Can I be met?

In holding some client space recently, the question emerged, Can I be met by my partner / mom / brother / friend / daughter, or do I need to be always left wanting more, wishing for more, trying to forgive, trying to not be resentful that this person never meets me in the ways and at the level that I need?

That question struck me this week as one that goes far beyond an individual human longing and out to the ways pretty much all of us, myself included, feel unsatisfied with relationships.

Maybe you’re irritated that your roommate leaves their stuff lying around or requires constant reminders to clean up the kitchen after cooking. And having a peaceful, orderly space when you share it with someone is for sure a valid human need.

But my hypothesis is that this question, “Can I be met?” goes far deeper than how you’re negotiating household chores or how the family’s money gets divvied up.

It feels like it goes to this way deeper place of longing for human communion, of shared presence, of being with — at a really deep place — those you love. It’s not just loving them, but experiencing that love in tangible, meaningful ways.

When you’re asking, “Can I be met?”, it feels like the first step that's needed is to look at what assumptions underly that question. Can a partner / family member / friend even meet what you’re needing to be met in? If they do these external behaviors of walking the dog half the time and cleaning out the fridge on their week, does that meet at the same place you’re asking the question?

For me the answer is no. Not at all. When I’m looking to be met in relating, that question is clearly not about externals. It’s about the core reason and purpose for being alive.

If it was just a need like being hungry, I could easily get food from the fridge, prepare it in some delicious concoction, and satisfy that need. Yes, I would still need to eat again, but that instance of that need gets met.

And if the need is truly to have an orderly home, getting a system set up that accomplishes that can actually meet that need (something I’m working on with my 10 year old daughter — and we’re getting there!).

But there might be more beyond the need to be met. Maybe you’re irritated about socks on the floor because the socks appearing in your field of view reminds you that this participant in your world doesn’t care about you enough to notice their own messy habits that affect your feelings of sanity and ease in your living environment. In short, it hits your “I don’t feel loved” nerve.

But even when you get really clear that the need to be met is about the need to feel loved, it can be too much to expect another human to meet that — ever. It places a grand expectation on them and on your relationship that can actually get in the way of experiencing feeling loved — because you’re likely to end up clinging to what you want, not open-heartedly receiving what Life makes available for your enjoyment.

It’s not something that they can cook you a meal or do the laundry, and now the need to be loved is gone until next month.

On further exploring in my inner voice process, I came to understand that the need or desire that underlies the urge to be met is really about communion: The core need is related to sharing itself at the most authentic and vulnerable level in communion, in reception, and in deepest sharing of loving.

And I was surprised to learn that it isn’t something that can be “met” through an external event, whether one-time or on a cadence. That’s because it’s not something like hunger that you can just eat, and then the hunger is gone. Rather, it’s more like a fragrance wafting from a flower. Even if it were smelled every minute by people walking by, that doesn’t “meet the need”, because it isn’t even in the realm of having a need and being met. The fragrance continues wafting regardless of whether it is sniffed or not sniffed, or how many times smelling it happens.

But what does feel misaligned and lead to that feeling of “not met” is when the space in you that is meant for communion and sharing of love is shut away — like locking the flower in a box or even more so, placing a scent-inhibitor over the flower parts that produce the delicious smell.

It’s when you get really dishonest and unconscious about the core purpose that you are here for: for love to explore and express through you.

It’s when you’re really longing for some cuddle time but you sense the unavailability of your boyfriend, who is caught up in his video game, so instead you go play the game with him.

Or you meet your friend for lunch, and instead of sharing deep space, you “catch up” on all the details of each other’s lives.

You know you’re meant for more, but you don’t know how to enact that, or negotiate that into your current relationship. The status quo and habit of relating by mind talking about extraneous details of your lives leaves you feeling high and dry, not deep and satiated. The communion room is closed, and you’re out of alignment with your core urge to be and experience and express love — and that’s why you feel unmet.

It’s not because of what that person did or didn’t do.

It’s because you acquiesced, you gave in to the lowest common denominator of human engagement and what’s considered “normal” in our society and did the habitual thing. You met your friends out in mental land, and not in here where it matters, where your true choice is. And whenever you’re acting out of your core alignment, that’s when irritation develops in the outskirts of your life. So your husband’s shoes or your kid’s backpack not neatly placed away gets on your last nerve.

Because you’re here to love them. And it’s your core purpose to explore that love, not just talk around it or hear a daily run down of events that don’t touch your reason for being alive.

Yet the people in your life may be unwilling or incapable to go there with you. And if that’s the case, it is far more important to be with this true choice of holding the sacredness of this calling to love than to engage in lesser meaningless ways.

In other words, keep the communion room open in your own heart. Hold it sacredly. Don’t give up your true choice to sit in presence together to give in to others’ habits to stand around and chat in the foyer.

So maybe the question that is more needed than "Can I be met?" is "Will I hold space in my own being to live from my true core alignment, no matter what those around me do?"

This poem I wrote a few years ago seems pertinent:

I don’t want to talk about the weather

Our souls go on forever

Hear a siren call to connection

That goes beyond reflection

On the outer world

Or even what seems wrong

I don’t want to talk about the news

Fake news of massive disturbance

Turbulence

Doesn’t make up my life

I don’t take up the strife

I’m alive on the inside

Let’s talk human evolution

Let’s talk glory and execution

Of inner vision

Co-create our choice

Make new weather

And new news

For others to talk about