“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
- RUMI

*Painting by Alex Gray

Intimate relationships are perhaps the most fertile ground to do inner evolutionary work and healing. They are the context in which most of our deeply held fears get triggered. They are the space in which the psychological, emotional and spiritual wounds we are so adamantly covering up through ego identities, strategies and behaviors, resurface to be healed.

From the ego-lens, love is something that you get when you are, say or do what another person wants and expects from you; it is something that you give when someone is, does or says something you desire or expect.

From the evolutionary lens, love is a state of being. Love is the highest frequency of the Universe and our deepest essence. Love is the creational matrix, the invisible field that permeates absolutely everything in the physical and non-physical universe. Love is not a transactional currency one gives when certain conditions are met. Love is something we experience within as we allow ourselves to be what we really are.

Intimate relationships are emotionally turbulent and psychologically challenging because the Ego-Self we developed as a product of early conditioning, adaptation, and fear, -and with which we erroneously identify ourselves as “I”-, is constantly being threatened. All the ways of being, self-concepts, self-images, behaviors and relational patterns we developed in the past that are not an expression of our true, deep, natural, authentic and original self, are exposed. From the ego-lens, all this ‘drama’ is either something negative to be avoided altogether, or “just the way love and relationships are”, therefore something one must learn to live with. From the evolutionary perspective, relational conflict is not only an expression of our inner conflict, but an invitation to dismantle the False Self we have developed as a product of conditioning and adaptation, the personality matrix we erroneously identify with. From this point of view, relational challenges serve as a mirrored reflection of the aspects that want to be acknowledged, healed and integrated in order to embody our totality and become whole and free. Understanding how to use the relational context as a mirror and a platform to evolve is essential if we are to heal ourselves and the Earth.