Relationships

Everything is a relationship. And the quality of a relationship defines the impact, efficiency, and coherence of a co-creation process.

Since my last reflection on the Cocreation Wound, the concept of relationships has been ingrained in my mind. It seems natural to delve into discussions about intimacy and the fascinating universe of relationships after reconciling with our unlimited power and unconditionally accepting the power of others. Once we understand the concept of Power With, the true art of co-creation begins.

However, to make co-creation pleasant, successful, and meaningful, another aspect requires deep contemplation, awareness, and presence. We have no choice but to master the mechanics and dynamics of our relations properly. Often, this process is tricky, confusing, and painful for many of us.

Personally, relationships pose a significant challenge for me. They are more like a dance, even more vulnerable than my power-related wounds. They are more complex, faster, deeper, more multidimensional, more unpredictable, and even unsafe. Building and maintaining a sustainable and stable network of personal relationships, especially intimate ones, is my biggest evolutionary challenge.

As I mainly focus on co-creation, interdependence, interconnection, and systems in my daily life, this might sound odd. Or maybe not, if we understand that our biggest challenges and weaknesses are often our most powerful superpowers and gifts. Since I believe there's much more to understand and integrate about the deeper truth of our interconnectedness, I anticipate having even more fun and motivation in my business moving forward.

I comprehend the interdependence and power dynamics in the macro system. Due to a lack of meaningful and safe one-on-one relationships while growing up, I had to find another way to fulfil my profound need for intimacy, relational depth, and multidimensional interconnection. Besides a few exceptions of deep interpersonal interdependence in my limited network of friends, I mainly developed intimacy with either myself or the entire whole—the depths of my soul or the entire world system, humanity, and our shared time-space reality.

While living in Ukraine, I was fortunate to have a supportive and strong community. Even though my ancestry didn't emphasize emotional intimacy and safety in personal relationships, they knew what a real community is. I learned from the best about resilient social mycelium—what it means, how it works, and the power it holds.

Where I grew up, education stemmed directly from raw reality, the system, and the community itself—not from the safe yet illusory bubble of an untrue existence imposed by our parents or school.

Our Eastern-European collective and individual ego might appear a bit too significant or entitled to some, given that our power center developed not only in relationships with a few key and safe individuals but within an open chaotic system. Thriving in an open-system community necessitates a strong sense of self-awareness, self-confidence, and a connection to one's inner power center.

Our strength and resilience developed in relation to the collective, the whole, and the social complexity of the entire system, not just our parents. The boundary between close family, extended tribe, neighbors, city, country, or 'others' is very different in the East compared to the West. It's a completely different experience, story, and wisdom for each region.

What collective and individual mean to different cultures today is diverse and complex. It's a narrow and immature perspective to think otherwise. The quality of a society or any system is defined by the integration of both individuality- and collectively-related wounds. Citizens of a healthy society should feel safe and intimate with themselves, each other, Nature, system and the entire humanity.

Obviously, reality is far from perfect, but that imperfection adds excitement to the shared game of reality.

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Let's delve a bit deeper into something more reliable and witnessed in our experience.

Usually, kids from loving, protective families will manifest coherent and deep personal one-on-one relationships. They will have nice families, homes, strong social networks of friends, and likely be fairly successful and comfortable. However, if they haven't interacted authentically with the 'outside' reality enough, they might lack inner resilience and strength to connect with people too different or far from what they've experienced at home.

They become afraid of differences, of the outside, of Nature, of the uniqueness of others, of newness, and change—ultimately, afraid of more intimacy with the collective, the community, and the system.

Some kids have a different experience. Growing up on the street, they feel comfortable and secure in the wildness of the real world because they couldn't find safety at home. They learn to be safe everywhere else, understanding that they can't control or influence the collective field; they can only experience it and co-create with it. However, sometimes, these individuals, even when deeply intimate and attuned with the system, lack deep interpersonal connections with others.

They become hyper-sensitive, flexible, adaptable, strong, powerful, resilient, yet fear messy intimate human relationships.

I resonate more with the latter. Early in my life, I came up with an intriguing thought: if I couldn't be loved and accepted by my own mother unconditionally, I would need to find another way to be loved elsewhere. So, I decided to learn how to fall in love with the entire system outside of me and ultimately, the Field.

This decision made my life exciting, and I did fall in love with the system deeply. A passionate love-hate relationship—a journey full of intensity, raw power, and emotional instability. We broke up a few times already. A lot of tears, fighting, broken hearts, and all the love story elements happened in the process.

It's a metaphor, but it was a real relational dilemma at some point in my life. I was in a love triangle, committed to both my romantic partner and the 'system'. It was something else in terms of energetic, relational, and power dynamics. For all of us.

While I love and evolve greatly with concepts of love, friendships, family, romantic relationships, and sex, most of my personal and professional development is due to direct and intimate interactions with the 'system,' macro concepts, patterns, flows, and the mechanics and dynamics of our deeply interconnected reality. This is where I feel safe, supported, understood, and accepted.

I trust the collective whole more than people in my intimacy. It's easier for me to co-create with the whole than with individuals. I can feel the heart of macro systems, constellations, ecosystems, and even co-create with them sometimes.

I can intuitively understand many things about organizations, projects, and business networks. It's becoming routine because it's just systemic engineering applied to business, science, society, culture, and these days, even directly to people. It's logical, efficient, and predictable. Once you see the mechanics and dynamics of outdated management techniques and technologies in the system, you start seeing it at all levels and scales simultaneously—micro, macro, and everything in between.

Anyways, I guess this is why I do what I do, and also why I have a lot of fun and pleasure going even deeper into these topics. But when it comes time to understand and master the relational mycelium between humans in my most intimate and personal relationships, I often find myself completely lost, hurt, and confused. I struggle to find proper coherence and stability between my personal power, accepting the inner power of others, and staying in harmonious connection with them for an extended period.

Somewhere in the process, things fall apart. Maintaining an intimate connection and the quality of a relationship through challenging times is one of the most complicated and difficult things to do, at least for me.

Broken connections are painful and confusing. Repairing them is hard, uncomfortable, and often ego-crushing. So, more often than not, we choose to withdraw and suffer alone in our bath with ice cream than to set aside our pride and fear to be vulnerable and real with the other.

We don't know how to communicate openly, transparently, and sincerely about our feelings with each other. Strangely, the more we love someone, the more difficult and scary it becomes. Unprocessed emotions accumulate in our personal and collective systems—they never disappear, silently waiting for the right moment to communicate their essence more efficiently. Because we are bad at taking time and space to truly listen and be present with each other, the box of unprocessed emotional charge eventually explodes.

Dealing with the aftermath is not fun and even more difficult. This is why many connections are violently broken and destroyed for no apparent reason. Some decide to stop trying to build meaningful and deep intimate relationships, preferring meaningful aloneness to superficial relationships. Although this holds wisdom, it is not the optimal solution for coherent co-evolution and co-creation.

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It's interesting; once again, I haven't written at all what I had in mind when I opened my computer. This feels like a Pandora's box of wonder and evolutionary surprises to be unfolded slowly, mysteriously, and with a lot of pleasure in the process.

To be continued...