Intimate relationship is one of the great amplifiers of our unlived parts. We can count on our partners to relentlessly illuminate everything that is unresolved within us. Not because they have some agenda to do so, but simply by the nature of the crucible that is formed when we allow another to truly matter to us.
We come to our relationships with an already-existing patterning that formed long ago. This template longs to be updated. Though, until reconfiguration, it looms over us and colors our perception. It functions by way of a time machine where, when activated, it is as if we have left the “here and now,” crossed the liminal, and found ourselves back in the “there and then.”
There are aspects of ourselves that are aching to come out of the shadows and into the warmth of holding awareness. Not to harm, but as emissaries of wholeness. There is nothing like a close relationship to remind us of our orphaned feelings and vulnerable parts. These parts have lost their way, numbed through consumption and the often weighty demands of our every-day lives. These lost parts are caught in the tangle of somatic pathways and are exhausted from a long voyage to reach us, but have not given up.
The reminder of this truth can at times be agonizing, as the other seems to have extraordinary powers to open the raw, tender, and naked dimensions of our being. This achiness is sacred. Inside the ache is a jewel. I think we all need to go there.
Training ourselves to harness the energy of conflict – to engage it directly and with an open heart – is the activity of inner and outer revolution, and enables us to encode new circuitry. With tons to learn in traveling this path, I see its brambles AND its ability to transform us, the other, and our communities into vessels of love, purified.
This is a difficult realization to embrace, and one that is not all that popular in a world that has forgotten the gold buried in the dark. But here we are. It is up to us to bring these fruits to ourselves and the collective.