Photo by Dana Nollsch www.PhotoZen.us
While we breathe, live, and love, we also dream and desire. It’s the creative impulse born through us. We are one with the dance of the divine that stimulates change, growth and our alignment with our destinies. I’m sharing this post because I have had to be re-minded of the wisdom of this journey, especially when desire creates uncomfortable change. I share because I hope that some of these personal truths may also have meaning for you if and when the dance of desire brings change to your love, life and world.
I have danced all out in the land of shadows and projections, as we all have as part of the human condition. I know that surrender, non-attachment and deep-allowing in relationship can be a challenge for me, especially when my own filters, shadows and stories come to run interference, and when I feel the need to protect my ego and my perceived needs for survival, love, and more. It helps for me to remember one of my favorite inquiries of all time:
What would Love have me do?
As I mentioned in my last post, I know I’m not the only one going deeply into discovery in relationship. It’s part of our evolution to have experiences, challenges, and joys that help us to refine our preferences and ways of being in relationship, while allowing ourselves to more deeply align with love energies in each moment, especially the moments that hurt. As relationships change, we may be rocked to our core, wondering at our worthiness, rightness or righteousness.
I see so often in myself, friends, family, clients and more the impulse to make someone wrong in order to justify leaving a relationship or to allow that relationship to change form in significant ways. Most often, we will make the other person wrong. However, if we happen to be with someone we love, value and honor, often we will turn the wrongness inward, making ourselves wrong. If our partner(s) have dreams or desires that take them away from our aligned path, we may wonder what we did wrong and cause ourselves great suffering. In the paradigm of wrongness, there’s an impulse to fix. However, there’s pain and little room for true love’s expressions in the dance of wrongness and fixing.
Coaches Training Institute taught me:
Rule Number One: Nobody gets to be wrong.
No one is broken and nothing needs fixing.
We are all naturally creative, resourceful and whole.
So, I pose this question:
How would it be if we were to acknowledge a divergence in desires rather than an inherent wrongness on anyone’s part?
Dreams and desires are authentic, beautiful creations of the soul, a calling for expression and manifestation. Of course, they evolve as we do, but in any one moment, our desires illuminate who we BE in the world and our creative potential. Sometimes when we are in partnership, we may begin to deny our own dreams and desires, to stuff them into the shadows, because there may not seem to be safe space for their expression within the partnership. This may create mental confusion or conflict within, but also dis-harmony in the relationship. If we haven’t owned or articulated our dreams, we may project the responsibility for fulfillment onto the other in an unconscious way, and then feel angry. If we are able to share our dreams more fully, but there is great divergence, we may strive for some sort of compromise where no one really wins or loses. Or we may just step outside of the relationship to taste our desires elsewhere. If this can be done with honesty and integrity, then that can be a win-win. Dishonesty is pretty destructive, however, as we all know.
Putting the responsibility on another to be our “everything,” can feel like an overwhelming burden for the other, even if the responsibility isn’t articulated.
If we are willing to embrace our dreams and desires as keys to our soul’s expressions, and if we are willing to own our worthiness in receiving and embracing our heart’s desires, then our mental confusions and conflicts that subvert harmony in the relationship simply vanish. As we own our responsibility for channeling our intuition into actions that support our dreams, we find more peace within and with our partner(s). There may have to be a willingness to surrender to the process, to allow the relationship to evolve in ways that may not be foreseen. We may have to be willing to let go, for the greater good of all.
In a healthy, vibrant, expansive relationship, there’s room for creative expression and potential for everyone. There may also be times of going within, of contraction, to allow for the harvesting of fresh dreams and desires. When love shows up fully, there’s a willingness to hold the desires of the other, as well as our own, as worthy and valuable, even when there may be incongruences.
What would Love have you do?
