JOHN WELWOOD: "JOURNEY OF THE HEART: INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP AND THE PATH OF LOVE"

Sharing life with the one we love, with all its joys and sorrows is one of the best paths of spiritual growth. Still, the true awakening happens only when we are ready to face all our wounds, fears and illusions and to work on them. These are the things that we normally tend to avoid, rejecting permanent relationships and trying to replace them with spiritual practices.

The majority of the people would enjoy a healthy relationship that would bring them joy and happiness, but the truth is that all of us experience difficulties with our close partners from time to time. Rainer Maria Rilke captured the essence of difficulties of romantic relationship when he wrote: “For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation”. Rilke does not claim that it is difficult to love or that it is challenging to possess a quality of loving kindness. What he tries to say is that it can turn out to be complicated to continue loving the one with whom we live – day after day, year after year. Many people give up and refuse close relationship as soon as they face the same difficulties and endure the same failures. They start to perceive the scope of relationship as something that is brimming with romantic illusions and emotional dangers. For this reason, they do not want to continue wasting their energy on it.

Although the actual relationship might seem particularly difficult, the very same difficulty can be perceived as a possibility for personal and spiritual growth. What do we need to transform our relationship into a more conscious one? We should get to know how our relationship combines these three elements, the core components of a human being: ego, person and being.

Every close relationship includes 3 levels of interactions and partners go through these levels again and again. Ego meets ego, person meets person and being meets being. There are moments when two human beings can get connected with each other on a different level of being – the level of pure openness in one moment and in the next instance their egos can meet in a contrasting conditions of life and death struggle.

When our partners treat us well, we tend to open up but when they say or do something that is threatening our ego, we start to feel uncomfortable and mirror that feeling of uneasiness to the other person. When our closest person suddenly becomes a stranger to us, when our partner, instead of inspiring us, brings only the feeling of confusion and delusion, we can start feeling devastated. At that point, it is important to flip our perception of the situation and try to keep the broader perspective in order to understand what is really going on. The roots of this crisis can be connected to the change in your partner, in your relationship and in yourself. If you find what has changed inside of you and accept it, you will be able to transform your relationship, overcome the crisis and start a new chapter with them. You can get the real comprehension of who you are in a deeper way only through interactions with others. Only if you are sincere with yourself and your partner, the relationship can be fruitful and meaningful. Charles Spurgeon once said that sincerity makes the very least person to be of more value than the most talented hypocrite. Do you agree?