ESTHER PEREL AND DAVID WHYTE
Please note: Registration will close December 20th, 2023, with the recording available for streaming through December 31st, 2023.
How do I stay connected to an inner sense of self without losing you? How do I stay connected to you without losing me?
Intimacy and independence are two very highly desired qualities in any human life, and bringing them together makes up one of the great conversational dualities and tensions of our relationships.
Closeness with another always has to co-exist with an intimacy with ourselves: that necessary sense of inner simplicity we need and that foundation necessary to feel we have an independent life, in the context of a relationship, a work, or any of our duties and commitments in the outside world.
How do I stay connected to an inner sense of self without losing you? How do I stay connected to you without losing me? The holding together of that duality is one of the great paradoxes of love. To hold that conversation successfully: to find that place inside us where we feel as if we are living a life we can call our own while enjoying the joy of close relationships may be one of the central triumphs of a human life.
From the moment we are born, we straddle two sets of contradictory needs: the need for security and the need for freedom.
- Esther Perel
All of us struggle with the sense of a big, wide world that invites us into so many corners of it, and the human need to make intimate promises to one other person in one very particular corner of that world.
This session is about love in its most inclusive form, not only the forms that it takes with one specific person, but across the full spectrum of experience.

Our life like a breath, then, a give
and a take, a bridge, a central movement,
between singing a separate self
and learning to be selfless.