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.

Join the tribe here: https://www.skool.com/inner-spark-tribe-6042/about

When I was in my early twenties, I didn’t love myself. Honestly, I didn’t even know what self-love was. I was filled with deep, existential doubt.

Because I felt empty inside, I spent all my energy begging for love from the world around me. I became a professional at seeking validation.

I looked for it in women. I wanted beautiful girlfriends who would adore me, thinking that if they loved me, I would finally feel worthy. I looked for it in my family. I did everything they wanted me to do. I said “yes” to everything. I became the perfect “good boy.”

I also looked for it in my friends. I wanted to belong, so I acted exactly like them. I betrayed my own personality and desires just to be accepted.

I was chasing a feeling that I called love, but it wasn’t love. It was just a cheap substitute. It was an anesthesia to numb the pain of my own emptiness.

I was constantly anxious, trying to “rob” energy from the outside world because I couldn’t generate it within myself. I forced my behavior, my words, and my actions just to keep everyone else happy. Eventually, this pressure caused me to explode existentially. That breakdown was the beginning of my spiritual path.

The Solitude Paradox: Finding Connection When You Are Alone

Seven years later, my life looked completely different. I had gone through a massive spiritual awakening and moved to a new city where I didn’t know a single soul.

On the surface, it looked like I had lost everything I used to chase. I had no friends in town. I had no girlfriends. I lived alone in an apartment and spent most of my time working or being by myself.

But something incredible started happening.

Every night, I would lie down in a huge bed in a lonely room, in a neighborhood where nobody knew my name. And yet, I felt completely full of love.

One night, I opened my eyes, stared at the ceiling, and asked myself: “How is this even possible?”

Back when I had friends, girlfriends, a good job, and social success, I felt empty. Now, when I was more alone than ever, I felt more love than ever.

That was the moment I began to understand. I realized that self-love isn’t something you get from others—it’s a state you enter. And to enter it, I had intuitively followed a process that I want to share with you now.

Step One: Radical Acceptance (Meeting Your Shadow)

The first and most important step to finding self-love is acceptance.

But be careful—people often confuse acceptance with resignation. Resignation is when you look at something you don’t like and say, “Well, I guess it’s going to be like this forever.” That is not acceptance. That is giving up.

True acceptance is the ability to include everything in your perception. It means looking at what is happening in your body, your emotions, and the world around you, and letting it be there without trying to push it away.

Stop Hiding Your “Underworld”

In shamanism, we talk about the Underworld or the Shadow. This isn’t some mystical place in another dimension; it is right here, inside you.

Your Shadow is where you store all your pain, guilt, unresolved wounds, and the parts of yourself you are ashamed of. It lives in your body—in your muscle tension, in your joint pain, and in those intense, uncomfortable emotions you try to avoid.

For years, I tried to hide my Shadow. For example, I used to be a bit chubby, and I hated my body. Instead of accepting it, I covered it up with clothes and looked the other way. I put on my “good boy” mask to hide my insecurities from others and from myself.

But here is the secret: You cannot feel love if you are hiding.

To find love, you must start observing the parts of yourself you don’t like. You don’t have to like them, but you have to feel them. Ask yourself: “Why does this make me feel bad? Do I feel ashamed? Sad? Weak?”

Relax into those feelings. Include them in your experience. This is the prerequisite for love to enter.

Step Two: Trusting That Life Makes No Mistakes

Once you develop the habit of looking at your dark places, you need something else to keep you going: Trust.

You need to trust that your pain, your shadow, and your struggles are not mistakes. They are not glitches in the system. They are a fundamental part of your existence.

The Limiting Belief That Kills Love

Most of us walk around with a subconscious belief that life is dangerous, chaotic, or accidental. We think that if we stop controlling everything, things will fall apart. We believe that pain is proof that something has gone wrong.

This belief is the enemy of inner peace.

The truth is that life does not fail. Nothing that happens to you is accidental. Everything in this universe follows the law of cause and effect.

Your “Underworld”—that heavy baggage of karma and pain you carry—is actually there for a reason. Without it, your life would have no direction. It is intimately connected to your life purpose.

There is a hidden order behind the chaos. The ultimate goal of every experience, even the painful ones, is your healing, your growth, and your eventual return to love. When you start to see life this way, you stop fighting against reality and start trusting the process.

Step Three: The Art of Losing Control

This was the final piece of the puzzle for me. Once I accepted my shadow and trusted life, I started to develop a new ability: entering a state of non-control.

I used to try to control everything in my life to get what I wanted. But it never worked. I realized that the most beautiful things in life—like authentic love—only happen when you stop trying to manage the outcome.

Love is not a math problem. You cannot solve it like an equation. You cannot force it.

Transcending the Mind

Love only occurs when we transcend the mind and enter a space of non-control. This is what we do in our shamanic rituals, meditation, and breathwork practices. The goal is always the same: to stop directing the experience and just let it flow.

In this state, you stop fighting. You start including everything.

• A difficult emotion comes up? You include it.
• A painful memory surfaces? You include it.
• A negative thought arrives? You include it.

Instead of pushing these things away, you welcome them with care and trust. This capacity to include everything is what love actually is.

Love is not just a sweet, romantic feeling. Love is your capacity to connect with everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly. It is the energy that binds you to reality when you stop resisting it.

That is why you never fall in love with the person you expect to fall in love with. It happens spontaneously, on a random day, when you least expect it. Why? Because love needs spontaneity. It needs the absence of control to breathe.

Conclusion: True Love is Connection, Not Need

When you learn to accept, trust, and let go of control, you arrive at a beautiful, unique place in your life. You realize that you don’t need anyone to feel love.

The people in your life will be there because you want them there, not because you desperately need them to fill a void. Your relationships will come from a place of freedom, not dependency.

You will feel lighter, more energetic, and more joyful than ever before. Instead of adapting your life to get validation from others—like I did when I was younger—you will finally start creating your own life.

Ready to Go Deeper?

This power is already inside you, but you have to learn how to access these different states of consciousness.

If you are curious about how to enter these states of non-control, acceptance, and trust, we are here to help. We are always working with these energies through practices in nature, retreats, and community gatherings.

Contact us, leave a comment, or join our community. Let’s walk this path back to love together.

We are connected. See you soon.