Why trying to keep the peace is actually destroying your connection—and the counterintuitive path to true intimacy.
Let me ask you something.
Have you ever found yourself in a relationship where, suddenly, the other person’s desires became more important than your own?
Maybe it started small. A restaurant you didn’t really want to go to. A movie you hated but pretended to like. Or maybe it was that time you took a cigarette from a friend—even though you detested smoking—just because you were so hooked on his vibe, his jokes, his energy, that for a split second, his desire became yours.
It happens fast.
You wake up one day and realize it’s been two years. Two years of going where your partner wants. Two years of silencing your intuition. Two years of prioritizing their comfort over your truth.
You didn’t do it because you were forced with a gun to your head. You did it because you allowed it. You slipped into the role of the “nice guy” or the “good girl.”
And here is the brutal truth: You are losing yourself.
We need to talk about this. Because most of us are oscillating between two extremes that are killing our spirit, and we don’t even see the third option.
The Pendulum of Pain: Absorption vs. Isolation
When we talk about relationships—whether it’s with a lover, a parent, or even society itself—most of us fall into one of two traps.
Trap #1 is Absorption.
This is where you dissolve. You merge so completely that you lose your shape. You become the “follower,” dependent on the energy of the leader. You lose your purpose, your direction, and eventually, you lose your connection to your own emotions. You stop knowing if you like that jacket, or if you only stopped liking it because she made a face when you walked out of the dressing room.
The result? Emptiness. You give and give, expecting it to be enough, but you always arrive at a place of void. Why? Because you are serving purposes that are not yours.
Trap #2 is Isolation.
This is usually the reaction to Trap #1. You get burned. You realize you lost your freedom. So you swing to the other extreme. You say, “Relationships are dangerous. Intimacy steals my freedom. Screw this.”
So you build walls. You might still be in a relationship physically—co-living, paying bills together, sharing a fridge—but emotionally? You are gone. There is no intimacy. There is no connection. You are safe, yes. But you are also dead inside.
We tend to think these are the only choices: Lose yourself in love, or protect yourself in loneliness.
But they are just two sides of the same coin: Fear.
The Great Lie We’ve Been Sold
Why do we do this? Why is it so hard to find the middle ground?
Because we have bought into a fundamental lie about what relationships are for.
Society, movies, and songs have conditioned us to believe that the Relationship is the goal. That the partner is the destination. That the self must serve the relationship to keep it alive.
We put the relationship on a pedestal and sacrifice the Self at its altar.
We have it upside down.
The existential truth is this: The purpose of a relationship is NOT the relationship.
The purpose of a relationship is YOU.
The relationship is a sacred tool, a mirror, a door designed to help you rediscover your Being. When two people meet, it is an opportunity for consciousness to awaken, not for consciousness to go to sleep.
When you make the relationship more important than your own Soul, you lose the very thing that makes the relationship valuable: Your unique essence.
The Mechanism: The River and The Roots
To understand why we lose ourselves, you have to understand a fundamental law of this reality: Energetic Gravity.
If you stop cultivating your consciousness, your connection to your Being doesn’t stay still; it fades away. In Shamanism, we call this the “River of Life.”
The current of this world is always pulling you down—toward unconsciousness, toward distraction, toward adopting someone else’s purpose. If you don’t actively swim, the water takes you. This is why we get lost so easily in the city, surrounded by noise, comfort, and screens. We become volatile. We have no roots.
So when a strong personality or a new relationship enters our life, that “gravity” sweeps us away.
Compare this to the people I meet on our pilgrimages to the Amazon jungle. These people are grounded. They are so connected to the earth, to their bodies, and to their sensations that they have their own weight. You cannot just push them over with an idea or a joke.
They don’t need mental walls to protect themselves because they have Roots.
To stop losing yourself, you must cultivate this “weight.” You must be so filled with your own Purpose, your own Desire, and your own Truth that there is no space left for you to be invaded by another’s agenda.
When you are connected to your true desire—that hunger for life, that passion in your gut—boundaries happen spontaneously. You don’t have to “think” about saying no. Your Being simply rejects what does not align with it, naturally, just as the body rejects bad food.
But… Won’t This Create Conflict?
This is the question that keeps everyone trapped in the “nice guy” role. “Teiwaz, if I start asserting my truth, people will get upset.”
Yes. They will. And this is where we need to reframe our understanding of Love vs. Comfort.
When you are authentic, you become a mirror. Your authenticity is an invitation for the other person to also be authentic. But for people who are hiding from their own pain or living in a comfortable lie, your truth feels like an attack.
When I left my engineering career to follow the shamanic path, I had deep, painful conflicts with my family. My mother didn’t understand. It was tense. It hurt.
But I held my line. Not out of anger, but out of necessity for my own soul. I didn’t isolate myself (Trap #2), but I didn’t submit to their expectations (Trap #1). I stayed in the relationship while being fully myself.
And do you know what happened?
My authenticity eventually became permission for them. Years later, my mother—who never cared for spirituality—joined me on a pilgrimage to Peru. We walked the holy mountains together.
Our relationship is now deeper, truer, and more intimate than it ever was when I was just trying to be a “good son.”
Conflict is not the end of the relationship. Often, it is the fire that burns away the fake layers so the real relationship can be born.
Practical Takeaways: How to Stay Rooted
You don’t need complicated rituals. You need to change how you navigate your daily interactions. Here are the pillars to keep your gravity:
Audit Your Desires (The Jacket Test): Pay attention to the moment you look for validation. When you like something—a jacket, a plan, an idea—and someone else disapproves, observe yourself. Do you immediately stop liking it? Catch that moment. That is the moment you abandon yourself. Reclaim it. “They don’t like it, but I do.”
Connect with Your “Hunger”: Many of us are tired because we are disconnected from our Second Chakra energy—our passion, our hunger for life. We are running on the fuel of “shoulds” instead of “wants.” Reconnecting with what you genuinely want to experience gives you the energy to stand your ground. A person with a clear goal is very hard to push around.
Reframe Conflict as an Invitation: When you set a boundary and the other person reacts, don’t see it as a failure. See it as an invitation you are offering them to meet you at a deeper level. You are saying: “I am showing you who I really am. Can you meet me here?” If they can’t, that is their journey, but do not shrink to fit their comfort.
The Best Amulet is Presence: You don’t need protection spells to deal with “energy vampires.” If you are fully inhabiting your body, connected to your emotions, and clear on your purpose, you are naturally protected. Absorption only happens when you are vacant inside. Fill your space with You.
Stop Abandoning Yourself
If you lose the connection with your Being, the river will take you. You will follow others. You will get lost in the scroll, in the drama, in the demands of the world.
But if you keep that connection alive… you become a lighthouse. You don’t just save yourself; you invite everyone around you to rise.
That is true love. Not losing yourself, but finding yourself so deeply that you can finally really see the other.
If you want to go deeper into this path of reclaiming your power…
Join us in the Inner Spark Tribe on Skool.
We don’t just talk about this stuff; we live it. We do weekly livestreams, share exclusive content, and support each other in walking this Middle Path—where we stop pleasing and start living with fire and purpose.
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