<this article first appeared at http://lissarankin.com>
I’m in love with this Alanis Morrissette song “You Owe Me Nothing in Return.” In fact, I have a girl crush on Alanis in general, especially after I heard her speak with one my spiritual influences Adyashanti. For a long time, I used the lyrics to this song about unconditional love as a sort of sacred contract I proposed between friends, family members, and romantic partners. It was my benchmark, the ideal of perfect love that I strove to achieve.
Years later, I’d love to sit down for tea with Alanis and ask her if she still felt the same way about unconditional love as she did when she wrote this song. I still love it and resonate with a lot of it, but I feel like there might be an additional verse. Maybe I’ll have to write my own song some day . . .
The Privilege of Intimacy
It’s no small thing, this commitment to radical soul growth via relationship. It’s a privilege to be invited into someone’s most intimate heart spaces. It’s an honor to have our own heart touched and explored, with tenderness and curiosity. It also can be scary as hell, especially when your heart has been hurt, as most of ours have.
I’m an intimacy junkie. It’s part of why I went to medical school, so I could have a front row seat on the most intimate and vulnerable moments of the human experience—birth, illness, and death. I ponder what it means to be invited into these intimate spaces, not just medically, but in all the ways love shows up. I’ve come to believe that we have to be careful who we let all the way in. Taking risks is part of the journey from the head to the heart, but it doesn’t seem wise to be reckless with something as vulnerable and tender as the heart. Yet, there’s nothing stronger than the heart. Does it really need protection?
Protecting the Heart
These are the inquiries that I ponder when sitting beside waterfalls and gazing at stars. I’m curious about how we guard and protect the heart and what makes us feel safe enough to take down our armor. I’m curious how to keep the heart open when you feel like a turtle without a shell in a briar-patch world.
What happens when love has no conditions? Surely, we must still limit access to the innermost sanctuary of the heart, to invite others to earn our trust, even if love comes without needing to be earned. In other words:
Don’t let anyone into your garden who stomps on your flowers.
I don’t know how these things work, but I suspect that in order for the heart to feel safe enough to open all the way, we need to be with people we really trust. As I wrote in Part 2 of this blog series, building trust with someone enables us to be brave enough to dive deeper into true intimacy, not the false intimacy of over disclosure and premature vulnerability, but the real intimacy that comes with slowly disclosing the tenderest parts of ourselves and having them met with gentleness and respect.
<read the full article at http://lissarankin.com/relationships-on-the-spiritual-path-part-4-blind-compassion-neurotic-tolerance>
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