After awakening, your spirit and your human nature are finally working in sync. You’re no longer fragmented, no longer disconnected from yourself. As gradually you let go of the limited person you’ve mistakenly taken yourself to be, you finally become fully human. Now you’re living from your heart.
To awaken is inherently to become more sensitive. That is, you sense more. You literally take in more information than you did before. You are no longer contracted, no longer protecting yourself from your experience by shutting down or by blocking it out, and so you are open and available in an entirely new way.
This also means you are much more aware of the energies and dynamics of your relationships with other people, and so your interactions with others take on a new depth. You see people more clearly, you feel them more deeply, and naturally you find a new level of compassion and tenderness for the people in your life.
This goes both ways in relationships—even as individuals, we’re not closed systems. What affects you affects me, and vice versa. Even in an unenlightened sense, we’re all affecting each other all the time. So as you open up and begin living from a deeper space, all the people with whom you interact will be affected, whether they realize it consciously or not.
From the awakened perspective, your whole view of “other” is completely different. Now you realize that there really aren’t “others” in the most genuine sense, and even your sense of what interaction is shifts to a higher level. You relate to people more from the heart, from the big space of vastness and connection. In a way, you find that you’re in love with everyone.
That’s not to say you won’t be assertive with people when needed or call them on their behavior when it’s appropriate to do that. This isn’t about adopting some airy-fairy “spiritual” point of view—in fact, you won’t have a “point of view” at all. Rather, you will simply be open and available to whatever is happening and for whatever is needed. In that openness is the potential for a depth of understanding and compassion you’ve never had access to before. In a sense you will no longer need other people, but you will love them, deeply.
Being in love with everyone can be challenging in some ways, especially at first. You may need to relearn how to manage your personal boundaries and the ways you communicate with people. But at the same time, you now have the potential to communicate much more honestly and much more directly with all the people in your life.
People often ask if their intimate relationships in particular will change after awakening. The answer is…probably! The truth is, I’ve never seen anyone pass through this transition without their personal relationships being affected in some very noticeable way.
You’ll remember that earlier in the book I talked about energetic compatibility and how intimate relationships can really work only between people who are energetically compatible. Before awakening, though, it’s still possible to remain in an unworkable relationship by shutting down emotionally and not really being honest or relating authentically to the other person. But after awakening, shutting down is no longer an option.
So if you’re in an intimate relationship with someone with whom you are not energetically compatible, this will likely become very apparent after awakening, and that relationship will likely fall away. On the other hand, a relationship with someone you are energetically compatible with may shift as well, but in a direction of greater depth and greater intimacy.
You’ll also find greater compassion for the other person’s experience and point of view, as you’re no longer so caught up in holding on to or defending your own positions. That’s not to say you won’t still have positions, opinions, and preferences; you probably will, and you may very well defend them at times. But you’re no longer identified with them, and you’ll find that you’re more amenable to compromise and to really seeing and understanding the other person’s perspective, which might be quite different from your own.
You may even find a new ability to go to the source of the relationship. What’s the point of the relationship? What are you doing together in the first place? Often people lose touch with that. But now, from a place of clear seeing, you can see that purpose, and that makes it much easier to transcend many of the conflicts you may have on lower levels of interaction. You can move to a level where you both realize that what’s really, primarily important is that you love each other and want to be together.
So you learn to listen, to truly be the space of listening within which the other person can express what they need to express and can have the experience they need to have. You can be present with your partner in a way you never could before. You have a completely different perspective—a perspective of pure attention, pure awareness, and pure loving compassion. It goes beyond the personal. It’s the purest form of intimacy.