INTIMACY - INTO MY SELF I SEE!
The oxford dictionary defines intimacy as friendship, rapport, closeness, affection & affinity it struck me that there was an order to this that lead to a very important realisation!
We start a friendship , build a rapport , become closer ,develop affection and recognise an affinity , in Nepal they have a word for this recognition; NAMESTE ! It means ' I see the God in you' and it is how they greet each other every day to remember the truth of those before you.
However in the west we went a different direction. We developed a cloak of separation that protects us from world , we distance ourselves from harms way and set up sophisticated security methods to prevent anyone from getting to close . We seek to avoid repetition of Pain that we have felt in our lives and look for people to earn our trust before opening up , also we want to hide our faults as we fear the judgement that others might bring to their interpretation of our past , but most of all , as marianne williamson says" it is not our darkness we fear but our light" and it is this that we wish to hide ! If another was to truly see the magnificence we are , we would be faced with the conclusion that we are the God they see and in this have to own our own creator-ship and be responsible for our whole lives. This ownership is a daunting thing and leads us face to face with our deepest fears , the questions of why ? Why has our life played out the way it has ,?Why am I here ? Why did I do this to myself ? Most of us are not prepared to go there , so we stay distant from others and therefore distant from ourselves living a life of surface interactions constantly yearning for the touch that can never reach us .
As we get older and wiser in life we see time after time how we repeat the patterns of relationship , how the idiocy of presenting to a potential suitor a false image of ourselves, how we hold back from revealing and try to figure out what the other wants . how we should be to give us the greatest chance of winning their approval . Only to feel trapped in this fake persona a year down the line and as we start to resist its restricting limitations we are surprised that our partner is disenchanted and the inevitable break up ensues with both bitter for the deceit.
Finally after many repetitions of this scenario we gain the wisdom and the courage to strip away the layers of protection and to be true to our selves to allow our Intuition, Instinct and Insight to lead us . No longer hiding we step naked into each day with trust realising that in our truth we attract those which are in harmony with our soul not our ego! Thus with the distortion of illusion removed all can see us clearly for who we really are.
The opportunity of intimacy then is to go there, to enter the challenge of vulnerability and discover our true selves in the gaze of another !
