Valentine’s week and thoughts are on love, love, love. Not just romantic love for me but the essence of who we are kind of love and doing what we love and feeling so blessed by love. Romance does figure in, however, since John and I are going to be celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary in a couple of days. February 17, 2017, we celebrated our union legally after 17 years together. So now after 21 ½ years I love my beloved John even more than I did when this whole adventure began. How blessed am I (and I remind him that he is too 😊, on a regular basis)? We do have fun teasing each other and doing silly things and just being who we are.
There was a time when I would never have guessed this kind of relationship was possible after numerous failed relationships and even after doing personal development work. It took a major commitment to learn how to love every part of me, even the parts of me that I had previously disliked and rejected yet expected my partners to love. That made an enormous difference but the learning and the commitment to be love is ongoing and ever evolving.
Another thing that I have found to be essential in a healthy relationship is communication. I can’t stress that enough. Keeping secrets and not sharing our thoughts and feelings in a responsible way can only create separation. The severely flawed idea that we should just bury our feelings or conversely blame people for them is deadly in a relationship. It is indeed possible to express feelings without blame or fault and to be radically honest without hurting each other. When we realize the source of our upsets is not our partner even though they may be the triggers, and we own our feelings, we can talk about them and create more intimacy rather than pushing either our feelings or our partner away. It takes some practice but if we are even honest about admitting we may err in our communication then we make the space for love to flow through the darkest of times.
I am deeply grateful to those who showed me another way all those years ago and I am grateful to the greatest teacher of all, my own soul, for guiding me and keeping me going.
May we all continue to grow in love and peace all the days of our lives.
Namaste
