Yin And Yang Marriage Quotes

Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it's off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married....The Puritans called marriage "the little church within the Church." In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament – love and forgiveness.... Like the yin/yang symbol....Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I'm not sacrificing to her, I'm sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life in in the relationship, that's where your life now is. That's what a marriage is – whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.

Half and half equals one. And if already divided, Left they are as two halves For they're broken hearted.

The individuation journey — the psychological quest for wholeness — ends in the union of opposites; in the inner marriage of “masculine” and “feminine” aspects of the personality that can be symbolized by the image of yin and yang contained within a circle. Said more abstractly and without assigning gender, the journey toward wholeness results in having the ability to be both active and receptive, autonomous and intimate, to work and to love. These are parts of ourselves that we come to know through life experiences, parts that are inherent in all of us. This is the human potential.

The patriarchal ego of both men and women, to earn its instinct-disciplining, striving, progressive, and heroic stance, has fled from the full-scale awe of the goddess. Or it has tried to slay her, or at least to dismember and thus depotentiate her. But it is towards her-and especially towards her culturally repressed aspects, those chthonic and chaotic, ineluctable depths-that the new individuating, yin-yang balanced ego must return to find its matrix and the embodied and flexible strength to be active and vulnerable, to stand its own ground and still to be empathetically related to others. This return is often seen as part of the developmental pat tern of women-what Erich Neumann calls a reconnection to the Self (the archetype of wholeness and regulating center of the personality) after the wrenching away from the mother by the patriarchal uroboros and the patriarchal marriage partner.2 But Adrienne Rich speaks for many of us when she writes, “The woman I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born.” Unfortunately, all too many modern women have not been nurtured by the mother in the first place. Instead, they have grown up in the difficult home of abstract, collective authority-"cut off at the ankles from earth,” as one woman put it-full of superego shoulds and oughts. Or they have identified with the father and their patriarchal culture, thus alienating themselves from their own feminine ground and the personal mother, whom they have often seen as weak or irrelevant. Such women have all the more necessity to meet the goddess in her primal reality. This inner connection is an initiation essential for most modern women in the Western world: without it we are not whole. The process requires both a sacrifice of our identity as spiritual daughters of the patriarchy and a descent into the spirit of the goddess, because so much of the power and passion of the feminine has been dormant in the underworld—in exile for five thousand years.