Balancing Opposites in Relationships: Living the Quest for Authentic Wholeness

Balancing Opposites in Relationships: Living the Quest for Authentic Wholeness

Relationships with others always present challenges for personal growth. We sometimes resolve the either/or choices in our lives by making choices that shut us off from our greatest potentials. Both poles are a necessary part of living and yet we know that it is in finding the balance that we experience the full potential of a sacred Self. This Self, although it includes our polarized dimensions, transforms and transcends those dimensions and makes us creatively alive.

To let go while experiencing uncertainty,

To accept and rejoice in evolving process, is to know peace.

The pulsing rhythm of the Omnipotent Yes-No

Beats like an ever-expanding heart to evolve a Universe.

The breath of Life pauses neither in, nor out,

An affirmation of Life's dynamic balance.

Swimming in the ever-pulsing ocean of becoming

I find peace in the creative I AM

Ann Nunley, 1975

Many of us remember the powerful representation of the masculine and feminine set forth by the tobacco industry in ads during the latter part of the 20th Century. The Marlboro man, tall, muscular and wearing a cowboy hat and Levis, stared down upon us from billboards, while in another ad, the sexy lady with heavy lipstick, a long cigarette holder between her manicured fingers and stiletto heels on her feet, reminded us that "You've come a long way, baby!" The tobacco industry knew that these messages would appeal to our need for identity and would sell cigarettes.

It is important to differentiate between the superficial characteristics represented above and the more enduring intrinsic qualities that actually define the masculine and the feminine. Superficial characteristics are stereotypes that allow us to feel "as if" we are expressing who we are. True intrinsic qualities are archetypes that reflect the values of a deeper, more whole self.

When we form relationships, we are often attracted to others who seem "opposite" to us and who express qualities that we are not yet able to express. I suspect we somehow hope that by mere proximity we will be able to "own" those qualities for ourselves. And yet, what we have resisted and repressed within ourselves is not so easily set free.

My husband Bob and I have been married 47 years this spring. Being somewhat introverted, I was magnetized by his uninhibited expressions of exuberance. However, once we married I became uncomfortable with those very expressions. I found myself telling him what he "should" and "shouldn't" say and do - imposing restrictions that fit my narrow comfort zone. He bore this with great patience. Then one day as I was mulling over my judgments and making a few more, the Oscar Wilde's phrase "...for all men kill the things they love." entered my mind. I vividly saw and felt what I was doing and why. I realized that I needed to develop, within myself, the very qualities that I had first admired in Bob and then rejected.

This experience made me acutely aware than it is a lose-lose situation to ask others to give up genuine pieces of themselves to satisfy our own comfort zone, and our most significant creative act is to re-create ourselves by liberating ourselves from old coping patterns that inhibit the expression of our highest potential.

In individually balancing the masculine and feminine qualities within ourselves, we become more whole and dynamically alive. Love expands our hearts and then moves upward to bloom as an expression of the Soul. We can then share this wholeness with others without asking them to fill in our missing pieces.

When two whole and balanced people form a partnership, their hearts and souls unite in a sacred synthesis, creating a third expression that often surpasses that which either partner could individually express.

Our movement toward both individual and collective balance supports a true ecology of being from which we creatively support the integral systems of which we are a part. As we balance aspects within ourselves, we expand our influence to support balance within our partnerships, our families, our societies, all sentient life on the planet, and the universe itself.

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