Sacred Space
But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls (Kahlil Gibran)
To love someone is an art. You take your paintbrush, and with great patience, dedication, and inner calm, you apply strokes to the blank canvas with the intention of creating a masterpiece. As the white fades away and a landscape begins to appear, you realize that you are responsible for every color and every shade that appears on your canvas. Each thought, each action affects your canvas.
To stay with someone is also an art. We speak of communication, we speak of respect, we speak of honesty and loyalty- all these things are crucial for a relationship to function and grow, yet there is one important aspect that people usually over-look: what I call “Sacred Space”. As Gibran wrote in his famous The Prophet, in order for love to grow, we need to nourish space between the one we love and us.
How do we practice this sacred space in a couple? First off, by making sure we have our own friends, our own activities, and our own hobbies. In order for us to feel free with someone, we need to have our own world orbiting our own sun. Some other ways to conserve our sacred space and hence keep our relationship healthy is to sleep apart some nights, so that we can stay in our bubble and re-make our energies. Always sleeping next to someone can affect our sleep and our energy levels, and if some nights we need to go inside and seek for answers, one of the best ways is to sleep alone.
Another way to conserve our sacred space is to have moments that I like to call “Bubble Moments”. This is when people stop talking and enter their bubbles in which they feel in peace and in love with themselves. A lot of time, when we are in a relationship, we enter the other’s bubble without knowing it. Having our bubble moment allows us to really unplug from the one we love in order to go and spend time with our own selves, in quiet and in peace.
May the spaces between you and your loved one help to create a stronger and more durable love.
