When we first began speaking in public about our commitment toward M/s as part of our spiritual path, and began to work out what that looked like and how to communicate it to others, our experiences were intensely personal. How this worked for us colored many of our assumptions about how it worked in general, if only because there were so few accessible models. However, as we met and talked with other couples (and triples) who were finding their own ways along the path, we noticed that the structures holding the spiritual energy in its place in the M/s relationships often differed from ours. There were many things in common, but some overarching patterns were very different indeed.
After a while, we began to notice that the various spiritual M/s relationships tended to fall into two basic patterns. Raven chose to call them “the yin-yang” and “the tree” as metaphors for how the energy moved in each relationship. (If the word “energy” is too woo-woo for you here, replace it with “effort” or “time and attention”.) Neither is good, bad, or better than the other. Each M/s couple will gravitate into what is most comfortable for them. It’s possible to do either of them wrong, but it’s also possible that if you’re strongly ensconced in one, looking in on the other from the outside can cause you to imagine “They’re doing it wrong!” when in actuality they are merely doing a different path right. who does better with a Tree structure than with a Yin-Yang. These are usually strongly service-oriented people who are more fulfilled by useful work than by attention and control (although they may enjoy that as well). We remember the words of such a slave who had a brief and unsatisfactory relationship with a Yin-Yang master: “I’m not broken, I don’t need your healing, just give me something useful to do!”
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© 2010 Raven Kaldera, reposted with exclusive permission