Dating the Divine Guan Yin
What your relationship troubles as to do with the Asian Virgin Mary having 1,000 arms
Upon attaining enlightenment, Guan Yin swore to help those who most needed mercy.
That’s another way of saying Asian society needed a deity of compassion and this legend decided to fill that need. Once he was a prince. Now, having given up his earthly body, he took on the female form.
In many depictions, she appears like an Asian Virgin Mary. Pure, serene, nurturing, understanding, and all-embracing.
She’s the perfect mother figure and in many ways what we secretly want from our romantic partners when we fight.
Breaking Down Fights
Sure there are an infinite number of triggers for a fight between people in a relationship, but if we are honest, these fights can usually be boiled down to both sides externalizing their own deep-seated resentments with the world. Our past, our parents, our authority figures, and whatever else has hurt us so that we feel we need to raise our voices to be heard, resort to personal attacks to be felt, and use brute force to solve problems we know are better handled with kindness, compassion, and humor.
What gives?
You pick (or naturally fall into a groove with) someone that represents traits you most want to spend time with, who completes that which you lack, and then you are outraged to find they have corresponding traits that you absolutely cannot stand.
The truth is: if you feel anger at your loved ones even though you know you love them–assuming that your relationship is healthy–then what you likely don’t realize in your fury is that the reason they anger you is also the reason they are so lovable.
Oftentimes, I’ve noticed that the traits our lovers and spouses possess which so infuriate us are the same qualities that drew us to them in the first place.
A sardonic sense of humor becomes an inability to take the things we cherish seriously.
Energetic extroversion begins to seem like an aversion to emotional intimacy.
Cleanliness starts to seem like OCD, carefree becomes slovenly, and so on.
That which you love can easily become that which you hate.
Every Loving Relationship Is a Relationship with the Divine
When you were a baby, your parents, aka the closest people in your life were your universe. How you interacted with them would influence how you interact with the world today. Whether you believe in God or the Universe or divinity or not, you still have a relationship with the cosmos that surrounds you.
Your outlook on “other people” or “the planet” or “authority” is there whether you consciously reflect on it or not. This forms your worldview and chances are, how you see the world is a reflection of how you see the people you’re most intimate with.
Some spiritual traditions even believe that all of life is a kind of foil by which we train ourselves. A perpetual practice of self-improvement so as to bring ourselves closer and closer to the divine. They see the entire universe as set up this way, so that everything, including relationships, is a way for us to learn who the ideal person we want to be is.
These traditions hold that there is divinity in all of us. It’s up to us to cultivate that divinity through how we think about, act, and treat those around us.
What does all this have to do with the bodhisattva Guan Yin?
Guan Yin came back to embody mercy and compassion, which goes deeper and further than the divine femininity of Mary. While the desperate and dying may call out for their mothers, that isn’t always what we are truly calling for when we demand mercy and compassion. What we want most from others is usually something we ourselves lack.
Guan Yin came to put a face on this lack. She embodies that part of the culture we couldn’t quite define, the part that is outside of us. She is all the qualities of the universe we love, fear, hate, and yet cannot live without.
But Guan Yin isn’t here to be what you want, she’s here to be what you need. That’s why she is also depicted as having a thousand arms and many faces.
Some hands clutch prayer beads, while others clutch scriptures and even weapons of war. What you need to better yourself in your dealings with loved ones–and your dealings with life–isn’t someone who is there for you all the time with answers and sympathetic ears. Sometimes what you need is conflict and disagreement and a plethora of emotional turmoil. That is when you practice patience, and understanding, and compassion. Sometimes you have to see the divinity behind your partner’s ugliness.
Sometimes it’s your turn to be the Guan Yin.
The key to a successful lifelong relationship isn’t to marry a perfect being, but to find someone that has all the qualities you want and then work to accommodate those attributes which show up that you dislike.
Find ways to turn undesirable qualities into desirable ones. Encourage them to change without becoming strict and judgmental. Be there for them when they need guidance and do not burden them more than is necessary.
Think also about how you would consciously guide and change yourself. How you would wish someone would help change you.
Be that for them. Be the spouse your wife or husband needs. You have a lifetime to figure out who that is.
For better or for worse, you were made for each other. And if it doesn’t feel that way
You can always remake yourself to make that true in the process. If Guan Yin could do that for an entire culture, you could at least do that for one person.
The concluding paragraph sums it up well!