Over the next few days I’ll be taking a spiritual look at various things that transpired during my vacation from February 26th to March 9th in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. My initial entry in this foray is titled “The Ring” because it deals with what transpired on the morning my vacation began.
It must have been about 5:15am when I noticed my partner was roaming around the bedroom while I listed to one of my spiritual attunements in my headphones. My friend was coming to pick us up at 6:00am to take us to the airport in Detroit because our flight was leaving for Mexico at 8:50am. I’m really not a morning person so as I watched my partner frantically search our room again and again, I paused my attunement in irritation and asked what was going on. His response was that he couldn’t find his ring, which was the same one I had signifying our commitment to each other. Initially I passed it off assuming he would find it shortly and proceeded to finish up my morning spiritual routine.
By the time I was done and stepping into the shower, he was still madly searching the house, tearing through his suitcase and various other places looking for where it could be. The clock ticked away getting closer and closer to when my friend was picking us up and I began to wonder if this was some sort of a sign about my partner’s commitment to the relationship.
Yes, I’m one of those people who really do pay attention to things like this and believe in all sorts of spiritual signs. I’ve had a lot of examples of this happening in my life and in the long run, each have always had some sort of a spiritual lesson. In the case of this one, I continued to maintain the focus on my partner, believing it was his lesson and started to wonder if I should even take my own ring on the trip. My ego kept telling me why bother if he wasn’t going to be wearing his.
Soon my friend arrived and my partner had to give up the search for his ring while I made the decision to still bring mine. I spent the majority of the car ride up to the airport in my head thinking about what this meant for him, for us, for our relationship and the like. In all truthfulness, I became downright obsessive about the whole matter and overly frustrated.
Once we cleared security in the airport and were waiting for our flight to take off, I was so deep in my head about the loss of my partner’s ring that I knew I needed to call someone for assistance. I chose to call my new recovery friend Steve who always seems to have a knack at helping me to see things from a different perspective. And he did. He truly only had to say one thing that got my attention. He said, “What if the lesson here with the ring isn’t about your partner at all? What if it’s about where you are at in the relationship?”
I knew immediately he was right because I began crying right there in the middle of the terminal. I suddenly realized I hadn’t been accepting my partner in recent months for who he is. In other words, I had been trying to change him a lot, to fit what my ego thought he should be. Many times, I have found myself verbally disciplining him when he didn’t meet my expectations and that’s not being unconditionally loving at all. All of this inner reflection just seemed to come to me once he said those words.
I thanked Steve for his aid and went back to sit down with my partner. It was there I made some amends and apologized for how I’d been lately with him. I told him I was going to work harder on accepting him for who he is and not for who I want him to be, which has been an ongoing pattern in my life with so many others.
So as not to drag out this story much longer, I felt far better after that amends and I’m sure my partner did as well. When we finally arrived at our hotel and began to unpack, there was his ring sitting on top of his clothes in plain sight. It was then I knew the lesson had always been for me and not for him. It definitely got my attention and probably was the only way it could have.
It goes to show that sometimes when we truly think the spiritual lesson is about someone else, it really is about ourselves. Thank goodness I was able to figure out this one before my ego got to run away with it and potentially ruin the vacation…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson