Navigating You And Me With Love And Compassion: Two Sweeteners for Intimate Interaction

Everyday Dilemma: Do I honor my thirst to be alone for awhile, or do I follow the longing in my heart to be together with friends and family ?

For years I believed intimacy meant being together with my beloveds - all the time! Everyone I knew suffered greatly from my youthfully exuberant misunderstanding!

As a woman, it seemed natural for my life to revolve around the notion of ‘we’. Unfortunately, it did so without my knowing the ‘I’ that made up my part of the duo. When I realized I could meet this ‘me’ by being alone with myself, I was both relieved and scared.

But then I was taken by the notion that ‘alone’ and ‘together’ were actually sweet lovers working together in a quiet and unyielding partnership. From this perspective, I could see them both as equally essential ingredients for the intimacy I was seeking.

I’m sad to say without being aware that ‘together’ and ‘alone’ were interdependent, I wreaked havoc in all my relationships. It never occurred to me that one pole couldn’t exist without the other.

I was unaware that each defines itself, paradoxically, by the absence of the other and thus could never be separated! Of course I was eventually overjoyed at this insight – as were all my loved ones!

It is incredibly empowering to understand the interrelatedness of these two human experiences. They play an essential role in building bridges between us. But when you are polarized to one as better than the other (it doesn’t matter which one), neither being alone nor being together will generate the joy and pleasure they are capable of offering your heart.

I had been for 'togetherness' as the essence of relating. And, I had taken an unconscious stand against 'aloneness' as bad, threatening to the relationship, or saying something was wrong with me.

If you choose one as better than the other (it doesn’t matter which), you will disrupt the balance of the flow between the two. As a result, an unconscious power trip emerges that will sap your energy, exhaust your mind, and wound your heart.

Your need to be alone with yourself is a deep and pulsing urge to move inward. Your need to be with others is a deep and driving push to move outward. By design, your nature embraces both. And both provide a path to essential wisdom and counsel – one inner and one outer.

Coming to human interaction with a richer understanding of what it means to be comfortable both alone and together allows you to relax. You can accept the texture, timbre, and feel of each experience for exactly what it is – part of nature’s circle of completion.

This plays out again and again through the need to commune and the need to communicate – with others and with your own deepest Self.

Relating is always an amazing opportunity to explore your capacity to embrace being truly alone - and to open to being truly together. Embracing what unfolds within you, and between you and others, simply means being Present to what is happening.

Aloneness offers communion with the Whole. Togetherness offers communication with Its Parts. Once you know both, you can glimpse the Whole in all the Parts, and see every Part as essential to the Whole. From that moment on, the dilemma of aloneness vs. togetherness can never again be quite the same.