Embracing Ease

In part one  and two of this series, I shared with you about my perception of what true love is, and about safety and trust, the foundation of true love. In this blog, I’d like to share with you about my experience of the next step up on the true love pyramid: freedom and ease.

Freedom is where it begins, freedom within yourself to let go of worry and expectation about your relationships. The trouble with worry is that it isn’t productive. All it does is use up a lot of my energy and make me miserable in the present while I worry about the future. Expectation is no better, leading me to feel resentment about anything someone does that isn’t what I had wanted them to do.  But the worst part for me is the suffering that goes along with worry and expectation, this whole swampy boggy place where I can wind up torturing myself about how the other person is behaving.

What I notice is two things: 1. I feel better when I don’t worry 2. Worrying about the relationship usually makes the relationship worse, not better.

Sometimes to let go I imagine my thoughts are like little biodegradable balloons, floating off into the atmosphere until they snag on something and pop. Other times, when a worry is too big for that method, I write it on a piece of paper and give it over to Spirit. Lately I like to insert that piece of paper into the Godseye dangling from my rearview mirror. The Godseye is a simple weaving that I made this year on my birthday to remind me that I am asking Spirit to help me manifest EASE in my life. It’s been about a month, and so far every problem or worry I have put there has resolved itself within a week, with a lot of EASE. Once that resolution happens, I burn the paper, offering thanks to Spirit for bringing an easy and serene solution.

Once I put those pieces of paper in there, or send those balloons off into the sky, I do my best to remember to breathe to bring myself fully into the present moment, where everything is ok. I do my best to appreciate the beauty of a sunset or the sound of birds singing outside my window. I meditate on Spirit’s plan and surrendering to that so I can let go. And then I get my mind off of the situation by playing. I play games, read books, dance, hula hoop. I cultivate a state of mind where I am a little child again. And then I realize that rather than focusing on THEM, I need to focus on my own life, and my own happiness. I remember that other people are not responsible for my happiness, That is MY job.

If I can do all this, really let go, then tremendous ease comes into the relationship. I no longer have any worry or expectations about that person that are getting in the way of my connection with them. Now admittedly some connections will be more easeful than others, because there is also that little issue of compatibility. It’s hard to be in relationship with someone if you don’t want the same things from that relationship. It is also hard to play with someone if you don’t like to play in the same ways. And it’s incredibly hard to communicate effectively if you don’t have the same communication styles. For me, part of true love is both partners being able to talk about things that matter to them and to be listened to and understood. But it is also about sharing time together doing things that feel good and refresh both of us.

In the end it boils down to this. If I want Ease in my relationships, then I have to cultivate it within myself.  Just as trust in relationship grows from cultivating an inner safety, ease comes from cultivating inner freedom.To create an easy and playful relationship with another, you have to create an easy and playful relationship with yourself. If you have ease, and you have trust, then you are ready to open your hearts to unconditional love with each other.