Life Partnership Potluck

Last Tuesday my wife Kiki and I, along with our friend Jess, gathered twenty friends in our home for a life partnership potluck — a shared community ritual for people who are single and ready to call in devoted monogamous partnership and family.

We weren’t there to matchmake. We were there to hold a prayer together.

Around an altar we built together, each person spoke from the deep yearning in their heart. The invitation was to feel that yearning in its fullness — including any heartbreak and pain around their life partner not being here yet. And to be witnessed in all of it: the yearning, the heartbreak, the trust. People cried, touching the tenderness in their hearts.

It’s one of the things I learned from founding Co-Awaken and stewarding my work in the world: yearning is how we signal to life and to the universe that we truly want something. And to fully feel our yearning for something, we also have to feel the emotions around it — particularly the heartbreak that what is so dear to us is not here right now. We can’t feel the totality of our yearning without including that.

I had my own prayer to share too. One of my deepest dreams is to help create a deeply loving, securely attached world. By that I don’t just mean secure attachment in partnership, or raising securely attached children. I mean, fundamentally, our secure attachment with life itself. A deep unconditional trust that life will show up for us and hold us — including in our community prayer for life partnership.

It wasn’t always this way for me.

What I have with Kiki and our family took years of attachment work — unlearning old patterns, learning to stay.

What I’m realizing is that the only way I can create the world I want to live in is to transmit from my heart the love and beauty I feel for my relationship, my family, my life, and my work. It’s been difficult to speak from this place — because when I feel into it, my heart trembles and breaks open to the amount of love and beauty I experience. It is an experience of letting myself be penetrated by the love and beauty of life, and letting that be the place I create from.

Because this love isn’t rare luck. It’s learnable. It’s available.

The evening filled me with so much life that Kiki and I are already dreaming into what wants to come next — gatherings and rituals open beyond our close circle.

If you’re in Boulder and would like to be part of what comes — or join the next life partnership potluck — leave your contact info:

And if this stirred something in you, write back — I read every response.