This Tip for the Road is my answer to the question: What are the most powerful things I can do to build an inspired relationship? I answered the question with romantic relationships in mind; however, I believe the answer below applies to all important relationships.

No. 8. Follow Your Dreams and Find Your Purpose

Keep doing what you love. Keep inspiring yourself. Keep living into your deepest purpose. Lighting yourself up and deepening into your soul’s calling will allow you to bring more and more of your passion and whole-heartedness into relationship with others. It will also reveal the disowned parts of you that are longing to be reclaimed.

Relationships are a precious and sweet part of life, but no relationship or person can make up for a missing whole-heartedness or sense of purpose. You are the only person who is responsible for living the most rewarding, inspiring, and loving life you can live. If you remain committed to falling more and more in love with yourself and with your life, then you can share more and more of your heart in a relationship and not be utterly devastated if it comes to an end.

No. 7. Find or Build Communities that Help You Meet Your Relationship Needs

Relationship needs include emotional support, intimacy, fun, passion, physical contact, companionship, and being understood, acknowledged and valued. Meeting these needs with others releases the pressure on a relationship to meet them all and will give you great support as you face the difficult things that arise in relationship.

Examples of supportive communities include:

• Communities formed around a particular practice or process

o Meditation groups
o Co-counselling communities
o Nonviolent Communication communities
o Spiritual communities

• Women’s groups
• Men’s groups
• Support groups
• Cuddle-party communities
• Dance communities
• Artistic/creative groups
• Emotional support groups: groups that practice a particular form of emotional/therapeutic/healing support. One example of an emotional support group that I value is a community of empathy buddies with whom I can practice somatic-based resonant empathy. Giving and receiving empathy with empathy buddies will

o Help you face and move through the fears and blocks that surface as you follow your dreams and deepen your relationships with others and with yourself
o Increase your capacity for differentiation (knowing and trusting yourself and not becoming engulfed by others) and for linking (sharing more of yourself with others, letting others share more of themselves with you, and attuning with and caring for others)
o Increase and strengthen the neural networks for regulating emotions of your brain so that you can feel your emotions without becoming overwhelmed by them; you can better connect to your needs, your body, and your intuition; and you can be more empathic toward others

No. 6. Become Better and Better at Finding, Asking for and Receiving Support

We are designed to thrive through interdependence. We are not meant to heal and grow on our own. Whether you ask friends, family, therapists, a community or other sources, keep asking for and opening up to as much support as you need or can currently accept. Make requests, not demands. Providing support in response to a demand takes all the joy out of giving.

No. 5. Be Playful and Creative

Healing and growth work (and life in general) will almost certainly drain you if you don’t find time for play and creativity. Moreover, play and creativity can be incorporated into your healing work and healing work into your play and creativity.

No. 4. Take Time to Be with Yourself

• Make friends with your creativity, your loneliness, your emotions, your body, and all aspects of yourself
• Develop your capacity for self-nurturing
• Discover the gifts of solitude
• Practice self-empathy or other self-attunement processes so you can become more and more unconditionally present and accepting of your thoughts, emotions, needs, and body
• Turn off the TV, computer, phone, put down the book, the paper, the magazine, and make space in your calendar to learn how to be with just you

No. 3. Spend Time in the Wilderness

The natural world can be a very healing place to work through grief, anger, fear, loss, and other difficult emotions, as well as to feel vital, inspired, and expansive. The wilderness reflects back to us our beauty and wildness and reminds us that we belong to something greater. Nature shows us that all forms, realms, and qualities are needed to make up an interdependent whole—the muck and the manure, the flowers and the birds, the fire and the water, the stillness in the meadow and the explosive volcano, the depths of the ocean and the stars above.

No. 2. Be Patient, Kind, and Curious with Yourself

Reclaiming disowned parts, healing wounds, following dreams, finding your purpose, and building inspiring relationships take time and courage. For healing work and growth to be successful and sustainable, self-compassion needs to be your home base. Do not assume that you know everything about yourself or have all of your answers. Stay curious and open to discover more and more about who you are and why you act the way you do and how you might want to explore and grow.

No. 1. Fall in Love with Your Shadow

When inner healing work is done deeply and consistently enough, it leads you to the beauty in your shadow, and you become smitten with the treasures found therein. But beware: the courtship of your shadow is not to be taken lightly. It requires a romance like no other, one in which you are called to turn toward fears and dark places, face the unknown, fall apart, crack open, and feel it all. It is the love affair of a lifetime in which there is always more to discover, pursue, and beckon.

The more you learn to love your shadow, the more you discover that darkness is not a place of annihilation or despair; rather, it is a wellspring of creativity, energy, and inspiration. Many of the songs I’ve written (and all of the ones I love the most) were inspired directly from facing and falling in love with my shadow. Also, my singing voice is becoming stronger and less inhibited. And then there’s the dancing! Seducing the shadow frees up all kinds of energy and unleashes all kinds of crazy moves as the body explores the expression of the reclaimed parts of the shadow. (Writing, singing, and dancing are only a few of the many ways that the released energy and inspiration of the shadow can move and be expressed.)

Each time a disowned part is reclaimed another barrier to love comes down, another step toward earned secure attachment is taken, and more ground is gained for building an inspiring relationship with another.

Become curious about what parts of yourself—what “positive” or “negative” emotions, needs, characteristics, and traits—you had to disown into your shadow as a child in order to be loved or accepted. When you find a disowned part, build a relationship with it in which it learns to trust that it is safe to feel what it feels and need what it needs. Give it lots of acknowledgement and empathy, and experiment with different ways to embrace and inhabit it. Often, when I allow myself to really drop into the feelings and needs of a disowned part, there is a release of creative energy and inspiration. More than once I’ve begun the writing of a song with tears in my eyes or a growl in my throat. Experiment with expressing your shadow parts through music, pictures, acting/inhabiting the part, poetry, dance, movement, and more.

Be patient with reclaiming your disowned parts. You disowned them for good reasons, and it takes time to trust that it is safe to embrace and express them again. Sometimes it takes several years for a disowned part to be fully reclaimed. Some disowned parts might never be fully reclaimed, but there is much to be gained by continuing to build a relationship with them.

Reclaiming disowned parts is crucial for relationships. If you do not make peace with your disowned parts, they will do battle with you and with others, fighting to be acknowledged, heard and valued, and blocking your path to inspired relationships with yourself and others. When you embrace and value your disowned parts, you will stop projecting your fears, judgments, contempt, or admiration, adoration, and longing of them onto others, and you will reclaim your whole, complex self. You will fall in love with your hard-to-love places.

Keywords:

• relationships
• intimacy
• intimate relationships
• vision
• visualization
• community
• support
• self care
• shadow
• curiosity
• Eric Bowers