For many of us, intimate relationships are the great amplifiers of the unlived life. I know I can count on my partner and close friends to relentlessly illuminate everything that remains unseen and unresolved . . . all those experiences and dimensions within me which are suppressed and of which I am unaware. Not because they have some agenda in this regard, but because this is the nature of the vessel that forms when we allow one another to truly matter. Humans come into relationships with an already-existing psycho-emotional patterning and spiritual orientation that formed in the earliest moments and early years of embodiment. These perspectives and personalities are shaped by both individual and collective experience. While inherent in the original template is the desire for evolution and reorganization into more integrated forms, until there is actual reconfiguration, the old patterns have a way of looming over us and coloring perception. Old patterns function by way of a time machine where, when activated, it is as if we have left the “here and now” and found ourselves back in the “there and then.” Nothing comes close to the capacity of an intimate partner to illuminate the emotions, beliefs, and vulnerable parts of ourselves that have lost their way in the tangle of somatic and psychic pathways. It can be a revelation to see how we attract and are attracted to those aspects and qualities in the other that we have disowned in ourselves. It can feel a bit achy and agonizing to realize that the universal energy enlivening each of us, in whatever form it takes, seems to have extraordinary powers to open the raw, tender, and naked dimensions of our being. Please be kind to your partners in response to the inevitable disturbance that will arise as you make this life journey together. Learning to transmute the energy of conflict with an open-hearted attitude toward yourself first, and then with the other is the essential secret doorway into the evolutionary potential that relationship offers.
The practice of rupture and repair is the cycle of death and rebirth we are here to experience, again and again and again. Relationships of vast depth and meaning are not free of conflict. Rather, working through the inevitable conflicts that arise in a world of duality and reflection is a path of purification, unification, love, and healing.
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