One of life’s great challenges is creating a healthy relationship. Getting on someone’s wavelength can be a grueling, near-impossible task that does not come with guidance or instructions. Most of the time, though, it is worth evaluating your own decisions; selfishness, in particular, can quickly drive an otherwise loving relationship to ruin.
As such, there is a lot to be gained by working towards making your relationship a ‘conscious’ one. This entails ensuring that both yourself and your partner are working towards a state of growth; that requires focusing on both individual growth and unified growth as a couple.
What kind of growth, exactly? The kind that makes the world brighter. Unfortunately, most people throughout history initiate relationships for their own personal goals. However, if you are not focused on working together to achieve this unified growth, your relationship is more likely to leave you dissatisfied.
The ‘intention of growth,’ as it is called, can provide you with mutual satisfaction. Your relationship can become more than a mission for self-gratification, which is better for all involved. Here are four tips for achieving ‘next-level’ love in your progression to conscious love.
First things first: focus on growth instead of the outcome of the relationship.
By all means, you can daydream about how your relationship will turn out. Your first port of call, however, should be focusing on growth. Stasis is the greatest enemy of progression, so your level of satisfaction will automatically stop if you cease to grow spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically.
Furthermore, to ignore your own growth in favor of your partner’s is to cage yourself in their growth. You are unable to engender your own growth if you are simply not focused on it. Once again, this corrupts the balance of your relationship and causes it to become unsatisfying.
Indeed, growth can be terrifying; you may consider the risk of outgrowing one another, which would be ‘too much growth.’ Alas, collective growth strengthens the relationship by keeping it truly alive, and the risk of drifting apart becomes minuscule in comparison with non-conscious relationships.
Respect Your Triggers
Everyone brings some form of negativity to a relationship, whether it’s the hurt that lingers from a previous relationship or emotional wounds that have no correspondence to romance in general. Rejection and abandonment are two common feelings one can expect to experience in a new relationship—especially if you expect to emphasize growth.
Another misconception is the idea that negative emotions are detrimental to your relationship. However, these are your negative emotions, not your partner’s, caused by dysfunctional patterning. Your own beliefs are to blame for your pessimism.
Facing your faulty belief systems is essential to conscious growth, so the conscious couple should prioritize this area despite its difficulty. Take responsibility for your dysfunctional patterning, and you will be on track to attaining a much stronger relationship.
Disregard All Manner of Judgment
Conscious relationships require partners to feel free to feel whatever is natural to them without fear of judgment from their partner. Of course, this can only come after the previous point about taking responsibility for one’s actions. Truly naked desire can be dangerous for any relationship, but it can be the most freeing thing imaginable when it is accepted.
Finding the courage to be completely honest with your partner is one thing, but the importance of allowing them to be brutally honest with you often goes unmentioned. Certain things may be difficult to hear, but working past these negative reactions is essential for ensuring your relationship is the strongest it can possibly be.
Remember: the reason you alter your self-image around other people is to feel more comfortable in yourself. That, however, only serves to limit your personal growth all the more; by extension, it limits your collective growth with your partner. Radical honesty (and its acceptance) is essential to strengthening your bond as a couple.
Love is a Practice, not a State of Being
To love is to enter a state of vulnerability. It’s a practice that includes acceptance and forgiveness. Most people make the mistake of treating love as a destination; people become unsatisfied when the feeling of ‘love’ is absent and treat their relationship like something has gone horribly wrong.
The truth is that love appears in the nuances of a relationship. This exploration forces you to question whether your approach to your partner is actually a form of practicing love. Furthermore, every act of practicing love is different, allowing your relationship to blossom in new, interesting, and ultimately satisfying ways.
To be a conscious couple is to rely on that growth and to trust love to appear in strange, beautiful ways.