The dance of spiritual union and sovereignty.
Photo by David Hofmann on Unsplash
Perhaps one of the most sought-after postures of relationship is spiritual union.
In layman's terms, this would be the kind of emotional intimacy where intuition, presence, and spiritual pursuits greater than our material environment govern the quality of the relationship, and two individuals have the capacity to function as one (a "one" that is far greater than the sum of the individual parts).
It sounds pretty cool, right?
I remember having a preoccupation with this concept from long before I ever intellectually understood anything about partnership, when I still was blindly operating in mostly codependent ways in all of my connections.
I wrote with fascination about the only space separating me and a long-time lover being the gap inside our belly buttons, and the sort of spiritual merging that was birthed out of us both letting go so fully of our preferences, rules, expectations, and anything that may or may not exist beyond or prior to the present moment in which we had found ourselves.
I was well-groomed by Dave Matthews' Say Goodbye in those days:
Tonight let's be lovers
And hear me call
Oh, soft spoken, whispering love
A thing or two I have to say here
Oh, tonight let's go all the way then
Oh, love, I'll see you
Just for an evening
Oh, let's strip down, trip out at this
One evening's love starts with a kiss
And away here
And tomorrow back to being friends,
But now lovers, love,
Just for tonight, one night, love you
We had both experienced it, but at the time, neither of us had any idea what was going on. Mostly all we could say was "wow!" and then we would allow our hunger for more of that nature of experience guide us until we wore ourselves out and had to take a break.
This is one of the many avenues through which two people can discover the universe together.
I often say to my clients that once they prioritize presence in every area of their life, life instantly reveals to them all the places where they have work to do.
One of the places we quickly LOSE presence the fastest is in relationship.
We can dangle on a string of chemistry and attraction and allow our baited breath and the butterflies in our stomachs to govern our choices for only so long before we start imposing our ideals and fears on the relationship and the relationship in turn begins to crumble and sift through our fingertips.
Most of those ideals and fears are elements of relationship we never even think about but which we learned from our parents and extended family. We don’t know how to talk about it openly. It's just what is "normal" and we've never questioned it or learned to give it words or space. Without fully understanding why, we become possessive and jealous and critical and controlling, or withdrawn, avoidant, unavailable, and flaky.
The game changer is then establishing the sort of emotional intimacy described above BEFORE hooking into attraction and chemistry, a pursuit that functions sort of like the Olympics of relating (which is to say, only the elite really manage to do this well, and most people require support and mentorship in order to know what they’re doing). This means prioritizing a type of connection, no matter the terms, in a way that brings the relationship closer and closer to spiritual union, first.
Prioritizing presence with zero pretense, in the relationship, always.
Doing so, in my experience, changes the landscape of sex and relating (and friendship!) so wholly that alternative set-ups (finding emotional intimacy and spiritual union through primary attraction, for example) truly pale in comparison.
The reason for this is that attraction and chemistry have their inherent limitations (people change, every day).
With spiritual union, the field is wide open. Anything is fair game. All portals are open.
INCLUDING the portal of sovereignty.
My personal experience is that these are two sides of the same coin: sovereignty includes union, and union includes sovereignty. They are not separate, and this is what distinguishes sovereignty from freedom.
Sovereignty is interdependent by nature. It recognizes the inherent connection that exists between all of us (and to the planet and animals and the universe at large) all of the time.
But how does this work practically?
I will personally out myself here and fully own that having had experiences of such deep union, followed by the inevitable separation that MUST come next, feels a lot like being turned inside out.
Every single time.
The nature of this experience has changed in flavor over the years, wherein I no longer have a trauma-oriented abandonment or betrayal response to the separation (which used to have me feel like a slave to my emotions during my years deeply seeped in codependent relationships). I used to struggle massively from my own capacity to lose myself completely, but then not always knowing how to find my way back home to myself afterward. While I find wonder and awe in the aspect of losing myself now (still), I no longer struggle to find my way back home.
There are three key factors here that are essential to master in order to be able to play in this domain of relationship like a champion: a profound level of self-trust and self-knowing, boundaries, and humility.
Without self-trust and self-knowing, the likelihood of losing ourselves in these experiences and then becoming addicted to them as compensation for areas of low self-worth is incredibly high. The challenge is not accessing presence and merging. That part is actually relatively easy. The challenge in these cases is being able to hold the reality that we are *both* in union and sovereign, at the same time. And if there were an order to things in terms of priorities, we’d have to start by being sovereign (or more aptly put, remembering our sovereignty) in order to merge into union in a way that is self-honoring.
Speaking of self-honoring: boundaries.
You may have heard me say last year that to a person with no boundaries, other people’s boundaries will feel like walls. And those perceived walls are likely to trigger a trauma response in the person on the receiving end of someone's boundaries.
To a healthy, emotionally mature adult though, boundaries are like butter (if you like butter, that is). They function like salve in a relationship, they exalt the fundamental nutrients of the relationship, they feel GOOD, and they promote intuitive connection and emotional intimacy, rather than detract from it.
HERE IS THE TRICKY PART THOUGH.
Knowing what your boundaries are comes through experience. Creating boundaries is not an intellectual process. Boundaries exist in the felt sense of our human experience, which means we must allow ourselves to feel our edges in order to know what our edges are.
This is where humility comes in.
It’s a compelling notion to believe that once we’ve accessed spiritual union and managed to come home to ourselves once, we’ve nailed it and can move on.
Hello, arrival! (JK!)
But the hairier, messier, more humbling truth is that this work literally NEVER ends (so long as we’re in active pursuit of growth). Each time we carve out a new layer of depth in the domain of spiritual union, we also necessarily have to carve out a new layer of sovereignty (and boundaries, and self-trust, and humility).
The dance is never-ending.