Changing Relationships

       Cultivating a compassionate and fearless heart does not mean all our relationships will magically work out happily ever after. A man may develop compassion and fearlessness and still decide to file for divorce or set firm boundaries with family members and coworkers or still never hear from an estranged child again. Awakening is not a mystical cure-all or a twelve step program that promises to repair every broken relationship. Awakening to the fact that all things end, including all personal relationships, deepens our ability to feel compassion for and connectedness with those who experience and fear such losses, including ourselves. But awakening is not a switch that flips and turns a relationship from dysfunctional to happy in an instant. Sometimes the compassion and fearlessness discovered within the heart directs us to the decision that what is truly best is ending or distancing certain relationships.
       A man may develop compassion and find new space to develop a fresh and new relationship with his spouse or partner. A man may feel compassion for himself and his spouse but realize that romance and attraction will not follow because they have become or always were incompatible people. He may see in practice the fact that all things, all relationships, emotions, and individuals end. The awakened heart may see that the marriage or relationship itself is a form of grasping meant to create an illusion of permanence and solidity to stave off our fear of the unknown. As fearlessness develops through staying with the groundless, raw, and challenging elements of our hearts, the unknown becomes less and less threatening. As the unknown becomes less threatening, those relationships and attachments we have built up against the unknown come into clearer and clearer view. As we see more clearly, some relationships will remain and some will pass, but all will change.
       The end of a relationship is not a failure, just as the continuance of a relationship is not a success. Notions of success and failure are still the delusions of a heart that insists relationships are permanent or eternal. We can develop a compassionate heart for all people, but nothing requires us to develop a romantic or sexual attraction to all people. We can develop compassion, but nothing requires us to endure abuse or indulge co-dependency based anxieties. We can develop compassion and find that some relationships simply do not and will not function in their past or current forms.
       As relationships change, stay with the feelings that arise within you. You may feel anxiety about facing the unknown without a partner, or anxiety about facing the unknown with your partner as the relationship takes new form. You may feel blame surge within you, elevating yourself into the righteous position and pointing at her or him for not being someone or something different. You may feel an empty space where you expected romantic love to be, or you may find new passion as old storylines of anger and blame fade away. As with all other exercises of staying with the raw emotions, get to know the shape of these feelings and follow them down into the darkest places that scare and disturb you. Face them, let them rise and fall as neither good nor bad, and let them be, then act with the increasing compassion and clarity that you find in all of your relationships.