Random list o tings :: Relating, relationships, and soul contracts edition
We can want something and know we aren’t ready for it. Sometimes this can intensify our longing. The more we are able to sink into the knowing we are doing the work to make it possible, the more we can trust the divine timing of it all.
We can’t rescue people. We can be a refuge for them.
Loving someone means that we want them to be happy, nourished, and fulfilled whether we are a part of any of that or not.
Making a commitment while under duress and in survival mode is not a real commitment. More of us should recognize this.
Bargaining our love, support, and care with another for their loyalty, devotion, and exclusivity is not loving, caring, nor supportive , it’s manipulative, controlling, and dehumanizing.
Allowing people to be who they are and where they are gives us the clarity to know if we actually want them in our lives.
There can be people in our lives, who, on paper at least, we have little to nothing in common with, and yet our souls sing and our nervous systems calm completely in each other’s presence. These connections need to be cherished and protected.
It is rarely our place to warn folks when we believe they are making a life choice they will later regret. Sometimes people need to learn their own lessons without interference.
Giving up our own life, as in friends, career, sense of purpose, etc, for another, especially when we are claiming to do so in the name of love, is little more than us projecting the responsibility of fulfilling our unmet childhood needs on someone who is neither responsible for our black holes of pain nor for filling them up.
It is not uncommon for people to think they are far more important to someone than they actually are.
Having relationships where we have the freedom to both come close and move away as we are able and as we desire often contain a level of intimacy and connection that cannot be surpassed or matched.
It is our own responsibility to determine who does and doesn’t have access to us. It is our responsibility to defend our boundaries and remove ourselves from situations and relationships when they aren’t respected.
Intimacy is more than sex or even sharing deep, dark, secrets about ourselves. Intimacy is a knowing, a feeling, a soul connection, a sacredness and holiness that is beyond words or explanations. It is about finally finding home, not in another person, but within ourselves in another’s presence.
Love, commitment, intimacy, and loyalty requires us to attend thousands of funerals and rebirths, our own and another’s.
We never meet the same person twice, not even in the same person. Embracing and encouraging a person’s evolution and devolution, expansions and contractions, healing and growth is both a practice and a love language all its own.
Part of doing our inner and outer works means not waiting for people to catch up to us, but to continue on our own path, at our own rhythm, and see who joins us along the way.
Attempting to control, manipulate, claim ownership or possession of another person is never about love and is always about fear, attachment wounds, and relational trauma.
Doing our inner work, learning to dance with our demons, calling home our exiled parts, resolving trauma, healing our wounds, is something only we can do for ourselves and we can’t do this work alone or in isolation. We need nurturing and nourishing relationships to support us as we walk through the fires of our transformation.
Our relationships don’t have to make sense to anyone but the people in them. Only the people in the relationship can define its meaning, boundaries, depth, and importance.
Breaking away from toxic monogamy, the relationship “escalator,” and striving to attain the lie of the romantic fairy tale can be painful at first, and the freedom, nourishment, and fulfillment we can find in our relationships when we break away from those stunting and harmful ways of relating can be, and often is, infinite.
This is the only complete publication of this new RLoT. A portion of this is also published on IG.
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Ways for us to connect
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Gwynn Raimondi Writes on Insta
Soothe Your Nervous System Card Deck
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Recent essays on Embodied Relating:
What will be, will be : A stream of consciousness for the Venus-Mars Conjunction
Random List o Tings : Can’t even with the astrology edition
EWG : 19. Walking through grief :: Embodied Writing - Grief Series