When I Lean Towards Love I am Led

This Capricornian woman is learning humility (and you can too)

Two days ago I was in a place of believing that a restraining order might really be necessary for my partner and me. We are neurodivergent (autistic and schizophrenic) and so we have tended to experience life in the extremes -extremely peaceful or extremely turbulent.

We can’t seem to stay away from each other, yet we get very set on our need to separate (basically a drama-fuelled rock-star relationship from a movie or something).

I’ve been hyper-focused on training us to come into an ever-stronger relationship with our own internal securities despite what society might have us believe about ourselves and our functioning capacities.

My partner often expresses that he does not enjoy being my experiment, though he also confesses that he is attracted to my tenacity and conviction in this particular direction.

I am aware that I can be cold in my hyper-focus and lack of sentimentality.

Not only am I autistic, focused on following the energy to embrace the most efficient effective systems as my special interest, but I am also a Capricorn moon. This means that my emotional world is ruled by Saturn — perhaps the planet that seemingly values emotions the least and favors rational practicality.

I wish I had documentation of all the schedules and agreements I have drafted for us in an attempt to organize and orchestrate our scattered intensity and align us in harmonious home life. It’s been a humorous hazardous ride.

Yesterday, when he called me and said he really wanted to come back and talk snuggled in a blanket with warm drinks (my idea from the day before, not credited, so annoying), my mind immediately started drawing up a contract of the intricate path to follow based on all of the recent learning about what we each and both want and need, not to mention our almost-three-year-old son, two dogs, and a cat, and my ten-year-old stepdaughter.

He said he could be here in an hour. I was very hesitant with a bunch of voices in my mind arguing about how cute he was a few nights back so sad and scared being honest about that, but all the atrocious betrayals I’d been ruminating on the next day, and what about how delirious it feels to be considering this when he still isn’t grasping my very clear boundaries about his other co-parent.

He asked if I was still there. I took a few more deep breaths and said I would prepare to hold that space for us to meet. I was desperately fighting off the ice-queen in me who wanted to be so mean, who wanted to orient the interaction towards stern rules and explicit behavioral expectations.

I cleaned my room and drank water and said a little prayer. I fed my kid and I lunch. I did one powerful sun salutation and he showed up.

My system went into oversaturation almost immediately between the barking dogs, my child’s requests of me, and seeing him. I was both delighted and miffed that he arrived in the state of being I would expect of him — collected, gentle, available. Part of me wanted him to be squirrely riddled with fear so I could shoo him away and go back to my work.

I had rosehip hawthorn tea brewed on the stove and I set kiddo up with some blessed Paw Patrol. I took deep breaths and set a timer for forty-four minutes and tucked it in my drawer. He sat waiting for me on the stool beside my bed and I invited him up on the big kingsize with many blankets that has at times belonged to both of us.

I did not let myself have a plan. I felt awkward and vulnerable without one. I felt like a little kid getting close to my crush.

We made eye contact and I couldn’t help but grin.

It’s nice to see you smile, he said. I let awareness wash through me of how I hold my face when I am fighting for my boundaries — excessively alert to the codependency inherent in our “disorders”, fighting to live beyond expectations or projections, fighting to thrive rather than survive.

I let awareness wash through me of how much responsibility I have to take in navigating something other than fights.

I surprised myself in sustained softness and openness.

I took an extra deep breath and leaned into him. Our foreheads pressed against each other I began to feel the immense electricity I had been shunning. We sat there for so many minutes that I seem to have had time to take responsibility for the whole vastness of my being…

I was both hurting and feeling healthy. I was both nervous and excited. I was both dominating and surrendering.

Holding space only requires one thing: presence.

I have a much easier time harnessing quality attention for clients and friends when my own personal life isn’t on the line igniting the vast array of my own emotional reality. I have many times previously gone into communication exchanges with my partner plan in hand so that I can evade the stress of trying to listen and have an emotional experience at the same time.

It has been a humbling trip to see that my only job ever is to listen — within.

In order to be available to *actively* listen to someone else, I need to have offered that to myself first and foremost.

When I stray from this simplicity, stress builds up.

When stress builds up it short circuits the system and we lose contact with executive functioning. No adamant ruler of their own dominion desires to lose contact with the impulse control of executive functioning.

Humility: a modest or low view of one’s own importance; humbleness.

I know I am relied upon to follow the patterns and suggest opportunities. I know this is one of my natural strengths and something that isn’t very available in my partner’s psychological structure. I repeatedly remind him that if he wants my skills to be effective, he has to trust me.

Trust is tricky when you’ve seen the worst of one another.

The thing is, trust is easy when you’re willing to listen within.

When you’re willing to drop out of your head and into your body, the trust is just there — in your center, in the secure place that can never be disturbed… only disassociated from.

We’ve been learning about trauma and this learning massively equalizes us.

We have very different skills and neither of us wants to be debilitated by patterns within that we didn’t choose. We want to choose our way out of stagnant thinking and reactive behavior, however, easier said than done.

Strategy often seems so necessary and yet, yesterday we proved to ourselves what is really most required — leaning into love and letting ourselves be led.

We ended up chatting about our inner child and I think mine actually guided the discussion. He isn’t sure that he knows his at all, which gave me a wonderful opportunity to share what I see of the little boy who comes out to play with me — who knows a great deal about freedom and about pain. We felt both of those realities come into visceral awareness.

My inner child knows, without an ounce of doubt, how to prioritize the senses, listen to feelings, and follow the energy through the openings of both verbal and nonverbal communication.

I literally leaned in. I leaned my forehead against the man that I trust the most in the whole wide world. I took a deep breath and leaned towards the man who often shows me where and how I forget to trust myself.

I see him regularly through crusty muddied lenses as a weight, a job, a demon, a thing I wish was different and the truth is… that always shows me where I am judging myself.

When I get vulnerable with this human I have transformative experiences and I am humbled beyond comprehension into a space and place where there is nothing but safe secure Divine love.

The timer went off at the exact moment I was ready to release my inner child and be a naked adult.

Synchronicity ~