Do not fear intimacy

[1]

Amrit Sadhana [1]

Is your relationship hampered by emotional walls and barriers, secrets and long silences?
Are you dying to be intimate with your beloved or a friend and yet you don’t know how to get close to them? If this is the case, cheer up, you are not alone, most people face this dead end while relating.

People are yearning for love and all the promises it makes, and yet are afraid of getting deeper into a relationship for it means being intimate with the other. All love affairs that start romantically get shattered on the rock of intimacy. Because to be intimate means exposing onself, inviting the lover to be part of your being, allowing the other to see deep wounds and scars you have hidden even from yourself. It is scary and it poses a great risk.
The risk is: we have developed a false image of ourselves that society has given us. Therefore when two people meet actually two images meet, the real person is lurking somewhere deep down who has no chance to surface. The first layer of the personality is very beautiful, charming, loving, caring and so on. But it is only a persona, a mask. How long can the mask survive in the fire of a real relationship? One is not courageous enough to open up, to show one’s inner chaos and to be vulnerable.
If people mature emotionally and recognise the whole gamut of emotions they carry within, they may be able to dive into intimacy and eventually, in love. Accept that you are human and that the mind is a battleground of all kinds of demons: there is anger, jealousy, fear, greed, possessiveness, bitchiness. When people fall in love they also fall in jealousy, they fall in fear, they fall in anger. Falling in love means falling into the emotional ditch. At least, initially.
The long cultivated self-image is destroyed and people are apprehensive of facing their reality, their own truth. There is also the fear of losing the other if their truth is exposed.
The longer fear of intimacy festers, the worse it gets — and the more difficult it is to overcome.
The word “intimacy” explains the essence of this word. It comes from a Latin root: “intimum”. “Intimum” means our interiority, our innermost core.
Osho says the spiritual poverty is responsible for the lack of intimacy. He says, “Unless you have something inside you can’t be intimate with anybody. It is a strange world! Everyone wants to love and be loved but nobody reveals their authentic being to others. Intimacy is a totally different dimension. It is allowing the other to come into you, to allow the other to see you from your inside, to invite somebody to that deepest core of your being. In the modern world intimacy is disappearing. Even lovers are not intimate. Friendship is only a word now. And the reason? The reason is that there is nothing to share. And who wants to show one’s inner poverty?”
But don’t lose heart, Osho makes some constructive suggestions to develop the feeling of intimacy. He asks you to start becoming intimate with trees. Sitting near a tree, just feel the tree and feel that you have become one with it, that there is a flow within you, a communication, a melting. Sitting near a flowing river just feel the flow, feel that you and the river have become one. Lying under the sky, just feel that you and the sky have become one. In the beginning it will be just imagination, but slowly you will feel that you are touching reality through imagination.
And then try it with people. This is difficult in the beginning because there is fear. Because you have been reducing persons to things, you are afraid that if you allow someone to be so intimate s/he will also reduce you to a thing.

— Amrit Sadhana is in the management team of Osho International Meditation Resort, Pune. She facilitates meditation workshops around the country and abroad.