“My willingness to be intimate with my own deep feelings creates the space for intimacy with another.” ~ Shakti Gawain
There is a saying that we cannot love another until we love ourselves but that was not my experience. I had to be loved and held in a safe place so that I could find what was loveable in myself. I had to be seen through the eyes of another before I could see myself. For most of us it wasn’t physical or mental trauma that short circuited our ability to love ourselves unconditionally. It was more or less trained out of us by a culture which thought it boastful and impious. In the incompleteness of our society and its mores, community and religious we capped our light feeling unworthy.
A fully expressed life flourishes from the steady flame of self-love and if this is dimmed, then the initial desire is to find the loving place to discover our own radiance. Is this in a lover’s eyes or in the loving community of others who deeply desire to create the safe place and support of self discovery? Books offer pathways to our inner light and kindred spirits or truly spiritual teachers hold us on our first wavering steps past the brambles of misinformation about our divine reality. It is in this depth of intimacy that we achieve with our self that we can open in ecstatic intimacy with another.
Me agapi (with love),
Marilyn
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