Effortless Intimacy

Resting in Non-Separation

This article is part of our ongoing exploration of the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness. Each month from January through July, we're offering films, articles, conversations, and live workshops for each facet. March's territory is Intimacy & Relationship: both the context for our wounding and the vessel for our awakening.

Join us for a free workshop on Intimacy & Relationship on March 26.

“We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”

Teilhard de Chardin

Relationship with ourselves, each other, all of life, and the inseparable and ever-present ground of being (awakened wholeness) – is what can support us to more fully realize our human potential and generate flourishing futures for all of life. It might also be the very threshold of our collective evolution as a species.

We co-create each other and have the potential to co-liberate one another. This endeavor of relating, of coming into a deeper intimacy with what is – not what we wish were so, but what already is, is a pathway for human wholeness, awakening, and culture/world building.

We truly need each other to help us recognize and become more of the whole of who we are, and through this we can orient towards the challenges we face with a more networked and interconnected resilience and collective intelligence.

“A group of wise people, tethered through intimacy, is the most powerful problem-solving system in the universe.”

Bonnitta Roy

If we take the view that each of us is an expression of the whole, an embodiment of spirit in a multiplicity of utter uniqueness – then we can orient towards a shared endeavor of collective awakening and collective flourishing.

Awakening isn’t and never was an individual pursuit. As each node of the web of humanity awakens to its true nature, we can fully embody that awakening in how we relate with each other and vice versa. This can take the form of an effortless intimacy, a resting in relatedness that allows for and supports agency and communion, union and differentiation, full acceptance of how things are and compassionate action in response to suffering.

All the ways that we aren’t able to fully embody that, are further opportunities for healing, growth and liberation. They point us to that which calls for deeper love and truthfulness – a slowing down and really being with what is, and an integration and healing of patterns of relating that aren’t serving us. It also calls for cultivating the skills and capacities needed to engage in this kind of relating.

Luminous Porosity

In the midst of a meditation retreat some years back, I had a vision of humans as a porous structure emanating (and receiving) the light of spirit. Each of us was a node or jewel in Indra’s net, reflecting all the other nodes in all directions. In the vision I saw that as we navigate life, through the fundamental vulnerability of being a human in a body encountering pain in a fractured world, that the luminous porosity dimmed or was blocked over time.

The vision was of something like a beautifully carved clay human figure with a lattice of openings, some of which were blocked with the accumulation of pain and in an effort at self-protection. I saw the healing and awakening journey as one of unblocking the pores – releasing what had accumulated and was obscuring the light of our true nature.

This has been very true in my own life journey. Early in life I learned to hide from others which was essentially hiding from myself and my own needs and vulnerabilities, and ultimately also became a hiding from or not recognizing true nature. Our relationship with all that is, is reflected in how we relate with ourselves and each other.

I also had some shaping experiences (such as moving a lot internationally in the first 14 years of life, and then ultimately going to boarding school which I experienced as a loss of family) which made it harder for me to trust others. I trusted nature more than people. All of this manifested in social isolation. My healing and growth involved reaching through the isolation, revealing myself, risking vulnerability, discovering my needs in and for relationships and learning that I could truly lean on and trust others.

One of the ways hiding manifested in my life was through a secret addiction to smoking. Finding the courage to work through the shame and hiding and let loved ones know, helped me discover and receive the love and acceptance that was waiting under the cover of shame. After that, quitting, while challenging, was so much more in reach. This was a profound example of dissolving the barrier to love and discovering it was there all along just waiting to be let in.

Resting in the Interrelatedness of All of Life

Healing and awakening in relationship has been profoundly liberating and life giving, so much so that this has become the territory of my life’s work. And my relational healing and growth has opened into what I now call effortless intimacy, or a resting in non-separation, the interrelatedness of all of life. This includes the fundamental vulnerability and sometimes tender awkwardness of simply being human.

The harm we experience in life occurs in relationship and so can the healing and liberation. By staying present with ourselves and others, we can co-create forms of relating that support a natural unfolding of the awakening process. We truly can walk each other home.

“The circle is strengthened not by perfection, but by the way we return to each other after absence.”

Parker Palmer

But doing so requires skill and capacity development in addition to repatterning our maps of what it means to be in relationship that we internalized from family and the culture. We need to learn the skills of relating, including how to communicate with each other, how to listen to each other, how to integrate and navigate conflict, how to support differentiation and navigate differences, how to set healthy boundaries and recognize and ask for what we need, etc. This kind of relational work calls for vulnerability – to risk revealing ourselves and being receptive to other’s experience of us. And it calls for an openness to allow the process of relationship to unfold. It invites curiosity, compassion for self and others, humility and self-responsibility.

“Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen.”

Malidoma Patrice Somé

There are three dimensions of relationship that we can attend to. At the foundational level, we are working with the patterns formed in early life that shape our experience of self in relationship. At the subtle level, we are developing more complex and nuanced ways of relating. At the non-dual level we are recognizing the universal nature of our relatedness and belonging.

At the foundational level we attend to:

• Attachment and our ability to form bonds

• Differentiation – the ability to stay grounded in the face of difference and intensity

• Cultivating what we call ‘real relationship’ – to get involved in each other’s lives, to show up for each other, and to be there in times of need.

• Grounding and working with the nervous system

At the subtle level we can:

• Work with our multiple parts including bringing awareness and compassion to exiled parts

• Cultivate capacities for complexity and engaging with multiple perspectives

• Practice owning our projections and releasing introjections

• Cultivate awareness of cultural/systemic currents in relationship

• Co-create developmental and transformative relationships and collectives - being with and for each other

At the nondual level we can:

• Recognize a deep relatedness of everything

• See through reactivity and personality patterning to the deeper ground of a prior unity

• Engage with radical acceptance, awakening and embodiment

• Cultivate transcendent trust, love, equanimity, truthfulness, and sense of abundance or possibility as we navigate life and the world’s challenges

• Cultivate collective coherence that helps us to orient towards the emergence of generative and life-giving future potentials

Through all of this we can cultivate capacities to lean towards, not away from, the inevitable challenges that arise in relationship, and recognize that conflict itself is an opportunity for a deeper wholeness. We can also clear our own seeing of ourselves and each other so that we become mirrors to one another of true essence. This helps us create the relational foundations of new forms of culture and more fully realize relationship as the territory of awakening and emergence.

“New human potentials only manifest in the context of new forms of relationship … Can we place our individual love stories within the larger love story of the universe itself?”

Zak Stein

Ways to Engage

This month is one facet of seven we’re exploring through 2026: Integration, Complexity Capacity, Intimacy & Relationships, Awakening, Embodiment, Soul Expression, Collective. These represent an ecology of interconnected territories of human development and transformation.

Each month, we’re going deep into one facet through live open workshops, short films, podcast conversations, and articles.

---

Attend the Open Workshop

On Thursday, March 26 at 1:00pm Pacific, we’re gathering to practice intimacy and relationship together. This will be an embodied practice space—an opportunity to explore what becomes possible when we cultivate the willingness to be truly present with others, developing both the subtle capacities for differentiated relating and the concrete engagement of showing up together. Can’t make it live? The recording will be available.

---

Watch the Film

The Intimacy & Relationship film on premiers on YouTube on Tuesday March 10. Geoff and Abigail explore relationship as both the context for our wounding and the vessel for our healing—examining how we develop the concrete skills and subtle capacities needed to lean toward each other when difficulty arises.

---

Listen to the Podcast

We’re diving in with Layman Pascal on the Integral Stage Podcast to explore Intimacy & Relationship in depth. Geoff, Abigail, and Layman explore conflict as deepening, boundaries as intimacy, and what it means to differentiate in order to come closer together. The next episode drops this week.

---

Leading Through Emergence

This spring, May 7 – June 25, we're offering Leading Through Emergence, a live 8-week online program for anyone navigating the threshold between dissolution and becoming. It's a practice in learning to meet breakdown from a deeper ground and participate with what wants to emerge.