As souls, I believe we make contracts with one another before coming into the human experience. If you’d like to learn more about that I recommend going to http://www.stevesinatra.me.sourcesciencesound/resources and checking out the book Journey of Souls by Michale Newton or Sacred Contracts by Carolina Myss.
I have many special people in my life. We all do. But we don’t always perceive them that way. We oscillate between liking them and hating them. Rarely do we touch grace and LOVE them. Not the l can’t live without, have to have, I’m nothing without you kind of love. I’m talking about LOVE, whole, complete, and objective LOVE in the full sense of the word. The good, bad, and ugly and the roles that we play for each other as the complementary opposites to facilitate growth.
Let me offer you an example. I was feeling a lack of gratitude for my co-parent Kerry. I decided to reflect on that some this morning. In doing some mental writing exercises that I offer my clients that I work with I shifted from feeling ungrateful to overflowing with love and gratitude for her in about 10min. Instead of running the polarized story, I was telling myself I opened my heart to the bird’s eye view and the complementary opposite of what I was seeing happening.
Like in a game of tug-o-war as long as there is a relatively equal amount of tension on both sides of the rope there will be little to no movement. Not enough to see a measurable gain in any direction. For 4-5 years there has been a massive amount of tension between Kerry and me. We both have been pulling on the rope in the equal and opposite direction of what felt natural for us and resisted the opposite perspective and approach. For Kerry, she desires grounded stability in her life. Things that make her feel safe, secure, and stable. All the ways that we have moved around geographically changed cities, changed homes, not knowing where the money was going to come from to pay for things, changed directions in our plans as a result of my contribution to the choices of the family were torture for her. To be in a relationship with me she was constantly and continually disregarding these desires and casting that aside to choose our relationship and our family. For me, I desired freedom, excitement, fluidity, the thrill of chasing the wind and or throwing the hell marry passes into the end zone and trusting it would be caught for a touchdown. To me, that was living life. Experiencing the edges of being human and pushing the limits of what is perceived as possible. I felt so trapped, confined, and restricted in all the ways that she was asking me to slow down, be present, confront my fears, and deal with my emotional baggage which for me was torture. To be in the relationship with her I was continually disregarding these desires and casting them aside to choose our relationship and our family.
The reality is Kerry is one of the most if not the most special people in my life BECAUSE of how she challenges me. She has loved me in a way that no one else has. Being the ground and anchor attached to a rocket ship heading for outer space is HARD. It’s hard either way, to let go or hold on to anything. The ground, her to me, me to her…imagine the opening scene in mission impossible Rogue Nation where Ethan is holding onto the plane as it takes off into the sky. THAT is the type of tension I am describing. She has managed somehow to be strong and steadfast for long enough for me to meet myself and begin to move toward her in the middle. Through everything, I could throw at her, every way I manipulated and squirmed out of putting my feet on the ground she was a ROCK. For better and for worse. I have begun to see that I can’t have what I want without what she wants and vice versa. We chose to play tug-o-war as each other’s complementary opposite until we both surrendered and met in the middle. I don’t know anyone else who is a worthy adversary in that back and forth than her. I see the value and importance of the role she has been playing in my life more than ever. I am grateful at this moment for her more than ever. I wouldn’t ever replace her. Few people have loved me the way that she has. I feel much happier with some stable ground in my life and so will she. Perhaps she will feel safe to experience some freedom with that stability too and somewhere in the middle there will be balance.