Hello, and welcome! in this video, I’m going to share with you a very simple tip to not fall into the traps that your ego sets for you in terms of limitation, blame, and conflict, in life and relationships.
Before I do that, I want to share with you that I wrote a book for you. Align: Living and Loving from the True Self, a comprehensive map that offers you practical tools for how to come back home to the truth of who you are and how to live in love from this deep, really sacred place within yourself. I also created these new, self-guided Alignment Cards. There’s 48 cards in this deck, and each card has a wisdom teaching and a sentence stem to support you in living and loving from your true self in your contemplative practice, in your work with clients, in groups, and even at parties, if your friends are also interested in a self-development and self-growth.
Maybe you have heard the Rumi quote that, “your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find every barrier within yourself that you have built against it”. I love this quote. Every time I mention this quote, it seems that everybody else loves this quote too, because this quote is pointing to something so essential and integral to the way the mind works. The way the mind looks to find relationship or even navigate relationship, is through looking at another person as separate. If I continue to look at somebody else as separate, as my beloved is separate, or the beloved that I long for, as separate from me, then I begin to fall into the trap of my ego that I’m powerless, that I’m stuck, that I’m trapped, that I can’t find my way through what’s happening. And so in relationship, the moment that the mind begins to blame our partner, resent our partner, feel annoyed at our partner, sees all of our partners blind spots, sees all of our partners flaws, whatever it is that we are seeing in them, is the indicator and the queue to look within and see where that same quality, our shadow, lives in our blind spot. Because we are attracted to, and attract people, who embody our shadow.
Whatever it is that we are seeing in our partner that we don’t like, is an indicator of something that we are projecting onto them from our own shadow. And this is the key to our own block to intimacy, to our own block to love. So I’m going to give you an example:
Let’s say that you have a pattern of being in relationship with somebody who minimizes what you want, cares more about what they want, they are simply more self-referenced, and maybe even says some things that are shaming about your desires. That behavior in them is a reflection of you, the part of you that minimizes your desires, that minimizes your wants, that feels shame about having needs, is your work, is your barrier to love that is yours to be with consciously and transform, so that you can honor what you want, so that you can stand in your sovereignty, and then decide how you want to relate to this person that you’re in a relationship with.
When we do this work, sometimes we realize that we don’t actually want this relationship, the relationship only works if we continue to minimize ourselves. And so part of this transformation is really paying more attention to who we are becoming than if we stay or leave a relationship. Because if we focus on, if we stay or leave, we’re still focusing outside of ourselves. The work is really internal and integrative and the more we integrate the parts of ourselves that we’ve disowned, the more wholeness we bring into our relating.
This is my tip for you. It might seem simple but in real time, it can be so so challenging. I want to ask that you practice, every time you start creating narratives about your partner, or your boss, or your friends or anybody in your life, and even if they’re not in your life, if there’s somebody that you want in your life that’s not there, it’s still the same pattern, every time you notice your mind making up these narratives about other people, seeing people as separate others, whatever that narrative is, follow that thread back home to yourself. So that you can be with yourself with more love, more compassion, more awareness, and transform and dissolve these internal barriers to love that you’ve unconsciously built as adaptive survival strategies throughout your life.
With that, I want to let you know that I have a course, Spiritually Aligned Relationships, that will support you in transforming the way that you show up for all of your relationships, including your deepest intimacy.