There are seasons when clarity doesn’t arrive through effort, but through what quietly falls away. After periods of intensity, rupture, or profound relational learning, something simpler can remain — not answers, exactly, but a steadier place to stand. Lately, I’ve been aware that much of what I understand about love, presence, and truth hasn’t come despite painful relationships, but through them.

No matter the relational wound: abandonment, rejection, abuse, neglect, alienation – such woundings became the portal to transformation and evolution. Ultimately out of the darkness of relational trauma, came awakening to presence. There is much inner work one can do by oneself to heal relational trauma, but it is not until we consciously choose relationship itself as the crucible for healing that we can transmute pain to presence.

Romantic relationships provide a powerful container for relational development as adults can, finally, meet the unmet needs of childhood, through marriage and long-term relationship. Many wounds are also ameliorated through the therapeutic relationship and with family members over time and with intention, especially after estrangement or major life transitions. Similarly, we can be present with nature, with animals and, even, inanimate objects, but relationships are the real test. As Ram Dass, the spiritual teacher, once said: “If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family.” This is not to say that presence cannot be learned in isolation, of course – many gurus became enlightened from their years in the archetypal cave. What can be said is that relationship is also a path.

For those whose path has been relationally forged, there will be a recognition of growing stronger through the pain of heartbreak and rupture, maybe after many years of being crushed by failed relationships, the proverbial phoenix rises from the ashes – and transforms to become their highest and best self; even to become the one that they are seeking, perhaps.

Personal and relational healing matters for happiness. Not as a goal, but because unhealed wounds travel with us from one relationship to the next. Paradoxically, this path is also what allows us to free ourselves of the pain body that has attached itself to us, and to awaken to loving presence and joyful aliveness.

Perhaps this is what it means to walk a relationally forged path — not to arrive healed or complete, but to find ourselves able to stay. To remain present in relationship, even when it is difficult. To discover that love, when it comes, is less a feeling than a capacity we grow into. And to know that the path continues, not away from relationship, but more deeply into it.

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