by Tara Joyce | Aug 12, 2016 | Self/Business Growth
When we unite with another, we create something greater than we could create alone. Coming together, we increase the talents and efforts we have available to create something meaningful. From business to friendship to romantic relationships, partnering with another can be a powerful tool for growth.
Everyone in our life is a mirror reflecting back the parts we love and dislike about ourselves. Partnering with another, we face our reflections. And it takes courage and awareness to look at them honestly. Denial, shame, and blame can often be easier routes.
The partnerships we choose matter. We need to be conscious and intentional about them, as acting from any other space can be hard to recover from. Rushing into a union. Preventing our self from entering into one. Looking to another to fix or complete us. Another looking to us to fix or complete them. These are all actions that do not serve our partnerships. Considering beyond our immediate needs to our intentions underneath, we prevent ourselves from creating dependent bonds.
Taking space to get clear on our intentions, we have the potential to choose unions that truly support and enhance the best of who we are. A union where we can face our true self, supported by our partner, is where we create the possibility for growth through our partnerships, as they offer us the ability to transform and to be accepted. Finding this interdependence with another, we sense the strength and fertility of its foundations, and we naturally invest in it and nurture it. Together, we sense we’re creating something greater than we could alone.
Forged from our clarity around what we need and want in partnership, and grounded in remembering we are our own source of happiness and fulfillment, we have the tools to shape healthy partnerships. In tune with our self, life becomes a collaborative effort, and much of what we do and who we are is enhanced through our partnerships.
photo credit: Redd Angelo
by Tara Joyce | Jul 19, 2016 | Self/Business Growth
To see only yourself in every reflection, and only the parts you want to see, a life is lived in the shallow end. Where there is deepness and darkness, you do not probe, unwilling to go deeper. Uncomfortable with its truth, you reject and dismiss that which you care not to understand.
To be shallow is to only see—and believe in—the surface facade of others, and of yourself. This shiny surface is so alluring when the darker, less “perfect” aspects of yourself are unacceptable. You live on the surface, so that life’s deeper truths and anyone who expresses them, can easily be rejected.
To dip below the surface is supremely threatening, for to acknowledge the depth possible is to accept the imperfect life we each bear. Dipping below your own facade, your own shiny surface, to acknowledge and accept your own imperfections is more than your shallow heart will currently bear.
Instead, it is easier to see that “other” people have issues, that there is something supremely “wrong” with them. It is easier to point fingers and to place blame. It is easier to not understand and to judge. Resolved of responsibility, comfortable in the shallow end, you do not see the deeper, darker truth of yourself hidden in plain sight. Everyone in your life is a mirror reflecting back the parts you love and dislike about yourself. Those which provoke you and numb you, those which drive you to turn away and to hide from your darkness, are the very reflections you can learn the most from.
photo credit: stttjin
by Tara Joyce | Sep 18, 2012 | Cultural Creativity
Good mirrors matter. It’s important that I see myself as I truly am. It’s good for my heart and for my growth to have an accurate picture of who I am.
So I’m learning to be a wiser shopper when it comes to mirrors. Just any old reflection of me will no longer do. I’m getting serious about the mirrors I choose to use.
Finding the good mirrors, I’ve learned, is easier when I am clear on what a true reflection of me might look like.
Then I can confidently say “in this mirror I look fatter than I am”. Or “in this mirror I feel like too much of a caretaker”. Or “in this mirror I appear less whole than I actually am”. By knowing what I want to see reflected back at me, it’s easier for me to spot the mirror that shows me as “the funny and clever person full of love” that I am.
After all a mirror can only reflect what it knows, what it feels capable of showing, and what it chooses to see. A good mirror it will have no trouble showing me as I truly am, reflecting back the whole of me. While other mirrors, perhaps more cracked, may prefer not to reflect certain things. In their reflection, if I stay conscious, I might find my colour is muddled, or a strand of my hair is missing. In some part of their reflection I am something less than whole.
It makes sense that a mirror that does not feel complete itself can not reflect back completeness in me. It’s own feelings of lack create distorted reflections of others as less-than-whole too.
That’s why it’s important for me to find good mirrors, those who see themselves as complete — they are capable of reflecting the same truth onto me.
photo credit: nualabugeye
