Healing Relationships
by Gina Lake
Your
preferences, opinions, judgments,
beliefs, and reactions to others are
all part of your
conditioning. As such, you are responsible for them in the
sense that no one else caused them, although others do trigger them.
Nevertheless, you didn't ask for that conditioning; for the most part, it was
just given to you. You could say you inherited it from your family, experiences,
culture, previous lifetimes, and astrology chart. It's your particular
programming for this lifetime, and it is no better or worse than anyone else's
conditioning, which they also inherited.
The problem is we assume that our conditioning is right and other people's
(when it's different) is wrong. This unconscious assumption is what causes
problems in relationships, not the conditioning itself. If we can allow others
to be different from us, then conditioning doesn't have to be a problem. But we
tend to judge others who do and see things differently than we do and try to
change them. Our conditioning is bound to be different from someone else's;
we're designed that way. So having different conditioning (i.e. beliefs,
preferences, opinions, styles, ways of being) doesn't have to be a problem
unless we make it one.
We tend to hold our conditioning as inviolate: We want what we want, we like
what we like, we don't like what we don't like, and we believe what we believe.
Our conditioning feels important, meaningful, and worth fighting for. That's
where we get into trouble. Conditioning is just beliefs, preferences, and
desires (which are just the thought I want with feelings attached to it).
Conditioning comes from the
ego, not from Essence. While the ego will fight with
others over what it believes, likes, and wants, Essence chooses love over
beliefs, preferences, and desires. If you want relationships to work, that's
what you have to do as well. If even just one
person in a relationship is
willing to choose love over what he or she believes, prefers, or desires, a
loving relationship is possible. If not, then the relationship will be a
battleground over conditioning.
When your conditioning gets triggered in relationship, it's an opportunity to
discover more about that conditioning. Feelings are a sign that your
conditioning has been triggered: You feel angry or sad or some other negative
emotion in relation to the other person. When that happens, the tendency is to
say, You make me angry when... or You make me sad when... We think it's good
mental hygiene to let others know how they are affecting us. We were taught to
do this, but it isn't actually helpful. It puts the burden of change on the
other person when it really lies with us.
If you feel angry or sad over something someone said or did, that's a sign
that your conditioning is interfering with love. When feelings like these arise,
there is a choice to be made between your conditioning or love: Is your
conditioning more important than love, or is love more important than your
conditioning? Most people fight for their conditioning because it feels like
their conditioning is who they are: I'm someone who believes... or I'm someone
who likes... Their identity is tied to their conditioned beliefs, and without
their beliefs, it feels like they wouldn't be who they are. And they wouldn't
be. They wouldn't be who they think they are; they would be who they really are:
Essence.
Most people also deeply believe that they can change others and that it's
their duty to do so because they believe their conditioning is superior. They
choose trying to change others to fit their own conditioning over loving them.
This choice leads to misery in relationships. No one wins the battle of
conditioning. Everyone loses love. Even if you get the other person to change,
at what expense is that accomplished? And at what point do you finally give up
trying to mold the other person to your conditioning? The ego is never
satisfied, and it always finds more improvements to push for in relationship as
in every other aspect of life.
Relationships are meant to be a safe haven in the storm of life. They are our
best chance for finding love and
acceptance. They also serve as a laboratory for
love: They are where we learn about love. What we learn is that only Essence
knows how to love, not the ego. To create that safe haven, you have to move out
of the ego and drop into Essence, where love is possible. Our desire for love
and relationship motivates us to overcome our conditioning and live in Essence
more because that's the only way it's possible to feel love and maintain it. We
learn this by first trying to get our way in relationships and then finally
surrendering to love. The secret of many couples who stay together for decades
is that they accept each other. Each allows the other to be the way he or she
is.
You might argue that acceptance enables your partner to continue his or her
bad habits, when who could help him or her better than you? What is true in the
realm of personal healing is also true in interpersonal healing: Acceptance is
what heals. That is Essence's way. Acceptance is not the ego's way, but the ego
isn't trying to help others as much as it's trying to get its way. If you really
want to help someone, then accept that person and just see what miracles love
and acceptance can perform.
Here is an exercise for healing your relationships:
Exercise: Healing Relationships
Your job in relationships is not to change others, but to release any ideas
that keep you from being loving and accepting. To do that, notice when feelings
are triggered, and then give curiosity, acceptance, and attention to those
feelings until you discover what beliefs are behind them. Then examine how true
each of those beliefs are. You will find that none of your beliefs are true, at
least not true enough to warrant withholding love from another. All of your
beliefs are just conditioning.
Click the link below to read the entry:
http://grou.ps/univisions/blogs/item/healing-relationships
