I've been reminded recently of one of the primary ways of measuring 'success' on this journey of understanding.
Wendy Palmer, in both Conscious Embodiment exercises and aikido gradings, is looking for how well people recover after they have been knocked off centre. So, someone can do a marvellous technique at first, but when pushed off centre doesn't recover.
This has come to mind just now as I've been a real grumpy so-and-so at home as I've been suffering from a virus for weeks and have had low energy and generally acting in a total man-flu sort of way around my partner. It's put a degree of irritation into our relationship that is not usually there. It's given both of us a chance to practice coming back to centre and relating once again more from the space, than from ego. It's taken me a little to remember to move back out to this larger space. But as Wendy says, it's all about the recovery.
When things are working well in the relationship, I've got a personal metaphor of the space bwtween us - that it seems to 'sparkle'. So, the skill we are building is not to hold on to that sparkle, but to notice it and when it's not there, then to re-centre and have the delightful experience of it coming back into our lives. If it's there too long it seems we take it for granted and forget it a bit. So, we keep having the fresh experience of the sparkle appearing by finding ourselves off centre and grumpy and then practicing our recovery :-)
