Awakened Relationships

Every relationship – whether with partners, parents, children, or friends – can support one’s own awakening. It is often even helpful to have someone by my side who knows my peculiarities, triggers, and defense mechanisms and reflects them back to me.

I am grateful to all the people in my environment who have repeatedly shown me the tricks of my ego on my path of growth and awakening – sometimes lovingly, sometimes painfully, but always truthfully.

In this taboo-free, clear truth lies the key to every awakened relationship.

Traditional relationships mostly consist of dependencies: Children need their parents, and partnerships or friendships are often shaped by the understandable desire not to have to go through life alone.

These dependencies arise mutually and bring with them countless – often unspoken – agreements. Most are taken for granted. Only when the unspoken or the taboo pushes its way out of its well-guarded confines into the light do irritations arise.

But how can people who are themselves caught in entanglements truly be sincere mirrors for each other?

It’s not possible.

A prerequisite for a relationship that supports awakening is the willingness to honestly confront oneself and the other – and thus enable mutual growth.

Mostly I want something from the other person: to be seen and understood, recognition, support, security, love, or sex. This wanting – the feeling of needing something – I package, depending on my abilities and mood, into demands, seductions, or subtle manipulations.

This has little to do with truth. It is rather – sometimes charming, sometimes undisguised – a request for the satisfaction of my needs.

Confrontation or mirroring, on the other hand, are independent of my neediness and the misguided paths of my ego. They are a gift to the other. If I am mindful and compassionate in doing so, no protective shield is needed – because truth unfolds by itself.

Just as important as speaking a felt truth is the other person’s ability to accept such hints, criticism, or affection without feeling offended or fleeing into new illusions.

Both require compassion – compassion for the other and compassion for myself.

Every relationship has its history of illusions, projections, and hurts. Often it takes a separation to leave the old behind – that which has not only burned itself into memory but has created countless identities.

It is by no means easy to make a blank slate out of what has been experienced.
What has been experienced does not disappear – it has happened. What can be transformed, however, is the judgmental interpretation.

Everything that has happened – whether fulfilling or hurtful, whether empowering or offensive – has made me exactly the person I am today.
Only this person can awaken.

Everything else are identities in an illusory world, figures on a cosmic playing field that they want to understand and yet will never truly recognize.
The fabric in which everything is interwoven transcends all understanding. It can only be humbly felt and accepted.

The blank slate – or the empty space – knows no trauma, no drama, and no euphoria.
It does not distinguish between perpetrator or victim, active or passive.

The clarity that unfolds on this blank slate does not ask for meaning or purpose.
It is love and compassion.

The gift of my awakened relationship is having met someone who constantly reminds me: who takes no account of my everyday entanglements, who combines all-encompassing love with painful clarity – and expects the same from me.

That remains challenging. But it keeps me alive and prevents me in melancholic moments from sinking into the bubbling swamp of false harmony.

Are you ready to show your truth to your partners and friends, your children and parents?

Are you ready to risk everything and leave the mire of everyday lies behind you?

Are you still sleeping, or are you already loving?