If you want to experience profound personal growth, just get into a relationship. There is nothing more powerful – or more challenging – than opening ourselves to love. Did you ever notice that you could be feeling perfectly balanced and emotionally stable until the moment you meet someone you are crazy about? Just when you were beginning to think you were really evolved, all of your insecurities pop out like a jack-in -the-box.

Well relax. This kind of anxiety just comes with the territory. In fact, it’s part of learning how to create a conscious relationship. If we already knew how to do that, we’d have no reason to be here. Right? Relationships are a path to spiritual and emotional growth, and learning how to expand our capacity for love is fraught with growing pains. Here’s how it works. Whatever aspects of ourselves that are closed to love will be revealed by the partners we choose. This is the how the universe gets us to look in the mirror and become more self-aware. In other words, our outer relationships are a reflection of our inner relationship.

What do I mean by “inner relationship.” Within each of us exists two energies. Chinese Taoism refers to them as yin (feminine) and yang (masculine). Everything in the universe is composed of various proportions of these two polarities. Yin is receptive; yang is active. Yin represents our capacity to receive – yang our capacity to give. Neither can exist without the other, since nothing exists without its opposite. It is the healthy interplay of these two principles that enables us to create fulfilling relationships.

When we learn how to recognize these two energies within ourselves, we can observe how they interact. Unfortunately, most of us have not been taught how to do this. We associate the words “masculine” and “feminine” with gender only; so we don’t realize that each of us contains the opposite polarity. Feminine energy exists in men, and masculine energy exists in women. In order to have a conscious relationship, our inner masculine and feminine energies must be balanced and integrated. That is, they must operate as a team. They must work together in creative partnership, respecting and honoring each other for what they individually bring to the party.

It’s as though there are two people living inside of you - a man and a woman, with two distinctly different personalities. We tend to favor one of them (in this culture it tends to be the man), so a power struggle emerges within the inner couple. We can create loving relationships only to the degree that this power struggle is resolved. Very often, we don’t acknowledging the presence of this inner battle because as human beings, we have difficulty embracing the dualistic nature of things. So the battle continues, and our relationships suffer.

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