Spring Cleaning 04/24/2010
My relationship with Eli is shifting again. We are walking out of a warm and cozy winter into an alive and breathing spring and our relationship is shedding layers to adjust. We are leaving behind fears in pursuit of what we want. We are letting go of our tight grasp on a future forever together in the hope to more deeply feel the present moment between us. I still want to marry him. I still want to have kids with him. I still want to be business partners. I still want to live with him. I’m allowing those wishes to be there for as long as they want and by allowing it all to be there, the deepest desires are emerging. The desire to be myself and express myself has come to the foreground again and thus, our relating is shifting. One of my mentors, Nicole Daedone, wrote a beautiful insight into true love. “A love that never changes is no love at all, for love is the life force, and whatever lives is also constantly in the process of dying. If we refuse to surrender to the fall of death, nothing new can be born. This falling in and out of love, in and out of turn on is the whole of the experience, all of it.” I love these words and I know they are true after months of falling in and out of love with my relationship to Eli. My love for Eli touches the bottom layers of my heart. The way he fearlessly speaks his mind, the way he spoons me with every muscle in his body, the way he listens with his attentive clear blue eyes - all of that and all of him is not what I am losing. The relationship with its roles, its forms, its rules, is what I fall in and out of love with and is that which is gently dying. In the recent months, Eli and I have spent more time together: in coach training, coaching couples together, having business meetings, going to yoga, cuddling after discussions of our breakthrough moments. We’ve opened up our sexuality by becoming intimate with other people when it feels right, dating new faces, and talking about what turns us on. We’ve stayed connected throughout it all and become closer as a result. I find myself depending on him less and knowing him more. Even with the almost constant communication, a deeper shift occurred this past week that surprised us, then scared us, and now it’s what is carrying us towards the next phase of our relationship, a phase that is still unknown to me but already feels more intimate than anything I’ve experienced with another human being. This last weekend, I started to admit my desires to myself more freely. One big one on Saturday and then another on Sunday and then another on Monday. With each acknowledgement of what I wanted to create and who I wanted to be, I became more turned on. I won’t water it down for the blog. I want to change the way the world talks about sex. I want to be a leader in relationship coaching. I want to fully explore my sexuality. All of these are under the large umbrella desire of wanting to be myself, no matter what it looks like. Several times, Eli was scared he didn’t know me as well as he thought he did because the words I stated were new to him and each time he got scared, I got scared that maybe I had gone too far and I had said too much. That is the issue with hiding your desire, because when it comes out (and it always does) the desire isn’t as bad as the fact that you kept it from the people closest to you and then their fear around change triggers your fear that you’ll lose them and so you leave your poor desire behind to return to the way it was and then the desire comes back bigger and with some kick to it because you left it behind once or twice already and nothing likes to be left behind and so the cycle continues. Whoa. The potential for this pattern to unfold surfaced repeatedly over the past week but the aliveness I felt in my body couldn’t be stopped. Fear didn’t have enough power to take over this time. I kept thinking this is me and people will come around. Eli came around and wholeheartedly expressed his support of me, and then got ignited himself, dreaming up his own goals and stating his own desires (which means you can look forward to a future blog about the utter hell you go through when your partner goes towards their desire). There was a moment when it was just the two of us and we looked at each other wide-eyed and smiling. Eli said, “it looks like we are agreeing not to keep each other small anymore.” I moved closer to him and embraced him with all of my body. It is alarming to say “something isn’t working” or “can we please talk?” because we fear the worst, but the more we avoid looking in the ambiguous corners of our relationships, the fears and the potential of the worst happening grow. Instead, we can pause to communicate what’s true for us and shine light upon these weird uncertain places and then the relationship has a chance to find its right size. This latest shift with Eli doesn’t feel so big and scary because unlike the past, we’re not giving up or settling for smaller. There is a tinge of sadness in saying goodbye to the old form because it was so good, truly sweet and comfortable, but we have a bigger more spacious relationship to step into and so the sadness is quickly overshadowed by the excitement of what we are creating. We get to dream wider and be more powerful as individuals and as a result, a stronger force when we are together. We get to have more experiences, more stories to tell, more sensations as we venture out farther into the world and deeper into witnessing each other. I promise to write about the times when it gets hard and this doesn’t sound so simple and easy but for now, I have faith in us, in me, in my unfolding desire and its power to effortlessly ignite my path. With love, LC CommentsLeave a Reply |
