Last week I wrote about sometimes needing to get lost in order to find ourselves. This week I had a wakeup call about being lost and not realizing it all. A dear friend of decades felt justifiably upset with me because she felt that I hadn’t been giving our relationship enough attention. I had no idea that she felt that way, and I was horrified that this was my impact on her. 


I felt this realization viscerally.  My heart ached and the rest of my body shivered as I imagined her ending our friendship because she thought our relationship was not important to me. I was suddenly awake and aware in a way that I hadn’t been in a long time. It led me to think about friendship which I consider to be an essential part of my life. 


I have been blessed with having numbers of important friendships which span decades. Many of these friendships are long distance and we may not have seen each other in years. Yet, I always make a point to reach out on birthdays, or at the end of the year to reconnect. And, it has always felt that our connection was ongoing and solid because we could always connect as if we had just seen each other recently and not months or a year earlier.  


In preparing for our Dante Project programs, I have been spending a lot of time with Dante of late. Specifically, reading The Inferno. One of the gifts of traveling through The Inferno is learning to open our eyes and see what we have previously been unable to see.

I was living in a set of assumptions that blinded me to my friend’s experience. I assumed that we were both getting and giving each other what we needed. I was living inside my understanding of our relationship, an understanding that I thought had served for years but now I realized was no longer sufficient.

What does it take for us to see something that has been right in front of us but outside our awareness? Once my eyes were opened, I was immediately energized to co-create a plan of repair that will serve us both.

Despite her upset with me, and my shame about totally missing her experience, we both came together yesterday morning and faced our truths. We named what was not happening and what was happening between us. I feared the conversation before we spoke, instead of trusting both of us to rise to the occasion as we always had in the past. Our connection has always been about being willing to tell our truths and to listen to the other’s truth as well. 


It is a true blessing to have a friend like this. To have anger, disappointment, upset, shame, fear, etc. and know that whatever we bring to the discussion, it will be heard, received and used to create something better than we had before is a precious gift. And of course, we have also shared a lot of laughs and good times along the way. We even managed to find a bit of humor in our visit yesterday.

I’m both appreciating and basking in my new experience of knowing that we don’t always have to bring our best selves to our relationships. We have the power and the ability to co-create relationships that are big enough to hold all of our feelings and all the limitations of our humanness. Because we are human, relationships will evoke our best and worst selves and everything in between. Yet, by including both our dark and light sides, we experienced wholeness. This might be the most profound and enduring gift of our friendship.

As many of you know, Leonid Frolov and I have been collaborating and co-creating The Dante Project, inspired by Dante’s journey and the questions we face as we find our way through life. We’re beginning with a series of free, live pop-up classes. Our next one is about Receiving, on Thursday, October 29th at 10am Pacific. Together, we’ll explore how to be willing to receive, and how to embrace abundance. 

You don’t need to know Dante. Just bring yourself, and perhaps something you’re yearning to receive. Click here to reserve your space for Receiving and get a glimpse of the conversations coming over the next four months.