Apple, Orange, and a Pear: Becoming a Better Spiritual Partner
Accept that the highest spiritual occupation is to serve, accompany, and learn
rather than to lead, solo, or teach.
We have been fortunate over the past several years to spiritually cook with many couples who are part of the Sacred Ecstatics Guild. Below is some of what we’ve learned about the art of being alive in concert with another person. This discussion is inspired by our own relationship and shared experiences in helping other couples make the room of their relational life vaster with more space for mystical wonder.
First, Some General Truths
One of the surest obstacles to receiving and nurturing any spiritual gift or anointment is being in a rush to have it or show that you’ve got it. This leads to constant self-observation, assessment, and posturing to others, inevitably short circuiting what would otherwise more naturally take place. At least three undesirable things, all related, result from this kind of self-focused and hurried spiritual pursuit:
(1) You typically swing between feeling either inflated or deflated about yourself, missing the desired mark of getting past a self-centered focus.
(2) You constantly compare yourself with others, deciding whether you are above, below, on par, and so on. This leads to debilitating jealousy, distracting competition, or feeling in a low-down funk.
(3) Your attention completely strays away from the divine. More accurately, you try to squeeze divinity inside an ego jar instead of surrendering to the joy of being a tiny spark in a very big cosmos. Being a czar-in-a-jar makes it difficult (if not impossible) for you to feel any kind of authentic spiritual hookup.
When the focus of spiritual effort is on becoming a special somebody – a teacher, shaman, healer, conductor, or just someone with lots of spiritual mojo – you are vulnerable to getting out of whack. Human beings are typically unconscious or only partially conscious of what deeply motivates and governs their pursuits, even spiritual ones.
You may secretly lust for a miracle, enriched outcome, or elevated role even while you also desire real divine connection. In a split second each of us can become a messy mix of wise and foolish motivations, half-baked intentions, and a bundle of interfering contradictions. Do not waste time trying to think, talk, and understand your way through your own or someone else’s inner workings—this only assures becoming further lost in wordy psychological interpretation saturation. Instead, tinker with acting and interacting differently with all your relations.
Learn to Follow, Nurture, and Celebrate
If you and your spouse or partner walk a spiritual path together, you are truly blessed to have a special laboratory for co-practice. What we are about to say is also true, however, for friends, co-teachers, and co-practitioners of any kind. Inside a relationship you better learn how to serve and follow the other rather than be in a hurry to direct or enact a leading role.
Those who master following are made readier to follow the divine. Be careful—do not feign “not wanting to lead” in order to appear more qualified for leadership. Simply trust that the only motivational desire to trust is this: wanting to be near the fire of divine love, even if it means remaining what you may consider a spiritual nobody. If you still lust for an elevated name, magical claim, or any kind of social fame, then regard this as an indication that you aren’t yet on board the train and definitely nowhere ready to be its conductor.
Should your partner be fortunate enough to receive n/om or the sacred vibration,* then consider this a special gift for the whole of your relationship which is more than just a simple sum of two parts. A unique situation has now arrived for co-exploring the sacred vibration and its spiritual heat. No single body is the whole container of n/om, but only its place of rest and its occasional means of transport.
A sacred vibration carrier needs a celebrator to make the atmosphere a resonator and this, in turn, makes you both happier. When the sacred vibration wakes up, it belongs to the whole room and not just one person. Each of you are required to be inside the circulating circuitry, something accomplished by serving rather than observing. Ask yourself:
- What can I do right now to help wake up my partner’s sacred emotion or vibration?
- What action can I take to make our existential room bigger and warmer right now?
- What would ecstatically delight my partner?
- What would make my beloved laugh in order to help lighten the weight of their burden?
- What would help them feel their rope to God more strongly?
- What would inspire a closer relationship to mystery?
These and other questions are meant to inspire simple, immediate actions that help you serve, follow, nurture, and celebrate your partner’s spiritual gifts, expanding the room in which you both live.
Accompany Rather Than Compete
Sometimes one partner receives a spiritual gift while the other person seems to be a helper. In our individualistic, psychology-saturated era we tend to assume that the helper is secondary or less important than the person with the obvious gift. The higher cybernetic systemic truth, however, is that individuals’ gifts (and bad habits) are inseparable from the relationships that host them. (We don’t want to overwhelm you with the details, but just know the ramifications of that truth are staggering and life-altering, ending the myth of linear causality, dualistic blaming, and most notions of right and wrong.) At the risk of oversimplification, there is a practical truth in saying that people can help bring out the best or the worst in one another – which one do you choose?
For a relationship to thrive, each person must nurture, hold up, and foster the other’s gifts and resources. If your spouse, partner, best friend, or neighbor receives a spiritual gift, don’t be jealous or covet it. Instead, ask yourself how you can act in order to support the circulation of that gift. If you truly desire to feel the spirit working in your life, take joy in welcoming divine presence wherever, however, and in whomever it shows up. N/om is meant to be shared, circulated, and relationally celebrated.
Partners of any kind are granted different gifts so each provides what is missing in the other—there can be no true equality without embracing the full spectrum of human difference. Again, each person must serve, celebrate, and help wake up the other’s gift. Never rank order any particular gift as more important than another. Feed, serve, enliven, spark, delight, surprise, warm up, accompany, activate, inspire, and encourage the unique gifts your partner brings. This will help the spiritual current circulate more freely and strongly in your home.
Act Rather Than Analyze
You may be tempted to fall into the psychology trap of sorting you and your partner into different traits or personality types. Don’t do that—it just fosters more abstract assessment that distracts you from creatively changing the way you relate.
Rather than freeze-frame one another into isolated boxes by naming and categorizing your troubling habits, why not creatively experiment with the way you engage in everyday rituals. Start with the way you have dinner. Could you surprise your partner by serving a poetic verse or prayer alongside their potatoes? How about passing the salt to one another in a funny or theatrical way, or co-serenading the roast before you pull it out of the oven? Act rather than analyze in order to expand and sanctify your living space.
We are each a different part of the whole spiritual performance troupe, whether we are speaking of two people or a social group. Not only should you “stay within your gift,” but use it to be the accompanist to another person’s gift. When we lift each other up this way, the whole relationship becomes a vessel for hosting vaster holiness.
A Mystical Prescription
Brad went to sleep praying for a mystical prescription to help couples and members of a spiritual social group use their gifts in a more resourcefully aligned manner. He asked what would help you:
(1) step into and remain within your natural gifts;
(2) use this gift to serve, inspire, and accompany the gifts of others;
(3) avoid pushing another person into thinking they should operate according to the qualities you value most;
(4) avoid wanting another person’s gift more than your own; and
(5) appreciate that all gifts working in concert is the highest blessing—here all gifts are experienced as belonging to everyone. For example, to get the prayer wheel turning and the spiritual temperature rising requires two or more people being in a well-timed, rhythmic call and response. The same is true for all spiritual roles—be the response to the calls of others as they respond in kind.
Brad received a mystical prescription for a couple after making this request through prayer, and it is freely available for everyone to implement:
Before retiring to bed at night, cut out three narrow strips of paper, each the length of your smallest finger. Write one word on each with a pencil: “apple,” “orange,” and “pear.” Drop your apple, orange, and pear strips into a glass of water. Pray over it, asking that you best learn to use your gifts—even if you are unsure what your gifts are—and that they serve nurturing the gifts of others. Set the glass beside your bed on a table. Close your eyes, feel it nearby, and say your bedtime prayers.
The next morning, remove the three strips of paper and set them aside. Now lift the glass to your lips, but do not swallow. Only allow a little liquid to drip down your chin. Set the glass down and say, “It takes an apple and an orange to create a pear.” Place the three strips back in the glass of water and let them soak all day. Repeat every night for three or more nights—allow the paper and the words to fall apart and fade away.
You are here to be the orange to another apple and the apple to another orange. Don’t resolve this difference. Dissolve your differences to make a well paired pear. Then forget the names and use a drop of spirit to help you better remain inside a call and response with the other spiritual fruit in the orchard.
-The Keeneys, May 22, 2020 (updated from the essay originally posted May 17, 2019)
*We use the term “sacred vibration” and the Kalahari Bushman term “n/om” interchangeably. This is the biggest gift in ecstatic spirituality – a mix of non-subtle vibration, song, and sacred emotion that, once transmitted, lives inside the body and can be reawakened during heated prayer, ceremony, or worship.