The healing potential of the relational field

To whatever degree we have not metabolized unmet feelings of abandonment, loneliness, shame, and rage, we can count on our fellow travelers to offer this opportunity to us in a seemingly endless number of ways. This can be excruciating, but we might come to see this invitation as the unique gift of the relational field, a provocative summons into the very charged crucible of intimacy, openness, aliveness, and healing.

We each come into adulthood with a bias toward connection, separateness, or disorganization, corresponding to an early environment where caregivers were inconsistently available, engulfing, or abusive, respectively. As nearly all of our emotional wounding arose in relationship, many believe that it is best untangled and unwound within a relational matrix. Solitary practice is immensely helpful in this area, yet many have come to discover that it is not enough, realizing that most contemplative practice was simply not designed to work with this level of the developmental spectrum, intertwining with the unfolding of subjectivity, trauma, and narrative.

The notion that a “good” or “healthy” relationship is one where we are consistently seen and met by our partners is worthy of exploration. As infants, we come to know who we are through having our experience mirrored back to us. Through consistent and attuned contact to our developing subjectivity, we are able to acquire a sense of confidence, trust, and cohesion in our sense of self and in the validity of our emotional world. While we carry forward this longing for mirroring into our lives as adults, we may discover that it is not possible for another to fully provide this function for us, and the (often subtle) expectation that they do so is quite a burden to place upon them.

As long as we rely on a good other to mirror back to us our essential lovability and self-worth, we will not be able to fully open to them; it is just too risky because we have given them so much importance in our own psychic development, assigning functions to them that are ultimately ours to provide. To the degree we see the other as a mere object in our own experience, there to meet our needs and confirm who we are – and not as a subject in their own right – we will not be able to cultivate the clear perception required to explore with an open heart the shaky, at times terrifying, relentlessly precious territory that radical, transforming intimacy is by its nature.

This is in no way to say that we cannot or should not ask our friends and partners for help and support along the way, to hold us, encourage us, and stay close as we navigate the chaotic, glorious, messy, very human journey. Of course we can, and should, while simultaneously taking ultimate responsibility for our own experience, knowing the other will not be able to care for our inner worlds for us, to walk the path for us, to know what it is like to truly open our hearts and touch the infinite, and to also know what it is like to experience utter heartbreak, deflation, and disappointment.

It is valid, healthy, and totally honorable to ask our partners to be kind – to make contact with us and our emotional world, while not fusing with and impinging upon it – and to provide the space we need for our experience to unfold and illuminate on its own. To allow us to succeed and to fail, to hold it together and at times to fall apart, to rest in joy and to crumble in despair. To forget who we are and to remember again… only to forget once more. To know the full-spectrum of what it means to be an open, vulnerable, tender human being. These qualities of contact and space are the exact qualities that grow babies’ brains and nervous systems, and are likewise supportive of us as adults who continue to mature, individuate, and move into deeper levels of awareness and sensitivity.

May we make the revolutionary commitment to offering a true holding environment – for ourselves, our lovers, and our fellow travelers – and above all else to practicing a wild and uncompromising kindness as we walk the path of the heart together. When in doubt, be kind, to yourself and the others that mysteriously come into and out of your life. For it is a radical and astonishing path, this journey of intimacy, that will demand everything from us, but offers fruit that is worthy of our deepest gratitude and awe.

My new book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

Compassion for the inner other

It is important to realize that the path of opening the heart is not the same as becoming a receptacle for the unloading of others’ unconscious, unresolved beliefs, unprocessed feelings, and unintegrated behaviors. It is to the degree that we are attuned to the “inner other” within that we will be able to skillfully respond to the projections of the external other upon us. This inner other contains all of those partly processed feelings, unmetabolized emotions, and unconscious beliefs that we have lost contact with along the way, the entirety of our disowned vulnerability in all its forms.

The only way to care for and integrate the “other” is by way of profound levels of self-compassion. For many, this holding does not come naturally as it was not encoded into the nervous system of a little one in an environment lacking in empathic attunement, a field not ripe and open enough to contain the magic and brilliance of a unique, unprecented, unfolding emotional world. But despite early relational trauma, inconsistent empathic mirroring, and the seeding of disorganized narratives of attachment, you can learn and practice this now. You can experience reunion with the disavowed inner other and play with him or her, re-embodying to the pure flow of feeling that was once disallowed and misunderstood in a world that has forgotten.

While appearing “compassionate” on the outside, being an emotional doormat involves the re-enacting of early, unconscious dynamics. We learned that devaluing ourselves, often in very subtle ways, was the best route to get our needs met, to fit in, to receive attention and affection, and to maintain a precarious tie to an unavailable attachment figure. This trance of unworthiness arose not because there was something fundamentally wrong with us, but from our best efforts to care for a sensitive little heart when we were not developmentally equipped to dance in the opposites, to hold the tension, and to work through overwhelming states of survival-level anxiety.

But the pathways within you are luminous – neither solid nor fixed – and can be reorganized around empathy, kindness, and presence. The urgency of the little one scrambling to be held and mirrored can be metabolized now with new capacities that were once unavailable, replaced with the slower, more grounded circuitry of wise, empathic kindness. But this possibility occurs only by way of self-compassion and the unconditional commitment to no longer abandon the inner other as it surges within you, in the form of feeling, sensation, and vulnerability of all kinds. We must end the spell of self-abandonment, which will require immense courage, care, curiosity, and embodiment, staying close to the eruption of waves of emotion as they present for integration.

Look carefully and see the ways you habitually place others’ needs over your own… not out of true compassion for them, but as a re-enactment of an early environment of shame and unworthiness. With your presence, seed the somatic field with holding and attunement, receive the longing for an update to your holy nervous system, and lay down a new pathway. This pathway is grounded in self-care, which wisely expresses itself in the skillful care of others, and reveals the union of self and other in the heart.

My new book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

When the known crumbles away

There was an old dream that opening your heart was always going to feel safe, that somehow love promised that.

That allowing another to truly matter was going to be easy, that staying close to your vulnerability was somehow not going to feel shaky and at times unbearable.

That to heal meant you’d be in some protected, resolved, untouchable state where you had transcended the sensitivity of being an open, naked, alive human being.

But the beloved has no interest in your certain, invulnerable, crystal clear clarity and safe knowing. Or in conforming to anything. He or she is just too wild and untamed for all that, an of the nature of relentless creativity.

In whatever form the beloved may take in your life – an intimate partner, a child, someone who triggers and annoys you, or the purples in a late summer sunset – they long for your burning, for that quivering in your heart, for your tender not-knowing. To stand in awe as you meet this world as an amateur, not an expert, as a humble servant of the mystery.

When you are totally unclothed – of all of your spiritual concepts and certain, safe knowing – love will show you what you are. When the known crumbles away, all that remains is your burning heart. There is nothing more alive than that. There is nothing more sacred than that. There is nothing safer than that.

My new book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available