We have learned that when it comes to waking up together in our relationships, we are all in training, and that our attempts to be patient and kind with those we love will inevitably go through the natural growing pains of “trial and error.” You could almost say that getting “knocked down” is how we learn to give up parts of us that “lead with their chin!”
Not only are we going to find ourselves set back on our heels when we run into some of the unseen limitations in our partner, but this will happen even more so…when we encounter similar blockages in ourselves. But we can learn to see these unwanted moments for what they have always been in reality: “on the job” training. The more evident becomes this truth – that our relationships are the way love works to “exercise” us – the more we are inwardly strengthened by our discoveries, and gradually empowered to love one another more perfectly.
As just one example, if we know that our partner is “in training,” then we are a lot less likely to blame them for falling down on the job of caring for us. So not only are we able to forgive our partner for failing to meet our expectations, but at the same time, we’re also empowered to forgive ourselves whenever we see ourselves come up short, having missed some intended mark.
Such moments – of realizing that neither we, nor our partner are as we’ve imagined ourselves to be – are shocking, at best. But let’s be perfectly clear: love can no more be discouraged by what it serves to reveal in us…than can the sun be shamed into not shining!
This last idea can’t be stated strongly enough: when it comes to our wish – and work – to learn how to love unconditionally, all forms of discouragement are a lie; they are a misbegotten creation of an unconscious level of self whose intent – as expressed by the disheartened way it wants us to feel – is to make us believe that meeting these limitations in ourselves is the same as the end of love’s possibilities. Use the following example to prove to yourself why this, and any such form of discouragement is utter nonsense!
Can you remember the first time you ever tried to run a mile, or to work out with a set of weights heavier than what you may have used before? Let me refresh your memory, as needed.
The moment you pressed your body to go beyond its present level of conditioning, it started “screaming” at you; a “sound” we all know in one way or another: lungs gasping for air, heart pounding out of our chest, weary arms aching with fatigue. But why would we deliberately take our body up to and through such a threshold, especially one that brings this kind of suffering, as it always seems to do?
It’s by design: we understand there’s only one way to make ourselves physically stronger: we must pay the “price” for each new level of endurance and strength that we would make our own. That’s the whole purpose of working to train our body: to rise above whatever its present limitation, in order to realize the next higher level of our potential at that point in time. And then, to do it all over again, should that be our wish.
And so it is …when it comes to the “exercise” of waking up together.
Nothing in the universe can stop us from letting go and loving our partner unconditionally, because the higher love we seek has “gone before us” to prepare the way. But what love has prepared for us doesn’t mean that we don’t have to prepare to receive its power to perfect us, and our relationships.
We have work to do.
And right now is always the right time to get started.
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