Regaining the ability to heal our partners and ourselves
When we first meet those who will become our intimate partners, we often feel an intense sense of freedom. Much of our self-perseverating mind falls away in the romantic swoon of new love; this is why we often call it “falling in love.”
But in long-term relationships, we tend to focus on our partner’s limitations or the restrictions they impose on us rather than helping them heal or break free from them.
The very arc of attraction is what keeps relationships alive.
Part of the freedom we initially experience in a relationship is because we are distracted from ourselves by the presence of this different and fascinating “other.”
This is the primal arc of sexual polarity–our partner complements us in ways that distract us from our shortcomings, problems, and feelings of inadequacy. In fact, our original attraction to our partner is a payoff for the difficulties and awkwardness of the “getting to know each other” stage.
However, once our lover becomes a more predictable part of our everyday life routine, more minor irritations rise to the surface. These little annoying behaviors get added on top of our own annoyances with life and ourselves, making them harder to ignore as a whole.
Once the predictability sets in, our partner becomes an extension of our lives, and our view of them becomes polluted with our own issues. We live on the periphery as the accumulation grows until dealing with it takes up most of our time with our partner. Then, over time, we become energy-starved; we forget how to locate that original spark of attraction and fan it back into a flame to keep the relationship alive.
Sustaining a long-term relationship is not just about finding ways to cohabitate, pay your bills, parent children, and take care of pets. It’s about bringing back the arc of attraction consistently.
This is a skill, something to be learned and practiced. And understanding why that natural mechanism of our sexual attraction happens at all can give clues to understanding and integrating these energy flows into your intimate life.
Breaking the arc of attraction depolarizes us.
When we fall into the habit of focusing on our partner’s limits rather than helping them achieve new heights, it slowly breaks the arc of attraction. It’s depolarizing; it kills sexual attraction and brings in more heaviness than playfulness.
As a result, we both get caught up in the momentum of the mundane. We forget what’s important, how to play with the various elements of our relationship to make it more exciting. This can drop us right back into the needy feelings of desperation we may have had when we were dating in the first place. But even worse, now it seems the very person who could best free us from this state is standing right in front of us and doing nothing to help.
The accumulation of moments where we feel powerless, as though we need something from our partner and can’t get it, is toxic. It’s something we’re actually doing to ourselves, and the problem is that we don’t understand how to stop.
There’s a time when it seems the amount of energy we output is more than what we’re getting in return. That’s when our ego gets fired up. When we keep score in this regard, we enter a hazardous zone.
Remember the spark that distracted us from ourselves in the beginning? It is as much a spiritual practice as it results from the chemistry between you and your partner. Most people are affected by this; it feels like something magical happened when you met, or there was a predestined chemistry at play. Even the idea of twin flames or soul mates is founded on a lack of factual knowledge and, instead, a sense of destiny pulling at you, drawing you in.
Most people I’ve talked to who believe in soul mates will say destiny brought them together. But at the same time, they talk about their choices and how they focused their awareness and attention. In particular, they mention how they toyed with the arcs of appreciation, gratitude, attraction, and play to generate a spark that grew into a relationship. There is a spark there, and they once knew how to nourish it.
Finding, reigniting, and fighting to keep this spark alive is a spiritual practice that can be both learned and relearned once forgotten.
Very few people understand how to control their awareness.
I’m sure you’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon in the world: What we focus on becomes what we see more and more of.
Similarly, what we notice in our surroundings becomes what we can’t let go of or forget about. It’s like a child with a loose tooth – they can’t stop themselves from subconsciously poking at it with their tongue.
This happens because we encounter a neurological pattern with some novelty. So we indulge in it, the result of which is that we can become very easily manipulated by that same pattern.
We often see the exploitation of this tendency in the content we see on social media and other advertising methods.
What I advocate for, as a coach, is doing the spiritual work first to learn those underlying mechanisms that govern your awareness. Then, become more deliberate in choosing what you allow yourself to engage with from the media. Try to recognize that you are the product, and the media companies are more intelligent than you, so you need to learn how to control how they use you.
The next step is to ask, how can you take this new neurological learning and apply it to help find your own source of power and freedom?
We feed off our heightened emotional states.
Start with your turn-ons. What are you enlivened by? When was the last time you were turned on, blissful, or felt utterly free? When was the last time you found yourself surrounded by beauty, melting into relaxation, or at peace with your place in the world, even for just a moment?
Abundance in teaching is about finding your inner state of feeling better, regardless of what you perceive your situation to be. This emotional energy has such a robust magnetizing feel that, when we initially fall in love, it makes everything feel “better.”
We typically attribute the benefit experienced in the early days of a relationship to things external to ourselves. However, we fail to realize that we actually feel this way because we’re brought into contact with an inner state of being that’s been lying dormant for a long time. It’s come out now because, for some reason or another, we feel safe enough with this person, or maybe because they are reflecting back something we’ve wanted our whole lives.
The core of this work is to find those things that make you feel good, the shifts in energy that can bring you from feeling “blah” to feeling amazing. Those energy shifts are the beginning of the spark we are searching for. We want to catch hold of it, feed it, and fan it into a brighter flame that we can use to enlighten ourselves and our partners.
The gift of spiritual and erotic liberation
As humans, we’re tailored to witness this “feel-good” energy. When we do, we experience an implicit sense of the liberation we intuit is possible.
Suppose you can capture this truth and understand that it’s not due to external circumstances. In that case, it reminds us of the intrinsic states of bliss, happiness, and freedom that exist within us.
Those states are always there; we just need to learn how to better access them.
In fact, we all know what it would be like to be perfectly happy; most of us aren’t there right now because we are focusing on the wrong stuff.
But once we know what liberation feels like, the beauty is that we can learn how to give it to others, too.
You can find ways to teach your partner–not to manipulate or try to change them, but to evoke their own memories of happiness, bliss, erotic spark, and connection. This is what brings you back in contact with your spark and what helps your relationship thrive over time.
If you want to dive deeper into this topic, either solo or with your partner, feel free to reach out and book a call so we can work through it together: https://sunyata.info/contact