Three levels of intimacy: sharing your real inner state, receiving empathy in return, and both people meeting in peace together. The speaker also describes an internal version, where an inner voice meets fear with courage, framing these as forms of healing.
There must be thousands of people over the course of years you've worked with friendships, these relationships that you've seen. What have you learned? That the way is the best way for them to be fulfilled, for them to connect.
I think there's really kind of three levels that are intimate. One of them is just getting to be able to share where we are. Let's say I get to share with you my personal experience. I'm frightened at this moment, or I'm anxious at this moment, or I'm empty at this moment, or whatever my human experience is, and I get to share that with you. That's a form of intimacy that's really exquisite, beautiful and rare. That we get to be unperformed as we are. And I would say a very small percentage of people really get to have a trusted one. Maybe people have their counselor, or if they're lucky, they have one friend. But that's the most beautiful. It is for most people. Then the second level of it is you share it. And your friend or your beloved friend, lover is responding with some kind of nutritious quality that is in their heart. So they have great empathy for you. So you share some kind of vulnerability. And they feel warmth, or they feel tenderness, or they feel faith in you, or they trust you, or they're grateful that you're open. And so you have this mixture of. Of your vulnerability coexisting with their beautiful essential quality. And then you have this great spirited mixture with this great human mixture. And you have a quotient there together that is so rich that it's delicious. I mean, that to me, is a form of making love. And maybe the deepest form of making love, where the human is really meeting the most spiritual side of ourselves. Then the other one that's even rarer is where both people are in a state of gratitude together or a state of peace together or trust together. And that's happening. So all three of those levels are just forms of intimacy and represent healing itself. Just being able to be where you are and not being alienated from yourself is a form of healing. Being able to receive some kind of equality from somebody else is just being in a state of grace or ease or peace or trust or faith. Now, in addition, you can also experience this inside yourself, where you have a chance of being in a state of anxiety or fear. And there's still a voice that's coming in or some kind of a prayer where you're asking for the opposite of what you're feeling. If you're frightened, you're asking for courage or faith. And that's like a friend doing that for you. So that's an internal state for what I sometimes would call the real communion. Now, I know that's really loaded because of how the Catholic faith views communion. But anytime, inwardly or outwardly, we have a state of love or trust or faith mixed with our human experience. That does feel like a holy communion. That does feel like the purpose of why we're alive and what else is there. And so, really, when I look at my inner life or counseling life, that's really as good as it gets.
