While most people would like to have healthy, satisfying
relationships in their lives, the truth is that everyone has a hard time with
intimate partnerships. The poet Rilke understood just how challenging they
could be when he penned his classic statement, “For one person to love another,
this is the most difficult of all our tasks.”
Rilke isn’t suggesting it’s
hard to love or to have loving-kindness. Rather, he is speaking about how hard
it is to keep loving
someone we live with, day by day, year after year. After numerous hardships and
failures, many people have given up on intimate relationship, regarding the
relational terrain as so fraught with romantic illusion and emotional hazards
that it is no longer worth the energy.
Although modern relationships
are particularly challenging, their very difficulty presents a special arena
for personal and spiritual growth. To develop more conscious relationships
requires becoming conversant with how three different dimensions of human
existence play out within them: ego, person, and being.
Every close relationship
involves these three levels of interaction that two partners cycle through—ego
to ego, person to person, and being to being. While one moment two people may
be connecting being to being in pure openness, the next moment their two egos
may fall into deadly combat. When our partners treat us nicely, we open—“Ah,
you’re so great.” But when they say or do something threatening, it’s “How did
I wind up with you?” Since it can be terribly confusing or devastating when the
love of our life suddenly turns into our deadliest enemy, it’s important to
hold a larger vision that allows us to understand what is happening here.
Relationship as Alchemy
When we
fall in love, this usually ushers in a special period, one with its own
distinctive glow and magic. Glimpsing another person’s beauty and feeling, our
heart opening in response provides a taste of absolute love, a pure blend of
openness and warmth. This being-to-being connection reveals the pure gold at
the heart of our nature, qualities like beauty, delight, awe, deep passion and
kindness, generosity, tenderness, and joy.
Yet
opening to another also flushes to the surface all kinds of conditioned
patterns and obstacles that tend to shut this connection down: our deepest
wounds, our grasping and desperation, our worst fears, our mistrust, our rawest
emotional trigger points. As a relationship develops, we often find that we
don’t have full access to the gold of our nature, for it remains embedded in
the ore of our conditioned patterns. And so we continually fall from grace.
It’s important to recognize that all the emotional and
psychological wounding we carry with us from the past is relational in nature:
it has to do with not feeling fully loved. And it happened in our earliest
relationships—with our caretakers—when our brain and body were totally soft and
impressionable. As a result, the ego’s relational patterns largely developed as
protection schemes to insulate us from the vulnerable openness that love
entails. In relationship the ego acts as a survival mechanism for getting needs
met while fending off the threat of being hurt, manipulated, controlled,
rejected, or abandoned in ways we were as a child. This is normal and totally
understandable. Yet if it’s the main tenor of a relationship, it keeps us
locked in complex strategies of defensiveness and control that undermine the
possibility of deeper connection.
Thus to gain greater access to
the gold of our nature in relationship, a certain alchemy is required: the
refining of our conditioned defensive patterns. The good news is that this
alchemy generated between two
people also furthers a larger alchemy within them. The
opportunity here is to join and integrate the twin poles of human existence: heaven,
the vast space of perfect, unconditional openness, and earth,
our imperfect, limited human form, shaped by worldly causes and conditions. As
the defensive/controlling ego cooks and melts down in the heat of love’s
influence, a beautiful evolutionary development starts to emerge—the genuine
person, who embodies a quality of very human relational presence that is
transparent to open-hearted being, right in the midst of the dense confines of
worldly conditioning.
Please continue this article here: https://www.lionsroar.com/intimate-relationship-as-a-spiritual-crucible/
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