences take at least half as much time to digest afterwards, as they take in preparing.
So no…
I don’t know when I ll be back.
All I know is that I have three things on my calendar that I want to give my FULL attention, because all three are part of the vision I hold for myself.
And just like the Bon Jovi concert, I have no idea where it will lead or what will change because of it.
I always knew that the bullet-point, getting-things-done approach was somewhere missing the mark, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was until now:
Daily habits, linear thinking, and an allowing of the little stuff to play a role of importance doesn’t allow for peak experiences.
There is no concentration on the upcoming events if I keep pushing for a daily video or a blog post.
Even a quick “Share your work” heads-up, is lethal.
Communicating keeps me tied to the outside world, whereas for a true peak experience I need to go in. I need to already live from that place, where I want to be at. Already be in the energy of it.
The closer the event itself gets, the more difficult it becomes to be in the real world at the same time.
Right now I have three events lined up. On three consecutive days.
So having learned from my Bon Jovi concert experience, and feeling the anxiety in my body of having to stay visible online when I know I need to start turning inwards now –
You will not be hearing from me.
It took me until now to realize that if I want to have peak experiences more often, I have to move away from having a daily online presence, and into anticipation and alignment.
I need to finally and fully, make peace with the fact that I m not entrepreneur, I live for my art.
Not of it.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

.
subscribe to YouTube for My Life in Bon Jovi songs.

7-Figure Rock Star Writer

This is the fourth chapter of
7-figure Rock Star Writer part 4: A New Life

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Always { concert inspired story }

Published on June 25, 2019June 26, 2019 by LS HarteveldLeave a comment

This House
Raise Your Hands
You Give Love a
Born to

It was Tuesday morning and Lauren knew what she had to do, to save the two elevating, icing-on-the-cake-of-life kind of things she had been most attached to.
But that had been slipping away.
Three things, if she counted her own high, the moments when she herself had felt on top of her game and as if God himself was supporting her in doing what she had come here on earth to do.
But aside from her own ecstasy, the other two things she wanted to rescue were:
The memory of the rock concert and its charismatic front man.
He was someone whom she would have fallen for regardless of his profession or the context she would meet him; But he’d also been the first international star she had ever fallen in love with.
In 1988, two years into being a fan, she was still only 16 years old and had gone to the concert. She could still not believe she’d been so lucky that her parents had driven her to the other side of the country on a week night.
She had not understood the double meaning of any lyrics, but there had been no need to either. She seemed to naturally pick up on the sexual energy of the music itself. That she was the only rock chick in a class full of pop lovers, served her well. She had always had a strong sense of individuality.
By being the only one from her class going to the concert, she had widened the gap even further.
Her lover Mr.Big, seemed to pick up on the significance of what was about to happen. On the day of the concert he sent her a text to wish her a great time, and said that he was moved by the thought of her, all the way back then. An innocent teen, looking up in awe to the rock star on stage.
That was the second thing she wanted to save:
Her relationship with her lover, Mr. Big.
They had been seeing each other for the past four and a half year. She had written about their sex life in the past, and their first two years together had resulted in an erotic diary.
What came after was a respectable affair, one where Lauren was not such a cry baby and didn’t need to write a seven page story every time she slept with him.
Something she had considered quite an accomplishment, and she had been happy to join the ranks of the mature people.
Until she realized, in the aftermath of the concert when she could feel that slipping away because she had not written about that, that writing about their sex life had made it richer and more valuable to both.
And that quitting writing was probably responsible both for the extremely long intervals between their dates, as Mr.Big was definitely contacting her less than he used to.
But that her not-writing, was also responsible for the feeling that they had to start over every time.
Their dates had a fresh but also melancholic feel to them, as two lovers who had been on a break and had been unsure if they’d ever be together again.
Their encounters were no longer bucket-list material.
Instead they were let-s-take-this-very-slowly love making.
Whereas if she had locked the experience in, in a story, their intimacy would have been secured. They would probably have been able to pick it up any time.
Not writing about her sex life had made her feel less exposed, less hunted, less prone to ridicule because she could now say that all erotica had been written years ago and that she didn’t do that anymore.
But she had paid the price.
Even what he had been doing behind her back, and behind his wife’s back, had changed. In the early years she could feel that they were more flings or one-night-stands. Now it seemed to be one woman at a time, who was in his life more consistently over a longer period.
He never talked about it but she could feel it in her bones.
She wasn’t bothered by his other affairs, but it was more that in conjunction with the intervals between their dates growing from weeks to months, that she got irritated with it because she was competitive and wanted to win this.
The other women probably had no idea what they had gotten themselves into. And yet they were beating her.
That was what annoyed her.
It was an ego thing, much more than that she actually believed having sex every two months was worse than every three weeks.
By quitting writing, she was behaving like your average run of the mill woman, who will sleep with you even if you’re married.
And that’s exactly how she got treated.
If she wanted her legendary status back, as the one who understood him, the one to whom he’d always return, and the one who’d be there at his grave incognito but with a deep understanding of how important she’d been?
Or he’d be there at hers, but she had the sad feeling he’d go first.
If she wanted that epic affair back, that no one would ever be able to take away?
She needed to put more skin in the game.
She needed to put ALL her skin in the game, and start writing erotica, despite how exposed it made her feel. She had grown soft, responding with a near panic attack when someone started asking questions about her and Big.
But from now on, there was no more of that.
She was going to bring it home.

Whole Lot of
Lost
Runaway
We Weren’t Born to
Have a Nice Day

The rock star actually had made the joke “The wetter the better,” referring to the rain. She heard it on the recordings, but he had not paused, highlighted, nor draaaaggged out, the joke the entire crowd had been wanting to hear.
It had been tucked into one of the in-between songs speeches, where he spoke to them with a voice that gave Lauren even more butterflies in her stomach than when he was singing.
The last half hour before the show, she had been nervous. It became almost unbearable which might explain why she was the first to recognize the music and the video, that announced the show was starting.
It was still light, so it wasn’t like in a theater where the lights turning off make everybody aware that something is about to happen.
Just seconds before the start of the show, Lauren had confessed to the friendly girl who had stepped aside and had offered Lauren a spot at the barrier.
“I m so nervous!”
The girl was attending the concert with a boyfriend; A tall, rangy guy with short hair, and model-like features.
Nervous, yes. The little woman with the cute curls nodded enthusiastically. Lauren wondered how it was possible that she didn’t particularly care for women in general, and had even walked out on the 50 Shades of Grey premiere, because the energy of all those women in sexual anticipation had made her physically ill;
Yet here at the concert she found the friendliest, most disarming women in the world, towards whom she felt protective and caring. Something she was able to express because she had come better prepared than a single mother going to the beach with three toddlers and a puppy.
She shared the food she had been able to smuggle in, and gave two women sticky plastic and elastic bands to cover their water bottles, since they had all been made to hand in the caps, going through security.
Maybe the reason the atmosphere between the young women and the older Lauren was so good, was the same reason no one in her class had been listening to this band:
These girls were.
And the music meant so much to them, that they too had gone through lengths to be first row, in the armpit area of a T shape runway that was attached to the stage.
The other armpit was a VIP deck.
The T- shape of the stage, and the VIP deck taking up one armpit, made the first-row area in the Golden Circle extremely small.
Yet these women were there! Just like Lauren!
They were top fans.
The guitars, the anthems, the pounding of the music song after song, had excited them, just as it had excited a 14 year old Lauren.
And they had all drowned into the emotional depths of the heartbreaking ballads.
Yet another mesmerizing thing about the band: That they were originally labelled as being shallow. When every album had at least one song that required a box of tissues and doctor to put your heart back into your chest.
Had the eighties really been such a cruel era that no one had heard that? Or even felt a need to ridicule it?
The wetter the better.
Maybe that explained why the rock star made the joke into a minimal thing instead of going for easy laughs.
And why Lauren missed it because she was not literally listening to him.
Just like she had trouble memorizing the lyrics to the songs – although she had tried and had a notebook with written out songs in her purse – she didn’t hear individual words either, when he talked.
Just the message.
Just his energy.
Lauren took the entire show in as an all body, mind, soul and heart experience. She had even made her peace that the song where the rock star would get someone on stage could be played, and that there would be this awkward little play where the fan would practically assault him (Lauren expected foul play here, most likely the roadies encouraging you to go give him a big hug) and then the rock star would play being the irresistible idol who had women jumping onto him out of nowhere.
It had been the most difficult part of Lauren’s preparations:
How could she work around her resistance to witness this?
Ultimately she chose to label it positively, as the most artistic part of the show. He was taking risks here, something could happen that he did not anticipate.
If it was indeed a premeditated choice to invite the girl to cross his boundaries- for maximum show value – Lauren was sure the rock star realized that ultimately he did not have a say in what would happen.
A smart woman would just be polite, and he would automatically reward that by giving her real attention. Lauren had seen it happen on videos, where after the initial struggle the woman had dropped back into her normal ways, and he had immediately turned extremely sweet and gentle with her.
And lowering the energy to dangerously low levels and risking the connection with tens of thousands of people in the middle of a rock show.
Lauren decided to focus on that:
The admirable risks he was taking.
She made a video about it, and posted it tagging him personally, which was as far as she wanted to go in announcing her coming.
And then she let go.
She would take anything and everything he would give her.
If there were going to be twenty songs with twenty different women on stage and none of them was her?
She’d take it.
She would completely surrender, fully submit. There would be no bad things that could happen. It would all go down the way it was destined to.
And yet there she was.
First row.
Hyper-aware of the privileged position she was in, looking straight up into the blue eyes of her idol. She felt undeserving.
Despite having studied him, their music, and creating set list poems from every show they had done this year;
Despite preparing for this day in every way she could;
Despite writing about her personal history with him and filming countless videos that contained a reference to their songs;
She still did not feel she had a right to be there.
Which explained why something terrible happened. And it was an accident.
Four days after the concert, when Lauren was still receiving download after download on where her life needed to go, she met a friend who was educated on the field of sexual energy transmission, and when Lauren told him how the concert had been the best day of her life – her gums had been tingling when she had walked home, a feeling she literally only knew from sex. Good sex. – the friend had thought out loud about what had happened.
Had tried to help her label it.
But in the process he had used a triggering word. Although he denied ever using that word one week later, when a broken Lauren explained to him how she had fallen from grace.
And flat on her face.
She had been at the peak of her energy just one week prior, but now she was crawling through the mud, so dark and sticky. Her lover was gone. The connection to the concert was gone.
The word he had used, that crept under Lauren’s skin and slowly but effectively started poisoning her entire memory of the show was:
Stealing.
That she had stolen the rock star’s energy, and that’s why she felt so good, when meanwhile he seemed to be in slightly lesser shape, for his next show 48 hours later.
Lauren remembered trying to deny that she had stolen anything, but the friend had pointed out:
“You said it yourself: He gave everything he had, singing that song. He was completely empty.”
“That song” referred to a fan favorite which was hardly ever played. It had left some fans outraged on social media that it had not been played when they had been attending.
As if not the vocal demands alone, would offer a sufficient explanation why the rock star was unable to perform it on demand. And the lyrics were particularly touching too, as they seemed to be about a struggle with fidelity issues (or maybe Lauren was too eager to translate the apology for a “mistake” into a sex thing) and the song also seemed to forecast the difficulty the rock star had with the higher registers, more than two decades after the song was written.
Lauren imagined having to come to terms with his voice changing, was even more painful for him, than it was for her to deal with the concept that she had stolen something. From someone she deeply admired no less.
She understood perfectly well why the song was rarely played. You could not expect an established, older rock star on tour, to turn himself inside out and bare his naked soul to the world with every show.
That was borderline abusive.
Which was perhaps why the suggestion that she had stolen something from this unique moment, made her sick. That, and that she must have been susceptible to the idea that she had done something wrong, in the first place.
The underlying emotion of being undeserving to be there.
Within one week, she had felt life slipping through her fingers, but she did not blame her friend. Lauren was a sensitive woman, and she had felt there was no ill will in his words.
His remark had been completely harmless if she had not been so eager to blame herself for something. For proving how unworthy she had been.
One week later she saw her friend again, and told him what had happened. And also how she was going to solve it.
She said:
“I realized I had failed to put my concert into writing. Because I didn’t write, I had not claimed my reality.
Just like when I stopped writing about my encounters with Big, and I lost him.”
Although Lauren had no idea if she would ever be able to write herself out of the dirt and back onto the mountain high, or write her lover back into her life – she was grateful for the trigger the friend had given her.
She now knew she could only claim reality by writing it down.
This was extremely important information for the second half of her life.
And since she had promised herself she would learn and understand ALL the lessons of the concert, she embraced even this dark side. Even if that cost her the glow of the concert and it was too late to get her lover back.
Even then.
Her friend asked her if he could help her find a better narrative, since he had been at least partially responsible. And also because he didn’t like seeing Lauren this sad.
This is what he offered Lauren:
“I would not say you stole anything. You received. It was given freely. Just like when a man has an orgasm. Yes, he is spent. But because of the release he can then rejuvenate and replenish. This man is on earth to give this. But he can only give it if there is someone to receive it.”
Lauren felt like crying, but she didn’t want to make the friend feel even more guilty for everything last week’s conversation had caused. But she thanked him for this relabeling.
And hoped she had not unlearned writing.
That the break from it had made her better at it, and that somewhere under all the filth, she’d be able to find back what she had lost.

Keep the Faith
I’ll Be There for You
In These Arms

Lauren was so grateful for all the uploaded recordings of the concert.
She had felt slightly superior, attending the concert without holding any equipment. But she had to eat her words and was deeply grateful for anyone who had recorded something or who had taken pictures.
Her favorites were a video of The Song, which one of her new friends had shot. And the other favorite was a full audio recording. Although it was on YouTube, it did not contain any video.
This long audio in particular, allowed her to relive the concert in its entirety.
Yet, for the first days she couldn’t bear this registration!
The audio was nothing, compared to the real concert experience.
She actually suspected that most, if not all, criticism on the singing voice of the rock star, was actually due to poor audio quality of mobile phone recordings.
The contrast with the real life experience was so stark, that she didn’t allow for the recordings to stain the memory, when it was still fresh.
It was only when it began to fade, that she started looking what she could find.
And that’s when she found it… again something she had definitely missed when she was there. At the one hour marker, the band played one of their all time favorites, the music was flawless and the challenging singing in the verses immediately hit the mark.
But she could hear the rock star rely on the backing vocals, in the first chorus. Second chorus his singing was fully confident, even stretching his voice further than nessecary.
During the guitar solo the crowd started to sing.
A wordless, swaying melody. It sounded like a lullaby, a choir of angels.
The rock star picked up the lyrics, sometimes trusting himself, sometimes relying on his singers. When all the verses had been sung, there was only a repetition of the chorus.
The crowd had picked up singing their supportive, loving tune.
And that’s when she could hear it.
Like magic.
The rock star found his full voice, his confidence. It was the going all-in, no holding back, every fan hopes to one day witness.
And when the first thought of playing The Song, must have surfaced.
It had not been on any of the set lists.
Not on the standard set list, and not on the one with the songs that could be chosen from last minute.
But at this point, The Song, was just a whisper.
Of the angels, perhaps.

It’s My Life
We Don’t Run

Lauren knew she was probably the most well prepared fan in the crowd. Yet, in hindsight, she realized nothing could have prepared her for seeing the rock star live.
She was a yoga teacher but as far as she had ever believed there was such a thing as “yoga” that was actually A Thing Of Importance – and if she had ever believed that was already up for debate – then the last bits just fell off her seeing the rock star sweat, jump, run, prance.
Spitting at almost regular intervals, a gesture of utter concentration she immediately saw reflected in the determination in his eyes.
He was magnetic and it made her realize she had been slacking. Her body was healthy and strong, but she had failed at having a home yoga practice for years.
And she had never been as strong and agile as the rock star.
Her body had never bounced up and down a stage for two and a half hours, and she seriously questioned if it ever would.
The rock star ran 6 times a week and he also did yoga, although that information dated from a few years back. But whatever he was doing it was working.
She could not remember being so close to someone in such killer shape, although she knew she was now not giving her lover enough credit.
It was a physical thing, but not in the way you would expect.
More a chemistry thing.
Because the rock star had not made an effort to get back into the photo model physique of his 40s, and neither did Mr.Big who was still in his 40s.
But her response to the rock star on stage, did remind her of a fantasy about her lover, which she was unable to pinpoint as to why it was she fancied that:
To wait for him, when he had been with another woman.
Take care of him, bathe him, feed him, put him to bed and to make him feel loved.
Aside from the fact that Lauren didn’t think that was the role Mr.Big had in mind for her, there was something strange about it.
Why did she even want this?
When he was all spent?
It didn’t make any sense.
Yet seeing the rock star on stage stirred exactly the same fantasy with her:
To be there when he came off the stage.
And replenish everything he needed, for a good night’s sleep.
Maybe, although Lauren enjoyed being on the receiving end of someone’s energy, giving back made her just as happy as receiving.

Wanted
Lay Your Hands on Me
Captain Crash

Who Says
I’ll Sleep
Bad

Always
Livin’ on a Prayer

“Did you see?”
One of the friends Lauren had made at the concert, messaged her. “They played Always!”
It was two days after the latest concert of the band. 70.000 People had attended.
Of course Lauren had seen what they had played. She had already felt it. At the exact time Always was played she had experienced a dramatic energetic shift that had been so nasty, she still did not know what to do.
She felt God awful and the weekend had filled up with even more drama, such as a pigeon chick falling on her balcony in the middle of the night.
And Lauren felt her off-energy was contagious.
Someone she had spoken to on Saturday, was robbed within hours after that. Lauren couldn’t help but thinking it had been her icky-yucky energy that had caused it.
Ever since the shift, she had lost energetic connection to both the rock star as well as her lover. Although the steady slope downhill had started days prior of course, when her friend had made the suggestion that she had stolen something.
Every day had been harder, until that Friday night she had felt it snap.
She was still unsure if it really had been the band playing Always, if it was just a coincidence, or if it was her lover being with someone else.
Something she swore she could feel.
Judging from how powerful the shift was, it had probably been both.
But she blamed herself. She was the one who had let the memory fade, and had started being ashamed of receiving so much from him. By now she was seriously toying with the thought of quitting being a fan.
“Yeah I know,” she texted back. “I m sure I m overreacting but I was jealous.”
The girl sent Lauren a smiley and a second line in a separate message.
“Oh Sweetie, I think it was for his wife.”
The words brought out an ear to ear smile, and then the tears started rolling down Lauren’s face.
“One week later he was back at the level where he could sing it again,” the male friend said, to Lauren. It was a tropical night, and they were having drinks at one of the many terraces that were still open.
“He had come full circle. This is the meaning of Life.”

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

subscribe to YouTube for My Life in Bon Jovi songs.

Lauren’s erotica (2017) :
Big, Diaries and Erotica

7-Figure Rock Star Writer

This is the third chapter of
7-figure Rock Star Writer part 4: A New Life

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Hello Rock Star

Published on June 24, 2019April 22, 2021 by LS HarteveldLeave a comment

Sara is my creativity coach. I always send her an email before our call.

Dear Sara,

It is tempting to reread my other blog post from today, or rewatch the many videos I created over the past two weeks, in order to reconstruct exactly what happened.
What the right order of things was.
Where I went wrong, and where I went right.

Oh, and of course, to write out ALL the resolutions and habits and basically the entire game plan which will serve me well for the second half of my life.
As the Bon Jovi concert was definitely the most profound experience I ever had. It will go down as my best time sex, ever.
The best sermon I ever heard.
The best Tony Robbins seminar ever given without Tony Robbins.

And the best yoga class, because it definitely got my energy soaring, and I m positive I will never have another physical ailment again.

Oh, and I m enlightened.
Of course I’m enlightened, what else would I be after this concert for which I had been preparing even more meticulously than for my dates with Mr.Big, leaving everything and nothing, to chance.
Nothing , when it came to the things I could control, such as preparations for the day and getting into the right mood.
And everything when it came to accepting and celebrating whatever would happen.

Fortunately for me, just like Mr.Big, Bon Jovi was a great match in showing up with the right energy. And that’s when the best night of my life happened.

.
And this is the small-can’t-bother-Sara-with-too-long-email version because I could write an entire novel out of that one gig.
Sadly though, I didn’t.

As we discussed earlier I am determined to go more out there with my message, in performance mode, and leave the days of 7 hour blog posts behind me.

.
However – and this could be a beginners fuckup! – my performance, talking about something on video, seems to be a lot less strong when it comes to claiming the narrative.

Performance does raise my vibration, way more than writing does. And in that sense it is a lot more rewarding. It also costs less time than writing.
But this is my latest key insight about my otherwise perfect choice for video over writing:
It’s not as strong.

When I m done with a blog post reality has been claimed, and it is almost impossible for me to get another version of the truth in my head, than the one I put to paper.
I ve used this in my affair with Mr.Big:
What I wrote became the truth.
And it was a good truth. One in which he could see his own power and how we connected, how we were doing this together. I patched up, polished, sowed together the truth if needed.
I often used fiction.

The only thing I always kept intact was the love we had for each other, and then I let the rest of the story serve that. Even the most extreme things we did sexually, were undeniably loving.

.
If anyone had told me, after reading the story, that I should be ashamed of being a secret mistress, there is no way I would have adopted that as the truth.
The truth was on paper.
The end.

But after the Bon Jovi concert, about which I did not write but I created daily videos for both of my accounts, and I stayed on the high for days and intended to keep that going indefinitely:
Someone qualified what I had been doing to Jon Bongiovi as stealing his energy.

And because I had told myself that everything I needed for the second half of my life, was given to me in that gig, I adopted it as a possibility that I had actually been doing that.
That my energy had come at the expense of Jon Bongiovi himself.

And suddenly I could see evidence in my relationship with Mr.Big that this was true: After all, he seemed to need two months between our dates if we had sex.
Regardless of how enthusiastically he had been fantasizing with me, on how amazing it would be to see each other more often.
I saw in this long pause a confirmation that I stole way more than I had been entitled to.

And from there, my spirits plummeted.

Very soon I started hating myself, and when the 13th and the 14th of June had been the best days of my life, both with regard to Jon Bongiovi as well as Mr.Big who seemed to have a deep understanding of how much fun it was what I was doing, and he sent me a few texts that testified he was supporting me;
But one week later, it was all gone.

Last Friday I could just feel both of them, energetically snap out of it. And I felt lonely and heartbroken.
Especially because by now I had designed my entire life around the concept of being a rock star yoga teacher.
How could I be that, if I was consumed by guilt of being an energetic vampire?

This morning I woke up, and got my act together.
Two major decisions were made.

1. I need to start writing again.

And in particular erotica. I have not written about my sex life in years. The exact same years our dates became more infrequent and sex was intimate and simple because it felt like our first time every time.
Like we’d been on a break or a breakup.
I had been too eager to drop writing erotica, too eager to be a good girl, one who doesn’t kiss and tell.
But with that I almost killed what we had.
It’s a miracle there is something left to save.

Also, I intend to start writing about the concert, and come up with a better narrative than me being a no-hands succubus.

2. I need to focus on raising my energy

The reason I got so much out of that concert is the same reason I get so much out of dating my lover: I prepare.
I get ALL the way up there, the peak of the mountain, way before we even meet. And then that is automatically where they meet me.
If I focus on doing things that raise my energy, so that I am on the peak of the mountain, regardless, it becomes more likely that I find the connection back with Jon Bongiovi and my lover.
And feeling really good where I am, and about what happened.

.
I never want to come down again, to hear what others have to say about my moral code of conduct.
I m going to do everything to get back what I lost the past week.
Including writing what must be written.

So that although others might have an unloving interpretation of what it is I do,
at least I will not be listening anymore.

~Lauren

An unexamined life is not worth living

erotic stories are avialable in:
Big, Diaries and Erotica

subscribe to YouTube for My Life in Bon Jovi songs.

7-Figure Rock Star Writer

This is the second chapter of
7-figure Rock Star Writer part 4: A New Life

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Follow on Facebook or Twitter,
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Heatwave

Published on June 24, 2019June 25, 2019 by LS HarteveldLeave a comment

It was Monday morning of the week for which the weather forecast predicted a heatwave.
Lauren woke up.
Her night had been short but sweet as she had chosen to sleep on the couch with the door to the balcony open. Her cats had been able to enjoy the cool hours of the night outside, before the heat would lock all three of them up behind heavy curtains and shut blinds.
She had slept with a sheet covering her face instead of using mosquito repellent, but now she was wide awake. Not just from sleeping this night, but also from a ten day haze, in which she had redesigned her entire life, but had somehow managed to lose the two men that meant the most to her.
They had still been there, ten days ago, on the day of the rock concert and the morning after.
Maybe it had been because of the thrill of having them both, that she had gotten lazy and had – as she called it – given away the game.
She could feel both of them had withdrawn and she assumed both of them had returned to their day-to-day lives of work, children and their wives.
A life she wasn’t a part of, nor did she care to be.
But it had come as a surprise to her, how easy it had been.
Although “it” in terms of an achievement, was a dubious term here, since the rock star had not been in her life in a normal way.
And “easy” too, was perhaps not the right word either, since she was convinced few people would be able to love, to adore, to manifest, to focus, to dedicate, the way she did.
And originally, before she had started making mistakes and lost them both, she had actually been able to do it to two men at the same time.
She had felt the rock star and her lover the strongest, at exactly the same time.
And she had felt them turn their backs on her, at exactly the same time too.
This Monday morning she realized she had two options.
Since giving them up was a hypothetical one, it meant she had only one:
To get them back.
Yet, the reasons she had considered to give them up were multiple.
First of all, if she did that, then no harm would be done. All she had to do was to pull her energy out of the situation. Especially now that last week’s poor game had already sent them on their way, it would be a smooth, drama-free exit for all parties involved.
A fleeting memory.
For Mr. Big to the years he had a mistress named Lauren.
And for the rock star she was probably already gone, but maybe she would stay in his mind for a few more days. And then he would forget about her.
None of them would ever meet again, and if they did no one would feel anything and they would all feel really mature for handling it so well.
A second reason to give it all up, was that Lauren was still ashamed of who she was. She had actually had two visions within that ten day period in which she had alienated the men from her:
Two visions about two men who she had been convinced would play a role in her new love life.
One mature man, she had met going out. What she had liked about him was that he was a bit rough, unpredictable.
It wasn’t until now, that Lauren started realizing she might have liked that in theory, but that none of the men she had ever fallen in love with had possessed that quality of being rough.
Either they had a boy-like charm or they were dominant but calm.
“They don’t make sudden movements,” Lauren had often illustrated that she craved stability not so much in the relationship, but in the man himself.
Although her relationship with Mr.Big definitely qualified as exciting, this was not because he would do unpredictable things. His unique quality, and the reason she absolutely wanted him back, was that he tuned in with her.
He could read her, and in particular the darkest corners of her mind where no one had ever joined her, but him. She masturbated thinking of him, something she had rarely done with any other men she had known.
If she had, then it was an effort.
A ritual of some sorts.
It wasn’t because it came natural, nor did she ever repeat it.
But masturbating to Mr.Big had become a habit that she had fully given in to, when they were about 9 months into their affair. Before him, it had been nameless, faceless beings.
Next to the rough man she had met this week, the other man Lauren saw in her visions, or idea of her future sex life, had been a young man in his mid-twenties.
This had been the most fun, lighthearted fantasy in the world.
What a wonderful idea, to not be in those complicated relationships with married men, and have a young lover instead!
Someone who was obviously way too much to handle for the women his age, and whom she could learn how to love himself and to honor his own sexuality.
Maybe she could save him from monogamy, or save him from being jealous if his wife ever had a lover.
She would be able to save a life, as far as Lauren could see it.
Two lives, if she counted the one from his future wife.
Yes a young lover was definitely in the cards for her!
Except of course, just like the man with the rough edges, it wasn’t.
Lauren had done her share of dating younger men, and she had found it tiresome. Not so much because she didn’t have feelings for them, but because they couldn’t receive them.
With the strong ones she had to play being the cool chick.
And with the inexperienced ones, she had gotten sick of them leaving the moment they had had great sex and felt confident enough to take on the rest of the world.
But whenever she saw their Facebook status change or pictures of beautiful girls they were now dating, she smiled.
Lauren’s cougar days were behind her.
So the vision of the 25 year old, that had originally appealed to her, got stained by all the fuss it had been to date his predecessors.
And Lauren had another reason that only she could know.
Another reason why both the rough man as well as the 25 year old, were not her real calling. The reason was this:
they were an expression of her desire to be saved.
From both of her crushes.
Obviously, being in love with a rock star was idiotic. She had learned this right from when she was 12 years old, and had gotten a Dutch idol which had been around her age. She had been ashamed of her feelings then.
And of all the men that came after him.
Between 2005 and now, there had not been an international star whom she had been affectionate towards. “Just” a handful of Dutch writers.
Since The Netherlands didn’t really have a star culture, those men had counted as real life men, in Lauren’s trail of thought.
If she had been ashamed of her feelings for one of them, it had been nothing compared to to overwhelming shame that she felt for being in love with her international idols, like Brad Pitt had been.
And this rock star was now.
The eagerness, with which she wanted to throw him back into the rock star pond and get a normal lover in the real world, or a crush on a Dutch writer which was basically the same thing- was astounding.
She was running away.
And if she ran away now, she’d be running forever.
An interesting detail to the entire conversation in her head, was that she had been running away from him since the eighties.
After a short relationship with a boy her age, who had looked like the rock star and who had even incorporated the band’s music into their correspondence, their music into their lovemaking and the acoustic guitar into songs that he wrote for her – after that relationship ended because he left her, she had struck back by giving up her rock star.
It had been like cutting off her left arm, but she had done it.
As if she had said:
“You’re leaving me? Fine! I don’t need you or our music! Keep it!”
Her grandma used to say to her mother, whenever Lauren had done something slightly crazy like dying her head red:
“Better they do that now, than when they’re forty.”
Maybe if she had saved the rock star from the ashes of her courtship, dusted him off and started over, she would not have suffered this crush now that she was forty plus.
And yet, and yet?
She could be downplayed here.
Maybe dumbing down idol crushes was a sign of society’s blatant ignorance, a need to feel superior and to have a reason to put people like Lauren down.
Just like they had done every time she fell in love with a married man:
“Well he’s not going to leave his wife.”
As if the value of her feelings was being measured by their reciprocity.
If a man loved her back, her feelings were justified.
If he didn’t, or if she didn’t have evidence? Then her feelings were stupid.
The longer she thought about it, the more she understood how this worked and why she had been so eager to switch to new men for her future affairs. The young one and the older one. Both single, both easy. Both free from the judgement of others.
So after the euphoria of feeling Mr.Big and the rock star so close by, just ten days ago, Lauren had made the mistake of jumping at the opportunity to date someone normal.
No wonder they had left her.
Now that Lauren knew she had been running away from her own feelings, and by doing that had estranged the men that had been causing them, she made a plan on how to get back into the zone.
Back to that time when she had been on the highest of the high, and then they came. She turned out to have a better understanding of what was required, than she had expected.
As soon as she stopped listening to inner-voices who had been shaming her feelings for these men;
And made a resolution to first ignore and then deal later, with the biggest bitch of them all, which was an inner-voice that accused her of having stolen the energy of the rock star and Mr.Big;
It all fell into place.
First of all, she decided to fully accept who she was, including having feelings for famous men, which was currently the rock star.
The same rock star she had run away from when she was 16, because she wanted to outsmart her ex-boyfriend.
That became the second rule.
Her feelings were allowed to change, but she would never let them be hijacked by someone who didn’t have anything to do with them. Her feelings would never again need justification.
The third rule would be that she would cultivate the feelings.
At the beginning of her affair with Mr.Big she had started writing erotica, to process the sex they had. The stories became the nourishment that he could not give her. They warmed her, instead of having a nice long talk or something else that would have made her feel loved.
The stories became like a fire to warm herself by.
And in the end she became so good at them, that she actually preferred it this way. She no longer knew how to deal with a normal relationship. She preferred to be left alone, at her desk, and reshape their time together into something that would never leave her.
And that was all hers.
But this too, had been an aspect of their affair where she had gotten lazy. She had not written erotica in years. And the most exciting things of their sex life, dated back to mid 2017.
She had blamed him for the distance that had gotten between them. For the weeks separating their dates, that had become months.
She always thought it had been him.
But now she realized she too, had done something here. She had stopped writing, because that had left her feeling exposed. And with every erotic story she felt like she was reducing her already slim chance of ever becoming the real woman at his side.
That yes, the stories had once served her, to be able to have a relationship with this difficult man. But that they were to be dropped as soon as she had upped her game and could do without them.
And she had been doing well.
She had not missed them.
But she could see now, how not writing about her sex life, had basically ruined it. That their sex life had been nourished by all the painful things she poured into the stories: Her vulnerability; Her sorrow; Her pain.
Her uneasiness with being someone’s lover and it, or her, never having a real name.
The pain of writing them had been what had made sex so sweet.
It was a miracle there was actually still something left to be saved. That the feelings between her and Mr.Big had not died out.
And the moment she had been on the super high last week, he had immediately checked in with her, to be there with her.
As if he finally saw the woman he loved, the moment she dropped her shame and rose to the level where she could meet the rock star.
It was right there, where Mr. Big had been waiting for her all along.

~Lauren

An unexamined life is not worth living

Lauren’s erotica
Big, Diaries and Erotica

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7-Figure Rock Star Writer

This is the first chapter of
7-figure Rock Star Writer part 4: A New Life

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Normal was never going to cut it

Published on June 6, 2019June 9, 2019 by LS HarteveldLeave a comment

The past two, three days have been hell on the Richter Scale, as I managed to disappoint myself AGAIN, with how little room there is to do the sensible.

To stop writing.

Art.

Yoga.

Thinking.

YouTube.

My business.

Publishing my books

Teaching.
Or to marginalize them to modest blocks of free-time.

And even the logic to take a part-time job, to create more time;
I long for a full-time, going all-in experience.

So despite my best efforts to envision, get passionate, to plan and get real with what one person can do;
I dropped into a deep knowing that unfortunately for me, and for everybody still hoping that one day I ll be cured, the truth is this:

Normal ain’t gonna cut it.

It really is, in no uncertain terms, going to be my way or the highway.

And it’s not gonna be the highway.

It just has to be, going to be, and from this day on WILL BE the way it was always meant to be:

Motherfucking everything.

The whole shebang.

There will be no choice between writing or YouTube. Or between a fantastic, exciting job in the real world and a 7-Figure book empire. Build as a side hustle, no less.

There is just no way to cut this short, nor to plan for this, nor will it let itself be beaten into some sort “create your dream life – schedule” that would make sense to anybody.

There will be no to-do lists on how to do it all, because I will just be doing it all by the nature of who I am.

The way that my life will work is by doing all the things that people say you cannot do or combine. It is the only way that from a spiritual, intellectual, fun perspective, makes any sense!

And that may be crazy, to the layman’s eyes.

But this morning was the first when I woke up happy, and light. Knowing there will be no more choosing. In the end there was only one thing that was ever going to work.

To do it all.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

7-Figure Rock Star Writer

This is the eight chapter of
7-figure Rock Star Writer part 3: Submission

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The Artist is Present. As is the Bon Jovi fan, the avid yogi and the hot as fuck Katrina Ruth devotee

Published on May 28, 2019May 28, 2019 by LS HarteveldLeave a comment

“Abramović performed The Artist Is Present, a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum’s atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her.”
Wikipedia

The signs have been there for a while now. That being a writer would not be enough to keep my hungry artistic heart satisfied. Not even now, when I had freed myself up to write only what I really wanted, without ever having to think about how this would make me into a 7-Figure Rock Star Writer.
And without getting distracted by my YouTube channels for this account (The Bon Jovi my life in songs – series*) and my account under my real name where I created yoga videos for my studio.
No more yoga videos.
No more talks on My life in Bon Jovi songs.
It has never been true love between me and video, and I know exactly why that is:
The main reason I did YouTube was because I thought I needed to do that to have a successful yoga studio, or be successful as a writer.
I needed to share my energy, show my face, and give people a chance to get to know me, and interact with me.
If I had been convinced success came from other things than public exposure I would never have been on YouTube to begin with.
And since success never came that way, and I hit my however-how-many-times low, of not wanting to do video anymore, it was done.
Out with YouTube.
If I can detach from the idea of having to make money from writing or yoga, the first thing that goes out are all the activities I made myself do because I thought I needed them.
And it wasn’t that I didn’t like doing them.
Once I was doing them I was usually okay, and I also liked the result.
It was tempting to keep YouTube up, just as it was tempting to keep fantasizing how I was going to become a success after all.
But in the end it wasn’t true love, YouTube and me. It was a fling, not a satisfying relationship. Like an ex you can’t stop seeing.
I quit, so that I could concentrate on my true art.
But then it happened.
And this I did not foresee: The Art itself, changed.
Writing these blogs, creating yoga programs, my art?
No more. The pull, the inspiration, suddenly came from slightly different or entirely new directions.
After visiting a theater, I started toying with the idea of practicing yoga as performance art.
Which reminded me that this was not new:
For years and years, I ve cherished a medium-sized Marina Abramovic obsession. Her older work because of its play with fear of death, and surrender. And her latest work because she makes concepts like meditation and mindfulness, compelling.
I wanted to explore how this could change and perhaps even revolutionize how I taught and practiced yoga.
So that was one side of the Influenced By spectrum:
Theater and performance art.
And then there was the second track.
Because despite quitting my Bon Jovi YouTube series*, I was still looking forward to the concert in June. Maybe you could even say that, although there were multiple reasons of why I quit the channel, one of the underlying reasons was that it was not contributing to a good experience of the concert.
Making the My Life in Bon Jovi Songs – videos was taking time away from what I really wanted: To study the songs they would most likely play.
To go inside the songs, and inside myself as well, so that the concert was already an integral part of me, before I even went.
I feel that is the way to get the maximum out of anything, just like a holiday:
To get into the history of the place, its museums, its unique seasonal things to do perhaps.
So that you know where to start when you’re there.
For example if I look forward to seeing a movie, I ll watch reviews and even spoiler reviews beforehand. And I never regretted it.
I love studying where I am going, not because I want it to pan out according to an exact plan, but because being familiar with the structure or different elements, makes it easier to understand the nuances and appreciate the details.
So I had the intention of dedicating many, many hours to preparing for the Bon Jovi concert.
And in this light, the playlist I had created for the My Life in Bon Jovi series, and studying them and making videos about them, was a huge distraction of what I had set out to do.
And I quit.
With YouTube out of the way, I picked up preparations for the Bon jovi concert. And its impact was way bigger than I expected!
Wow!
Just listening to Jon Bongiovi sing is altering my current use of English, and the way I think, in English. To New Jersey American.
My “own” accent has always been tested as Australian.
I believe both in the way I pronounce certain words, as my grammar. Although that’s not to say, English native speakers cannot find plenty wrong with it.
But I did this language test once, which estimated both your native language as well as where you learned your English.
It said my native language was Dutch, and that my English was tied to Australian. Which makes sense because I am Dutch, and I used to live in Australia, although just briefly.
But I also used to have an Australian friend, who lived here for a few years.
That’s when Australian-ish as my default English probably sank in deeper.
And the last couple of years, I would find it hard to believe my English has not copied many more Australian traits, because I ve been watching Australian born Katrina Ruth videos each and every day.
I have paid programs, but also listen to her free live streams and I m subscribed to her YouTube.
That I was getting so very much out of her online video presence, was one of the prime motivators to stick with YouTube.
I felt a slacker for not sharing my message and my energy on video.
And Katrina Ruth also has a blog! That’s her 362 days a year thing!
So she’s an example that being a writer is no excuse not to do video.
But, however, she does do something that I no longer do: She coaches people.
And she has an online business.
I have decided a few weeks ago I don’t want to offer any services, other than selling books, online/ outside of The Netherlands.
And for the Dutch market I ll create yoga programs, and do in-person or telephone coaching, but it’s not an online business.
Katrina Ruth has been my main source of inspiration for my business and she will keep on being that. Yet I didn’t feel she had a big part to play in this new, unknown path that I was setting my first steps on.
She didn’t match with the theater/ Marina Abramovic vibe, I wanted to infuse my yoga practice with. And she also had no overlap with the Bon Jovi music I was studying or the concert I was preparing for.
But you could see her influence in my patience to sit this out:
The void of not knowing where it is going.
Where my art is going.
Or my life.
And knowing that it is important to not stay busy, or commit to shadow-work, a term she invented to describe doing things that may look like real work to the outside world:
But you know you re hiding.
That you re not speaking your mind, not doing the real thing, writing the book, creating the movement, the revolution, or whatever it is you were put on this earth for to do.
Shadow work is dangerous and evil, because it allows you to fool the entire world and even yourself, that you re on track, when in fact you re throwing away your life away for things that don’t matter.
I didn’t see Katrina Ruth’s wisdom directly influencing whatever art, yoga or even the Bon Jovi concert would turn out to be.
But the fact that I was waiting this new art form to develop and to show itself, was definitely her influence.
And then it happened.
I listened to the latest short videos that were added to her Katrina Ruth channel, and this one turned up:
Get Serious About Your Intent To Live Purposefully…Or You’ll End Up With A Dry Vagina!

In it, she clearly states, and this was probably the biggest Aha moment of 2019, that having that daily release of doing your work as a creator and letting out what needs to come out, is not only crucial to your entire physical well-being (which she had been hammering home for years), and that driven women have a strong sex drive (on her agenda of Points To Be Made since 2018 or earlier), no she was extremely specific this time stating that:
“When you’re a driven badass woman, and you’re in alignment and you’re pressing fully play? You should be wet all the time.”
WHY DOESNT ANYBODY ELSE SAY THESE THINGS?!
WHY DID I MISS THIS?
Why did I, just five days ago, write a blog post about working a day job, and also reserving three hours a day for my yoga, my writing and publishing my books, describing my new lifestyle in the title literally as:
Preparing for life as a monk
Without red flags waving?
Without alarms ringing?
Without an ominous voice barking:
“Hello! Earth to Lauren! Thou art wasting thou life!!”
And not in the Art capital A that you would want to “waste” it on.
That I actually assumed, that the answer to getting a daytime job so that I had artistic and creative freedom, meant micromanaging my creativity?
That is ridiculous.
It s the dry vagina version of creativity! I wouldn’t even call it creativity. It really is a monk’s life.
And I am anything but.
I ve said on more than one occasion, that if I can’t have sex anymore, I will either die or stop writing and probably both.
And I don’t mean that I need a lot of sex, but I need this:
I need intrigue.
Mystery.
Feeling sexual.
Shaving, waxing, taking care of my body AS IF, I m going to have sex all the time. Keeping everything down there in great condition, and yes.
I have wondered, so very often!, until I just stopped caring, and as of today I will just count my blessing:
Why am I wet so often?
I even know that I ve thought I must secretly be lusting then, after the person I am with, making some perhaps questionable conclusions and decisions in my love life. That was a long time ago but still – that I thought a guy who I rationally didn’t find that attractive, was causing my physical reaction?
Eh. No.
This is how I am if I feel happy, and creative and ALIVE.
Katrina Ruth was so right!
And now I see what was missing in all my recent plans. From the monk lifestyle to the acetic Marina Abramovic inspired yoga to the “studying” of the songs of Bon Jovi:
Sex.
Juiciness.
Mystery.
The forbidden fruit, the unexpected, the great story that has yet to be written. The art that is forever changing and unpredictable and violent and perhaps destructive in unexpected and all consuming ways.
What was missing from my yoga, my work, and being a Bon Jovi fan, was Life.
And for a whole week, I risked losing it for my vagina as well.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

*) About YouTube

I m not final on my thoughts about terminating my work for YouTube.
My reason for doing it, is that I’m going for a normal job, which means that I don’t have to have a YouTube channel because I no longer need to be successful with my books.
Nor sell online coaching.
These are all off the table, and writing/art can just be whatever it wants to be.
Another reason, tied to this, and I do mention this in my final video, is that when I have a daytime job, I don’t want this intimate information about me floating around in such an accessible way.
I ve always been extremely open, and am rarely misunderstood by those munching through a meaty blog post. Yet the sex-thing, especially when expressed verbally, makes it feel cheap and too accessible when shared on video.
Too vulnerable even.
And in particular if I don’t offer a service or program that’s tied to it.
Because I m no longer selling international coaching services or programs, I feel I need to be more careful speaking about these things.
Over time, it has been a continuous mostly internal conversation on whether or not to make my teachings on sex and relationships more accessible through video, or not.
Right now, with a normal job pending, I have decided to stick to my plan to remove all content, but I ve decided to keep the channel on, along with a few older, neutral videos.
The my life in Bon Jovi Songs series, contains many of my signature ideas on sex and relationships, as well as pillars of my personal history.
It will stay up until June 13.

About this blog

This is the seventh chapter of
7-figure Rock Star Writer part 3: Submission

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Preparing for Life as a Monk

Published on May 23, 2019May 23, 2019 by LS HarteveldLeave a comment

I just reposted yesterday’s blog to social media, and was tempted to quote one of the sex-related sentences about this week’s much needed encounter with Mr.Big.
Although Mr.Big is a “want”, not a need.
That is the biggest difference between my love life and a normal relationship: I don’t want a lover to be a need.
Nor do I myself, want to be a need.
I want to be a want.
A luxury so luscious, only a true hedonist will allow themselves to have it.
Yesterday’s blog post, which plunged from the very neutral title “I forgot how to breathe” right down into the arms of my lover and the heart of our encounter, took a whole evening to write.
And few read it.
Tempting, to repost it using one of it’s click-baity sexual confessions.
But I didn’t.
With a real job just around the corner, daily writing has become something that needs to be scheduled in, and its time-block needs to be defended.
I used to be a yoga teacher and writing was something I could do every day and all day. As long I showed up for my night time classes.
With real workweeks pending, I have an hour every morning to write this post. And it is an hour I would rather have spent socializing my new cats, especially since they will be alone the rest of the day.
Yet I am dedicating that A.M. hour to writing.
That’s how big a Need writing is!
I will take it from the pockets of my furry friends, which is saying something because I would do anything for them.
That ONE hour every morning, needs to be spent wisely, oh so wisely.
Posting yesterday’s post with a click-baity title, is disruptive.
It does not contribute to today’s productivity.
It does not make that stolen hour behind the computer, more meaningful. Anything but.
So part of preparing for life as an employee, with little time to write, is that I will no longer be promoting these blogs with click-bait titles or quoting from the juicy sections.
But there is more.
Limiting writing to one hour, and no longer promoting my work, is just the morning routine.
The real challenge comes what to do, and what not-to-do, after I get home.
A little while ago I realized that as a teen I barely had any social life, outside school. And even less on weekdays.
I got up at 6.30, left the house 7.15; Cycled to school which started at 8.15
home around 4 P.M., a little nap until dinner.
And then doing schoolwork behind my desk until 10 P.M. , shower and be in bed at 10.30 P.M.
Every. Damn. Day.
And here I am, here we are, as adults. And this goes in particular for the ones without children, because parents with children don’t have much choice in what they want to do at night. Here we are thinking we have time for a social life.
Or to do sports four times a week.
That the evenings are there to make up for what we missed out on, during the day.
But anticipating my own new work life, I m like: Nooooo…..
Maybe one night a weeks tops, you could go see a movie, attend a social event, or in my case see my lover, as long as I m home around ten.
And make that a Wednesday or a Thursday, don’t do this at the beginning of your week.
For me, a 46 year old former entrepreneur returning to being a regular employee, this is NEW.
The realization how very little you can do, if you work full-time in a job. And how that makes total sense, if you compare it to the monk life many of us (not all!) had as a teenager.
Nights are not for partying.
My entire life is going to change so drastically.
From being a yoga teacher having the entire day to myself, for dates with Mr.Big, for writing, and so on;
To leaving the house at A.M. and returning around dinner.
And then the evening is dedicated to doing yoga for an hour, publishing my books for an hour, and then to bed 10 P.M. in order to get up at 5 A.M to write.
A monk’s life, that’s what it is.
I recently read an interesting blog about creating a sex positive life.
One day was for writing smut, another for masturbation, and so on.
Maybe that’s a way to make something interesting from my evenings, I don’t know. Squeeze in a daily 30 minutes to do something sex-positive.
Because it seems like despite acknowledging that after 15+ years of being an entrepreneur, I choose the stability of a normal job and income so that I can focus on creating my art and publishing my books:
I still can’t see myself settling for living this monk style life!
I just don’t see it happening.
But then what, right?
The first job I saw, or could see myself having, which I encountered this week, was so much fun, and so cool. And I do expect I would be able to work from home largely, and be flexible in my hours in case I would go for a daytime date.
So that makes it easier to see myself working, without having to go full-on monk style.
But in general working a normal job is far from what I m used to, and I still have no idea if I can do that.
My peers have spent the past 20 years living that way, and I ve always given them props for that.
But can I really do it?
I m not sure.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

About this blog

Is the sixth chapter of
7-figure Rock Star Writer part 3: Submission

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I forgot how to breathe…

Published on May 22, 2019May 22, 2019 by LS Harteveld1 Comment

What happened between me and Mr.Big this week, almost got lost in pre-employment stress of Oh My God I Can’t Share This

I think I tried everything.
To stop diary writing.
To stop writing all together.
To write whenever the mood strikes and let writing take until the post was ready. Which usually meant it hijacked my day and kept me behind my computer for 6 hours minimum.
I tried writing for 30 minutes.
Which including editing, and finding a photo always turned into one hour.
Which turned into two.
Which turned into however long it took, and brought me back to:
Stop writing all together.
And the diary writing, the personal life: Oh, the things I ve tried and decided, to feel better!
In order to preserve the good, to enhance it, to create a whole world out of the times I saw my lover Mr.Big.
And then the moments of doubt and anxiety for feeling like oversharing. As if I would not lose him every time, if only I could conform to secrecy instead of writing about our time together.
As if my loneliness was a punishment for writing.
And then the coaching and teaching yoga!
From offering it, to not offering it, to offering it only under my real name (and not this one).
I have a draft of a yoga program (a two hours blog post +) and my coaching program for the Dutch market is still up, as well. Neither one I will be posting or selling anymore.
Because everything changed last Monday.
And then today it changed even more.
Last Monday the decision to stop making my living as an independent and get a normal job became final. And I immediately stopped my yoga channel under my real name.
There was no point in making yoga videos as promo material, and it simply wasn’t a part of my purpose work.
For the first day, it was just that.
But then yesterday night I went to a social event, and I received this powerful vision on my new life as a writer. And I was literally counting out the hours I would have for my purpose work, at the start and finish of every work day.
I had not drawn any major conclusions from that – because there was time to write and do yoga next to a job.
But then this morning I started a blog post, yet didn’t finish it.
And I also recorded the same My Life in Bon Jovi songs video four times.
Until it hit me what was wrong:
I felt vulnerable sharing my personal life, and in particular on YouTube.
I had no idea if I would be able to apply for jobs, or do my work, if I set the bar so high in my personal life (being a secret mistress) that I had to write about it, in order to stay standing.
Maybe, taking a job meant I had to stop doing that.
Maybe I needed to become normal in my private, and sexual life, so that I didn’t need to write about it.
But then this is who i am.
I know this.
And I know that especially if I have a job, I need to stay in touch with my inner world. To sit behind my computer and “breathe”.
To let whatever comes out, come out, typing away on the key board.
So after the fourth take for my YouTube, I decided to quit YouTube entirely, and focus on my writing.
My real purpose work.
To stop wasting time (over-) sharing myself in YouTube videos, when it would already be hard enough to do my writing AM before work, or at night time.
So I made that final YouTube video, my farewell, and thought I had “solved” it.
Until the stomach ache, the doubt, and the anxiety that I would go down the rabbit hole of my inner world every morning, AND THEN – face the world.
Would I even be able to do this?
Was it really just as simple as deleting YouTube, to focus on my purpose work, writing?
Then why was I feeling so, so bad?
Why did I title this blog post:
I forgot how to breathe?
And then during the typing of this blog post, something that my coach Sara has said to me months ago, popped back to mind.
The job is there to support the creativity!
Not the other way around.
I repeat: NOT the other way around.
Months and months ago, when my insights in wanting a job were far from the firm decision that it is now – Sara already pointed out not to fall into the trap of compromising my art, in order to fit into a job.
And here I was, feeling shaken after my “big” YouTube fall out at the thought of still having to share myself on this blog..
I felt daunted, by the idea of doing the only thing I love without question. Without payment, without recognition, and with a message that just oozes from my pores on a daily fucking basis;
To write.
Getting personal.
Going DEEP.
I genuinely thought that in light of getting a job I was forgetting how to “breathe”, how to write. Afraid that I would not be able to do it because at 8.30 I would see people.
Colleagues.
But no, Sara was right.
Aside from the sheer impossibility that I would forget or could skip, something that comes as natural as breathing – I DO only have room in my life for a job that still allows me to do the art.
This post was me writing myself into a solution.
Remembering Sara’s message is soothing, and I will keep it in mind. Somewhere in the front.
But I also want to share here, right at the bottom of this blog post, hidden almost, what happened between Mr.Big and me, when we made love.
The story I tried to tell in this morning’s draft post and four times over in the video that I did not post, and deleted all versions of it: The story how we got back together.
It had been two months since we’d last seen each other. And it had been one of those times where I had been uncertain if he’d even want me back.
Or if he’d just let our affair die out..
I knew this was part of the agreement, part of what we had. That I put up with the periods of silence, but it seemed as if this had become a new normal.
As I remembered it, in our first year, it never happened.
In our second year it may have happened twice.
In our third it became frequent and ever since the final 18 months all I remember is dropping into that zone of not knowing, every time again and again, after seeing him.
And every time I promised myself I wouldn’t buy into my stories of drama.
I would sit it out.
I would trust.
And yet every time I had to break word with myself, and worry. Worry so much that it would be over.. Until we saw each other again, and I was happy.
Most people understand that this pattern leads to a better, more exciting sex life. Something we did have in the first two years. Very much.
I never fantasize about sex with other men, because Mr.Big is tied to my deepest darkest fantasies, in a way that I m beginning to think no man will ever be.
Even if I m in love – I m beginning to doubt my ability to enjoy being with another body than Mr.Big’s. If another man’s attention, focus, and love making skills will ever be able to satisfy me.
Is it ever fair, to make love to someone else, as long as I m in love with Mr.Big?
The older I get, the more I m leaning towards:
“No, that is not fair. Your body and mind only respond to Mr.Big.”
So most people understand that this pattern, where I have to keep the faith for months on end sometimes – influences our longing and our sexual desire.
But what they don’t understand, and maybe that’s also because I have not verbalized this explicitly – is that if the test has been this heavy, the time period this long, and if I have missed him so much and have been on the point of believing he will never return?
You don’t just hop back into having sex.
You are not crazy with lust for each other, and my body seems to carry all the mental scars of feeling lonely and rejected.
Of feeling abandoned.
My mind can survive, and I know I need a terrible amount of stress and strain, in order to even feel something, sexually.
Rationally, I understand I m better off having this problem, than having the same man sitting next to me on the couch for nights in the row.
But the body cannot be reasoned with.
And Mr.Big understands that. That despite me accepting that I don’t see him as often as I would like, that he needs to start from scratch with me, physically.
He excels at comforting me, making me feel safe.
He asks me, what I need to relax.
If I want to hug, we hug.
If I need to cry, I cry.
If I want to spoon naked in bed together, we do so.
And he will do all of those things without initiating more. He will never press for anything, not even the remotely sexual: All he wants for me is to feel good.
And if that means we won’t have sex, we don’t have sex.
As uncompromising as he is, not attending to my needs in the weeks and sometimes months in between, that’s how devoted and patient he is, when I m there with him.
He can give in two hours, what I would get from a normal man in two weeks.
So this week’s reunion was not a sexual, pushing-the-boundaries-of-civil, adventure where we could tick things off our bucket list.
It was sensitive, emotional and deeply satisfying both on an emotional as well as on a physical level, because I came multiple times.
My orgasms just came effortlessly.
And he had one but just like always, he waited until he could feel I was fully satisfied, and it was in a perfect melt-together moment of union.
Those were all things I tried to share in the video, which ultimately led me to the decision to cancel my entire channel.
Those were the things I didn’t want to write about, because the thought of sharing myself like this, suddenly scared me, in the light of my future career.
But writing this blog post has brought me so many insights.
That Sara was right – the job will be there for me, to support me creating art.
And also, and unfortunately for everybody perhaps, my sexual relationships but even more so my internal world, will always be this complicated.
YES, I will always need writing to balance them out.
NO I can’t stop, because I cannot live in this dark, and often very lonely mind, without releasing into this blog.
And there was a third thing I started realizing as I was writing this blog.
That this is sacred.
This is when the magic comes through.
A leaving of the world, into another. And with my time with Mr.Big being so limited, and my suffering so deep, this writing is therapy.
Writing this blog is a daily one, or a two, or a six hour release.
And it’s a bare necessity.
Just like breathing.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

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