MAMA LESSONS: Finding a Partner in Life and Nurturing that Relationship

Found on sweetfeelingsandcandydreams.tumblr.com

“Love one another, but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other’s cup, but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping; For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together yet not too near together; For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

- Kahlil Gibran

Each morning I awake, slowly, with a big grin on my face. From the kitchen I hear the pitter patter of little feet and the calming voice of a great man. This man is my partner, best friend, love of my life, my rock. He is not only my husband but more importantly the father of my children, the person whom I trusted with the greatest responsibility.

My loves, you will come across many people in your life who you will find connections with. Some will become the greatest friends. Some you will love deeply. My hope is that you will be lucky enough to find that ONE person who you are willing to commit to for they feel that you are the ONE person whom they were lucky enough to find, as well.

This ONE person lives up to your standard of genuine love. I speak of genuine love and not perfection because those who seek perfection will be disappointed always. We are all beings who experience life through success and failure and it is in those falls that we learn to become our perfect selves. But it is a journey and we all will tumble. I speak of standard as well. This isn't about creating such high expectations in your head that no person could ever live up to. However, standards must be established because my loves, you are amazing in every way, and you deserve nothing but that from another.

My standards when looking for love were as such:

1. Love does not hurt and those that love do not hurt.

2.Change will happen, and how willing you are both in accepting that must be similar. It must also be embraced if you are to grow together.

3. Acceptance of my faults (Not the complete unwillingness to deny them but the realization that I am a being on my own journey.)

4. Being okay away from each other. Independence and nurturance of your inner soul, physicality and dreams is essential. A relationship cannot survive if one person relies on the other entirely or out of need to fill a void. Relationships thrive on nurturing the times together and also spending time apart, but it is the time together that the partners should value the most.

5. A deep respect for the world and those creatures living in it.

6. And as Aunty El recently quoted Dr. Seuss, "We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love." Your father is the partner whose weirdness matches mine and we have grown to call it love. Our ideas are farfetched but they generally fall in line. We see each other in our futures and the future in each other.

7. You must be everything to yourself before you can expect everything from someone else.

But how does one nurture this LUCKY, LOVING RELATIONSHIP? I went to some spiritual leaders for guidance:

"Deepak Chopra replies:

Relationship Is a Daily Rescue

Relationships are happy where love is nurtured. They begin to fray around the edges when love is compromised, and they end when love is gone.

What causes love to go away?

Many answers have been offered — boredom, routine, various distractions, outside obligations, fixation on work, lack of trust. But instead of dealing with such a long list item by item, there might be a simpler way. If you can rescue love every day, bringing yourself back to the place where love is, all the other problems don't have a chance to grow.

To rescue love, you first must understand what it is. Love includes affection but is more than affection. It associates itself with desire, kindness, compassion, altruism, and mutual regard. With those things in mind, many couples turn love into loving acts and loving feelings. But such efforts are the effect of love, not love itself. You cannot turn an effect into a cause.

If you can discover how love works as a cause, you can rescue it every day.

Love as a cause goes beyond the individual. It's transpersonal or as spiritual teachers say, transcendent. That's not the same as mystical. To transcend means to go beyond. In this case, we want to contact love that goes beyond the ego. The ego is often put in charge of love. When love becomes what "I" want, then relationship is a negotiation between two selfish points of view. There's nothing wrong with negotiating the everyday details of your relationship but love isn't about trade-offs.

Love beyond the ego has to be on a new basis. It's not about quid pro quo, giving as long as you get to take. It's mutual. It exists in a space between two people. The only way to be deeply happy in a relationship is to find that space every time you lose it. In this way, love goes beyond affection and being nice. Loving acts blossom naturally once you find the place in your own awareness that is love. Needless to say, becoming aware is a process, in love as in everything.

Consider how relationships develop. We get along well with someone else who agrees with our point of view. We feel an intimate connection; we feel validated in their presence. Then the spell is broken. The other person turns out to have many opinions and beliefs where we don’t agree at all. At this point, the war between right and wrong starts and the road to unhappiness unwinds.

The very fact that you are intimately related makes it even more painful to find areas of disagreement. At the subtle emotional level you feel abandoned. The beautiful sense of merging with someone you love is shattered. At this point love is compromised. Both people feel the return of the ego, which says, “I am right. My way of doing things is the only way. If you really loved me, you’d give in.”

When the need to be right fades, we stop having so many grievances and resentments, which are the fallout of making someone else wrong. Instead of wasting time with the ego's version of love, return to the place of love. To detach yourself from anger, resentment, and the sense of being a victim happens only in the space beyond ego. You can only find this space by devoting yourself to knowing who you really are. Leaving the ego behind is the same as the spiritual quest for the true self.

When two people are on this quest, they are on the journey to a kind of love that can never be taken away. The differences between a man and a woman fade in the light of a shared goal that is bigger than any ego need or desire. Every day becomes both a rescue and a surrender. Not a surrender to another person's ego, which can only feel like defeat. Rather, both partners surrender to the larger goal.

The ego's path is much easier to walk and far more familiar. I know that someone is on the path of love when they ask the following kinds of questions about their relationship every day:

• Which choice is more loving?
• What will bring peace between us?
• How awake am I?
• What kind of energy am I creating?
• Am I acting out of trust or distrust?
• Do I feel what my partner is feeling?
• Can I give without expecting anything in return?

These questions don’t have automatic answers. They serve instead to wake you up spiritually. They attune you to a process that is more than “me” and “you.” When you become devoted to that process together, you and your partner will accomplish what seems impossible: your happiness will be as full for each of you as it is for the two of you together."

"Monica Berg replies:

1. Consciously focus on the good in one another. We need to make a conscious effort to focus on the good because this is what allows us to appreciate our partner. Only through a conscious effort can we create a consistent kindness, fondness and appreciation towards one another, where we actually want to honor “until death do us part.”

2. Cherish small moments of intimacy and laughter. Finding the opportunities in day-to-day experiences to engage and create beautiful moments and memories together is what it’s all about. Making a commitment to each other that no problem or obstacle will be bigger than your commitment to each other is so important.

3. Be vulnerable with one another. I know the word itself doesn’t sound appealing, but giving your heart to somebody you trust and love is a beautiful and necessary thing. Even if it is hard to do. We may be too proud or untrusting to become vulnerable, but so much love and connection can come from this type of openness.

4. Repair.

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” – John F. Kennedy

There are no stable relationships. There may be happy ones, but not stable ones. Either we are growing forward or falling backwards. This is true in all areas of our life. There is no constant; there is only change and movement. This is “the law of life,” which is why I believe nurturing relationships is so important. We owe it to ourselves and those we love not to settle for mediocrity in any way, and instead to nurture and allow our relationships to become the source of joy, support and love that they were intended to be."

Monica Berg is a spiritual teacher and guide. She is creative director at the Kabbalah Centre and leads a monthly forum in Los Angeles, Kabbalah for Women. She is also the co-founder of the charitable organization, Raising Malawi.

This was taken from goop.com and edited for you my loves.

NOTE: That if your Daddy doesn't like them, they may be a bad egg, because your Daddy likes mostly everyone.