“Love is the Water of Life. Drink it down with heart and soul.”~Rumi
We all long to experience a love that satiates our thirst like cool water on a hot day, a love that inspires our heart and soul and restores our spirit like a long soak in a warm bath. Water-like love is fearless; it flows freely and effortlessly -is refreshing and replenishes our spirit from the long, hard trials of life. So, how can couples flow in the waters of love together?
The Water element helps bring balance, joy, and a sense of contentment and flow with life and what each moment brings. Having a “healthy” Water element in a relationship is restorative and revitalizing. Sacred Intimacy practices help couples restore and revitalize their relationship by connecting them to the water element, renewing and inspiring their relationship and allowing it to flourish and grow. For example: our Sacred Bathing ritual shows couples how to purposefully connect with and tune into the sensuality of water in sacred communion with their beloved.
“Too little water in meditation means internal discomfort in the practice and a loss of the joy in the spiritual path. The practice can become infertile and arid.” (Healing with Form, Energy, and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetan, Shamanism, Tantra, and Dzogchen by Tenzin Rinpoche and Mark Dahlby)
The same principle applies to nurturing a relationship as it does to spiritual practice: when one or both partners lose their connection to the water element, Eros and passion dry up and the relationship loses its joy and becomes sterile. Without water in the relationship, couples seek joy and happiness outside the relationship in the external world rather than in themselves or in one another.
By immersing yourself in the waters of love with Sacred Intimacy practices, you give to yourself and your beloved the gift of flowing with each other in the moment and staying connected during challenges -you expand your hearts to love and connect from that deep place within your being. Sexual and sensual expression becomes elevated to a more spiritual level -beyond “just sex.” You embody Eros and connect with an expanded and more present sensuality rather than just your mind. Most importantly, you give yourselves permission to release expectations and agendas -opening your heart and soul to the flow of the waters of love.
Why Love doesn’t Flow
One way to identify a low, or imbalanced, water element in your relationship is to notice when you “fall apart” (experience extreme disappointment, anxiety, or frustration) if your partner does not meet your needs or expectations. When one partner has imperative expectations and agendas, an unwavering desire to control situations to ensure a particular outcome drives the relationship -and sets it up for failure since no one can consistently fulfill another’s expectations.
Agendas and expectations in a relationship act similarly to the way a dam affects water; they contain love and prevent it from flowing. From these attempts to contain or direct love in relationship come the disappointments and hurt that can further restrict love’s flow. Couples will try to avoid hurting or disappointing each other by compensating or accommodating patterns of behavior. While these patterns may feel comfortable and safe, ultimately they stifle the fluidity of the relationship and result in ego-serving satisfaction that creates unhealthy attachments rather than a soul-to-soul enriching connection.
Instead of mitigating disappointment or hurt, these compensating patterns deplete the Water element and dry up the relationship -leaving one or both partners longing for something deeper or feeling they have to settle for a mediocre relationship that is less than fulfilling. Instead of revitalizing and refreshing the relationship, love becomes like a cloud that withholds its blessing -one that will not drop its cleansing and refreshing rain! Why settle for being in a “relationship-cloud” when your love can pour over you like a waterfall?
Flowing in the Waters of Love
Rumi recognized the importance of the water element and its capacity to connect beloveds to their natural flow so that they may move through life’s challenges with ease and fluidity. He ends his poem writing:
“Lose yourself, lose yourself in this love. When you lose yourself in this love, you will find everything.Love is our steady guide on this road full of hardships.”
Many couples lose their balance when challenges arise in their relationship or life. Even if they remain committed in times of hardship, they lose love’s connection to the body and relate primarily through the mind as they try to navigate mundane life. In order to open to love’s full potential and experience its higher dimensions couples need to engage in an embodied spiritual practice together that helps them to balance, reconnect, and harmonize from the inside out.
Our Sacred Intimacy practices that couples learn through counseling sessions, meditations, and themed-lessons with us, are simple and yet powerfully designed to reveal unconscious patterns of accommodation so that your relationship stays fresh and alive like a cool spring bubbling up with refreshing sweet water
. Nurturing the Water element in your relationship will enable you both to flow with love -and together, embrace each moment and what it brings. Your relationship can then become a container of love that doesn’t restrict its flow -instead it creates an oasis, a place for love to pool so you both can take a refreshing cool dip together on a hot day!
Don’t allow yourself to be satisfied with just sips, drips and drabs of love. Quench your heart and soul’s thirst. Drink deeply love’s waters and your relationship will never evaporate!
Please tell us:
How has your relationship reflected the element of water?
What is your experience of the flow of love?
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