Introduction
I was twenty-two years old when I fell in love with Spirit. I had felt the presence of this mysterious, ineffable other dimension many times throughout my childhood and teenage years, mostly during times spent in nature hiking, rock climbing, or swimming in the ocean. During these times of communion with the natural world, I remember a sometimes vague, sometimes acute sense that there was something indescribably sacred, huge, and mysterious that permeated everything in the world. I would at once feel both a great longing to know it, as well as a deep knowing that even if I didn’t understand what it is, that it most certainly is. Like a child fascinated by things in the adult world that I did not understand, I resolved to not try to figure it out, but to simply enjoy knowing it was there. Growing up not going to church and not having “Spirit” or “God” ever come up in conversation at home, I didn’t have much encouragement to pursue my personal relationship with this mystery. Therefore, my relationship stayed at this childlike level until, at twenty-two, after two years of teaching yoga in college, I began my national certification as a yoga teacher in order to deepen my own practice and my teaching.

It is my intention within this paper to propose a map of how spirituality presents itself in relationships. I will begin by making a case for why traditional models of human and spiritual development do not support such a map, and shift perspectives to the relational emphasis of Gilligan’s work in women’s moral development, as well as to nature-based models of human development such as The Four Shields of Human Nature. A significant portion of this paper will be spent presenting the map and explaining the relationships within the map, as well as their relativity to one another. I will focus on the I-thou relationship in the context of intimate relationship, and on the role of relationship and spirituality within the collective. Drawing on the map, I will apply its implications to the contemporary spiritual movement as well as to the current ecological crisis.