What expectations and desires do hold around partnership?
And to what degree have they served your healing and wholeness?
The Dream
We’ve all had big dreams and desires around relationships. It’s hard to escape them. There is no lack of dreams and mythology around marriage and partnership. Billions of dollars have been devoted to that projection screen.
Happily ever after... in sickness and in health... ‘til death do us part. Much easier said than done. Right? We’ve all learned that lesson to some degree.
The Fall
An amazing prospect turned ugly. An electrifying partnership blown to pieces. It seemed so amazing those first few (hours, days, years) and then something happened. It strikes me that the bigger the dream, the more acute the pain in the shadow of its light.
What healing needs to happen to close the gap between our dreams and our tangible reality?
This New Moon Healing Opportunity
On Monday Sept. 8 this Pisces Full Moon offers a great opportunity to illuminate and integrate some layers of our core wounding around partnerships. Chiron, the archetypal wounded healer, will be intimately close to la Luna. At the same time, Juno (an asteroid that signifies marriage, partnership and conscious and unconscious contracts) will also be projecting her energy into the mix. If you are feeling raw and tender, know that you are not alone.
It’s a wonderful time to devote your awareness to heal core wounds that have perpetuated painful partnership cycles. You know the cycle, from fantasy to fall to fantasy again. I want to help you find your way to forgiveness and freedom.
So what does that process look like?
The Wounded Healer’s Story of Liberation
Let’s take a look at the mythological story of Chiron to find some answers. It’s a story we all share to some degree. This archetype provides a guiding light to evolve from painful suffering to healing liberation.
Chiron was a centaur-- half man, half horse. He was a teacher, mentor and a healer. One day, a misguided heroic act resulted in a terrible wound to his animal body. An arrow laced with the blood of Medusa (an ostracized woman turned reptilian monster) accidentally pierced his leg. The poisoned arrow would have killed most anybody, but because he was an immortal he didn't die. His wound became a source of suffering and unrelenting cycles of pain.
His suffering was not for naught, as it gave rise to many gifts to humanity. It propelled him to learn more and more methods of natural healing. In this process, he became all the more effective at showing up for others as a source of healing and compassion. Unfortunately, his learning did not provide the personal relief he was looking for.
Eventually, his liberation from his own suffering was realized when he agreed to trade in his immortality with the mortality of Prometheus. (That infamous human who stole fire from the Gods, brought it down to earth and advanced the civilization by leaps and bounds.)
As a result of his willingness to embrace mortality and therefore his humanness, he succumbed to death and thus was liberated from his suffering. The Gods took favor upon his soul and granted him another form of immortality by placing him in the sky as the starry constellation of Sagittarius.
Your Story of Healing the Partnership Wound
So what does any of this have to do with your dreams and wounds around partnership? As a lover of meaningful patterns, let me break it down for you. It helps to hold the myth of Chiron like a dream where some part of you is represented by each character.
In our story, Chiron’s immortality represents many of our mythological fantasies that attempt to keep us invulnerable to life’s mortal blows. Inhuman partnership expectations, grand fantasies, ideals of perfection, unrealistic notions of “The One.” These are all ways we use our disembodied imagination in an attempt to escape the inherent vulnerability of being human.
The poison of Medusa’s blood correlates to the way our systems go reptilian (flight, fight and freeze) in response to deep rejection that has been internalized. She was cast out of her home, family and community and shamed. What part of you has been cast out?
And what parts of ourselves do we continue to shame, reject and judge as unworthy of love?
How often have you ran away, picked a fight, or shut down because something you learned to habitually reject within yourself got touched in an intimate connection?
In the dance of relationships, we are frequently attracted to potential partners for the dream they represent. Disembodied dreams often are attempts to escape painful internal realities; relics of past hurts, evidence of our vulnerabilities. Jumping into the future is an understandable though ineffective way of avoiding these places within ourselves.
In our very real experiences with love and intimacy, our inherent vulnerability rises to the surface and we are forced to come into contact with those old wounds of rejection that the dream had a way of distracting us from.
The Healing Choice Point
This is an invaluable healing choice point. I hope you can appreciate this.
Can you feel my heart reaching out to you inviting you to stay in the present moment and take advantage of this opportunity to heal old partnership wounds?
Our liberation is found when we do like Chiron did and willingly embrace our vulnerable humanness (our mortality,) trade in our stories of invulnerability (unrealistic expectations, notions of perfection), and perpetually enliven the part of us that shakes up the old ways of being by bringing down to earth inspiration from the heavens.
Your willingness to let some part of yourself die (an outdated understanding of yourself, a belief, a dream, your favorite self-defense pattern, an attachment to a partnership) is what ultimately allows you to get free from cycles of familiar suffering.
Through this process we find our true place as Creators of new worlds of love and intimacy grounded in reality.
In Relationship with your Wholeness
In real life this might look like seeing your partner and yourself (past, prospective, present and future) as very human creatures, worthy of love in all our imperfections. It might mean making progressive peace with your vulnerability and as you incrementally release any dreams, fantasies, ideals or expectations that attempt to distract you from your tender places.
Acknowledge that rejecting any aspect of your essential self (your light, your anger, your body, etc) that doesn’t meet your expectations is an outdated strategy that isn’t truly serving you or your relationships.
And try loving (as best as you humanly can) and accepting and forgiving those parts of you that you were taught to reject. Experiment with some new Source inspired ways of relating. In this process you will create resilient relationships with yourself and others that will support your ever increasing experience of wholeness and freedom.