You can have joyous, happy and loving relationships, you can learn to break through the blocks that keep you from experiencing true intimacy and connection. The key lies within your subconscious mind. Meditation is a tool to work with this subconscious mind, and allow what is within you to open your heart to love.

The other thing to keep in mind is that our intimate relationships, specially the ones with our partners, are a mirror of our deep relationship with ourselves. So, if within ourselves, we hold guilt, shame, anger, unworthiness, all of this will be reflected to us by the quality of our relationships. By being willing to explore our deeper nature, we can unlock the door to unconditional self love and acceptance, by understanding where our actions and reactions come from.

Meditation is a way for us to develop an understanding of our inner world and to connect to our deeper spiritual self. Most people think about meditation as a passive process of trying to empty the mind, but I find that it it more effective when we use meditation as an active tool.

What exactly is active meditation? It’s a way of using meditation as a tool of self-exploration. When we get still and calm our breath and our mind, we can start to discover our inner motivations and intentions; this can help us understand the workings of our ego, that aspect of us which likes to keep us in the loop of repeated self-destructive patterns.

As it happens, relationships are a playing ground for our ego, and as such a majority of the time, we act and react from our unconscious minds in our intimate relationships. During meditation, we can begin to make these unconscious patterns conscious, and even dig into where these patterns are coming from. Awareness is the first step, and by simply becoming aware of the negative patterns that keep us in suffering inside relationships can lead to change.

Another important thing that a practice of meditation can bring into our relationships, is understand the ‘why’ behind our wants, desires and attraction. For example for the longest time, I was attracted to passionate, intense and unavailable men who treated me as second to the important things in their lives — sometimes a wife, sometimes children, sometimes a career — through really digging into why I was attracted to this kind of a relationship, helped me unravel my own commitment issues and helped me get on a path of healing this wounded way of carrying myself.

Now, even though I am single, any man I have any kind of entanglement with treats me with respect and love, because through working on myself and being willing to go within, I was able to shift this pattern and then my relationships started mirroring how I felt about myself.

You can do this too, and more. You deserve the kind of relationship that support you, uplift you and bring you happiness and joy, and meditation can be the tool that helps you on this journey of self-discovery.