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Healing Separation
All of us bring our needs to relationships, but they don’t have to turn into attachment. Attachment is created when needs aren’t understood and faced.
Needs you place on your partner never really get resolved; therefore even if your partner bends over backward to satisfy every need you have, the final outcome will be the same as if none of your needs were met: you will be left to confront why you have such needs. This “why” is answered by examining how you feel about being in separation, for the underlying anxiety of separation from God, spirit, and Self is what created need in the first place.
When you heal separation, your needs will not reflect fear and insecurity.
Relationship is meant to heal separation; therefore the proper attitude toward need is that you want to heal. However, in many relationships there is a confusing mismatch between what two people actually consider most important.
How can neediness be healed when there is constant jockeying over what two people want? We have to make a distinction between external needs, like food and shelter, and inner needs. Inner needs come down to what makes you feel secure.
You need to recognize imbalances where they exist and take responsibility for them. A man who has many female needs shouldn’t rely on his wife to make all the decisions, while a woman with strong male needs shouldn’t ignore her partner’s emotions. The object is to find the balance of male and female within you rather than take the easy road, which is to attach yourself to someone else’s strengths as a compensation for your weaknesses.
Satisfying inner need has to go deeper than what society or your ego tells you will suffice. To be in separation is by definition to be insecure.
Inner need must be faced before you can feel secure.
Adapted from The Path to Love, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1997).
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4 comments
add your comment »Sing us a new song Deepak, this we have heard at least 3 times!
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I understand the concept of wishing to balance relationship needs through understanding of what they represent to you and the other.As a woman I find that the line between self fulfillment, enjoying one's place in one's own life, and the vulnerability that makes me attractive to my other is very precarious. I chose to live those years under the misapprehension that it was good to be strong because if I was a man I would like my mate to be strong and we'd dance life together side by side complimenting skills and pleasures; that it would be an insult to him to be less.I saw brilliant and bold women's act of fragile air- headiness as demeaning to my future "perfect other", refusing to demean myself, preferring honesty to the isolation of lies. If I couldn't be myself with him I saw no point in spending any time at all and though my mother pointed out that those women had to be super-strong to survive and just acted that way to make their partners feel strong what good was it to be with a man so week that he liked that kind of suckiness? It seemed so boring! I was sure that my "Cosmically Promised" lover and mate would be as disgusted with intimate lies as I and want the true intimacy of soul, mind and body blend. I guess you can predict where that attitude got me and whether it was my Atman's need for this magical sorcerer hermit life I am gifted with or not I scared them off and was never able to appear vulnerable enough to suite. How is a girl supposed to be for the balance?
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Wise words. Thank you Deepak.
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Very relate-able!
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