It often seems as though being in our alignment is much easier to maintain and explore when we are by ourselves. Maybe when we’re alone on our meditation cushion or away on vacation, or not engaging with other people at all. Learning how to not only stay in our alignment when we engage with the people in our lives, especially our intimate partner, but to deepen into alignment and to actually have the intention of engaging in a spiritually aligned relationship is so revolutionary, it shifts the whole paradigm of what it means to even be in relationship.
I’m going to share more about that with you today in this video. Before I do, I want to share with you my new book, Align: Living and Loving From the True Self. Align is a comprehensive map of how to come back home to the truth of who you are and how to live in love from this deeply sacred place within yourself. I also have new self-guided Alignment Cards that I’m super excited about. There are 48 cards in a deck, and every card has a wisdom teaching, and a sentence stem to support you in living and loving from your true self.
I remember the moment that I had this epiphany about relationship, and I write about it in my new book, Align. I had this epiphany about relationship where I could see that when a couple was in conflict, either myself with my partner or a couple that I was working with in my work with clients, that I could see that they were holding what’s called a polarity. When a couple was open-hearted and deeply in their love for one another, they were in what’s called resonance.
Now, polarity and resonance is something that I talk and teach a lot about when I’m working with student therapists. It really influences much of the way in which I work with clients and orient towards guiding transformation. Once I was able to see this same principle applied to couples, everything shifted for me, not only in my work with couples, but in my own intimate relating with my partner, with my beloved.
I believe that understanding, polarity and resonance in our relationship, in our most intimate relationship, can transform the potential and the opportunity for our intimacy for our sovereignty, for our own alignment, and to stay in alignment and cultivate a spiritually aligned connection.
So what is a polarity? A polarity is essentially two opposing experiences. Internally, we each can have a polarity. When we have an inner conflict within ourselves, we have two opposing experiences that are fighting with one another. In an individual, I would work with their internal polarity. With a couple, what I’ve come to find out and learn, is that the couple ends up holding the polarity. When there is a conflict, one person is really attached to their idea, and the other person is attached to their opposing idea. We actually need polarity for relationship to happen. We need both polarity and resonance for a relationship to happen, but when there is too much polarity, a relationship can be quite volatile and when there isn’t enough resonance, there’s not enough sameness to really resource and find connection. Polarity can be that spark of excitement in a relationship, but when there’s too much polarity, there’s a volatility. The couple is holding too much opposing energy with one another.
When let’s just say, in real time, somebody says to us, it’s such a beautiful day. But when inside of us we actually feel quite miserable that day, and we’re like, this is the worst day ever. That’s just an example of a polarity, and obviously this probably wouldn’t cause conflict. But I just wanted to share with you this simple idea of what a polarity is. These are two people who are having opposing experiences and an opposing perception of what is happening in that moment.
Resonance, on the other hand, is sameness, a quality of sameness. This would be something like one person says, I love you so much and the other person also says, I love you so much. This is a similar quality of sameness, and there’s nothing to fight about right? Because there’s a similarity. Even if the sameness was, I think I’m done with this relationship and the other person says, I think I am too, I think I feel complete. That still is a resonant experience. What I’ve learned is that when somebody in my field is holding a polarity from my experience, I can still find resonance with them without dropping my experience.
So if somebody says to me, let’s just say my beloved says to me, I feel criticized by you. If I hold the polarity, then I would say, “I wasn’t criticizing you, I was simply stating that I wanted the grass to be mowed this way”, or something like that. I’m holding a polarity with my beloved. But if he comes to me and says, I feel criticized by you, I can find resonance with him simply by saying, “You’re feeling criticized”. I don’t need to agree with him that I was criticizing him, but simply by hearing him and reflecting that to him, I have created a resonant vibration in our field that has him feel safe. That creates more safety in our relationship. It’s not just for him, it’s for us. We’ve created more safety in our relationship, more sameness, more connection, even though there’s also a polarity. I still also don’t agree that I criticized, so I’m not dropping that, but finding resonance first, actually allows us to find a point of connection.
The way that this relates to alignment is really multifaceted, and I’m not going to go into the full depth of that here, but I do want to say that when a couple is holding a polarity, they are in an entanglement pattern. If this is two people in their alignment, this is two people in their entanglement pattern, where they’re projecting. They’re feeling onto one another. They’re disowning something inside of themselves, and they get into deeper, deeper conflict trying to find out which opposing energy is right. This is coming from the ego, and not from the heart or from the true self. It’s such a common pattern and can be quite easy to slip into when we identify and hyper-identify with our ordinary mind and the thoughts in our mind.
So by finding resonance, we actually prevent the entanglement pattern happening before it even starts. So let’s just say I’m here, just sitting here, and I’m in my alignment, and my beloved is just slightly off-center, and he says to me, “You criticized me”. If I came off center and said, “No, I didn’t. You blah blah blah!” I’ve now entered into the entanglement pattern. To stay in my alignment, I can just see him and see that he’s having an experience and not personalize it, not engage with it, but not leave him and not defend and not block him out either, actually stay in my heart and stay in the essence of my true self. I can simply say, “It sounds like you’re feeling criticized”, “What’s happening for you?”, and actually be curious, because a curious mind is a healthy mind.
To do that without leaving myself, to not hurry. I don’t need to rush and say my opinion, I can actually regulate my nervous system and I become a co-regulating force in our relationship. Which means I’m staying in my alignment, and the more able I am to stay in my alignment, I know that I have an unbreakable connection with the source that beats my heart. That even when my partner and my beloved is having a challenging time, I actually can still stay in my alignment and be in this relationship fully, as my fullest self, as he finds his way back home to himself, to his heart. Remembering that I’m not the source of his pain, I’m not the source of his solution, I’m not the source of his love. He can then come back into his alignment, and we can deepen into intimacy where those entanglement patterns are not what is the baseline of our relationship. Our alignment, is the baseline of our relationship.
In order for this to happen, there’s two things that are really important for both of us to agree upon. One, is we both need to agree that we are responsible for our own alignment. This is really important. The moment that we believe that it is our partner that is responsible for our OK-ness and our well-being, and is our source of safety and power, we aren’t in agreement that we are responsible for our own alignment. Our younger attachments and patterns, probably and in all likelihood, guide that misbelief that the other person is responsible. But full self-responsibility, 100% self-responsibility, is the way to have a sovereign, spiritually aligned connection. That is not to say that I am so self-responsible that I allow abusive behavior. That is not to say that at all, because in what I’m saying, both of us are in agreement that we are both responsible for ourselves. That’s number one.
Number two, is the recognition that our connection is important and sacred, and that we put our spiritual purpose, our spiritual body, our spiritual heart, at the center, and that we both hold that as sacred. That it is both of our responsibility to tend to the interconnectedness of our spiritual union. And this is seemingly a paradox. We are both self-responsible for ourselves fully, and we are both responsible for our interconnectedness. This place of interconnectedness is where most entanglement patterns happen. Because when we’re in a relationship, the connection is really what we both want, but to have that connection without leaving our sense of self-responsibility, without leaving our alignment, is where the beauty begins to unfold of the deepest, clearest, cleanest, crystalline connection.
To summarize that for you, every relationship needs polarity and resonance. We need difference to have a spark, to have connection, and we need sameness to have safety to have a sense of union. Too much polarity causes volatility and too much resonance causes dullness and boredom.
If you’re interested in learning more, I have an online course called, Spiritually Aligned Relationships, that I would love for you to check out. It is so comprehensive in teaching you how to really stay aligned, how to have clear, energetic boundaries, how to have clean and secure attachment cords, how to heal your own attachment wound, and how to have the deepest, deepest, most sacred intimacy.
I wish you so many blessings and joy in your intimate relating in your alignment and in your connection with yourself. Thank you for joining me today.
