Relationship is a potent medicine.

Relationship invites you to get right up close and intimate with everything that is unilluminated in you. Every ugly emotion and dark feeling that has been pushed away because you’ve deemed them unacceptable becomes unimaginably highlighted in the torchlight of intimacy.

When your buttons are pushed, do you resort to the ancient mechanism of attack and defense? Do you erect impenetrable walls to avoid meeting the raw energy beneath the reactivity?

Or can you take this opportunity to stop right here and be fully, wholeheartedly, and lovingly with the hurt and vulnerability? Can you allow the horror and the terror of being triggered to melt into the tenderness of your heart?

Because right here, in the furnace of intimacy, you hold the key to the world. Right here, in the microcosm of “you and me”, is where the collective shadow — playing itself out as greed, corruption, and destruction — is illuminated and transmuted to compassion. Every time you turn away from or deny what is here in your heart, you add to the darkness of the world because you are divided within. Every time you deeply accept or open to what is here in your heart, you set the world alight because you are radiant with an inner oneness. You are the cause of war and peace in the world, because the world is inseparable from who you are as consciousness. And right here, in the midst of the messiness of relationship, is where war can stop and peace can begin.

Relationship offers the possibility of an enlightened humanity because in every interaction it has the capacity to return us to the wholeness of love … if we allow our hearts to break open and welcome everything back home to rest in the deepest acceptance.

If you are willing for relationship to be more than a vehicle for security, comfort and gratification, if you are willing for relationship to be your spiritual practice by turning you towards your innermost truth as the One Being, then relationship will evolve out of the dream (and the drama) to serve its true purpose of transforming the world.