No matter how young or old, how innocent or experienced, we all long for the bridge of well-being that will complete us. When touched by a strange messenger that arrives in the form of a person, a powerful relationship unfolds, and we often start to mistake the messenger for the message. Despite the mix of lessons and blessings that lead us to what lives within us, we tend to imbue the stranger as extraordinary. We’re so happy to be seen that we’re pulled into the magnetism of desire, empowering the stranger with the key to what has been growing quietly within us all along. If we never claim the light in our heart, we start to believe that the energy of life is other than where we are. This is the seed of unworthiness, for now we believe that we need the stranger, when it is the message of the extraordinary we can’t live without.

It’s taken me years to understand that there’s a fire in each of us that we steward and the gift of every true relationship is that it fans our inner flame, which, once known to us, we must tend ourselves and keep going. So often, we inflate and overempower those we love; somehow convinced they are the source of our newfound spot of flame.

A very common example of this is the urgency of first love. A woman’s inner mind is taken seriously for the first time by a gentle lover, and she is frightened to live without him, for fear he is the only one that can unlock her deepest thoughts. A rock of a man is made safe and therefore softens in the arms of a certain woman, and he can’t let her out of his sight, terrified that without her touch he’ll turn back to stone. I was no different. I remember my first love and how alive I felt. Bearing witness to my tiny budding self, she mirrored my own goodness, which I attributed completely to her. I ached for her with an urgency, believing she carried the goodness I feared I’d never find.

Very often, that initial stirring of our ability to feel is so full of wonder and pain that we think it is beyond us. And overwhelmed, we begin to believe that this sudden awakening to the depth of life is within the power of the loved one to bestow or withhold.