Happy Enough

Let’s talk about relationships. Specifically, wanting to find a partner or companion to be in relationship with.

I love that we are living in a time when there is a tremendous amount of awareness around self-growth, healing past programs and patterns, and becoming fully authentic as individuals, rather than following a collective ideology or belief in who we “should” be.  I teach and promote this in my writing, and help clients to achieve greater levels of happiness and self-satisfaction through various therapeutic approaches.  I believe to “know thyself”  is the most important creed that we can live by.   

More specifically, perhaps that should be a three-part creed – 

• Know Thyself; know who you are.  
• Love Thyself; love and accept the beautiful, flawed, growing person that you are. 
• Be Thyself; be authentic; in integrity with who you are.  

But I’ve noticed that in our desire to grow and evolve, we sometimes have a tendency to take things to an extreme –  we have developed this idea that we need to be “perfect”, especially when it comes to finding and maintaining relationships.   We are being taught that in order to attract the right partner, we have to exemplify all the things that we want to find in our mate – attractiveness, intelligence, kindness, abundance, good health, compassion, and most importantly, our level of happiness. In short, we need to be perfect. 

 I do believe that if we are committed to growth and authenticity, our baseline level of happiness is going to be a whole lot higher than someone who is stuck or stagnant; living a half-life.  But if we are aware, life, hopefully, is evolution rather than perfection. 

If we are in a state of evolution, we are never going to be perfectly healed.  Self awareness is a process of uncovering many, many layers of subconscious mindsets and belief systems.  It’s often when we think we have ourselves figured out that those systems rebel and we may feel like we take a backwards step.  But two steps forward and one back is still forward movement.  

We are never going to be in perfect shape, all the time.  We all have seasons when we might fall off the wagon of good health and exercise for a little while. That’s OK, as long as we eventually get back to caring for our temples as being the incredible vehicles of transportation through this life that they are.  If we don’t have good health, our ability to experience all that life has to offer will be limited. 

We will never be perfectly compassionate, loving, and kind – all of the time.  Like happiness, there can be contributing factors in our ability to be fully present and compassionate with others – Grief over the loss of a loved one, being in a season of necessary introspection, dealing with the myriad challenges and distractions of life, or just because we forgot to eat breakfast and are a little “hangry”. But going back to self-love and healing, if we are in a space of self-acceptance and compassion to ourselves, we are most typically going to be in that space for others, too.  

We are never going to be perfectly happy, all the time.  

There are so many factors that contribute or distract us from our happiness, but when we can come to a place of  loving and accepting ourselves as being beautiful, messy, growing creatures, we can be happy enough to find a partner who is the same.  

We can find someone who will be real with us; who will accept, love, and have grace for who we are at any given moment, knowing that sometimes humans are messy, challenging, and even difficult.  We can be accepted as we are because we are also beautiful, kind, loving, and growing.  We can give our partner the same grace, compassion and understanding, holding space for their own evolutionary process, even when it’s a little messy or uncomfortable.  

In fact, I believe it is vital for us to have healthy relationships to fully grow and heal. When we are authentic and vulnerable with our partner, we can provide for each other the necessary mirror to better see those blind spots in our personality that we may not be aware of. 

This doesn’t mean we should accept bad treatment in a relationship, of course.  If someone does not match you in treating them with value, respect, and dignity, and is not willing to do the work to heal the core wounds that cause that behavior, we need to take a big step back for our own mental wellness and safety.  It is never our responsibility to heal someone, but in a good relationship that is committed to growth, healing can absolutely happen, together.  It is important for our own self-worth that we have discernment as to what we are attracting and accepting.  

But  if you are in the  space of “I have to be perfect”… to attract the perfect partner… maybe give yourself – and your future mate – a little more wiggle room.  Perfection doesn’t exist.  Hold a little more lightness and space around the idea of who you are, and who you need to be to be in a relationship.  Bring some fun and some joy into the many possibilities that are out there.  You will find that when you create the energetic space of ease, of lightness and of joy around any idea, you also create space for what it is that you need and desire to rush in.✨

Big love💖

– Terah