‘Deep relationships always contain enormous transformative potential because they bring out the best AND worst in us. While love makes us want to melt the rigid defenses that keep us from living more expansively, this desire to melt also threatens the conditioned personality, which hardens its defenses to perserve status quo.

Though we may truly desire to connect with another soul-to-soul, our ego still prefers to promote and defend self-image instead. That is why we often feel pulled in opposite directions when we are in love. The antidote to any poison in our psyche Always lies close at hand. Indeed, every poison calls for a specific antidote which can only be discovered through turning towards awareness, through acknowleding where we are and what is going on with us, no matter how unpleasant it seems to be.

If we are devoured by jealousy for example, we need to see what’s happening here: we are caught in a trance in which we feel insecure because we imagine we’re not as good as somebody else, that Other is more beautiful, valuable or lovable as someone else. As we see our insecurity and the pain it causes, the antidote also becomes available. We find a new desire coming alive in us – to free ourselves from our negative self image, to know an trust in our value. Thus our jealousy points in the direction of confidence which is the only real antidote for jealousy. In this way, every state of mind, when held in the space of our larger awareness, will reveal its own remedy.

(From: Love and Awakening by John Welwood)