Hello Beautiful Souls.

Relationships are an amazing opportunity for personal growth. At least mine have been, and the one I’m in now is no exception.

Why are they such potent ground for personal growth? In large part it’s because of how challenging they are. One of the huge parts of the challenge is that we’re with that person all the time. We don’t have space from them. They’re with us no matter what.

So, let’s think about other relationships as a contrast. Your relationships with colleagues for instance. You might have challenges with them at work, but you get to go home and rest from those. You get weekends off from them. Even your best friend or your best friends, when you have spats with them, maybe you have a fight about who’s supposed to pay for dinner this time or who called who last… even that you get to go home, from.  If you don’t see them for a few days, it’s okay. You can release some steam, let it go, do what you need to do, meditate, etc.. You’re good. Then when you see them again, you’re better, right?

But your intimate partner, you’re already home! And you might even already be in bed! There’s no getting away from this person. So, what that means is that you don’t get time off from them like you do with everybody else. They see the worst of you, and they see the best of you. They see all of you. And of course, you’re seeing all of them also. You don’t get space from them either. They don’t get to go home either because they’re already home, too.

There’s a Chinese medicine doctor in Thailand, and hen I was there, I went to see her a lot. She’s an amazingly wise person and a really good healer. I was there for something, I don’t even remember what it was. I was 32, I think, and I was telling her about something going on in my first marriage. I was complaining about him. She looked at me, really deep into my eyes and she said, “Elena, when you agree to a relationship like this, you agree to live with their dragons.”

Oh. Right. Okay. Got it.
That sunk in really deep.

Of course that means they agree to live with mine, too. We’re agreeing to be together, agreeing to have our dragons sleep together, eat dinner with each other, do our laundry together… all of it. We are together, thick and thin, and this makes it really challenging.

The other thing that being so close to each other does is it means that we can see their blind spots and they can see ours.
What do I mean by that?

This is especially helpful for those of us that do a lot of practice, those of us that have meditated a lot, or done a lot of chi kong, or whatever your practice is… whatever we’re doing to help ourselves heal, and transform, and grow, and progress, and be better and better people. We can be doing that for years and years and years, and get to a place where we feel like, “Wow, I’m really good.”

I followed a teacher, David Deida, and he talked about that. He did all this practice. He was in communities with people who were really long term practitioners, who’d practiced for 20 years, 30 years, and they were amazing. Their interpersonal relationships were amazing, except for their intimate ones. He said it was incredible how many times he would interact with them and learn beautiful lessons from the interactions, yet their intimate relationships were just a big mess. Their deepest inner dragons couldn’t hide in their intimate relationships. That was where they were exposed. They could hide in other relationships, but not in the intimate ones.

Our partners see the things no one else sees. They see our blind spots.

Even with all of the things that we think we’ve done, all the healing and transforming… and yet that’s the person who sees the bits we can’t see, who sees the bits that we’re unconscious of, that we’re still unconscious of even after all the work we’ve done. Intimate relationships are really challenging, which is helpful for showing us what we’re blind to in ourselves, even after years and years of practice.

And man, if you want someone to help you see what you can’t see, what you’re still unconscious of, that’s the person.

I feel like that’s partly why some of us don’t have intimate relationships for long periods. We need, for whatever reason, space from them. It can just be too much. We know when we’re in them, “Man, all those demons, and dragons, and shadows are up! There’s no space, no rest from them.”

It’s amazing we do them at all! -except that they’re really wonderful as well. As well as seeing the dragons, the darkest darks, we also see the lightest lights, and that’s beautiful.

So, I love my partner. Very, very, very, happy to be with him. And it is where I do the most personal growth for sure. The things that he helps me see about myself most importantly.

I hope that helps.
Go hug your partner—dragons, demons, shadows and all—and tell them how much you love them, because of course they’re living with yours, too! And take a moment and really appreciate the gift that that is.

Deep Love,
Elena