Intimacy & Relationship

Being with and for each other in love and truthfulness

Relationship is both the context for our wounding and the vessel for our healing. We come into the world needing each other. We grow our independence and differentiation so we have our own agency, but we are constantly enacting the deep truth that we are part of something larger. The longing to belong, to be truly seen and known, lives at the heart of what it means to be human.

At the same time, our deepest challenges lie in the heart of relationship. Our wounds and shadows are formed in relationship. We develop limited maps of relationship, live with unmet needs in relationship, lack skills and capacities for authentic, responsible relating. We might never have a real experience of the profound potential of human connection, while sensing it is possible. 

Everything we do rests in the realm of human relationship - community, connection, collaboration. All the other facets of awakened wholeness depend deeply on our healthy, open, awakened and free connection with each other. You and I are in this together in a very profound way. At the heart of this is cultivating our capacity for healthy relationship. 

This involves both growing more subtle capacities for relating - being able to differentiate and relate authentically, being aware of and responsible for our projections on each other, embodying awareness in our collective space and relating. 

It also involves more concrete engagement with each other - getting involved with each other, becoming implicated in each other's lives, mattering to each other, showing up together, working through conflict, embracing our individuality and diversity. 

This requires willingness to be vulnerable with one another, to risk asking for what you need, to even risk knowing what you need, and to acknowledge that you need each other. At a basic level, in order to open up pathways of authentic connection, we have to trust each other and feel safe enough to be vulnerable, and understand ourselves enough to know what our vulnerability is. 

Ultimately, relationship can become the field where we reflect each other's true nature back to one another. We can come to cleanse our perception such that we can reflect back each other's deeper essence. This creates spaciousness, freedom, fluidity, a sense of wholeness and sacredness in the work we do together.