If you look at the medicine wheel, you can orient anything to the four directions and the elements, animal energies, and life experiences represented there on the wheel.

This is why it’s such a potent tool and has been such since time immemorial, thanks to the indigenous folks who have passed it down for generations.

When we orient our relationships with our life partners onto the medicine wheel, we see that it’s important to have balance in all four directions.

For the sake of this essay, let’s say for relationships, emotion/the feminine lives in the west, the mind/masculine lives in the east, the physical lives in the south, and intuition/spirit lives in the north.

Most couples meet in the south, for physical/sexual relationships, then they go back to the east and west, respectively.. The relationship can consist of physical connection, and then talking about how they feel (west), and talking about what they think (east).

This can produce a “bottom-heavy” medicine wheel, without a shared spiritual experience between the partners in the north.

There’s no connection with our instinctual nature, because we are often operating from wounding received in childhood or past relationships.

We can also settle into relationships in east-west sort of relating: Who pays the bills, who takes care of the home, who is emotional, who holds space for the emotional expression.. the logistical conversations that split us into “role mates” instead of soul mates.  

And then we maybe go to the south to make love to have babies or outlet pent-up physical/sexual energy, instead of for any other reason…

Even if we go to couples counseling, we are often guided into endless discussions about how we feel and what we think (east-west, again).

This can offer us some understanding and knowledge (and many couples receive great benefit from couples counseling, I am not hating!), but it doesn’t ANIMATE a relationship.

It doesn’t tap us into our instinctual nature.

It doesn’t bring our spirits together, and it doesn’t bring Spirit into the “Holy Trinity” of our relationship.

When we exist solely between the east and west, we can feel like we’re dying, or like we’re losing our soul in our relationship.

Which is technically true, when we’re not living our “full wheel.”

So, how do we live the full wheel in relationship?

It starts with each person finding their own power and standing firmly in the center of their own individual wheel.

(This is according to this “medicine wheel” philosophy… I actually do believe that we can work on our shared relationship BEFORE or concurrently with “perfecting” our own individual medicine wheel, and they can feed into each other in the “opposite” direction, too.)

This individual empowerment could look like reclaiming parts of yourself that may have been lost in your lifetime, tapping into your truth, healing what holds you back from true empowerment in your own life, fully expressing yourself exactly as you want to, trusting that your partner will also do the same and that you can both hold each other in this stance of empowerment.

Then, once we are on the path to being fully centered in our wheel, we can work together with our partner to incorporate the north-south movement which is so key to the transformation of a dull or challenging partnership into a satisfying partnership.

This can look like working together creatively to tap into our instinctual nature as a couple and as individuals…

A big piece of this is actually our sexuality, and tapping into a deeper, more satisfying, more primal connection there, as a pathway to our instinctual nature and our spirituality as a couple.

I’m sure you have heard the phrase, “Finding God through sex.”

Another piece is just tapping back into the wildness of our nature, that has been — for the most part — tamed out of us by the time we are adults.

This is another reason we get stuck in the east-west movement of the wheel, because we have lost our wildness and intuitive nature.

The south works together with the north in this way, to not only tap us into this wild instinctual nature, but to help us grow our instinctual and spiritual connections and abilities from that place.

According to this particular view of the relationship medicine wheel, we can’t even have intuitive or spiritual connection without the wild, primal connection through our physical bodies and the truth of who we are as animals. (Hello, somatic embodiment! This is what it’s all about.)

I know this can be challenging for some folks to think about embodying, but that’s BECAUSE we HAVE been so disconnected from our animal nature for so long.

We follow the rules, we don’t make loud noises, we don’t allow ourselves to get stinky or dirty. Think about recent videos of the women who have lost their loved ones in Israel and Palestine. They are screaming, wailing, beating their chests, falling on the ground. That is because they allow their full expression. Imagine what a funeral in the United States would be like if anyone allowed themselves to do that!

I’m not saying you have to do all of these “primal” things all the time to be connected to Spirit, just that it’s part of the pathway there…. Allowing ourselves to tap into these parts of us that have been silenced or tamed.  

The manifestation of spirit into substance, and vice-versa of substance back into spirit, is an area we can collaborate creatively within our partnership if we want our relationship wheel to be balanced.

Do you have creative outlets that you can share in together with your partner?

Maybe you both love to attend the opera, or read poetry to each other at night, and then discuss how it makes you feel in your body..

Or maybe even a career you can share in together.

For example, maybe one of you writes (a process of shifting spirit into substance), perhaps it’s a book created to connect with readers on an intuitive level (shifting from substance to spirit), and then the other partner helps promote and sell the book (further shifting into the 3D manifestation of money from what was once a creative idea).

This is the flow between the north and the south.

Another example would be a shared practice of some spiritual ritual that you can agree on as a couple, like going to church together (spirit into substance), or establishing a home altar honoring the four directions and spending time together there, praying every day (substance into spirit).

So, I hope this metaphor makes sense in some way..

I’ve found it so helpful in my own relationship, and as I’ve learned other pathways toward deeper interpersonal connection AND deeper relational connection in my partnership (like the ancient wisdom of Tantra as a spiritual pathway, moving from south to north on the wheel), it’s been amazing to add more nuance and deeper layers to my understanding on how the ancient cultures viewed partnership and relationship to self.

What do you think? Does it make sense? Are you more of an east-west type of relationship or a north-south or a full wheel one? Let me know by responding to this email!

Last but not least… ! I recorded a super fun podcast episode with the beauties over at Sacred Rebels Pod. (Instagram link here, episode links below)

Episode Highlights:
- Somatic Embodiment Power: Discover how somatic healing practices can facilitate a profound connection between your mind, body, and spirit to address and heal trauma.
- Cultivating Connection: Learn intimate exercises and daily rituals such as box breathing and tantric meditation to deepen the bond in your relationships.
- Healing Through Community: Embrace the idea that by supporting each other on our healing journeys, we can create a ripple effect of growth and empowerment in both our lives and the collective.

Here is the link for Apple Podcasts and here is the link for Spotify.

Let me know what your thoughts are if you listen to it! It was super fun for me and I really loved diving in deeper to talk about all the big and small normal life stuff I love to talk about from a spiritual perspective anyway, but recorded on a podcast! :)