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A few of\u00a0my friends are in newly committed relationships. After the heady high of romance, things can get rocky. From listening to their stories, I\u2019m reminded of the challenges a relationship faces during that precarious and magnificent time when two people decide to merge hearts & lives.<\/span><\/p>\n John and I very quickly decided we couldn\u2019t live without each other; time was made irrelevant by the fact that we had found our other half. There is no more glorious feeling than finally finding the one you love. Cue: angel wings and the horns of heaven. So why then was the first year or two of our relationship so fraught with dramatic fights, fears and cry-fests (mostly mine)?<\/p>\n During those first years of commitment we seemed to bring out one another\u2019s worst fears. He: that no woman would want to commit to a man who already had three children. He had proof of this, as a staggeringly high number of single women refused to give him, a single father, a chance. He also had other, more personal fears I won’t name here, irrational fears whose origins still bewilder me today.<\/p>\n As for me, I ping-ponged back and forth between care-taking his fears and verily actualizing my worst nightmare. Every fight was another opportunity for him to abandon me,\u00a0for me to abandon me<\/i>. Every fight inspired an ancient anxiety in me, the feeling I needed to flee, to save myself from being hurt. I was so deeply afraid that every argument meant our relationship was over, and so defiant in my self-protective instinct to save myself before it happened, this virtually guaranteed a fight would end up leading to that deep dark place in myself. My yo-yo behaviour could cause me to\u00a0walk away, or plea in tears for his understanding. Sometimes I would go cold as ice while internally hugging my fragile self\u00a0 (held together by band-aids, paper clips, chewing gum at this point) so tightly that I would come close to hyperventilation –a nod to the way I used to hold my breath as a child when my parents would fight. Where was the self-aware, courageous, open-hearted woman\u00a0he fell in love with? I was becoming a hot mess.<\/p>\n It was horrible and glorious at once, to be so in so much love and so much\u00a0hurt.\u00a0<\/i>Both of us knew we were one another’s soul mates, so why was this happening? \u00a0It was as if\u2026 our magnificent joining brought out our very best and our very worst. It was as if\u2026 we finally found the lock to the key that neither of us could unlock alone. When love really opens us up, everything opens up. The blood, the guts and the wounding.<\/strong> \u00a0There was no more hiding the fact that somewhere deep inside we each felt deeply unworthy, unlovable, abandoned, and that all the crimes visited on our hearts by those we had loved would be revisited by the person whom we now loved \u00a0– and more than we ever thought possible.<\/em><\/p>\n This is the point in the story where things\u00a0could have gone either way. Looking back, I see that we were going through a powerful and painful process of trust-earning. By showing one another our respective wounds, we were asking each other, albeit unconsciously:\u00a0Will you betray me? Will you go away, too? Are you sure?<\/strong>\u00a0 <\/i>\u00a0If we had remained unconscious to those questions, if we had allowed them to secretly lurk behind every fight, our relationship would have spiraled out of control. But what happened was this: Neither of us left because neither of us wanted that. We wanted to be together. Over time, we caught on to what was happening.\u00a0We realized that if we didn\u2019t talk about and\u00a0include<\/i>\u00a0our deepest wounds in our newfound love, we would destroy it.\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0As we both\u00a0began to trust that the other person wasn’t going to leave, we knew\u00a0the relationship could survive our deepest demons.<\/p>\n The Scorpio Full Moon sheds light on the honest, bloody, ooey-gooey guts of things. The truth is, we cannot be wholly loved without being whole, and we cannot be whole without being fully seen and loved by another, our icky, wounded parts and all. Whether we’ve been struggling with hidden patterns in intimacy, or we feel blocked from moving forward in our lives, this Full Moon\u00a0shines light into the darkness. Under\u00a0her cool light, our resource is\u00a0the degree of emotional intimacy\u00a0and honesty we\u00a0have with our self.<\/p>\n There’s always a breakout moment in relationship, a critical point where all our shadow stuff is, often gracelessly and perhaps dramatically, revealed.<\/strong> Yet this isn’t a disaster. It could be the\u00a0moment\u00a0where we find the courage and love in our heart to fully face our self, our most unattractive parts, our deepest fears. \u00a0 It could be the moment where our greatest love\u00a0meets our greatest\u00a0pain, and loves us through it.<\/p>\n During those first years, we learned to restrain our selves from compulsively pushing our relationship to the edge. We learned to understand exactly\u00a0how our\u00a0train went\u00a0off the rails, and perhaps more importantly, we learned\u00a0to pause during those high-emotional-stakes-moments and refuse to engage the story. For instance, if the thought\u00a0“this is it, this is really the end” crept\u00a0into every disagreement, it\u00a0brought unsafe energy into relationship, energy that does not inspire\u00a0trust\u00a0and so\u00a0undermines the container that can hold it all. We learned to back off during those moments, and to gently befriend our own wounds, sometimes in the privacy of our own self. Scorpio needs calming Taurus as a balance; it takes guts to quell one’s fears, to be gentle and kind.<\/strong> It takes wisdom to back away from the edge of a too-intense conversation and get an ice cream, instead.<\/p>\n We survived each other and lived to tell the tale. From the\u00a0other side I can confidently say that being seen wholly by the one we most love, sticking together through hell and high water, has big healing power. Intimacy\u00a0unleashes a river of healing and forgiveness that we cannot access alone.<\/strong> It is<\/em>\u00a0the ultimate compassion. At this Full Moon, look into the mirror of your Beloved, or the\u00a0Moon herself. It takes courage to face your deepest fears, your disowned self-parts, to take a deep look at the truth and to finally… breathe.<\/p>\n image source: Pinterest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few of my friends are in newly committed relationships. After the heady high of romance, things can get rocky. From listening to their stories, I’m reminded of the challenges a relationship faces during that precarious and magnificent time when two people decide to merge hearts & lives. John and I very quickly decided we couldn’t […]<\/p>\n<\/p>\n