Separating in Awareness
Many of the songs that tip the charts are either about falling in love or breaking up. Neil Sedaka actually wrote lyrics to a song called ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’. The first verse went like this…
“Don’t take your love away from me
Don’t you leave my heart in misery
If you go then I’ll be blue
Cause breaking up is hard to do”
The last verse goes on…
“I beg of you don’t say goodbye
Can’t we give our love another try?
Come on baby, let’s start anew
Cause breaking up is hard to do”
In a conscious relationship that is ending, the words might read like this…
“Thank you for the love we shared
Gratitude for the way we cared
When you go we both will see
Our purpose fills our destiny"
"When you go don’t say goodbye
For the love we shared will never die
While loving you I still loved me
My purpose fills my destiny.”
Ok, so I might not be a lyricist, but you get the general idea. An aware separation has a totally different feel to one that is unaware. If you take a moment to observe the differences between these two sets of lyrics, you will get the idea. The first model is typical of a co-dependant relationship, one where there is excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner. This is the reason why the separation is so painful and often results in a lot of anger. On the one hand, one partner has given so much to the other (often described as being enabling), while on the other hand, the other partner has become totally reliant.
These behaviours arise from each persons formative years and have become the basis to repeated patterns of relationship (your story). Engaging relationship through that programming means that you will continue to get what you have always got. More to the point, you will get what you saw others model to you throughout your formative years. As they say, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.
In the aware model of separation, there is a celebration and appreciation for the love that was shared, possible because of the absence of co-dependency. This type of relationship could be called interdependent. In my lyric I described how I perceive this would look. Firstly there is gratitude with an acknowledgement of lives lived with independent purpose. Also, that the purpose is the priority, and not the relationship. It reinforces the interdependence in the line that stated “while loving you, I still loved me”. Both this capacity for self-love and your commitment to your noble purpose lessens the need to either enable or be reliant on another.
This is dandy when you are leaving an aware relationship. So how is it possible to leave an unaware relationship with awareness? Here are a couple of suggestions. The first thing is to find what existed in the relationship for which you can be grateful. Sedaka reminds us of one of those moments-
“Remember when you held me tight
And you kissed me through all the night”
The intimacy you shared was authentic in that moment, and there were probably many times like it. Maybe it was the physical, mental and emotional support given through difficult times. It could have been memories of special times together. It could be the children you brought into the world. It might be the opportunities for growth that came out of challenging times. Choosing to focus on the past in this way has been referred to as selective remembering and is an essential part of forgiveness. Of course, choosing to focus on the failings in the relationship and of each other is also selective remembering, only it is negative. If peace is your priority, if inner stillness is important to you, then forgiveness (positive selective remembering) is your only function.
The next thing is to identify the story you ran that has led you to either being someone who is needing to be rescued or someone who needs to rescue. What if you could see the story that led you to be a rescuer or needing to be rescued and realise that it was what you were programmed to believe and not what was real? What if your initial attraction was fuelled by your mutual wound and that when it became evident that this other person couldn’t mend your wound, the relationship was no longer tenable? The evidence of this is seen in subsequent relationships where similar issue continue to surface.
At EAP we call your deep wound/your story, the life sentence. You have a belief about yourself that typically can be summed up in one sentence. The play on words in this is that you become imprisoned by this sentence. One of the most important things you can do is to become intimately aware of your life sentence. Once you become aware of it you see how it takes you out of stillness and is responsible for your part of the relationship breakdown. By becoming aware of your sentence you make it possible to transform your reality. People turn up differently, it’s as if there is a parallel reality that already exists, where the people you engage are different.
So when Sedaka wrote, ‘Come on baby, let’s start anew’ I don’t imagine he was talking about a change in consciousness. As the adage goes, if you always do what you have always done, you are going to get what you have always got. Expanded awareness results in a broadened mindfulness of self and of others. This in turn leads to empathy, compassion and benevolence. It is these qualities that make loving, peaceful separations possible.
If you have enjoyed our series on Conscious Love and are interested in finding out more about how you can live life through a higher level of consciousness through enhancing your awareness, reach out to one of our mentors today.
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