Relationships and ‘Awakening’
“I struggle being present in a world that is anything but. Particularly in my relationships. They often bring out the worst in me, leading me back into states of over-thinking and judging. Are relationships the biggest roadblock to living spiritual awakening?”
The journey to meditativeness and centeredness is filled with great gifts. It’s also filled with great challenges. One of the biggest is navigating relationships—particularly with those who are not on the journey with us.
In my experience, this is a very common struggle. And as we become less reactive and judgmental it hurts to look around and find that reactivity and judgement are what most of society is revolving around.
But have you noticed this? Buddha, Jesus and all the other realized beings were the outcasts of society. It's a natural consequence of having a realized mind. A realized mind has never been in line with the collective mind. Because when a realized mind says 'I' and the collective mind says 'I', they refer to two different realities. The collective mind refers to a personality and the realized mind, a presence. Before a realized mind is grounded in its understanding, this lack of relational alignment is often a hard pill to swallow.
In the end, it’s simply the next step on the journey. First, there’s understanding, then there’s integration. First, we begin having a deeper intuition of who we are—that there’s a ‘spiritual’ dimension to our being or that we are simply a field of aware presence—then our hearts and minds begin integrating it into our lives.
Either we accept this integration process—with all the ups and downs, pains and discomforts—or we reject it. This rejection leads us back into a life of reactivity and judgement. Reactivity in the way we relate to those we feel are too reactivity-prone. And judgment in the way we meet them. Both are simply forms of unconsciousness. For a materialistic mind, the problem is the unconsciousness of someone else. For the meditative mind, it is our own unconsciousness that is being provoked from within.