sacred triggers

For most of my life, I have been a carving myself into a puzzle piece with a certain, particular shape, and this shape influences the kinds of people I’m attracted to and how I show up in intimacy. The kinds of intimate relationships that were most alluring to me were those that allowed me to enact a pattern of saviorism, my particular way of self-abandonment that I learned from an incredibly young age.

I continued entering into dynamics where I felt it impossibly hard to not try and save my intimate partner when I sensed they were in distress. I instinctually made up stories about their neediness and my ability to swoop in and save the day. At times, this was true: I was able to help them. In fact, I have an entire career and skillset based on helping others. But when I do so while ignoring my own needs, or when the other person is not actually asking for my help, resentment grows in our relationship. Conflict festers.

In an earlier phase of life, I didn’t know how to receive and learn from this conflict. I regret deeply that I left many of those relationships with neither ceremony nor reverence

I am going through an unweaving process with the person I have been calling partner for the last 18 months. We are starting to to re-shape and re-carve our puzzle pieces, while also wanting to stay close. I’m aware that if we do this, our pieces may not fit anymore, and that’s terrifying, because of how close we have come to one another’s hearts. However, I’m also holding that one reason we came together into this relationship was to learn how to notice and accept the ways we were conditioned not to love ourselves. I want to practice relating — to this person and everyone else — from the foundation of self-love.

Though we’re no longer partners, I find solace in knowing that we have accepted a role as sacred triggers for one other.

I Love You | Lou Stovall | 1970

In the culture that I come from, it is believed that the soul chooses the family, place of birth, age of development, and culture that is best fit for the kind of learning that it’s meant to have in that lifetime. It’s a particular belief that’s tied to a collection of other beliefs: reincarnation, karma, (vedic) astrology.

The particular belief that has served me the most in this lifetime is the belief that I am meant to learn from and overcome the situations I find myself in. Ram Dass has referred to this as the curriculum of life: we become who we are meant to be specifically through the journey of these life experiences. Sometimes, they are affirming. Often, they kick our asses.

As an addict in recovery, as a man raised in patriarchy, as a person with caste privilege, I grieve all of the ways I have unknowingly wrought harm. It might be seen as self-aggrandizing for me to simply state that these were learning experiences for me. I have participated in systems of domination that contribute to the traumatization of people I love, and part of my curriculum is learning how to take accountability and serve the healing of all beings of life.

Yet, there is something about the darkness I’ve experienced in my life that I find incredibly rewarding. Frankly, I am not who I am without my addiction. It has shaped me, taught me to feel, given me the gifts of community, presence, and resilience. It has charged me with the task of savoring this precious life and taking charge with it.

I am eternally grateful for my curriculum, the addiction stuff and everything else.

Whenever someone is going through relational strife, I am quick to recommend the book Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships. One of the ideas that has come to me from that book is that every relationship is some kind of mirror for one to learn how to better understand and love one's self.

This can be a tough pill to swallow, sometimes, and it sure doesn’t always mean “we have to learn how to stay in relationships even when they suck.” In situations of abuse or power imbalance, the lesson might actually be to learn how to leave!

But I do think staying is important. I might argue that the point of the book, the point of relationships, the point of our life’s curriculum is to learn how to stay with one’s self in all situations.

Staying with one’s self might open up more compassion for the other person. It might make it obvious that a boundary or exit is necessary. Staying with one’s self might help reveal that the conflict that’s playing out today is actually about something completely different. It opens up space for an entirely new relationship with the situation.

I think of addiction as self-abandonment, repeatedly, in the face of situations where it’s difficult to stay. Whether it’s doomscrolling, porn, alcohol, work, sex & intimacy, eating, the thing that marks addiction is not the activity but rather the role that activity has in one’s relationship with their inner world. I remember a time when I used to put on a tv show in the background and scroll on reddit the entire time I was watching. I must have learned that the feelings I was having in those moments were “too unbearable” to engage with directly.

The thing I believe about relationships is this: we really only enter into them because of the ways that they mirror our deepest patterns of self-abandonment. I used to fall into the trap of externalizing and blaming the other person for relational strife: they were the one who made things hard for me, because of course I was trying my best! I was living into my utmost virtue and effort.

Sometimes it’s exactly the way that I was trying overly hard to enact my savior role that created and reinforced the patterns of conflict that I ended up in with these loved ones. And I did that to avoid facing the sensations and experiences that I felt being in intimacy with them. I couldn’t handle the uncertainty, or the experience of seeing someone I loved in distress. I couldn’t stay with my own feelings around that.

If you’re feeling that you’re in a relationship that’s rife with conflict or codependency or tension, just take a moment, maybe a few breaths, to see what’s happening in your body as you read this right now. What are the parts of you that can accept what I’m proposing, and what parts are resisting it?

There are no universal answers to life, and I cannot promise medicine that has served me is guaranteed to resonate with you.

But yes, I have started to see every relationship my soul has placed me in as medicine. Since I was sixteen and learned the definition of “abusive relationship,” I have secretly harbored resentment towards my mom; every characteristic that my teacher shared about abuse was present in our relationship.

When I got sober (a month after my parents finalized their divorce) I was enraged with her. I realized just how much I give of my own life force to feed hers, a pattern that continued to persist in most relationships. I started saying “no” in more and more radical ways, including refusing to go to India to take care of her after my grandmother passed away. I kept learning to stay with my anger instead of abandoning it, and boy did I have a lot of anger.

A little under two years ago, my brother stopped talking to me. He has shared some of his anger with me, and I still feel at times entirely confused about what led him to cut me out. The first year and a half of our estrangement, I was grasping for him to explain, to share a moment of reconciliation, to just express his emotions towards me out loud. Eventually, I realized that here, too, I was leaving myself. As I have started to let myself be more and more at peace with his decision, with his sacred no, I can recognize the deep healing that he is facilitating on behalf of our entire family.

I have forgiven my mom. It wasn’t an easy road. But as I continued on my journey of recovery — which I feel in many ways is just recovery of the self — I am able to see with clear eyes the person she is becoming, the way she’s grown. Ultimately, our growth trajectories mirror one another. She, too, is learning not to self-abandon. She, too, is finding softness towards her full emotional world.

Just this week, as she visited me in my home, we cried together, went on long walks, enjoyed each other’s company. I fully consent to her being a large part of my life and I am immensely grateful for all of the lessons we’ve learned just by being mirrors for each other, sometimes with love and grace, sometimes with rage, sometimes with sorrow and longing.

I’m grateful to my soul for choosing her as a mother, and for choosing my father, my brother, my lineage, my upbringing between the US and India, this particular period of time we are sharing, all of it. Thank you, soul, for choosing this curriculum.

I am grateful to everyone I have ever been in deep intimacy with: partners, companions, friends, roommates, co-workers, clients. I have not always been in my full integrity, but I am growing up and am always available to talk about it.

I hope that your relationships also bring you into deeper awareness of your own puzzle-piece-shape. I hope you find ways to acknowledge and accept any self-abandonment that’s enacted when you come into intimacy, and that there’s permission for you to choose to re-shape. I sincerely hope that life feels more and more like your chosen curriculum, rather than a slog of pain and unwelcome experiences.

Ultimately, I hope that we collectively find our way towards healing and love. That those in power who are playing out their addictions of war, institutional grasping, blaming the other, and denial can soften into the truth that we’re actually all in this together. Our souls chose to do this work, and we cannot run away from it.

The external world often mirrors the internal one. I am committed to softening with myself and staying through all the experiences of life in my body, holding the conviction that this presence will spread outwards into the world. Just like my family is going through a healing process together, all of us alive on this planet, human and non-human, are going through a collective healing process. We all have our part to play. I hope you’ll join hands with me on it.

If you wish to explore doing coaching together, feel free to book a call or send an email to rishter@gmail.com.

My mother and I are collaborating on a new workshop offering that she will be leading weekly starting next Tuesday, called Befriend Your Emotions with Art. She is a dancer, well known for her style of expression. You can see her invitation here, and join the workshop here.