To go truly deep in an intimate relationship, we need to feel safe with our partner. We need to know — and know with our whole being — that we can trust them, and not just when we are with them. This trust is based not on thinking that we should trust them, but rather on consistently sensing in our core their trustworthiness—their integrity, their reliability, their commitment to remaining present under all conditions, their passion for accessing love, depth, and freedom with and through us.
If we cannot count on our partner to consistently take good care of the container of our relationship — as when energy is leaked through cracks created by erotically wandering attention — then we will find that we can go only so deep with them.
If one partner is chronically calling the whole relationship into question every time there’s a fight or conflict, then the other is probably going to become wary of opening fully. Less safety means more shallows.
Making the ground of a relationship unnecessarily unstable — as when certain boundaries are overridden or trivialized in the name of “freedom” — keeps our relationship from being as deep and fulfilling as it could be. The point isn’t to create a fortress of security, but to literally be a safe place for our partner to let go of playing it safe. Feeling safe is much more than just feeling secure!
Real safety creates an atmosphere in which we can give our all without giving ourselves away.
Real safety makes room for a radically deep sharing of all that we are. Without it, we may seem to be free to go where we could not otherwise go, but such freedom — in its relative superficiality — is actually far more limiting than is the freedom that arises in the presence of genuine safety between intimates.
The safer I feel with you, the deeper I can go with you. The safer I feel with you, the deeper the risks I can take with you. The safer I feel with you, the deeper and more fulfilling the passions are between us. Real safety gives us room to show up in all our colors.
Such safety gives us permission to be in as much pain as we actually are, thereby making possible the healing we need in order to come fully alive, the healing through which we are, to whatever degree, awakened by all things, including our pain.
What joy, what benediction, what grace, to share this in the dynamic safety possible in an intimate relationship!
~Robert Augustus Masters | Art by Carmen Tyrell
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