Relationship is the hardest and most fulfilling practice there is.
It is the ultimate test in human connection and connection is most important ingredient in pretty much every part of our lives - to others and to ourselves.
It is also an area of life where we don’t get any education growing up - other than watching our parents, other relationships in our social circle and whatever we get from movies and media. No wonder why we are all so fu***d up when it comes to relationships.
My idea of relationships was very much about acquisition i.e. you acquire a romantic partner, you have fun with them and then you live happily ever after. It is all supposed to work out all by itself. Well, my first marriage ended after 11 years of being together and definitely I was the one who looked at relationship through that lens and refused to look at it any other way, until there was no going back.
I think in the past it must have been something like, ‘lets throw these two people in the deep end and they will learn how to swim’.
In the second, and hopefully the final, round I am learning that Relationship is a daily practice.
A practice of communication, boundaries, responsibility, self-love, service, love, receiving, giving, intimacy, connection, sex and unconditionality.
It is also a practice where we really get to see our shadow and get a chance to work through it in connection with the other.
It is an agreement between two or more people, which is dynamic in nature and changes form through its lifetime.
Once you can master the art of relating, you can apply that to pretty much any part of your life and gain mastery there.
In my experience, you need three things to gain this kind of Mastery - a Community (a brotherhood and sisterhood), the Understanding of Relationship as a Practice, and a Guide who can show you the blindspots that you are can’t see for yourself.