I found this very accurate. Going inward is hard work but the payoff is well worth it. I guess when you meet your “soulmate” that’s pretty much their job. Making you face yourself for your own growth.
From Ram Dass:
“What you have found from your past relationships is that what you are attracted to in a person isn’t what you ultimately live with. After the honeymoon is over — it’s after the desire systems that were dormant in the relationship that have the attraction in it pass and all of it passes — then you are left with the work to do. And it’s the same work. When you trade in one partner for another, you still have the same work. You’re going to have to do it sooner or later when the pizzazz is over. And it just keeps going over. And you can’t milk the romanticism of relationship too long as you become more conscious. It’s more interesting than that. It really is. And people want to romanticize their lives all the time. It’s part of the culture. But the awakening process starts to show you the emptiness of that forum. And you start to go for something deeper. You start to go to meet another human being in truth. And truth is scary. Truth has bad breath at times; truth is boring; truth burns the food; truth is all the stuff. Truth has anger; truth has all of it. And you stay in it and you keep working with it and your keep opening to it and you keep deepening it. Every time you trade in a partner, you realize that there’s no good or bad about it. I’m not talking good or bad about this.
But you begin to see how you keep coming to the same place in relationships, and then you tend to stop because it gets too heavy – because your identity gets threatened too much. For the relationship to move to the next level of truth requires an opening and a vulnerability that you’re not quite ready to make. And so you entrench, you retrench, you pull back and then you start to judge and push away and then you move to the next one. And then you have the rush of the openness and then the same thing starts to happen. And so you keep saying “Where am I going to find the one when this doesn’t happen?” And it will only happen when it doesn’t happen in you. When you start to take and watch the stuff and get quiet enough inside yourself, so you can take that process as it’s happening and start to work with it. And keep coming back to living truth in yourself or the other person even though it’s scary and hard.”
~Ram Dass
What are your thoughts?