Attractions Define Our Options & Lessons
Attractions reflect polarities or choices in our understanding of Self. We are drawn to people, processes, and places because they facilitate our life lessons. We are repulsed when we are not willing to engage particular in lessons. Attractions change as we grow, which leads us to choose new lessons. When individuals do not grow, attractions become repetitive and set in stone when we believe they are the best experience possible. If we do not address our core lessons, we eventually diminish our life, light, and love energies. We become inert, stuck, and unwilling to take action. The more we affirm our life lessons, the more vibrant we become because our enthusiasm is contagious. When individuals stimulate us, our life lessons become more obvious to us and others. Attractions show up as either wanting to engage a lesson, or as a reaction when we deny it.
We lack control in our lives when our choices are unconscious. This means our instinctive desires predominate and drive us to seek pleasure. We can validate this by the degree we respond to the outer appearance of others by labeling them sexy, smart or reliable. We use Excitement to express the imbalance between our sensations and feelings while looking for a partner with an opposite polarity. As the driving instinctive force is procreation, we maximize our chances by choosing familiar patterns, which means choosing individuals who seem safe. Since our safety is compromised by parental conclusions about love, and we end up choosing partners who match one of our parents (opposite gender for heterosexuals, same gender for homosexuals), we are conditioned to choose difficult and compromised partners. This is why falling in love is such a chaotic and unpredictable experience.
On the intellectual level we try to individualize the understanding of others and ourselves. This drives us to choose partners who are opposite to us (defensively and creatively). It means our intellectual attractions of innocence, strength and personal autonomy come into play so we can feel a sense of independence or defensive power over someone. We develop partial truths, called positions, and seek partners with complimentary positions to create a sense of security. We can validate this to the degree our interactions become competitive, and by our need to prove we are right. We also become unbalanced and struggle to integrate our emotions and thoughts, making it difficult to affirm our own truth. Our differences create increasing separation, which means we are less willing to acknowledge the relationship. The status quo is to accept defensive differences until we are forced to confront that our compromise is not worth it.
On the idealized level, we seek to reconcile our body and mind awareness so we can operate as a complete personality. Driving this is our need to find balance between proving who we are and being who we are. We can validate this by the degree we seek to influence others by appearing to be good when actually we have different motivations. Some individuals vacillate between an inflated sense of self-importance or false humility in the struggle to move from anxiety to awareness. Self-importance is challenged by the attractions of creative self-acceptance vs personality self-rejection, making intimacy initially impossible. The more we unify these feelings and emotions, the more we can express our passion. The more we create intimacy with our partners that is balanced with our own self intimacy, the more our creative possibilities emerge.
When we understand our creative nature, our Intuitive Attractions emerge in full capacity. They are: Autonomous Aliveness, Vulnerable Intimacy, and Co-Creative Responsiveness. The ultimate goal of attractions is to build Alignment Awareness. The more we know who we are, the more we can use these attractions to facilitate our connection to people on deeper levels. Having a clear mission allows us to organize our life with others in a way that uses attractions naturally to support the expression of our intent, content and context. This course helps us to build a capacity to respond to attractions because we learn to internalize the chosen lessons. We hope you will join us for the Shaping our Attractions discussion.