Intimacy
The courage to be known. The willingness to know.
When did you start abandoning yourself in order to feel loved?
You have an enormous capacity for loving those around you. You care deeply, let people matter to you, and bring so much of yourself to the people you love.
The Energy
Intimacy begins with a longing to meet and be met. Beneath our armour, our careful distances and even our longing to disappear into another, there is something deeply alive that wants to reveal itself and discover what lives beyond the edges of the self.
Intimacy is not only something that happens between lovers, families or friends. We can become intimate with a forest, a city, an animal, an idea, a moment of beauty, a stranger's story, our own body, the night sky. Each encounter offers another face of a world that is infinitely more alive and various than we can know alone.
The Invitation
Pain can change how close we allow the world to come. We may buffer ourselves against intimacy, controlling how much can reach us and how much of ourselves can be seen. Or we may become too permeable, confusing intimacy with having no boundary at all.
Intimacy requires vulnerability, but vulnerability also asks for trustworthiness. To know something intimately is also to allow it to remain other than you. Intimacy asks for neither disappearance nor defence. It asks us to remain ourselves while allowing encounter to change us. To reveal without abandoning ourselves. To receive without possessing.
And sometimes intimacy asks for the extraordinary vulnerability of allowing another person to meet us where we are most deeply ourselves.
A Way Through
Notice where you have become armoured against the world, and where you have learned to dissolve yourself in order to remain connected. You do not have to open every door. Intimacy can begin by choosing where, with whom, or with what it feels possible to become a little more available to encounter.