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The Wheel of Intimate Relationships
Intimate RelationshipMaybe this sounds familiar?
In the beginning, everything is easy, your partner is amazing, you want to be together all the time. Everything about the other is interesting and one feels alive and attractive – and the sexual connection just happens by itself.
That´s the Spring.
If the flirt becomes a relationship, there comes a time where the partners create lots of structures together – maybe common projects, family, kids, a house etc… This needs a deeper commitment because it gets more challenging. Shadows come to light and there are more conflicts. Either the relationship deepens here, or it ends – and the sexual connection might be deep, or it needs already a restart.
That´s the Summer.
Every relationship has to also take care of endings. Either it´s the real ending of the partnership, or through consciously working on the relationship, patterns and aspects of this partnership that are no longer supportive can finish. This can bring a new depth and connection. But if we want everything to stay the same always, the connection and aliveness will fade away. The attraction doesn´t happen anymore by itself, but it needs care and real contact.
That´s Autumn.
Everything is in you. Your partner is simply a mirror of your inner world, and your consciousness is growing through observing yourself while relating. When you close your eyes at the end of the day, you are with yourself. Do you feel lonely with yourself, or are you connected to the bigger mystery of life?
Every relationship starts and ends here – Being with your Self.
You can be in a relationship and still feel chronically lonely, or you can be single, and feel really connected.
That´s Winter.
This is the wheel of the phases of the relationship – one of the tools we use in the Couples Retreat “Loving Relationships – Recreating the bond and deepening love”, in order to help partners to get clarity of where they are and what they need at the present time of their relationship.
The next retreat is happening in Austria: Loving Relationship (for couples) from 20 – 24 November 2019
Join us for this wonderful opportunity to either re-start, deepen or simply nourish your relationship.
We will teach in English (with German translation), and there will be couples from different countries attending.
The phases that are described above are a simple map of the different stages of attraction and relationships.
Every relationship moves through these phases, and most problems come from trying to cling to one of them.
We might want to stay forever in spring, but we also need the relaxation of the autumn, but for this, we need to go through the commitment of summer – and without the depth of winter, nothing feels really alive.
These cycles can happen within decades, but it also happens each day. What we want is to become aware of the strength and challenges of each phase, and learn to keep moving with them.
We went many times through all the beauty and challenges of these phases in our relationship. Therefore it´s a real pleasure for us to support other couples to deepen their relationship and renew their bond and connection.
Couples can bring clarity into entanglements struggles, and get simple and effective tools to constructively work with conflicts. You will come to understand yourself and your partner deeper and learn new ways to keep passion and the sexual connection alive – suitable for each phase of the relationship.
You can find all information about the retreat here: www.integralbeing.at/en/couple-retreat-loving-relationships/
For registration contact: Ulrike Prochazka, ulrike.prochazka@gmx.at, +43 650 5932483
Kali – Goddess of Transformation, Destruction and Transcendent Energy
GeneralKali’s archetype is associated with love and protection. She connects us with our power, our strength, and our emotions. She calls us to be alive, juicy, passionate and committed.
Kali is the goddess of life, death, and rebirth, and bring us in touch with the eternal movement and cycles of life. She brings us renovation and transformation, and with her fierce love supports us to let go of old structures and limiting concepts, so that life can start flowing through us again, bringing new energy and capacity to act.
She is the archetype of the wild woman, fully in touch with her emotions and instinctual self. This is the energy and strength that women draws from inside herself in order to give birth, when she needs to roar and bear down, connecting with a raw an inhibited part of herself which is just like the divine mother Earth herself.
Kali is the force of nature that comes to free us from old habits that keep us stuck and no longer serve us, and sometimes she may appear like a thunderstorm shaking everything up and waking us from our sleep. If we are not in touch with her fierce love and are afraid to surrender, she may seem terrifying. And, when we open to her powerful love, she is the mother, she is the lover and she is the ultimate teacher of freedom.
In her iconography, she comes out of the forehead of the goddess Durga, roaring like a thunder, swirling her bloody sword, slicing off the heads of demons. She is an intensely emotional Goddess and can get intoxicated by her emotions and become destructive. Therefore, the process of letting go requires the presence of awareness, which is symbolized by Shiva, her consort, holding and supporting her wild emotional dance with his silent awareness and vast consciousness.
She is the embracing mother that reminds us to love the non-beautiful part of ourselves, the places in our bodies, hearts, and mind, which we tend to hide and reject. And with the loving fire in her eyes, she guides us into our dark places, in order to find the treasures that are hidden in our inner world.
Kali’s fiery dance is a dance of life and love, and in her ecstatic dance she brings everything into manifestation and dissolves it. In the work with Kali we dance wildly and playfully, we open to our emotions with full expression and awareness, when our bodies come alive and our eyes become open and shinning. And mother Kali lovingly ask us questions such as: What are you ready to let go and release? What are you resisting in yourself? What is changing and how do you relate to it? What are you hiding from yourself and others? What are the old habits that keep on repeating in your life? What is opening in you, what is new?
Kali is related to our erotic and ecstatic energy and to our deep longing to let go of control and meet our orgasmic, pleasurable, and creative nature. And she shows us that when we have a sense of orientation, safety and grounding we can allow our wild, natural and emotional energy to express, settle and flow naturally through the river of life.
PARVATI – the goddess of relationship and sacred marriage.
GeneralThe Goddess Parvati has the strength of Durga and the softness of Lakshmi. She directs her seductive radiance to her beloved and at the same time she is focused on her own essence. She is a mother and a yogini, which is a woman that loves to practice and to be fully engaged with life. Parvati is powerful and tender, she is willful and she is playful.
Parvati incarnates our longing to experience the balanced union between the sensuality of the feminine and the presence of the masculine. This is an inner marriage that can happen inside of us and can also reflect in our intimate relationships, our actions and the projects we bring into life.
The conscious masculine is about will, capacity to move forward, express my energy out into the world, and the conscious feminine is about the joy of full expression, relating, emotions, endless creativity, playfulness, and relaxation.
The Goddess Parvati calls us women to question and inquiry on how our masculine and feminine energies are manifesting inside and outside of us: Is my inner man strong and clear or collapsed and disconnected from his will? Is my inner woman radiant and alive or asleep and disconnected from her body and her sensuousness? Is my masculine energy supporting or suppressing my feminine energy? Is my feminine putting down or appreciating the masculine? What is on the way and what supports me to connect these energies inside of me?
When you invoke the goddess Parvati, you tune-in to your own longing for sacred partnership, the dance of intimacy where two independent beings enter into deep union, love, and connection without sacrificing their individuality.
Durga – The Warrior Motherly Goddess.
GeneralDurga is the goddess we call for protection and help us move through obstacles. She is a fierce warrior and she is motherly. She is a queen and also a martial artist goddess that stands up for justice and inner freedom. She invites us to speak our truth and to stand up for it.
Durga is the female archetype for inner and outer power, she supports us to set clear boundaries by creating a protective field around us and she also gives us impulses to move forward.
Durga embodies the protective energy of the mother-lioness, and that is how she comes to us when we call her: powerful and elegantly ridding on a lion or a tiger. And she invites each one of us to find our own power animal – to ride it and to receive its qualities of joyful strength and will.
Durga represents the instinctual energy known in the animal world, which naturally protects her offsprings and care for the herd. She is the quality of strength and power in women, which flows from her belly into her solar plexus into her heart, arms, and hands… and she takes appropriate actions that are attuned with her body, her heart, and her environment.
The Durga that is in all of us asks: “What do you need to say no to, in this moment of your life? What do you want to say yes to? How do you define your limits – at work, with a partner, in life? How much are you in contact with your body to sense and feel what you really want and need? How do you communicate that?
We meet Durga when we dance and sing, when we feel ourselves in our strength and our vulnerability, and when we discover our limits in connection with our bodies. And with her support, we awaken the awareness of our female natural confidence and courage.
Lakshmi – The Golden Goddess of Love, Abundance and Generosity
GeneralLakshmi is the goddess of abundance, loving kindness, beauty and wealth. She reminds us that we are rich by nature. She represents the compassionate feminine heart that flows naturally, like the love of mother earth that is constantly giving and offering her gifts.
In the journey to meet Lakshmi, we enter a luxurious garden full of shinning trees and beautiful colorful smelling flowers and orchards full of the most delicious tasty fruits and organic vegetables.
She is the goddess of abundant nature and sustainability. We meet her in our clean homes, in beautiful smells, in all kinds of inner and outer beauty, in freedom and harmony. She loves nice comfortable clothes, flowers and the luxury of relaxation.
When we call her, Lakshmi comes to us with a gentle smile, as a beautiful woman with a golden face, wearing colorful clothes, and she emerges sitting on a lotus flower. She has four hands: in two she holds pink lotus flowers, in the third a pot of valuables, and from the fourth hand gold coins flow constantly down her feet and into the earth.
Her generous, gifted hands are directly connected to her heart, and as she receives our offerings with a smile she immediately opens her hands to offer them back into the world. She is the essence of generosity, fertility, and an emanation of female relaxation and well-being.
How do we discover Lakshmi in ourselves? How to connect with her? How to experience her?
She is one of the archetypes of the feminine energy, so each woman carries her as a potential. She is part of our nature.
We just need to create the right space and environment, which is easy when women join their natural gifts, their hearts, intentions and, together, call her divine energy… through dance, through breathing freely and through sharing. While our arms and hands swim in the dance we feel our heartbeat, we breath deeper, we swing our hips, we smile. There she is!
The goddess Lakshmi brings the questions to us contemporary women: How much space do I give myself to experience beauty, abundance, harmony, and balance in my life? What beauty do I see in myself, in others and around me, in the world? Do I give generously? Do I accept with joy? Am I aware of my internal wealth? How I use this inner abundance?
She reminds us: you can make a practice of being attentive to all manifestations of beauty and abundance in your life, and you can consciously collect these precious moments when you notice them… It will strengthen your heart!
A Dream of Creation and Re-creation of Life
General, Life & Death, Meditation & SpiritualityCREATION AND RECREATION OF LIFE
“Being round in the initial period of existence is equivalent to assuming oneself to be total and complete and hence a God that can do all things” – Edinger –
The “Breath of Life” is a Craniosacral Biodynamic term that refers to the principle of creation. Its intention manifests in a living being through creation at conception, and re-creation throughout life and death.
Life and death is a continuous process of regeneration and potentialization that carries on the intention of the Breath of Life, which patiently gives us the chance, again and again, to merge with its immense creative potential and love while we are alive in a human form.
When someone decides to go into a group process in order to explore death, there is already from the beginning a movement towards openings, connecting, exploring and expanding – The participant is carrying on with the Breath of Life intention and becomes a co-creator. That initiative and motivation shows a system that has enough resources available to move with the Breath of Life’s plan, and has the possibility to re-experience, while alive in a physical human form, one’s original wholeness as it has been before conception, during embryonic stages, through adult life and will be after death.
This recapitulation of the Breath of Life intention of recreation through life, death, and rebirth happens all along life. It can be observed within the duration of a lifetime, a day, and certain moments. There are moments throughout life that ignites this intention bringing it to its full potency. When someone decides to move into a conscious journey towards death, the igniting fire has already started, it is already in process.
This ignition may appear simply as a light that brings clarity and understanding to certain life patterns, or as a spark, that can start a fire which will burn one so completely that there is no other way than to be reborn with new potency, with new possibilities. And so the Breath of Life fulfils its intention of moving forward to keep the process of eternal creation and recreation of life.
CREATING SACRED SPACE: The Womb
“Life’s errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole.”
– Rabindranath Tagore –
The movement towards death starts with a creative intention, which brings a group of people together to experience something new. The intention manifests and develops by mutual attraction between all the different parts that are going to form one organism in the form of a group (the embryo), including facilitator, organizer, assistants, helpers, participants, and everyone and everything else that is part of it.
The facilitator is an important fulcrum of orientation in this process, and her/his ability to keep clear communication between all the parts, to be in a neutral state, and to be grounded in her fulcrums is fundamental for the development of this new organism.
The group – as a living entity and a system with its own organizing forces – is not just the sum of the elements it consists of, but an interrelation of all the forces present, which gives it an organic quality of unity and wholeness. As the facilitator, my work is to support the stabilization of this system so that it has space to flow with its inherent motion and intelligence.
* While doing the last touches to complete the project, the archetype of “the mother” came to me in relation to one of the facilitator’s function.
“The mother” is the container that holds the space for the embryo’s heart ignition and further development – by manifesting qualities of receptivity, lovingness, comforting and nourishment. And the facilitator, as “the mother’s” archetype – involved by the heart space that the embryo inspires – engages all her/his motivations towards the development of the embryo to its full potential.
The ‘sacred space’ – the womb – that will be hosting the process of recreation, is an important resource.
The preparation of the room is done with lovingness and sense of beauty. Everything is placed with equilibrium and aesthetic feelings, creating an atmosphere of care and welcoming that supports the participant’s nervous systems to settle as they enter the space. The group room will be in a constant process of transformation during the process.
Once the process of conception starts, the group space becomes more and more alive and keeps on transforming as the embryo develops throughout the days.
COMING TOGETHER: Conception
“The circle represents God and eternity, wholeness and fulfilment of the transpersonal dimension of life.”
– Michael Shea –
The internal and external movements, from the elements that are part of the group, start taking a clear direction towards the space of the womb, where the “ovum”- the circular space formed by cushions in the group room – is ready to be entered. And Participants start entering the quiet, vibrating, round and welcoming space.
The circle has a magic function. While entering it, a natural silence and respect for the space happen. There is an inner knowing that this is a sacred space. Many participants close their eyes as they sit in the circle and start moving inward. The Sufi music also invites this inner movement. Some people remain in a more alert, activated state, looking around, moving and changing position.
Through my mid-line – a vertical alignment of my body – I sense all the outside movements and use every experience to rest deeper in my base and belly, to enter a receptive space in my heart center, and to expand the area between my eyebrows. I may then invite people to close the eyes and take a moment to arrive inside themselves. Usually, it helps to invite a few deep inhalations to support the way in.
At this moment the facilitator’s ability to stay present and open to connect with the whole group functions as a resource, a fulcrum of orientation for the individual particularities – feelings of anticipation, insecurity, excitement, or disconnection. As the group settles into a more silent space, potency starts building up for the process of forming a new, unique organism.
This is a moment when life and death is very present.
Death is already happening as individuals die to parts of themselves, surrendering their old ways of being to a new and unknown experience, in order to grow. This is a continuation of a process of renovation that happens through life and death and will be recapitulated over and over during the group and beyond it.
A new embryo is in its process of development, manifesting in the group as a whole – as one organism – and in the wholeness of each individual. The settling deeper in the womb is a sign of a readiness to keep moving with the life-death-life journey that will culminate with death and rebirth.
The embryo will go through expansion and differentiation, and sparkling moments of transformation (ignition). It’s time for finding one’s own center, through the mid-line, and to orient around the fulcrum of the heart, to practice dying and being born, again and again, gathering potency on the way, getting ready for the eternal journey towards birth, death, and rebirth.
MORE ABOUT:
“Die Before You Die” (A Sufi journey of preparation to die consciously and to create space for ignition of life).