No, this is not only for the "Ladies"

quoted:


"TO ALL THE LADIES IN THE HOUSE
...On International Women's Day

The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says:
"Relationships are here to make you conscious, instead of happy."

I get that.

I wandered in the spiritual wilderness for many years, the barren wasteland of detachment, disembodiment, world-denial and superiority ("I'm more enlightened, more awakened, more conscious, more ego-free, more spiritually evolved than you, you mere mortal!").

Getting back into real, grounded, messy, intimate human relationships - that's where the real adventure of life began.

Relationships started to bring to the surface all the stuff within myself that I had been trying to avoid, numb, repress, or hide over the years, stuff that didn't fit into the 'spiritual' picture, the 'perfect' picture, the picture of 'enlightened man'. It was painful and humiliating to be shown time and time again that I wasn't 'done', that there was actually no 'finish line' at all, that unenlightened energies still raged in me, energies that I'd not yet accepted in myself, energies that longed for the light, fragments that simply ached to be embraced, given a relational home in the vastness that I am.

Painful and humiliating though it was, the journey came to be astonishingly liberating, and relieving. The 'stink of enlightenment' (as Mariana Caplan calls it) doesn't stand a chance in the furnace of honest relationship. Clichés like "there is no me", "there is only awareness", "I have gone beyond human feelings", "everything is perfect", and "that's all just your projection", just don't cut it when your close friend is standing in front of you, asking for honest, vulnerable, no-bullshit heart connection. She will see through your games, call you out when you lie to her (and yourself), make you face everything that needs to be faced. She wants to meet YOU, not your clever spiritual concepts. There's nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.

Thank you to all you strong, intelligent, beautiful women who taught me how to love and how to listen, how to receive and how to connect, and may this journey never end...."

- Jeff Foster
(lifewithoutacenter,com)