Awakening To spirit
by Heather Foreman and Nick Bustos
Relationship As A Spiritual Practice
9/28/08
The great saint Paramhansa Yogananda once wrote:
"Ordinary love is selfish, darkly rooted in desires and satisfaction. Divine love is without condition, without boundary, without change. The flux of the human heart is gone forever at the transfixing touch of pure love."
Whoa, that’s quite a mouthful, but Yogananda seems to be right on. The possibility of experiencing a far more transcendent and universal love is what keeps us searching through the messy and complicated roads our relationships have taken us down. What keeps us looking, especially when our deepest pains and disappointments have come at the hands of those we say we love?
For us (Nick and Heather), it was a road paved with intense happiness and equally intense sorrow. Throughout our seven years together, we had tastes of pure bliss, followed by waves of confusion, anger and sorrow. It seemed like our relationship had the capacity to lift us to the gates heaven or bring us to our knees. It was a wild and rocky emotional rollercoaster wrought with joy, tears, laughter and the occasional curse word. But as the saying goes, “The night is the darkest just before the dawn”, the funniest thing happened: while immersed in the depths of confusion and heartache, the spiritual bug bit us and we were forever transformed. What was unique in our case is that we were propelled into the experience of Awakening at roughly the same time. This experience was clearly a direct by-product of the hell we created via our relationship, and now questions loomed. How would we embrace our relationship with this newfound consciousness? Could we experience steadfast Divine Love in our relationship? We knew it certainly couldn’t stay the same; we had drastically shifted as individuals and we knew our relationship would have to mirror that, or it wouldn’t survive.
Needless to say, as if some invisible force was pushing us, we made the decision to make spiritual growth and evolution the number one priority in our lives. We became full time seekers of Truth—the type of Truth saints and sages throughout cultures and centuries have been talking about: that all-encompassing and pervading experience of the One; the Knowingness that connects all living beings. And as we delved deeper and deeper into the Divine abyss, the notion became clear that realizing our Truest Selves had nothing to do with escaping the world, each other, or anything of the sort. No, we had to get down and dirty and actually apply this stuff that we had been learning. Spiritual practice, we believe, is what they call it. To say that our greatest gains have been made in our failures and not our successes is an understatement.
An important aspect of our growth as individuals is responsibility. And by this we mean Radical Responsibility. We began to accept the reality that we are not victims of world we see, and much less each other. What a tremendous sense of empowerment one feels when they can say this and mean it! We committed ourselves to taking full responsibility for our feelings, judgments and actions. When you take on Radical Responsibilty, you eliminate the validity of projecting judgments and emotions onto others. By not blaming others (especially loved ones), for our own loss of peace, we create a new space for healing to occur. We are then in a position of immense power to transform the anger, hurt and judgment because it is no longer outside of ourselves. No longer do we have to wait for anyone or anything to change, all we have to do is change our perception. It’s simple, yes, but NOT easy. In fact, applying this kind of Radical Responsibility to relationships is one of the most difficult things in the world to do, let alone master. When the world throws disaster, chaos and disappointment your way, it’s easy to get sucked into the confusion and frustration that follow. Our commitment to the Presence of Being keeps us committed to seeing the True Nature in each other. Essentially, the point here is one word: commitment. As George Harrison famously put, “Everything else can wait, but the search for God cannot wait”, we recognized that our relationship is an essential element to our Self-Realization.
Relationships are a precious jewel in the process of Awakening. They are sacred mirrors into the depths of consciousness. With our partners, we get to see the sides of ourselves that are hidden from sight- what Carl Jung calls the Shadow. When we begin to take full responsibility for our shadow we begin to wake up to the idea that our world is made of arbitrary and ever-changing perceptions; it is something of a dream, and we in fact, are the dreamer. So what is there to learn from our partner? Well Jung said, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” In psychological terms, this is referring to the concept of projection, where we notice, attack and point out the flaws in others that actually reside in ourselves. Projection therefore, is a self-made prison, a deeply rooted defense mechanism meant to keep the ego intact, which is only transcended through the light of awareness.
So, wait a minute, the world we perceive is just a reflection of our own inner state of mind?!?! Yes. It’s true. There is no one ‘out there’ to blame for any of this mess we appear to be in. We are creators and more importantly, co-creators with God. As we heal our perception, our experience in the world is radically different from what we have known before. Where we used to point the finger at someone else while justifying and validating our insane perceptions, we are now silently observing the experience from a state of pure conscious awareness. When you finally ‘get it’ that you are creating your own dream of insanity and suffering, the ball is in your court. You realize you can alter the experience of any given situation you find yourself in. This is radical indeed. And also where forgiveness comes in, leading us into the Remembrance of our True Selves: as perfect Love created in Love, made only to extend, incapable of knowing it’s opposite.
Forgiveness, like all the other concepts we subscribe to, is radical in its application. When we forgive our partners, we are actually forgiving ourselves, as we are no longer attacking or projecting blame. We are boldly and courageously looking within at the loss of peace we are experiencing, and thus bringing the Presence of Being into our conscious hearts and minds. As we continue to practice this, we start to realize the unreality of the thoughts, beliefs and feelings that chain us to the egoic drama of our separate lives. Allowing our Eternal Nature, unborn and undying, to shine on these thoughts, beliefs and feelings provides a reality outside of illusions, where unity and togetherness is at the forefront of our consciousness; where peace and non-violence, awareness and presence, guide our experience from moment to moment.
Why do we practice this type of radical forgiveness? One word: Freedom. Freedom from the self made prison of who we thought we were. Freedom from past guilts, ‘sins’, and traumas. Freedom to express the infinitely immortal truths of joy, peace, and oneness that we taste during those sweet moments throughout the day. Freedom from the script that is always running that wants us to believe we are limited and identified solely with the material. We want the experience of Truth. Real Love, unconditional, enthusiastic, and inspirational Real Love…perfect Love, a unified vision that develops and grows in the silence of our being and then as if by magic appears in our external relationships. The unreal, ordinary love, which we defined above is no longer acceptable. The duality of the earthly highs and lows it brings are no longer valued as real, nor are they desirable. We can no longer place our happiness outside of ourselves and we can no longer live and die by the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ actions of another. We are free.
In our path together as partners, we have ridden the wave of what a lot of people consider a ‘normal’ relationship with its ups and downs and twists and turns. We have gone there and back, a couple of times. Now, we have come to a whole new place, green with the aliveness of Spirit, where there is an understanding, a peace, and a knowingness of that forever indescribable, magic presence of Love that brings a symphony of bliss and unites us in the very essence of our Eternal Reality. We do not claim mastery, only an unshakeable commitment to the discovery of Who We Really Are. If life is a classroom, then right here and right now, our relationship as we see it, is the curriculum. In this column, we hope to shed light on aspects of relationships that can sometimes be perceived as obstacles or struggles. We hope to evoke a new thought system in relating with others, a thought system which will always benefit everyone involved. This way of thinking always brings us back to the experience of Real, Unconditional Love, while at the same time empowering us through the practice of radical responsibility and forgiveness. Our hope is to extend the Freedom and Love we have come to know to all who are hungry for real change.