Embracing the Rawness of Love

Being close, sharing your heart with another, is an experience of vulnerability.

It can feel like a risk to let down the guards protecting your heart and let another see you deeply and truly.

When you have the courage to take this risk, not only do you allow yourself to experience the sweetest love, but you also give yourself the opportunity to grow, to heal, and to expand into your wholeness.

As John Welwood says in his beautiful book Journey of the Heart,

“Intimate relationships are ideally suited as a path because they inspire our heart to open while at the same time activating all the pain and confusion of our karmic entanglements.

As our love for another person brings our heart into contact with our karma, stirring up feelings of uncertainty, confusion, fear or vulnerability, it reveals a certain rawness at the core of our experience. Normally, we try to manage and manipulate our lives to avoid this feeling, which seems to threaten our security or identity. Yet this rawness is central to our humanity – we simply become more aware of it when we love. Letting ourselves feel it can soften us and loosen up old, rigid patterns. Therefore it is an important key to our growth.

To be a warrior of the heart means welcoming whatever arises in relationships, no matter how difficult or challenging, as an opportunity to grow stronger, to call forth new inner resources.”

- John Welwood

This is an important step in my coaching process: to learn to welcome whatever arises, and to meet it with loving acceptance.

When you master this art, then difficult experiences and feelings don’t knock you down.

Instead they are an invitation into deeper love, an invitation to inhabit more of the fullness of your being.

This poem by Rumi is another beautiful illustration of this idea:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crown of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing, 
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

- Rumi

Put this into Practice

Notice if you feel the urge to close down, defend, or protect yourself in some way in your relationship. In that moment, take a deep breath and choose to keep an open heart.

Make this your new path: to stay vulnerable, keep an open heart, and meet what arises with love.

With Love,

Cassidy