The People Shine Project is a SW Florida community service program that promotes and facilitates integrative recovery and holistic self care practices through affordable classes, groups and workshops, as well as private consultations. Our philosophy of healing is focused mainly upon the empowerment of the individual and the re-establishment of right relationship to everything, because everything is connected.
We believe that any recovery work, whether it be through addiction, depression, cancer, personal crisis or simply spiritual exploration, is a recovery of the true self and a restoration of the whole person. Recovery of the self is a life-long process rooted in good self-care, which includes reverence and respect for the whole self: body, mind and spirit, as well as the environment in which we live. We also believe this must be accomplished at the level of community and cannot be successful in isolation. Thus the need to provide the impetus for true communities to emerge is critical to our health and well-being. Yet, true community must involve a level of "spiritual partnership" in order to continue to unfold and evolve it's people into the next levels of wholeness and wellness.
Spiritual Partnership
According to Gary Zukav, spiritual partnership is between people who promise themselves to use all of their experiences to grow spiritually. They use their emotions to learn how to create constructive, healthy and joyful consequences instead of destructive and unhealthy and painful consequences. Can you imagine using a horrible, painful, can't-get-any-worse experience to grow spiritually? Spiritual partners don't squander them by exploding in rage or dissolving into depression.
Any number of people can form a spiritual partnership: two people in a live-together, have-children-together, monogamous relationship; six people in a family; or co-workers who want to use their relationships to do more than complain, compete, gossip and judge. Of course, co-workers can appreciate one another, be grateful for one another and cooperate with one another, but when they set their intentions to do that all the time, they are already experimenting with a spiritual partnership. Spiritual partnership only require at least 2 or 3 people, to be effective, but there must be the desire to grow in consciousness by all parties, or the spiritual partnership will degrade. There also must be some sort of proximity, so there is exposure to each other to learn and grow.
When two people in a relationship, and that includes friendship, or even acquaintance look at their interactions as opportunities to learn about themselves instead of change each other, they are infusing their relationship with the energy of spiritual partnership. If they are married or in a closely bonded relationship, they infuse their marriage with the energy of spiritual partnership, and eventually it will become a spiritual partnership. This can also happen with our children, friends, co-workers, the grocery store clerk and even people we meet on the fly!
A spiritual partnership is a partnership between equals for the purpose of spiritual growth. Spiritual partners use their delightful experiences together as well as their power struggles to learn about themselves and change themselves. This is a new way to live. A new way to create together. A new way to evolve together, and provides opportunities for healing, clearing, forgiveness, awareness, as well as creativity and innovation.