Seeing Your Partner as Your Teacher
continued
So the next time your ego kicks in, ask yourself these simple questions: what lessons are here for me to learn? How can I shift into learning, receptive mode and see my partner as my beloved teacher? It all boils to this: do you want to be right, or do you want to get along? Do you want distance, or do you want intimacy? Do you want a shared companionship, or a battle for power and control? If you chose love, it can be helpful remember that while your perceptions may be DIFFERENT than your partners, they are rarely better or worse. No one in an intimate relationship has a corner on absolute truth. Everyone filters the universe through their own unique experiences, desires, and tribal backgrounds. Viva la difference! This is what creates our unique dance and enriches our relationships. In reality, you don’t want your partner to be clone of you. You need to understand your partner’s different perception of things, because for the most important issues in relationships, perception IS reality.
So adopt an attitude of curiosity and wonder as you seek to understand before being understood. Put your ego’s concerns aside, and take time to truly listen, without judgement or expectation. What IS it like for this person to be in relationship or live with me? What would it be like to see the world as they do? What does it mean that they are absolutely convinced that the way they view things is so obviously self-evident that nothing else could possible be real? Open your heart again to seeing them freshly, as if for the first time, with a humble demeanor. In doing so, you invite your partner to do the same, and you shift the energy between you from combative to collaborative. As your ego recedes, your heart opens again and you truly be present for each other as the beloved who is sharing a journey of awakening.
We can never truly put ourselves in our partner’s skin and see the world as they do. But what we can do is listen to their truth - the only truth they can possibly have – and in the process learn amazing things about ourselves: what we project, what we distort, what we need to learn to become a more loving partner. It’s not a problem if you disagree or see things differently, as long as you can honor each other’s truth. If you can listen in this way and honor each other’s truth, solutions to problems will often spontaneously emerge out of the common ground of understanding that you have created. And while you may have a special teacher that guides your spiritual life, your partner is often the best, most honest teacher of daily living and intimacy that many of us will ever have.
The Relationship Institute, whose website is http://www.relationship-institute.com/, is located at 27172 Woodward Avenue, Suite 200,Royal Oak, Michigan 48067. It’s main phone number is (248) 546-0407.
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