When Intimacy is Freedom: Becoming Fully Relational

What does it mean to be intimate with something or someone? What are the barriers to intimacy? How is intimacy connected to peace, love, belonging, and safety?

To me, being intimate carries a quality of freshness and innocence, of curiosity and openness. When I feel open to Life in this way, my moment to moment experience is transformed regardless of what I’m going through.

The opposite of intimacy would be resistance. When we push Life away or try to hide from What Is, we lose our sense of intimacy with the moment. We are in opposition to Life.

We become distant. Disconnected.

One way that we keep ourselves disconnected is by being so busy that we don’t have time to feel what’s going on. We distract ourselves with endless things to such a degree that we become strangers to ourselves.

Alienated.

Another way that we keep ourselves “safely” distant from Life is when we get addicted to our feelings of worry and overwhelm. Our everyday suffering becomes a hiding place from our deeper pain. Usually, we are not aware of this.



Intimacy Within Reveals Wholeness

When we get to know our emotions and pain deeply, we are being intimate with our feeling core. As this intimacy deepens, we see clearly that there is nothing wrong with how we feel - absolutely nothing wrong!

As our problematic attitude with how we feel dissolves, we are no longer scared of fear, we no longer reject our feelings of rejection, or abandon the abandoned child in us. We begin to honour and relate to how we’re feeling.

When we relate to our pain instead of rejecting it, we begin to sense the presence of a new dimension of ourselves: Wholeness. This feeling of completeness (no lack) is often referred to as “Being.” Being is the unharmed dimension of us.

Intimacy within reveals the simplicity and beauty of Being at a visceral, felt level. We have room for our pain and emotions. We are room for all there is. We are OK even when what we feel is uncomfortable or unpleasant.



Intimacy in Relating makes Love Possible

When we get real close to people, our early wounding starts to get activated. In such moments of activation, our natural response is to shut down, isolate, get defensive or aggressive, disconnect, and perhaps to run away from relating.

If we can notice how we’re feeling, however, and stay there, we can name our emotion and communicate what’s coming up for us with our partner/ friend/ family member.

It is a beautiful moment when we share, “I feel angry and I feel like running away right now, but I’m not going to.” Here is an opportunity to be with and relate to our pain and wounding and to our default survival mechanisms.

Such sharing connects us both to our wounding and to our partner at the same time. Instead of shutting down, we are staying relational.

The more intimate we are with the elements that constitute us, the more intimate we can be with others.

The closer we get to others, the more deeply we can perceive and sense their innocence and beauty as well as their pain. In such moments, our love for them can help us connect with our own humanity and vulnerability, with our own worth and innocence and beauty.

The deeper we perceive and feel what it means to be human (without abandoning our healthy boundaries), the deeper our compassion and mercy become. We get to see the purity of each human being exactly as they are even when we don’t respect or cannot love what they do.

In such moments, we can say that we are not only experiencing love, but also being love to the point of recognizing everything as Love.



Living as the Interconnectedness of Life

When the armouring around our heart begins to melt through our intimacy with ourselves and others, the interconnectedness of Life becomes more than obvious. We are not a part of Life, we are Life.

You are the entirety of Life expressing itself directly and gloriously as this unique human being. How can anything be wrong with you?

Ponder this: What if there is nothing wrong with the World? This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about social problems and all the rest!

What if there’s never been anything wrong?

Life is beautiful. Life is Beauty made manifest. Life is.

Click here to get in touch with me for a free discovery call. Read more about relationships here.