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About Kara-Leah Grant
Kara-Leah is an internationally-renowned writer, teacher and retreat leader. Millions of people have been impacted by the articles, books and videos she has published over the last ten years. Her passion is liberation in this lifetime through an every day path of dissolving layers of tension into greater and greater freedom and joy. You can find out more about her, including when her next retreats are, on her website. Kara-Leah is the visionary and creator of The Yoga Lunchbox.
leighton james says
This without doubt is the best article you have written (and that I’ve read from you KL). Lovely to read, open, honest and scary at the same time.
Much love an emotional reading man x
Leighton
Sara says
Hey Kara-Leah,
Well. A beautiful article for sure, and one that rings most resonantly true for me, as I too am re-assessing all that I thought I knew about love (I believe thinking was the problem, when really I should have been feeling…). I too have pondered why I can have a deep acceptance of my friends with all of their faults, but hold every little fault of my partner under a microscope. Is it because we have to live with these faults, whereas we can leave our friends and go home at the end of the day? Or do we actually have a higher standard for our partners? Or a bit of both maybe :). I am working on deep acceptance without expectations, but most of all I am working on feeling. I noticed how stripped bare my heart was yesterday. My partner was staying over, and woke up cranky, as he nearly always does (he suffers from insomnia). In our relationship pre-breakup, I would have ignored him, or responded by becoming angry myself. But in this new post break up me, I felt sad and heart broken that he was not behaving lovingly, and felt so devastated by this apparent rejection that I was in tears (while cooking the pancakes :)). He was horrified that his mood had such an effect on me, and I was amazed to realise that this was how I felt all along – I had just covered it up with anger – I had hardened my heart. ohh, sorry about the super long comment there. Thanks for your awesome writing.
Kara-Leah Grant says
Hey Sara,
Oh I feel your heartache! I know that heartache too… I’ve lived with a partner who was always grumpy in the mornings and it broke my heart. I’d be happy and joyous and ready to share the day and feel so shut down and shut out by his grumpiness.
I suspect that we start with that deep acceptance of the present moment and our partner as they are – and then that might generate deep heart-ache in us as we’re not being met in that moment – as you experienced while cooking pancakes. From that place – we’re staying with our feelings and sharing them, but not asking our partner to do or be anything else. They then have space to choose how they respond. We then choose our response to them… so everyone is owning their own feelings and making their own choices and there is no drama or angst… At least, that seems to be the next step after the deep acceptance… where that leads, I don’t know yet.
Thank you for your heart-felt comment!
KLx