Committed relationships carry the lead of pain as well as the gold of joy.

   If it is our children we love then it is our children about whom we worry. Heart friends are sure to share their woes as well as their triumphs. Caregivers suffer with their patients & celebrate when they are healed. 

   We may think romantic relationships with all their wild expectations are hardest. But the most challenging of all is our encounter with ourselves.

   Almost at birth, we become split from ourselves & often end up in lives dominated by other's views.  

   The greatest psychologist of all time wrote that "Only what is separated may be properly joined." And Carl Jung is also the one who determined that the symbol of the soul for men is the image of woman.

   What symbolizes the soul for women? The answer comes sideways from one of Jung's disciples, Robert A. Johnson: We "must relate to the outer world from the strength of inner wholeness," he wrote, "not search aimlessly outside for meaning that [we] can find…only in the solitary pathways" of our souls.

   Radical Loving Care begins with marrying ourselves. 

-Erie Chapman

Photograph, "The Feminine Soul" by erie