Intimate Relationships

By Barbara Brennan

All of us long to know who we are in our true divine center. Our deepest longing is to allow that divine center within us to express in every way. We all have a deep longing to create from our core – from the divinity within us – but what that creation is like will be different for each individual.

Our desires are directly connected to spiritual longing. Every desire you experience, no matter how outrageous or off the wall it may seem, arises from a spiritual longing which is an expression of what you've come here to do or be. Bringing spirit into matter is how we make heaven on earth. That is really what we are here to do. Once the spiritual longing at the root of your desire is recognized, everything begins to fall into place.

Perhaps you want a relationship but don't have one. You feel a longing, and you link it to a personal need. But under that personal need is a spiritual longing for communion. Start out by allowing yourself to feel that longing fully. Give yourself full permission to actually feel the loneliness, pain, and negative feelings of wanting a relationship when you don't have one. Let those feelings flow without protecting yourself from their intensity.

This will open your heart and create the space inside you for someone to come. Of course, when a relationship does come into your life, you will be faced with more personal process work that needs attention. All the ways you prevent yourself from opening to a relationship will have to be attended to and cleared.

Many people long to have a relationship, but do not perceive it as a spiritual longing. They just feel lonely. I encourage them to feel the loneliness instead of cutting themselves off from the feelings. Emptiness can be terrifying. But if you really allow yourself to feel it, out of that emptiness will arise an awareness of how you have kept yourself from having what you want.

If you can begin to perceive that new awareness and follow what it tells you about what you need to do to open yourself, your spiritual longing will eventually manifest in reality. Looking outside yourself or busily keeping up with match.com, for instance, will not bring you to the needed insight and growth. But if you do the growth piece first, you can go anywhere and attract interesting people.

Note: Barbara Brennan is the author of two books considered classics in the fields of energy work and complimentary medicine, Hands of Light and Light Emerging. The above is an edited excerpt from her essay titled "Energy Fields in Intimate Relationships," taken from a compilation of essays in the enlightening book, The Marriage of Sex & Spirit, edited by Geralyn Gendreau.

Special Addition: The below few paragraphs from an essay in the same book titled "The Energies of Love" by Donna Eden and David Feinstein offer some excellent advice for working through difficulties with an intimate partner. For their top-rated book Energy Medicine, click here.

The Energies of Love

You are wired to treat a threat to your closest relationships as a survival issue. This means that when stress is caused by difficulties with your partner, your perceptions narrow, your capacity for logic diminishes, and your readiness to fight or flee is heightened. In fact, the closer a person is to you, the harder it is to keep that person in perspective when you are feeling stress about the relationship.

It is much easier to create a crisis plan when you're not in the middle of a crisis. This is why we recommend that you and your partner make a rock-solid pact, when you are feeling a strong connection, to stop, look, and listen when conflict arises. Even if your partner refuses to work with you, you can use these techniques on your own to effect real energetic change.

Before reactive, stress-triggered energy patterns can be reigned in, the very first thing you must do is to literally stop what you are doing, thinking, and saying. This is harder than it sounds. Every fiber of your being is engaged in a rapidly escalating conflict. You've just been insulted, dismissed, or weathered an accusation that no person with any self-respect would leave unanswered. And you are supposed to stop?! Impossible!

When fight-or-flight hormones are surging through your body and you are caught in your primary sensory mode, a momentum takes over that has its own life. It may feel dreadful, but it is compelling. Stopping at such a moment is the hardest part of this formula. But if you don't stop, the biochemistry of fight-or-flight reflexively takes you over.

If, on the other hand, you can honor your pact with one another and shift the agenda from pursuing the conflict to changing the energy, you can break the spell and move into the biochemistry of tend and befriend. And changing the energy itself becomes a shared achievement.

The above is an essay from one of the free Personal Growth Courses offered by PEERS