Sacred Relationship

I am too tired to write my own words tonight and I am being kind to myself in regards to my commitment to self care. It's been a full day of work. I have done enough. So I share the words of others that resonated with me today as I contemplate sacred relationship.

From Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening, the entry called "Love at First Sight":

"We all walk around within the numbness of our habits and routines so often that we take the marvels of ordinary life for granted. It is first sight that opens the freshness of each moment, unencumbered by any of our habits and routines. First sight is the moment of God-sight, heart-sight, soul-sight. It is the seeing of revelation, the feeling of oneness that briefly overcomes us when nothing remains in the way.

At its deepest and most real level, the notion of love at first sight is spoken of in every spiritual tradition as the reward for being fully awake. Such seeing anew restores our sense of being alive."

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"As soon as we look beyond both duty and pleasure for a deeper meaning and purpose in relationships today, we start to move in the direction of the sacred, which we could define as coming into deeper connection with our true, essential nature, behind all our masks and facades...

Although "awakening to the sacred" might sound esoteric, it is, in fact, quite ordinary -- for it only involves learning to respond more deeply to what we already experience, and to appreciate what we already essentially are. If the bad news is that we can know another, and be known, only as deeply as we know ourselves--and coming to know ourselves can be a long and arduous journey--the good news is that love helps and inspires us to develop this deeper self knowledge. How we relate to someone we love provides an extremely clear and accurate mirror of how we relate to ourselves. For this reason, relationships can help us face ourselves and understand ourselves more rapidly and profoundly than any other aspect of worldly life. Seen in this light, love becomes a path of awakening--rousing us from the sleep of old, unconscious patterns into the freshness and immediacy of living more fully in the present, in accord with who we really are. This is the source of a deeper kind of happiness, which goes far beyond pleasure and comfort, and is the only real basis for healthy and satisfying relationships.

~ John Welwood, from Love and Awakening