Devoted Context
In Devotional Partnership, our common ground brings us close and forms the foundation of the relationship.
This is what it means to be "best friends" at the core of your partnership. It is the commitment to meet and play on common ground, and the natural abundance of common ground between you.
In compatible Devotional partnership, the way we are willing to occupy and honor one another's presence in uncommon ground brings us apart in ways that serve the partnership. We extend out to uncommon ground alone, ballasted to be there by our partner's presence in their solo-ground. Like dancers join hands and then may sit back farther than they can without a counterweight, we can rest in extremity through Devotional Partnership.
In this way, the partnership is context for our mutual metabolism and alchemy of life.
In compatible Devotional Partnership, our solo ground is complementary to our partner's solo ground, creating safety in the concept of occupying uncommon ground.
When we can extend out and fully occupy our solo ground, ballasted by a partner, we are empowered to pursue our preferences. We are nourished to show up to our own greatest creation in life. The other's extreme positioning enables our extreme counterposition. We are privileged by the way we make a larger, more capable, more artful shape, for the way that we join and share oppositional force from the point of our connection.
We create conflict and harm the integrity of this shape when we attempt to claim common ground out of uncommon ground.
It's possible the solo ground is not complementary, simple incompatibility, or it might be that we fear to occupy our solo ground, fear to honor our partner's occupation of their solo ground, overly cherish presence in common ground, revile the "distance" which seems to be created when we occupy our uncommon ground. It might simply happen because we don't know another way, because it has never been safe to be enormous in partnership.
Culturally, we have been taught to design partnerships around the cession of solo ground, the enlargement of common ground. The ideal partnership is one where we can spend every minute together, eye-gazing.
However, the more of our sacred solo ground we cede, the smaller and less capable the shape becomes. We cede our sacred solo ground in order to create more common ground, eventually operating as one. We operate as one, yet we are more limited than when we are single for the way we are joined, hindered, held back from parts of our uncommon ground, attempting to relate in their uncommon ground, attempting to advocate for aspects of our own uncommon ground to become part of the common ground, that it might be safe to be there.
When we join so completely with the other as to be operating as one, it becomes preferential to be single, operating as one in full alignment with our preference, and thus these relationships have a predictable trajectory.
Devotional Partnership has metrics of compatibility you can feel in your body, in every here and now interaction. Devotional Partnership has sacred practices of communication and somatic relating which anchor you and your partner in your common ground while empowering each of you to hold your own center.
These are practices we cannot know until we learn them, and cannot learn until we begin to question what we were taught. Let the curiosity be gentle, my love. There is nowhere to get. There is love to be in, right fucking now.