The honeymoon might end months, years, or even decades after
the commitment you made to each other. And when it does, partnerships or
marriages that survive, will have generally learned new ways of communicating in
ways that involve the soul of both partners, ways that weren’t necessarily a part
of the earlier period of the relationship.
At the beginning, so much is easy due to the
love-need-chemistry element present in those early stages. It almost seems as
though anything you say to each other is filled with magic. But when you’re no
longer in that stage, the need to recognize that more than that exquisite
love-need-chemistry element is required for the relationship to prosper, becomes
imperative.
So what do you do?
Interestingly, here it becomes clear whether you have
already begun to do some work on yourself; whether you have already taken on
the task of personal – and inner, or soul - growth. Those who have may find it
an easier job of dealing with this new way of communicating with soul. If only
one of the two partners has taken on this task, things can become quite tricky.
If you have taught yourself to have good boundaries, to take
good care of and love yourself, to not be reactive, and to therefore
self-regulate, you are already going to be communicating at another level than
someone who has not. This is not about intelligence, culture, or academic degrees,
but about the quality of
communication, given everything implied in the first sentence of this
paragraph. By quality, I mean that
the level of your communication is different even when it stoops to arguments
and misunderstandings caused by poor boundaries and a lack of self-regulation. So
if you find yourself there, the you
that has been walking the path of inner or soul growth, recognizes the negative
energetic pull of that kind of communication and therefore finds a way to move
to an energetically higher level. Carl Gustav Jung said: “where love reigns,
there is no will to power, and where the will to power is paramount, love is
lacking.”
But there is another element involved with this new soul communication that must set in
after the honeymoon, and that brings words such as mystery, depth, awe and wonder
into the equation. The near-spiritual quality of those words is precisely what allows a relationship
to transition from honeymoon to a communion
that Thomas Moore calls “the irrationality of the soul when a relationship
is soulful” in his beautiful book Soul
Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship.
He writes: “An essential part of becoming marriageable is to
be a maker, a person who cultivates a life of beauty, rich texture, and creative
work. If we understand marriage only as the commitment of two individuals to
each other, then we overlook its soul, but if we see that it also has to do
with family, neighbourhood, and the greater community, and with our own work
and personal cultivation, then we begin to glimpse the mystery that is marriage.” And he later states: “All intimate
relationships require some degree of magic, because magic, not reason and will,
accomplishes what the soul needs.”
So we can infer from Moore’s words that without
communication at this soul level, the relationship may well remain sterile in
those ways that eventually cause the partners to drift apart because there is no longer – or perhaps there never
was, except in that honeymoon period – any magic and mystery.
In his Letters to a
Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes “The point of marriage is not to
create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a
good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the
guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible
trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to
exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties
of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted
that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvellous
living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse
between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a
whole and before an immense sky.”
This makes it clear that being joined at the hip – as so
many people seem to believe is necessary for a relationship to be successful –
is, in fact, dangerous to the life of the relationship, and the growth – in
particular the soul growth - of the
two partners.
Ursula Le Guin wrote that “love doesn’t just sit there, like
a stone; it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
And this ‘making new’ tells us that soul (as Moore puts it)
and self (as Rilke puts it) must form part of love and the way we communicate
with the beloved, even as we are emptying the dishwasher or taking out the
garbage. Moore wrote: “As odd as it may sound, a relationship may find its soul
more in attention to such things as the way we eat together or paint our
bedroom ceiling than in mutual introspection. Soul is not necessarily nourished
by what satisfies the mind.”
If we ‘tend’ to it, soul initially comes up in life through
the most banal things, whether it is how we meet someone who becomes important
to us, our work, that little (or big) accident, or that unexpected bit of luck.
What then arises from that and how we develop it, is what becomes the makings
of and the growth of the soul. This raw material we chance upon in life – and
it can truly be on a daily basis - is what the alchemists called prima materia. Jung wrote in his Alchemical Studies about this: “The
prima materia is, as one can so aptly say in English, ‘tantalizing’: it is
cheap as dirt and can be had everywhere, only nobody knows it; it is as vague
and evasive as the lapis that is to be produced from it; it has a ‘thousand
names’. And the worst thing is that without it, the work cannot even be begun …
It is the most despised and rejected thing, “thrown out into the street,” “cast
on the dunghill,” “found in filth.”
Buddhist thought about this prima materia that “grows” the soul, which in turn allows us to
communicate with soul, in the words of Pema Chödron states: “If we learn to
open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our
teacher.” And I would add: as can the events
of our lives. Continuing along the same line, we have the title of one of Zen
Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh’s books: No Mud,
No Lotus, which reiterates the identical point.
Our task then, is to hone and polish the jewel – the soul - using
the raw materials we are given, just as alchemists spoke of transforming the nigredo or blackness into gold by passing
it through the alchemical fire.
***************
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CHARLAS EN ESPAÑOL EN YOUTUBE
Vampiros energéticos: Su efecto destructivo en tu vida
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CHARLAS EN ESPAÑOL EN YOUTUBE
Vampiros energéticos: Su efecto destructivo en tu vida
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"Límites malsanos y autoestima: Tu felicidad y el amor hacia ti mismo"
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Elige hábitos para llevar una vida de bienestar
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Morir: Un enfoque espiritual
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"Soluciones para personas emocionalmente inaccesibles
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Narcisismo y Psicopatía: Vivir sin Empatía
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Relación espiritual y sexo en pareja
en YouTube aquí
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Elige hábitos para llevar una vida de bienestar
en YouTube aquí
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en YouTube aquí
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en YouTube aqui
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BOOKS - LIBROS - BÜCHER
Also visit my book website: www.gabriellakortsch.com where you may download excerpts or read quotations from any of my books (also in Spanish & German). My latest book Emotional Unavailability & Neediness: Two Sides of the Same Coin is available globally on Amazon in print & Kindle. You can also obtain it (or any of my other books) via Barnes & Noble.
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