Relationships as mirrors



To make up for my inability to post about my own life, here is an old past writing about relationships...


Have you ever noticed how often the qualities that attracted you to your partner or friend turn out to be the same ones you end up hating about him or her?

Why is it that opposites attract? One of the wondrous gifts of complementary or opposite relationships is that they motivate us to greater wholeness and fulfillment, through the laws of mirroring and karma. These laws were formed at the very beginning of our universe.

In the beginning…

Once upon a time, an aspect of The Creator decided out of great love and curiosity, to create a reality in which a part of itself would not remember its true nature. In order to accomplish this, The Creator manifested a body on the third dimensional plane in which to situate an aspect of itself. The Creator gave this body certain limitations, so it wouldn't be able to fully remember who it was. The experiment was to discover if The Creator, when hidden from itself, could remember who it was. In order to assist itself, the human retained, as in all dimensions, the ability to create its own reality according to its beliefs. But because the third dimension is dense, the process of creating reality is slowed down so that it is not as apparent in the higher vibrational realms.

The conditions were so perfectly conceived that when a piece of The Creator contained itself within the body, the density of the third dimension created separation and individuation. The human believed itself to be a separate from all that is, and conceived itself to be individual! This split The Creator's wholeness into complementary pairs, and dualism was born. The human experienced the illusion of self and other, male and female, good and evil, life and death, abundance and poverty.

Dualism also created karma – the law that every action causes a reaction. So whenever the human's actions came from the belief that it was separate, karma ensures that the human has the opportunity to discover that it is not. Until a remembrance of its unity and wholeness is achieved, the human rides the wheel of karma.

In self-love, The Creator (because The Creator is love) provided itself two very important clues to remembering its wholeness: the mirroring nature of reality, and karma. Because wholeness is the fundamental truth of reality, each aspect of reality contains the whole. Therefore every piece of reality contains a holographic mirror of the whole. Reality mirrors one's beliefs, and within that reality is the unity of all that is, and karma allows limitless opportunities to discover this. These gifts allow us, the human – as an individuated piece of The Creator – a path to return home.

The holographic nature of reality is another way of saying, "everything is in relationship." Separateness is an illusion. All things cooperate in relationship to work together. Even the smallest, most invisible and immeasurable particle has consciousness, because it too is a piece of The Creator, and the law of its nature is to cooperate with other particles to create the highest good for all. Relationships are, therefore, another word for cooperation. Your relationship to others, and others' relationships to you, is a cooperation that brings you to remembering your unity and wholeness.

Rediscovering Your Wholeness

The veil between our human selves and our Creator-selves is so effective that it takes us many lifetimes to perceive the relationship between situations, things and ourselves as interconnected. Fortunately, in this new age, mass consciousness is awakening and we have greater opportunity to learn from these relationships, and reclaim our wholeness. The new energy being released into the earth makes us oscillate at a higher vibration, quickening the process, forcing us to confront all the aspects of self that we believe are not whole, and separate from others. The earth plane is becoming less dense, and our beliefs are manifesting our reality at an ever increasing pace, making it clearer that we create our reality.

Because we are master artists at creating our own reality, every relationship we have is reflective of our beliefs. Because reality is a holographic mirror, our relationships give us clear feedback as to what we believe about others, the universe and ourselves. Often our beliefs operate unconsciously, without our awareness. By examining our experience of relationships we may discover our unconscious beliefs, and transform them into beliefs that serve us better.

The Mirroring of Disowned and Shadow Characteristics

One of the primary ways in which relationships serve to remind us of our wholeness is by mirroring aspects of our psyches that we disown. Often we are attracted to people who have complementary or opposite characteristics from ourselves. Whenever we need to acknowledge and develop the other person's characteristics in our own personalities, the complementary characteristics eventually cause conflict in the relationship. Co-dependent relationships form from complementary relationships because we believe we "need" the other person to fulfill aspects in our selves that we are lacking. We also mirror disowned characteristics in the other person – our relationship partner needs to acknowledge and develop the recessive personality characteristics in his or her self, which are dominant in our personalities.

Complementary relationships end up creating conflict between two people because there is a lack of balance between the dominant and recessive aspects of the personalities.

While our partner's dominant characteristics are the basis for our attraction and admiration, the lack of balance between these and opposite characteristics means that these qualities are carried to the extreme. Whenever personality characteristics are carried to the extreme, it suggests they are operating as defensive mechanisms, to protect us from our fear of the opposite characteristic. In complementary relationships, we both need and fear the very characteristics we love in our partner.

I was attracted to Les' qualities of independence, discipline, and confidence. Being a very feeling, expressive, and social person, I was often undisciplined because the flow of my feelings influenced my decisions. I admired how Les' stability allowed the building of financial and material continuity. Likewise, Les admired my expressiveness, creativity, spontaneity and capacity for intimacy. But whenever I pressured Les to display more expressiveness and intimacy, Les would withdraw into greater detachment and coldness. In turn, I would react by becoming more emotional and needy. The positive aspects of our dominant personality characteristics became extreme, revealing themselves as defense mechanisms.

We both feared developing the other's characteristics, because in childhood we had learned that in order to feel safe and loved, we needed to be both unemotional and strong, or emotional and vulnerable. As our conflict heated up, we began to discover the shadow sides of our personalities. The shadow is a part of our selves we believe to be "bad" and "wrong," and deny exists. I discovered I could be raging, volatile, and needy; whereas disassociation, selfishness and abandonment were shadow qualities discovered by Les.

Eventually I couldn't stand the emotionally volatile shadow characteristics I was expressing, so I began to detach and distance myself, taking on Les' defensive reactions. When I no longer allowed myself the verbal outlet, I found myself alone with my feelings of fear, hurt and anger. Taking responsibility for my feelings, I discovered their connection to childhood dramas. Likewise, when I withdrew, Les became more emotionally expressive and volatile.

By taking on my shadow characteristics of detachment and distance, I discovered that my underlying fears and sorrows originated in childhood. I was projecting them onto my relationship with Les. Over time, I made friends with them and began to honor all my feelings, developing greater independence and confidence. Les too discovered that feelings are not to be feared, and became more comfortable expressing them. Though our relationship ended, it allowed us the space to heal and integrate the denied and shadow aspects of ourselves. Having experienced both sides of my shadow, I have developed compassion and understanding for those who feel the need to detach because they fear their emotions and vulnerability. I have also developed the confidence and independence to withdraw to take care of my feelings, when necessary, so that I do not project my issues onto others.

Complementary relationships are karmic contracts agreed to by both souls, as an opportunity to learn that not learned in a past life. These contracts are made out of love, to help one another remember our wholeness. Relationships are an opportunity to heal ourselves by bringing us into confrontation with aspects of ourselves we have disowned, rejected and denied. The mirroring of disowned and shadow characteristics of our personalities also reflects our underlying core beliefs.

The Holographic Mirroring of Core Beliefs

Our relationships holographically mirror our beliefs about others, the universe and ourselves. By examining our relationships, we can discover our unconscious core beliefs. When our relationships cause us suffering, it is our soul's call to heal false core beliefs. These false core beliefs not only affect our experience of relationships, but also limit our experience of all aspects of life.

My relationships mirrored a core belief that affects nearly all of us –
"love is always followed by rejection and abandonment."

Core beliefs influence and affect our life experiences. This particular core issue has its roots in birth. As an infant we are protected, comfortable and surrounded by the love of our mother's womb. Then during birth we sense our mother's psychic pain and understand we are the cause of it; we are forced out of the comfort of the womb, cut from our breathing apparatus (the umbilical cord), slapped, and choking, we gasp for breath. We are born into rejection and guilt.

Just when we begin to recover from the intense shock, we experience abandonment. We are removed from our mother's arms, put in an incubator, away from physical touch and the psychic energy of human nurturing. We have learned not to trust pleasure and love because we have learned it leads to pain and abandonment. This prime belief is reinforced in childhood, to a greater or lesser degree of intensity in all of us, depending on our karma.

The parents we choose reflect our karma, and they reinforce our false core beliefs via emotional patterning in childhood. By looking at our relationships with our primary care givers, we can discover the emotional patterning that took place in childhood, and how it gets re-created in adulthood.

My relationship with Les mirrored my relationship with my father. My father was a loving, kind and generous man who spent a lot of time with me as a child and never outwardly betrayed my trust. But I never felt a heartfelt connection to him. He remained distant and unconnected to me on a heart level, and as a child I felt unloved. I did everything in my power to make him love me from a feeling level. Though I intellectually knew as an adult that he loved me, I never felt the heart-cord connection as a child. This relationship set up the emotional patterning for my relationships. I recreated this relationship with others in order to try to make my father love me. Perhaps if I was successful, I could then believe I was worth loving.

I mirrored my mother by taking on her personality and shadow characteristics. I chose a mother who could be extremely loving, nurturing, intimate and loyal, but when triggered her shadow side would suddenly flare. She would express rage, leading to rejection and some form of abandonment. As a child I lived on eggshells, wondering when her loving and nurturing would suddenly turn to blame. I came to believe that I am responsible for other people's feelings about me, and that I needed to make others happy in order to be loved. Love is something that comes from others, so I am dependent on others to make me feel loved. When my mother was angry, I felt guilty, responsible for her anger, and unlovable.

I manifested these now deeply ingrained beliefs in the rest of my life. I experienced betrayal, rejection and abandonment to a fierce degree in elementary, junior and high school by my peers. But mirroring the childhood experience of my mother, I also experienced great love and appreciation by others – from my teachers and peers at church. I was very popular at church with kids my age, and being the preacher's kid I was treated with honor and respect by the entire congregation. Yet I had no friends in school, and spent many years hiding at recess, or spending lunch alone in a park, several blocks away from school, crying from the loneliness of rejection. I believed I must be truly worthless to be rejected by so many. And I was distrusting of the love I did receive from others because I decided it was based on excelling in school or by my status and position.

Even my understanding of The Creator mirrored my core belief. I was taught that The Creator loves and is kind, and as a child I felt the love of The Creator. But later, when I prayed for help from the constant scorn of my school peers, my prayers were not answered. "The Creator once loved me, and now has abandoned me. Even The Creator thinks I am guilty of punishment and worthy of being hated," I believed.

The volatile emotional swings of my life eventually made me turn to self-destructive behavior – I inflicted self-punishment, even when I wasn't being punished or blamed by anyone. I used drugs and alcohol to escape my self-hatred and guilt. But the pendulum swung in the opposite direct when I turned 20, and with my usual extreme intensity, I began my healing journey.

Although I did much inner work and therapy, and experienced a great deal of healing, the core belief hid like a virus, infecting me on a cellular level, latent, yet subtly influencing every aspect of my life and relationships. As the vibration of the earth increases, our deepest core beliefs manifest and surface to be healed. In relationships, I unconsciously feared being rejected and abandoned from the beginning of feeling loved. And my fear ensured that I created rejection, abandonment and betrayal from others, by provoking it in some manner. Yet I was blind to being the cause of the rejection and later, abandonment.

The people with whom I had relationships shared my core belief, and to a complementary degree of intensity. They would experience their belief of being unlovable as well, because I was blaming and judgmental. My partners experienced that they were unworthy of love. At some point they would abandon me, and I would take on the guilt, and blame (punish) myself.

My relationship with Les mirrored our fears that we are not worthy of being loved.

Our relationships always mirror what we believe we are worthy of receiving.

And were we to be loved, our relationship would end in rejection and abandonment for us both.

Finally, our relationships mirror the relationships of our society, culture and planet. When we surrender our false beliefs and fears, we assist the world in healing.

Such is the wonderful, loving and cooperative nature of relationships, that we are reminded of our core beliefs at every level. And every relationship is an opportunity to discover our wholeness and divinity.

Letting Go of Self-Blame and Punishment

When examining our relationships as mirroring our core beliefs, it is necessary to let go of self-blame and punishment. Because the belief that we are unworthy of love, and deserve to be punished is deeply entrenched in our psyches, we use this knowledge to further punish ourselves and cause ourselves pain. The thought sounds like this: "I am the cause of all my pain, which proves that I am guilty and deserving of punishment. Of course I am unworthy of love." It is only when we begin to realize at an emotional level that we are unconditionally and fully loved by the universe at all times, and it is only our own self-punishment that causes us pain and suffering, that we can transform our beliefs and experiences.

Self-punishment, guilt, the belief in our lack of wholeness and worthiness of love is at the root of all karma and suffering. To step off the karmic wheel, we must surrender guilt, and open to the infinite and unconditional love of The Creator. Then we will remember who we are and that we are one.