A good friend recently asked me “Do you do a lot of resourcing in your couples work?” The question got me thinking… What does it mean to be resourced in relationship? I considered the word carefully: Resourced. Sourced again. A return to source. An awareness of source. A connection to source.
I believe that to be resourced in relationship means more than having the right support or the right books or the right ideas; to be resourced is to be sourced again, to make contact with and inhabit something that can be understood as “source”.
So what is our source?
At a very basic level we are sourced in life itself. Life is our source. To be resourced in relationship is to return to life. But wait, how could we ever not be sourced in life as long as we are living?
Losing connection to source (and finding our way back)
It’s actually very common to lose that primal, essential, felt sense of connection to life and life-force, to lose our trust in the basic goodness of life, to forget our purposefulness as we ride the leading edge of the wave of life ever expanding through time and space.
This leading edge of life is now, and now, and now. To be actively and consciously sourced and re-sourced in life itself, and to revel and delight in this source in each moment is simply a habit of awareness and focus. This habit is always present in us – or not – in some measure. Our vast conceptual mind can wander in many directions, and many of these directions lead us away from an active, felt connection to life. We might discover that we have wandered far from our source – relationship trouble is often a way we discover this – and we might eventually decide to become “re-sourced”.
My work has centred around the couple relationship for many years, so I most often see patterns and opportunities within a relationship context.
It’s quite common for my clients to report having “lost themselves” in the relationship. I understand this most essentially as a loss of connection with that primary autonomous self-hood that rests upon that primary relationship with life source itself. How ironic that a love relationship can cause us to lose touch with our most basic relationship of all: our relationship to source. But it happens frequently, often enough to be considered entirely normal, even predictable, perhaps necessary or by design.
A love relationship with a significant other can actually be a seductive alternative or distraction from our own relationship to our inner or truest self, synonymous with “source” energy or, simply put, life. We might choose the outward path of romance rather than the inward path of source, only to feel abandoned when the romance runs out or gives way to its natural successors. Our feeling of abandonment can run deeper than just this other person though; we might come to feel abandoned by life itself. In actuality, the abandonment is our abandonment of our own selves, of our primal relationship to source, to life, and so we are called to become “re-sourced”.
Becoming “re-sourced” in relationship means that we stop making our partner the source of our happiness, of our hopes, of our satisfaction, of our desire, and so on. We release them (and ourselves) from this burden, and we seek to connect with the source inside our self. Again, our partner, no matter how wonderful, can not be our primary resource. Our primary source is life itself, and our clear connection to it.
How do we do this?
We become “re-sourced” through the engagement of our three distinct but interactive intelligence centres: body, heart, and mind (aka sensation, emotion, thought). Life, as the source of our being, is ever present, ever available, and ever ready to be engaged and celebrated through our attention to and through each of these centres.
Starting with bringing our awareness to our breath, we begin to consciously inhabit our body.
The natural rise and fall of breath is at once the most literal expression of life, and also makes for some wonderful metaphors about the nature of life (flow, letting go, receiving, contrast etc).
Inhabiting our breath with conscious awareness is one of the most basic and available re-sourcing practices available to us. It forms the basis of many wisdom practices across cultures since the beginning of recorded human history, including what is commonly called “meditation” (which actually refers to many different traditional and contemporary re-sourcing practices).
From the body, we move up into the heart intelligence centre, “feeling in” to our emotional self. Initially we might encounter emotional chaos, numbness, or discomfort. With increasing practice and familiarity these outer edges of the heart give way to a more peaceful and contented centre.
Moving up from the body and the heart we encounter the head, the “thinking” intelligence centre. Having inhabited the body for a time through breath awareness, and then the heart through sensitivity to our emotional state, head intelligence is ready to be-resourced. We are now able to become more discerning about our thoughts, choosing thoughts that support our well-being and connect us to source, ie – thoughts that support us in feeling good.
With body, heart and head in alignment, we are tuned and re-sourced, and much better equipped to see our love relationship with more clarity and optimism, and to navigate it more genuinely and with more skill.
Like what you’re reading here?
You’ll love my book.
Read the first 10 pages free.
Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships. Serving clients worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com
Never miss a new post. Sign up to get my articles by email –
Want to share this article? You can use the buttons below.