When One of You Is Waking Up
The joy of facing your shit (sorry, your perfect protective adaptations) together. On love, eros and waking up inside the relationship container.
I have been in many spiritual or developmental containers over the last two decades. Some were transformative crucibles, where couples came in together. In others, people came alone, and their spouses stayed outside the work, waiting at home, curious or wary or quietly hoping it would pass.
Over and over, I have watched one of three things happen.
Sometimes the couple wakes up together. They become incredibly radiant. A little more space opens between them, and they grow stronger and more luminous in their independence and interdependence. Their union takes on a new purpose, and you can feel it when they walk into a room.
Sometimes the one who is growing leaves. They can no longer hold the dissonance, the leash, the smallness of the old container. The marriage can’t adjust, or the partner isn’t ripe to craft a new container. The marriage ends, sometimes gracefully and sometimes in pieces.
Sometimes the pull of the old wins, at least for now. The one who was opening gives up on their spiritual development and retreats into the tightness of the familiar. They cannot break free yet, so they re-dim and wait.
This happens well beyond the long arc of retreats and training cohorts. It happens at festivals, at Burning Man, in any place where you can be free and be met and accepted in your freedom, your kink, your weirdness, your full expression- or even your testing and experimentation on who you MIGHT be without judgement. In these spaces, for a moment, you can take off all the masks you put on to belong. That moment of unmasking can be as destabilizing to a marriage as any other initiation.
Many of us made our first commitments to a beloved while our masks were still fully on, before we had become transparent to ourselves, before we were brave enough to feel or to express the authentic depth of who we really are. As the masks come off, the old agreement starts to strain. Often there is quiet isolation in this, where one partner grows into their fullness in secret and leaves the other behind without a word, and sometimes that leaving is overt.
There is another option, though, if you want to wake up, and you want to wake up with this person, the beloved who has been part of your life forever, who knows your father’s voice and the way you take your coffee and the sound you make when you are about to cry.
Together, you can make the case for abandoning every prior deal between you that was built on falseness, on masks, on social and cultural ideas of what a marriage should be. You can sit across from each other and ask: how do we really want to live?
This way asks for real bravery, heart and courage. You take risks. You tell the truth about what you long for. You bring home what you are learning. You let your partner see you change, and you let yourself see them resist, grieve and change too. Some of these risks will cause pain. A hard conversation, a tender reveal or a season of friction can shake a marriage without blowing up everything and ending everything. Pain is often part of growth, a sort of ache of stretching the capacities.
The invitation here is to the joy of facing your shit together. Two people who are willing to look at what hides, to be brave with each other, and to stop making each other wrong discover a kind of freedom neither could find alone. Shadow work inside a marriage can be one of the most joyful things two people ever do.
We can craft anything we want. We have limitless capacity. We are tied to the infinite power of the divine. We are the aperture of the divine. We can make any kind of relationship we want, as long as we stay grounded, steady, transparent and loving, and keep exploring how. To keep imagining from the limitless yes. It could be amazing. You could be amazing, the two of you, together.
This essay is descriptive, drawn from the tantric traditions and from what I have witnessed. It’s also an invitation, into a possibility that is entirely feasible and more glorious than you ever imagined.
What Love Is For
In the tantric traditions I teach from, the householder’s life is a complete spiritual path. The gṛhastha, the householder, walks the same road as the renunciant. The practice is in the home, the family, the community and the workplace. Relationship is where awakening gets embodied. It is also a mirror. In this thinking, intimacy shows us what solitary practice can hide: the guard, the old grief, the need to be right, the fear of being left… a true laundry list.
When I ask what marriage is for, I find four purposes braided together. The first is care: mutual safety, a shared life that holds two people through their seasons. The second is eros and intimacy, the physical cherishing and tenderness that give our deepest longing a home. The third is mirroring, the friction that polishes the glass. The fourth is service, a shared offering to family, community and the world.
A marriage can be strong in one of these while another is still ripening.
Eros is often the first thing to change when one partner begins to wake. In the tantric view, desire is the living pulse of Śakti moving toward union. Every attraction carries a trace of the original longing of consciousness to know itself through another. Tantra aims at bhoga, enjoyment, together with mokṣa, liberation, so pleasure between lovers belongs to the path. It is one of the ways the divine tastes its own creation. The Vijñāna Bhairava offers that in the joy of union with a beloved, or even in remembering that joy, we can rest attention in the delight itself and find it opening into the joy of consciousness.
Cherishing has a slightly different flavor than the pure life force and creativity of Eros: to be held, touched with care and known in the body is one of our deepest needs and a sacred act in its own right. Loving touch settles the nervous system, and a body that feels safe in love can open further in every other part of life. Cher, which means both dear and expensive: you are a treasure and I will treat you as such
Two people practicing this potent and tender love create a field others feel. The light moves through our faces, our hands and our hearts into the room. Lovers practice this with each other first. The Tirumantiram says it in two words: anbe Śivam. Love is Śiva. The love between two people is itself a form of the divine.
Different Paces
Two people rarely open on the same schedule. When I began to see the asymmetry as part of a lifetime’s rhythm, the sense that one of us is ahead and the other behind begins to soften. One may be ready for depth while the other still needs adventure or achievement or simply time. Readiness can’t be hurried, or argued into being. There’s no forcing.
In our twenties and thirties, partners often stand at different stages of maturation and readiness. One may still be forming an identity, a career, a relationship with their family of origin, while the other is already turning inward.
In midlife, the asymmetry moves into the body itself. We age at different paces. Menopause and andropause arrive at different times and in different ways, changing desire, energy, sleep, mood and the felt sense of who we are. One partner may be deep in a hormonal passage while the other is untouched by it, or only just beginning.
These passages are initiations. They shake loose old identities and bring shadow to the surface, and they can also open a fresher, deeper eros when both people meet the change with curiosity. We are processes in the mind of creation, and we meet each other in emergence, as we actually are, and we keep choosing to face what arises together, bravely, without making each other wrong.
The Leash
Certain archetypes, karmic imprints or saṃskāras quietly undermine the final phase of spiritual embodiment. They take different forms, yet they share a resistance to fully surrendering into divine flow. Often in marriages, you find what Patrick Connor calls “the person on a leash”.
This person feels tied to the approval of family or tribe. They cannot step into full sovereignty for fear of rejection, of disappointing the people they love, of losing their place as the good girl or the good boy. They put the status quo first. They secretly fear their own power, worried that if it were fully unleashed it might turn into force or dominance. So they play small, often while operating at a level of capacity that outruns most of the people around them. It’s not obvious they’re playing small. They’re on a leash.
In a marriage, the leash is often a spouse’s approval, or the fear of what waking up would cost the family. The leash can we held by a partner who is fearful of being left. Or the one on the leash can hands it over willingly, because staying small feels safer than risking the marriage. Either way, both people end up living inside a smaller container than their love could hold.
The way through is sovereignty.
True belonging arises when we stand in our real power and love. The same power we fear could dominate can move as fierce compassion instead.
At its best, your beloved becomes your greatest ally, and you become theirs. We reflect to each other our higher possibilities and call us forward.
From Each Side
When your partner is waking and you feel left behind, the fear is real and it deserves your attention. You may fear losing them to a teacher, a community, a new life. You may fear being judged as less. Changes in sex, food, drinking, money or time can feel like a rejection of everything you built together. Underneath, there is often grief for the person you married.
Please turn toward your own fear before you turn it toward them. Ask what it is protecting and where it lives in your body. Maybe ask this question: what is being lived in my partner that I have kept unlived in myself? Sometimes the one who feels left behind is standing at the edge of their own opening.
When you are the one waking, read your partner’s response with the compassion you would want for yourself. Fear often means I’m afraid of losing you. Scorn often guards grief or the sense of being measured. Skepticism can be healthy discernment. Indifference may simply be the pace of their own path. Anger may just be a longing for presence, attention, love and connection.
Look honestly at your own shadows, because on this road they wear spiritual clothes. There is the quiet superiority of believing you see more. There is the urge to wake your partner up. There is bypassing, using it’s all perfect to avoid a real conversation. There is secrecy about practices or friendships in the community, and there is the subtle leaving that happens when you stay in the house but take your heart elsewhere. Your job is to stay awake yourself.
People feel a real shift in how you love long before they understand where it came from.
How We Walk the Staying
The fourth way, the invitation to radiant relating, is made of small, brave acts repeated over years.
When your partner triggers you, treat the trigger as a compass. Ask what in you is reacting so strongly, why it feels so familiar, and what it wants to say. When you catch yourself certain that the problem lives in them, turn it around and ask what in you resonates with this pattern and what you might be co-creating. Before a hard conversation, feel for the guard that rises to protect you, thank it, and ask it to soften enough to let you listen. Speak in sensation before story: my chest tightens when you leave for retreat. It disarms reactivity in both of you.
It helps to make agreements and to revisit them as the seasons change. Talk openly about time and money for practice. Decide together what stays private and what is shared. I do recommend a lean toward transparency about anything that touches intimacy or the shared life. When eros changes shape, name it, and offer new ways of being together as an exploration with plenty of invitation and no pressure at all. Keep some shared practice, even a few minutes of breathing together before sleep. And when the two of you can’t hold it alone, find support from someone who respects the spiritual life.
There are real risks in the expanded container. Practice amplifies sensitivity, charge and eros, and attraction can intensify toward anyone present, including teachers and fellow practitioners. A deep resonance with someone outside the marriage can feel destined and holy, and it takes time to discern soul recognition from shadow projection, or from an unmet need at home that is asking to be spoken. We can project the divine, or the ideal partner, or the rescuing parent onto a teacher. In expanded states, boundaries soften and people lose themselves, some in the partner and some in the practice. Old trauma and sexual shame can rise during intimate work. Opening too far, too fast, shows up as anxiety, sleeplessness and fragmentation.
Keep eros consecrated through clear vows and clear disclosure. Go slowly. Tell the truth early. Stay in community with people who can see your blind spots, because your own glass is the one pane you can never quite see.
One more discernment: disagreement and doubt and hard talk belong to any real partnership. Contempt, control, isolation and threats are something else, and they call for protection before practice. The same discernment we use for spiritual communities applies at home. Anyone who cuts you off from the people you love or demands exclusive truth, whether a teacher or a partner, is a red flag.
The Hint of Leaving Pierces the Veil
The threat of ending, the possibility of someone leaving or any dissolution, will likely be highly triggering. In this, we touch some of the core wounds of humanity. Abandonment. Ghosting. Not being enough. The feeling that you can’t count on anybody. The chaos of renavigating housing and money and everything else a shared life holds. And the sense of betrayal: we had a deal, and you changed it on your own.
When one person sets out on a path because they sense there is more to this life, and the partner is not co-initiating, it has the potential to touch the very deepest wounds. It can bring up judgment, blame and shame, where it might have brought up wonder: this person I love is changing. This person I love wants to expand. How can I hold that?
And when the catalyst is another person, it cuts deeper still. Sometimes someone meets a person in the container who is already in sync, waking up in the same way, at the same pace. Then the sense of betrayal carries what we would have called cheating. That new relationship energy doesn’t have to be sexual. It can be a spiritual new relationship energy, and it is intoxicating, especially set against the long thread of an established and often ossified marriage.
This is exactly why the fourth way asks so much of us. The wounds are real, and they are old. Meeting them with honesty and tenderness, on both sides, is the work.
This really does take bravery. Feeling into just how constrained people are, how hard it is to drop the masks, is one of the reasons I feel so strongly about this work of examining the shadow, so more of your own radiant light can shine through and be born into the world.
Love That Lands in More Than One Place
For 20 years I was living in the Bay Area in Northern California, and in the southeastern corner of the Big Island, where polyamory and ethical non-monogamy communities were taking off. Everyone seemed to be exploring how it could work. There was a great deal of heartbreak in this brave experimentation.
Many people were touching a directionally correct truth: love can land in more than one place. The theory was that monogamy, as our culture defined it, may not be the shape for everyone, and that hearts that open to another does not have to be a threat to a marriage.
What was often missing was the capacity underneath the truth. It takes deep transparency to yourself, a steady and coherent nervous system, and real skill in navigating change graciously with the people you love. Without those, the truth turns into chaos. So many of the people I knew in that world, though certainly not all, were carrying unsettled nervous systems while trying to move from lover to lover and have it all at once. The idea was ahead of the skills.
Whatever shape a relationship takes, the capacities come first: self-knowledge, regulation, honesty, and care for everyone the choices touch. Build those, and many forms become possible. Without this, every form becomes fragile.
I’m a romantic, I love marriage and family. I love safe containers. I love the beautiful, expansive witnessing that becomes possible between two people over forty, fifty, sixty years. What a gorgeous invitation that is. It’s also a call for the deepest mastery, to do this well. Longevity without awareness turns into bitter resentments.
Seeing Your Beloved in Full Flower
What we hold in our minds and feel in our bodies becomes the field our relationships grow in. A clear intention, joined to an elevated emotion felt now, as if it were already real, begins to reorganize the nervous system and the life around it. The tantric traditions knew this too. Saṅkalpa, the heart’s resolve, is planted in the body, and what we attend to with devotion grows.
There is an invitation to envision your marriage in full, outrageous flower. See your beloved radiant, free, fully themselves, laughing in a way you haven’t heard in years. See the two of you meeting each other with curiosity, with play, with an eros that keeps renewing itself. See your home as a temple.
The vision works on you first. Holding your partner in their full flower changes how you see them, how you speak to them, and what you draw out of them. You stop rehearsing old grievances and start rehearsing the life you want. Sometimes the beloved rises to meet the vision, and sometimes the vision shows you the truth about where you actually are.
Either way, you are practicing love as a creative act, and the two of you become co-creators of a marriage more glorious than either of you imagined.
The Heart Vow
Some relationships ripen through an awakening and some complete. If an ending comes, let it come with grace: gratitude for what was given, a clear completion, and no villains. Taste the whole experience all the way through so it can dissolve instead of leaving a seed. How we end a relationship shapes the field for our children, our friends and everyone who loved us together.
But I hope for the fourth way. I hope for couples who choose to wake up with each other, who take the risks and survive the pain, and who discover on the other side a love with more room in it, more light, more play.
Under every practice I have named here lies one simple vow. When fear rises, when your partner moves at a different pace, when eros changes shape, when the body you love begins to age, return to it:
I desire my beloved’s happiness and freedom.
Love that truly wants the other’s happiness and freedom can hold almost anything. It is the ground of the fourth way, and the joy of facing it all together.
Visualizing (guided blessing for the relationship)
This is a seven minute meditation on imagining and living into the best relationship you can. Use your own words, eventually, but this is a start. XOXO
Sit quietly and let the breath settle. Place a hand on your heart.
Bring your beloved to mind. See them in their fullest flowering, the version of them that their own soul longs for.
See your relationship as you most want it to be. Be specific: a morning, a touch, a conversation, a laugh.
Feel it now. Let the gratitude and joy fill your body as if it has already happened.
Speak the heart vow silently or aloud, or make your own…We are happy and free together, radiant witnesses for each other and partners in full awakening and inspired action.
Carry that feeling into the first moment you see them
Come on Retreat This November
Join for 1,2 or 3 weeks
Queen rooms with Hall Bath shared by 2 rooms remaining, for couples or solo travelers.
November 1-8 Living Tantra with Optional Detox
Bhakti Tantra — Breath & Energy Body
For everyone: breath, the energy body, and a full integrated system reset.
Teacher track: guiding breathing techniques, reading bodies and energy patterns.
Featuring special guest teacher Richard Bock.
Led by Christine with guest teachers. Excursions to the caves and the Temple.
November 8-15 Living Tantra Transformation for Couples and Singles
Bhakti Tantra — Rasa & Relating
For everyone: rasa, relating, and frequency.
Teacher track: practicum in embodied leadership and spiritual guidance that invites sovereignty.
Led by Christine with guest teachers. Excursions to the Temple of Mu and the lava fields.
November 15-22 I Ching Immersion led by Adam Bauer, supported by Christine
November 22-29 Thanksgiving week: Friends and family, flow arts, Thanksraving
GLOSSARY
Sanskrit and Tamil terms
Anbe Śivam (AHN-bay SHEE-vum): Tamil for “Love is Śiva,” a two-word summary of the Tirumantiram’s theology. The love between two people is itself a form of the divine.
Bhoga (BHOH-gah): enjoyment, the full tasting of embodied experience. In tantra it is pursued together with liberation.
Gṛhastha (GRIH-hahs-tah): the householder, the one who keeps a home, raises a family and works in the world. The tantric traditions treat this as a complete spiritual path.
Karma: the residue of past action, the imprints that shape impulse and repeat as patterns.
Mokṣa (MOKE-shah): liberation, freedom from the contractions that bind us.
Saṃskāra (sahm-SKAH-rah): a karmic imprint, a groove cut deep by experience that keeps shaping perception and behavior until it is seen and digested.
Śakti (SHAHK-tee): the dynamic, creative power of consciousness, felt as energy, desire, feeling and aliveness. In the essay, eros is Śakti moving toward union.
Śiva (SHEE-vah): consciousness itself, the awareness in which everything arises, paired with Śakti as its inseparable partner.
Texts
Tirumantiram (tee-roo-MUN-tee-rum): the foundational scripture of Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta, about three thousand verses by the siddha Tirumūlar.
Vijñāna Bhairava (vig-NYAH-nah BHY-rah-vah): a Kashmiri tantric text of 112 doorway practices. It includes verses on resting in the joy of union, or in its memory, until that joy opens into the joy of consciousness.
Shadow and inner work
Container: the held space of a relationship, a retreat or a community. It can be spacious or tight, and it can expand or ossify.
Divine flow: the movement of grace or life force when we stop resisting it. Surrendering into it is the final phase of embodiment.
The guard: the vigilance that rises to protect us from a feeling, such as scanning, bracing or explaining. Shadow work begins by feeling the guard itself.
Masks: the adaptations we took on to belong, which the subtitle calls “your perfect protective adaptations.” They are often still fully on when first commitments are made.
Projection: seeing in another what we have not owned in ourselves, whether difficult qualities or golden ones.
Shadow: whatever has been pushed out of awareness, whether painful or beautiful. As Patrick teaches, it is where the rest of the light is hiding.
Spiritual bypassing: using spiritual ideas, such as “it’s all perfect,” to avoid real feeling or a real conversation.
Transparency: becoming clear enough, to yourself and others, that the light moves through you. It is the essay’s thread from the Rainbow Glass teaching.
Relationship terms
Andropause and menopause: hormonal passages of midlife that change desire, energy, sleep, mood and identity, often arriving at different times for two partners.
Co-initiating: both partners choosing the path of awakening together, rather than one setting out alone.
Co-regulation: calming each other’s nervous systems through touch, tone and presence.
Ethical non-monogamy and polyamory: relationship forms in which love or intimacy can land in more than one place, by open agreement.
The fourth way: the essay’s name for waking up with your beloved, beside the three common outcomes of waking together, leaving, or retreating into the old.
New relationship energy (NRE): the intoxicating charge of a new connection. The essay names a spiritual form of it, which can be as powerful as sexual attraction.
The person on a leash: Patrick Connor’s archetype for someone tied to family or tribal approval, who plays small despite great capacity. In a marriage, the leash is often a spouse’s approval.
Sovereignty: standing in your full power and love, the ground of true belonging.
