watching Gary Zukav and his spiritual partner on Oprah’s super soul sunday clarified something for me that was often a source of longing, confusion and disappointment. there are people in the world that i feel a spiritual tug towards… it can manifest as intellectual curiosity, attraction, felt sense there is something more there.
a spiritual partnership, as they described it, is one where the individuals are partners in waking each other up. inherent in it is a desire to wake up, to grow, to fully realize our authenticity… and there isn’t much of platitudes and politeness. yet this kind of relationship requires an intention to stay together, to wake up, and to stay committed and not run away because it’s hard. although waking up sounds wonderful, it’s fraught with brutal encounters with ourselves and what we call our shadows, the neighbourhoods within us that we don’t like to go into. so it’s easy to see why we may bail out of these relationships, or tone down their intensity because it feels like too much, too close, too real.
i’ve seen ebbs and flows in my spiritual partnerships. a desire to avoid the truth combined with a thirst to fully realize. like we can’t handle the intensity of being real for too long. but i’m drawn to it just as much.
but friendships and romantic relationships are not always these. they describe how in a friendship, the goal may be to be supportive, to make each other feel better, to not say or do anything that will rock the boat. in fact, in most marriages people spend a lifetime not rocking the boat.
Zukav said “spiritual partners like to swim.” getting swung off the boat is okay.
the paradox is our ever present desire to grow and awaken, opposing our fear of what we will become if we fully wake up and what we’ll face on the way. the road to self discovery is fraught with hidden demons. on a realistic level, these demons are things we’ve already experienced AND survived. but when those movies play in our heads, they seem so real it’s hard to remember.
my mentor says the treasures are guarded by the guardians at the gate and we must be warriors as we seek these depths. a spiritual partner i guess pushes our buttons to make us go there, but make a commitment to be around. not to rescue or protect, but to be around acknowledging and witnessing us becoming real.
the paradox of being 