Part 26: The Role of the Open Centers in Relationship: Where the Not-Self Meets the Other

Open centers are not your weakness. They are your deepest intelligence, but only when you're no longer identified with them. In the relationship field, these open centers are like magnets. They draw in the other, reflect the other, amplify the other — and in that, they shape the way we experience intimacy. But for most people, what’s open becomes what’s distorted. What’s open becomes the place where the not-self lives.

Let’s be very clear: the not-self is not the enemy. It is the passenger trying to drive the vehicle. It’s what happens when you live from your openness, instead of simply witnessing it. In relationship, most people are not meeting the other — they are desperately seeking to fill what’s open in themselves. That’s where distortion begins.

Where Conditioning Happens

Conditioning doesn’t come from culture. It doesn’t come from parenting, or schools. It comes from the people you’re most intimate with. Your open centers are like windows with no curtains. When someone with definition walks in, the energy pours through. And if you don’t know it’s not you, you will begin to need it. You will become addicted to what the other provides — not because it’s correct, but because it feels familiar.

This is how dependency begins. Take the open Solar Plexus. The undefined emotional center is deeply sensitive to emotional waves — but not its own. It feels others’ feelings more intensely than the defined being does. And if you don’t recognize that, you start to avoid conflict, to people-please, to suppress your own truth so that you don’t rock the emotional boat. You call that love. But it’s fear.

Or consider the open Heart. No willpower, no need to prove. But in the not-self? It will do anything to prove it’s worthy of love. It will take on debt, take on roles, take on pressure to be what the other needs — just to feel deserving. That is not a relationship. That’s survival.

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