HOW I KNOW MY WAY

Apprenticeship to Love: The crooked path of sacred marriage (September 15, 2026)

TODAY'S QUESTION

In these last days of summer, can you feel the season changing? Not just in the chill of the morning or the colours in the trees, but in your heart, can you feel the season changing?

TODAY’S MEDITATION

Some time ago I came across this notion, Your nervous system is built for relationships. (No source given.)

It seems almost obvious now: my nervous system is designed to work with others.

When I first read it? Then, like so much that I'm learning, it was a revelation.

I am built for all kinds of relationships. Friendships. Parent-child. Brother-sister. Collegial. Romantic and sexual relationships. Teacher-student.

In my life, it’s been so easy to fail at any of these. I may be “built” for them; but that doesn’t mean I am prepared. Or that I won’t fail.

What happens then?

…

I have so many ways to justify my failures. And the world keeps creating more me to lean on: the other person is “toxic,” or “wounded,” or afflicted with the wrong form of “attachment,” etc.

I resist these labels. Yet, these words describe real qualities or experiences that stand between so many of us. Qualities that I've noticed. Qualities that I've labelled and used to stand in the way of the beauty of relationship.

I've heard Kimberly Ann Johnson talk about how psychology has replaced formal religion in the popular imagination. I'm paraphrasing, but how I understand her is like this: Rather than referencing God in our search for truth or a way forward, we reference the diagnostic manual. She doubts this helps us find our way.

I share KAJ’s suspicion.

I’m concerned that we’re creating more reasons not be compassionate. More reasons not to allow our nervous systems to do what they do: figure out how to be in relationship, even though we're broken or bent or otherwise pathologized by the diagnostic manual and its popularized versions.

What I am learning: the qualities that I want to make a problem may be showing up in my life for reasons other than for me to judge them. I’ve listened to good people make their world smaller based on this new religion of how to be in the world. I've watched myself do this. I'm not proud of this, and I know it doesn't make my world or my life better.

...

My complaints are rarely a good thing, if I take them at face value. When I do that, I’m just creating more reasons to mistrust —myself, and others.

I think my nervous system is here to tell me something that will help me, not limit me. The discomforts it makes real for me are a signal. Now, to choose: to close, or to open? I am learning to trust that my nervous system is giving me the opportunity to do more than shut down. The discomfort I feel may be an invitation to know something new, to me. Perhaps, to experience some richness and beauty, new, to me.

…

In tango, the lead leads by following the follow. That doesn’t mean the follow tells me what to do, when I am leading —at least not with words. It does mean that I pay attention to how the follow wants to be led, by listening into all the ways the follow communicates that are of the body. The follow becomes the dancer at the furthest edge of my sensitivity. They are communicating a way that is beyond my nervous system, my body. It is a "way of beauty," if I listen. If I allow myself to be uncomfortable enough to interpret with a raw sensitivity, and with artful decisiveness.

…

My nervous system is built for relationships. I know feeling into another to be a way of beauty and truth, with unreasonable knowing.

Knowing this, however, does not mean I am prepared for relationships. For any kind of relationship. I think my legacy of failures and stumblings is a testament to that. That is why I practice.

My practice is not just the postures and breathing and mediation in the dark hours of the morning. More than that, it is the necessary bumping into the unreadiness and failings of others, and my unreadiness to receive them, fully. I need them. I need you, dear reader. I need all of you, that I may begin to know my own failings, my own unreadiness, so that I may begin to have awareness, and compassion.

...

Every morning I sit with myself, in silence and in the holy aura of mantra. My nervous system becomes more sensitive. I become more aware. I work to prepare myself for the others, the ones I love. The ones I hardly know. The ones I do not yet know.

I practice to prepare myself to receive and honour what I receive. I practice that my nervous systems learn to create and hold the safe spaces. For others. For their awkwardness. Their noise and their silence. Their pathologies —however they are named. The other person is the mirror that helps me know myself, and that allows me to receive, honour, and love the beauty and love that are all around me. Broken. Half-formed. Timid. Overwhelming. All of it, here for me.
I practice to let my nervous system become stronger and more stable. Only strong enough and stable enough am I able to begin to register what my relationships bring me. The words, behaviours, feelings, etc. and especially those that are most difficult to receive, ie. those that it would be so easy to pathologize— not as pointing to insufficiencies in me or the other, but as helping me to remember the man I am.

I am built for relationships.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀Recognize that the other person is you. (Aquarian Sutra 1)

🌀…..stay connected to ground. There is so much to be swept up in and carried away by that we can lose our tether with the very space giving birth to the experience.
… just remember to stop, open the soles of our feet, and take a few breaths. (John Wineland)

🌀There are so many…. and then I remember you, who sees me and hears me and knows me. (My beloved, my oracle and siren, she who must be known)

-Rev. Hans
rev.hans@sacredbodies.ca