“Only out of deep experience of love, sweet and bitter, pleasant and painful, high and low, heaven and hell, only out of deep experience of pain and pleasure through love does one become aware. They are needed to make you aware.” – Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
There are many ways to evolve in this life but one of the fastest roads is through relationship. It may take decades to work on healing wounds alone, but when you enter a relationship, very quickly the unacknowledged shadow parts emerge, and the dance of raising awareness begins. If you project your shadow onto the other person, and say it is not your stuff, it is something they are doing, conflict arises. At some point, no matter how much psychological work you’ve done on yourself, or think you’ve done, the shadows wake you up at night to be recognized. Is this me or is it you? Maybe you are me and I am you? One of the deepest lessons in a relationship is to bring us to this awareness of the self as the other, and seeing the beloved in ALL.
“Self-knowledge is not the knowledge of a dead self, self-knowledge is the knowledge of the process of the self. It is an alive phenomenon. The self is not a thing, it is an event, it is a process. Never think in terms of things, the self is not there inside you just like a thing waiting in your room. The self is a process: changing, moving, arriving at new altitudes, moving into new planes, going deeper into new depths. Each moment much work is going on and the only way to encounter this self is to encounter it in relationship.” – Osho
Relationships are a river; dynamic and flowing, constantly transforming as we evolve higher and raise our frequency. When we are not willing to take responsibility for our shadow parts, then projections can take over the show. But if we remind ourselves that this work is the gift of awareness, a relationship has the potential to help us evolve light years faster than simply walking away from it. It is a question of willingness and awareness. How willing are you to do the work of evolving? How much awareness of your shadow and light can you handle? Relationship work is really the work of raising awareness, of becoming more aware of yourself, through the flow of relating.
Published in 2016
