A Quote by Iyanla Vanzant

In my mind, marriage is a spiritual partnership and union in which we willingly give and receive love, create and share intimacy, and open ourselves to be available and accessible to another human being in order to heal, learn and grow.
By being receptive, we can avail ourselves of the spiritual wealth available to us. By being open, we can receive things beyond what we ourselves might imagine.
Marriage is a way to avoid intimacy. It is a trick to create a formal relationship. Intimacy is informal. If a marriage arises out of intimacy it is beautiful but if you are hoping that intimacy will arise out of marriage, you are hoping in vain. Of course, I know that many people, millions of people, have settled for marriage rather than for intimacy - because intimacy is growth and it is painful.
Love can never really be a great base for marriage because love is fun and play. If you marry someone for love you will be frustrated, because soon the fun is gone, the newness is gone, and boredom sets in. Marriage is for deep friendship, deep intimacy. Love is implied in it, but it is not alone. So marriage is spiritual. It is spiritual. There are many things which you can never develop alone. Even your own growth needs someone to respond, someone so intimate that you can open yourself totally to him or her.
Healing ourselves on the spiritual level involves developing a strong connection with our soul. We heal ourselves on the mental level as we become aware of our core beliefs, release those that limit us, and open to more supportive ideas and greater understanding. Emotional healing takes place as we learn to accept and experience the full range of our feelings. And we heal ourselves on the physical level when we learn to honor and care for our bodies, and for the physical world around us.
A spiritual partnership is a partnership between equals for the purpose of spiritual growth. Spiritual partners use their delightful experiences together as well as their power struggles to learn about themselves and change themselves.
Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.
The ideal that marriage aims at is that of spiritual union through the physical. The human love that it incarnates is intended to serve as a stepping stone to diving or universal love.
In a spiritual partnership you learn that wanting what you want is not enough, but that you must both want it deeply and create it every day, that you must bring it into being and hold it in being with your intentions.
Intimacy, in my opinion, is when you are vulnerable with someone, you share secrets, are open to love, and you take care of their emotional well-being.
There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.
The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity.
Spiritual direction is an interpersonal relationship in which we learn how to grow, live, and love in the spiritual life.
Share your presence with others, no boundaries, completely, openly, lovingly. Love is what makes us alive, that is why we feel so alive when we love. Service is being available to love. Life is the combustion of love. That we love ourselves here, that is the true magnificence in the mountains of being.
In order to heal others, we first need to heal ourselves. And to heal ourselves, we need to know how to deal with ourselves.
Of all the foods we share, there is nothing more primordial than meat. It's no surprise that meat-eaters still want a partner who will give, receive and share this primordial symbol of a budding partnership.
A wound needs air in order to heal. We must talk about and expose those things which have hurt or harmed us in some way. Our wounds need nurturing care in order to heal. If we are to nurture and heal, we must admit that the wounds exist. We must carefully do what is necessary to help ourselves feel better.
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