It is impossible to be intimate with another, until you have become intimate with yourself.

In many ways Mindful awareness is key to this intimacy. To spend time absorbed in your own experience, to watch your thoughts come and go, to see your feelings come and watch them fall away, to experience your reactions to all these, and to be with your mental process, to see it clearly. Learning all this is impermanent, transitory, this is the key to true intimacy with the self. And from here we can meet others with mindful awareness, and intimacy between us can truly develop, without the veil of expectations. Just the ever present awareness of what is rather than what we think should be.

Shedding our own should’s, the expectations of others and for others is at the heart of meeting, one authentic self to another. After all, if you live your life by another’s should, you will live no life at all.