AMAZING GAZING - PART III - Being Saves

Experiencing authentic intimacy with each other is not ‘a doing’, although it may be experienced through all sorts of shared activities. Experiencing intimacy with each other is ‘a state of being’.

When most of us enter a new relationship with another, we initially enjoy ‘being together’ as something that is effortless. We may float within this space of effortless being for some time. However, and because this is one of the underlying intents of all initiated relationships, by being together we invariably initiate and energetic triggering within each other of an awareness of our unintegrated emotional imprinting. For most of us, the way we cope or react to these surfacing energy patterns is ‘to do stuff’. Our relationship them then gradually becomes about ‘the stuff we do together’. We then confuse the ‘stuff we do together’ with the experience of intimacy or ‘being in love’.

When we or our companion no longer want ‘to do that thing together that we always loved to do’ – or, when those things ‘we loved to do together’ lose their capacity to keep us glued together – we then declare that, ‘something is wrong or missing’ or ‘that intimacy has left our relationship’.

Yet, authentically experiencing intimacy is not attached to the presence of absence of any particular doing. On the contrary, for the most part, people who do a lot together are unconsciously reacting to an inability to simply be together. Once a state of ‘being intimate together’ is authentically established, all doings become a secondary aspect of our shared encounters.

Often, when the magic of beingness starts seeping out of our shared experience with each other – we resort to an increasing menu of ‘doings’ in an attempt to ‘rekindle the flame’. This is one of the most stupid pieces of advice handed out like a band aid by marriage-menders to relationships which are bleeding through a gaping artery: “Why don’t you find something you both like to do, and then do that together…it will bring you closer again.”

This ‘doing together as a reaction to an inability to be together’ is always a movement in the wrong direction.

Intimacy cannot be established by ‘added doings’ – it is only initiated by ‘initiated beingness’. Gazing, which is in itself a not-doing practice [an undoing], efficiently remedies this predicament.

When two people truly love each other and seek to continue life’s walk together, yet have found that they have lost their way in being intimate with each other, gazing – and the consequences it initiates – and our intent to respond to these consequences as consciously as possible - is ‘a savior’.