Compassionate Self-Love as a Guide to the Limits of Relationship

© 2010 Peter Free

 

Compassionate self-love can assist us with difficult relationships.  But the proportion of self-love, versus Other-love, is difficult to figure.  It helps to recognize the traps that direct us away from soulful growing.

 

If we are indescribably attracted to someone who regularly upsets our emotional well-being, we have to sort two issues:

 

First, is our perceived emotional well-being really that, or is it spiritual complacence that would benefit from the challenges that Otherness brings to relationship?

 

Why did we choose to be entangled with the person who upsets us?

 

Is our upset a sign of:

 

(i) resisted spiritual expansion,

 

(ii) understandable (but probably overly harsh) self-loathing, or

 

(iii) self-love resisting self-loathing?

 

Second, what do we do when we have come to love the person who perennially keeps us unbalanced?

 

Does continued spiritual maturation require staying, leaving, or a combination of both?

 

In sorting these issues, we can use compassionate wisdom as guide.  But disappointingly, wisdom comes from the acknowledged sum of missed directions, and compassion springs from conscious suffering.

 

When misdirection and suffering are not consciously or meditatively analyzed, we remain caught in a loop of blundering.  Hence Buddhism’s emphasis on the minute-to-minute practice of mindful awareness.

 

So the analytical start to challenging relationships begins with awareness.  And ends with an understanding of our soul’s direction.  Confusingly, our soul’s necessary direction may lie in the blundering and pain we are seeking to escape.

 

Paradox is nettlesome fun.  Alternatively stated, spiritual expansion is a pain in our soul’s behind.