Responsible Devotion
It's started happening a little more than I'm comfortable with.
People are telling me how they've learned about devotion from me, and telling me how they're using these concepts to clarify to potential relationships all their precise requirements, how others can show up for them.
Missing the point entirely.
If you're using concepts of devotion to say how other people should show up better, you did NOT learn this from me.
My practice of devotion is centered on personal responsibility so complete, I never ask for different behavior from another person.
I will share the fullness of my experience with someone, but not in a way that claims my experience was wrong, not in a way that accuses their offering of being flawed or misattuned, not in a problem-solving way. Sharing the fullness of my experience is valuable information to those who know how to capitalize on it. It informs the emergence of relationship which honors the connection and the intention behind the connection.
If there's not really a connection, or if there's a low level of intentionality in the connection, it's tempting to use communication practices to make requests and create understanding. This seems to be a way of establishing a robust relationship and strengthening connection, but this is a way to stay in a connection I'm finding incomplete or unintentional. This is a bidirectional corruption of the unidirectional personal responsibility required by true devotion. It's taking more responsibility for the other person than I can while also taking less responsibility for myself than I might.
When I share the fullness of my experience with someone who is not capable of meeting in the intimacy which fuels devotion, it pops off like a problem in the relationship. It inspires long argument and conversation. “Devotion” might seem to indicate that I participate, but again, that is missing the point.
Devotion is secured by intimacy. Intimacy is being in love with what is. I walk toward where the truth is welcome, I do not try to create a welcoming space within a connection or relationship for the truth. If there is not a space in connection or relationship to welcome the truth, that is not a connection for me.
Devotion says "I am the one."
I am the one to love better if better love is necessary. I am the one to make amends if there is injury. I am the one to walk toward the experience I desire, and if I hear myself advocating for the experience I desire, it's a sure sign I made a wrong turn somewhere.
I don't advocate for myself in exquisite connections, in loving relationships. I advertise my preferences to someone who is hanging on my every word, and they produce things along the lines of my preference to the exact extent to which that delights them. My nourishment does not depend on any one person, I am fully responsible for my systems and strategies of nourishment.
This always involves other people, but it never involves coercion or extortion. Ideas of my needs, the delicacy of my emotions, my wounded or unwhole parts are not only false, but they also drive coercion or extortion.
If I need it, how can they say no? If they can't say no, how can they be generous?
If my emotions are delicate, specific behavior is required, and I disrespect however they would prefer to relate, claiming they would be disrespecting me to put their preference ahead of my need.
If I am wounded, not whole, I am asking them to be something more than human, something precise, clinical, safer-than-life, extorting their exquisiteness to excuse myself from the truth of my responsibility to show up whole and healed.
Rather, in the responsible truth of devotion, I know my pain is my own, and I know that my expression is a gift. I cannot give away my pain, but I can offer the gift of my expression to those who honor it as a gift, or I can keep it to myself, a gift just for me.
This takes away much of what I would ask of connection. Much of what I was taught to ask of connection was meant as a strategy to ease my pain or to prevent similar pain in the future.
This technique, of course, operates from the assumption that connection involves contending with avoidable pain.
Avoidable pain is circumstantial grief, and it's a feature of incompatibility.
Unavoidable pain is existential grief, and it's guaranteed to presence regardless of circumstance, though often seemingly because of circumstance. But I learned to recognize it.
This strategy of bringing pain to be healed by connection is flawed in two ways—it makes circumstantial pain something to workshop rather than something to weed out, and it intends to heal that which is not broken and therefore cannot and will not "feel better."
It makes existential pain seem like frustrated circumstantial pain, and it makes circumstantial pain seem like it could change, giving me hope instead of having.
This strategy also frustrates connection because it disrespects the preferences, desires, and experiences of the other person, asking them to be evaluated by impossible standards—their ability to heal my pain, to "make me feel..." [fill in the blank]. It's a shifting target they can never achieve, and I can always say it's because they should be loving me better.
In true devotion, I am always asking how *I* can show up better for the love I desire. In true devotion, I am always honoring the love the other desires to offer, receiving it fully, or receiving something else elsewhere.
