Spiritual Partners

The significance of living with someone who is as focused on Self-realization as I am is unquantifiable and has been one of the greatest impacts on my personal development. (The fact that I hang out with a few Enlightened beings a few times a week is the other massive factor in the rate in which I am feeling the change.) From the outside, I sense that even our closest friends wonder how two people can live and breathe almost every moment discussing, contemplating, and introspecting this Self-realization game. And yet that is what Kitty and I have done for each other for the last nine months together, and even for a good part of the first two months before we became a couple.

Prior to connecting with Kitty, I was in a three and a half year relationship with someone I loved very much. I still do love her as she is an awesome, beautiful person. But as much as I truly loved her, we were miles apart, spiritually. This was our second time around as she and I were high-school sweet hearts and lived basically next door to each other when we were growing up. After 16+ years of marriage to two other people we reconnected during our 20th high school reunion. Fairy tale, right? And it was. But two years into our relationship I had a radical awakening that turned my world upside down.

For two months in November of 2007 I became disoriented, thought I was going insane, and spent most of that time disassociated from my body. When I came out the other side in January 2008 I had no clue what I had just gone through and had no support system to explain any of it to me. Fortunately for the internet and my penchant for used books I eventually came to The Celestine Prophecy and then the big breakthrough with Eckhart Tolle and I had discovered that what had happened to me was consciousness oriented. And so began my interminable march that ultimately led me to the path of Self-realization. That was also the beginning of the end of my idyllic relationship with my then-current lover.

About a year into my intense exploration of consciousness I met Kitty. We first met on January 6th, 2009 when I attended a MetaMystics meeting about shamanism and she was the speaker. But we had heard about each other a few weeks earlier through a mutual friend named Julija. Kitty had already joined the Meetup group that I had started a few months ago and was receiving the myriad emails that I was sending out to the group. And Julija emphatically encouraged me to read Kitty's blog (www.PoetKitty.com) and so I did... and was blown away by her candor and incredible writing style. And while the attraction was certainly there when we first met, it wasn't until we had got to know each other while attending the many various gatherings that we realized how we were not only on the same sheet of music, but we were on the exact same 16th note.

We found ourselves faced with a rather precarious situation. I was engaged to my current partner and while the wedding date was a year and a half away (to coincide with our 25th high school reunion), our love was very deep. And in 2008 Kitty had reconnected with a long-term former boyfriend herself, someone who loved her very much as well. As synchronicity would have it, both of our relationships were with people who did not live in Las Vegas. Why would we have both put ourselves in the exact same situation is only evidence of the perfection of how we manifest things.

So there we were, both in love with people who loved us, and yet there was something that each of us recognized in the other that was so compelling that five weeks after meeting each other, Kitty had left her boyfriend. To top it off, I had not left my girlfriend and when she left her boyfriend she did so in blind faith. She had no commitment from me that I was going to leave my current relationship. She was like a trapeze artist who had let go of her bar, flying through the air, trusting... trusting that whatever was supposed to happen would be there when it was supposed to be. So two weeks later I went to my partner, the woman that I loved, and I told her that I had to leave because my path was calling me to do so.

She must have thought I was nuts. While I did tell her that the stress of the long distance relationship was becoming rather challenging from an integrity perspective, which it was, I made it very clear that it was, as I naively called it at the time, my path towards "Enlightenment" that was the primary driving factor in my leaving her. She was graceful during the breakup and it was one of the most mature and natural separations that you could imagine. I know that there was a ton of pain on her end as there was great anguish for me in my leaving her, but the pull drawing me towards Self-realization was infinitely compelling.

Almost immediately Kitty and I committed to a path together. From the outset we made it clear that our individual spiritual paths would take precedence over our relationship. It was to be a great lesson in detachment, one that many believed was doomed to fail as "they had heard that one before." But here we are, almost a year later, and many have witnessed how true to that consecration we have remained. Our detachment from the relationship itself has made our bond stronger than almost any couple I have ever met. It is not a bond of codependency. It is a bond of kindred spirits honoring each others expansion. It gives true meaning to the cliche, "If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it's yours; if it doesn't, it never was." What is funny is that it is never mine and it is never hers, and paradoxically, because it isn't either of ours, it just is. And that is perfection.

But it is easy to talk about the lovey-dovey part. Yeah, we're very attracted to each other. And yes, we have many important compatible likes and dislikes. Our musical taste is remarkably similar. And we're not just talking about liking to listen to the same radio station. We love some very niche genres like Psytrance and Psybient that most people have never even heard of. All of that makes it easy to be around each other all of the time.

The significance of having a partner that is right there with you, spiritually, is discovered in the hard spots. It's not found in the awesome rapture of tantric embrace, it is found when face-to-face when one or the others' ego is large and in charge, or more challenging yet, both egos are out to play. To the unawakened individual, these rough spots are looked to as "the bad times." But to those who have discovered the keys to personal growth, those situations, the times when tension is high and tears and anger come forth, are the greatest opportunities to uncover and resolve issues that we have traditionally learned to repress and avoid.

One of the most important part of being a spiritual partner is to hold the space for one another so that the egos can expose themselves fully. In doing so, both of the partners are able to observe the flaring ego and, with practice, can track back to the origin of the issue. At first the tracking back can be done after things have cooled off, but with practice it can be done even while the ego is in the middle of its expression. Not only is this more effective, but it allows the person who is operating in egoic mode to learn to be both the ego and the observer. The one holding space can remind their partner to connect with the observer, not so that the observer takes charge or dampens the ego's response, but just so that the person gets used to having a dual awareness where one is fully feeling the egoic response and the other is the unobtrusive observer holding space for one's own ego.

Kitty and I stumbled into all of this. We made it up as we went. Our commitment to integrity, even when in the most egoic state, allowed us to not take things personally. That was a key element in the evolution of our conflict resolution process. Our conflct resolution process shifted from trying to figure out how to resolve the issue into trying to just hold the space, observe what was going on, and trying to find the lesson that we had gifted ourselves with.

Another key to this was our ownership in a concept that Kitty has often called "nothing outside of self exists." That means that we accept the perfection of exactly how everything is, and that we manifest EVERYTHING that we bring into our lives. In doing so, we were able to look at each of these conflicts as true lessons that we had orchestrated, sometimes entirely subconsciously, so that we could have this opportunity to observe and track back to release. We humans are ingenious, as the system worked so that if we were observant enough we could begin to see these things when they were small. But if we weren't willing or able enough to utilize the subtle manifestations, our incredibly perfect system would gradually amplify the next manifestation until we WERE able to recognize it. If we still chose to consciously avoid releasing the issue we might be able to side-step it this time, but the next time it was going to be bigger, bolder, and more in our face until we did release it.

It is only as I type this that I realize that the act of holding space for your partner is exactly the same process of learning to hold space for yourself. All those times that Kitty held the space for me she was learning how to hold space for herself. For every egoic break that I was able to observe and be there for Kitty and her ego, Kat, I was learning how to hold space for my own ego.

It was this morning at 4 am and I found myself lying in bed pondering our conversation from the night before. We were discussing the two concepts of Personal Mastery and Abiding Non-Dual Awareness when Kitty and I did something we almost never do. We allowed ourself to discuss how we felt each other's observer awareness compared to the other. I have felt that for several months, probably since my September 9th breakthrough, that I have been in observer mode for many days in a row, and Kitty agreed. Kitty stated that she felt that she was very close to that, but that there were many times where her ego had risen up and expressed itself. It was in this moment that we realized that we had gotten into the habit of gauging ourselves in how often the egoic programming was affecting our behavior. Kitty said that almost all of the time that her ego was expressing itself that the observer was there, but that it was just a shred of her total awareness. And that is when we both realized the crux of everything that we had been discussing, in satsang and with each other, for an entire year. Our goal is to have the observer there 100% of the time, but it is only so the observer is AWARE, it is not for the observer to manipulate or affect the situation at all. So while we first were thinking that I might be more "in control" than she was, we realized that both of us have the observer going on at all times, she's just allowing her ego to express itself fully and unmolested more often than I have been.

As I type this, I realize that there is great benefit from allowing the ego to fully express itself without the "higher Self" manipulating the experience. And that is great during the bulk of the day. But there seems to be a great benefit in allowing the Self to consciously direct the egoic programming to be more in flow, to learn Personal Mastery.

If you have gotten to the point where you are the observer 24/7 and you are in the mode of allowing things to be unmanipulated, where does the ego's personal preferences end and the manipulation begin? In other words, if I am laying on the bed and the cat's licking sounds are driving my ego nuts, is it manipulation of the scenario to pull a pillow over my head or to nudge the cat off the bed, or is that just letting the ego do what it wants? It seems to me that "manipulation" comes in when there is a "should" or a "judgment" about the action. The organic response of being annoyed by the licking sound seems to be "what is." That by avoiding my initial, thoughtless response is the manipulation. The avoidance is a result of my judging that it is "wrong" to not like the noise. I don't judge the noise, it is what it is, and my ego doesn't like it. That's FINE. It is when I step in and "should on myself" that I am manipulating the experience from what it is.

Since the beginning of the year Kitty and I have had numerous breakthroughs and ah-ha moments. Some of these come while alone in meditation or in the shower. Others come while spending time with some of my favorite sounding boards like Steve Mikrut, Rich Belsky, or Jennifer Korsten-Mills. And others come during my weekly events with my Enlightened teachers. But I have to say that most of the big breakthroughs come while discussing all of the above with Kitty, my incredible spiritual partner. Perhaps our story sounds a bit extreme. Leaving your current partner, someone whom you love dearly, to blindly leap into a relationship that is going to take a back seat to your own personal path is not for everyone. But I can't convey to you the impact that having such a partner has been.