The Life or Death Nature of Relationships -- They're up to us...

The Life or Death Nature of Relationships -- They're up to us...
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Are we Creating or consuming our relationships?

Something AMAZING is possible for us.

What if we could set aside our human need to look good and examine the relationships we say are our most important ones. . .to learn to notice when we're Creating our relationships, or simply consuming them.

Creating looks and feels like all of us in the relationship are adding to the shared happiness, that there's a fluidity to everyone inventing and orchestrating inspiring ways to share time together (no one person is making the fun plans, writing notes of inspiration/acknowledgement, giving flowers/tokens of appreciation, cleaning/beautifying shared spaces, initiating intimacy...for a few examples).

Creating, when it's shared, leaves everyone so inspired about the relationship, that merely thinking of it brings a rush of inspiration -- that sense that anything in life is possible.

Consuming, on the other hand, can creep in when we're not looking, perhaps when we're high on the first blush excitement of the new romance, new friendship, new project, new job...

Consuming arises when one or more of the people in the relationship, for whatever the reason, stop Creating the relationship, and just ride on the other/others' efforts.

Consuming leads to the 'blame game' with lots of finger-pointing, hurt feelings, and unmet expectations.

Practicing Creating all the time builds superheros in our Culture -- men, women, and tribes who evolve the Culture as a whole. . . these are the relationships and teams that bring forth the goose-bump-inducing, history-making, game-changing evolutions like the Freedom of India, the ongoing chapters of the Civil Rights Movement, and the Renaissance. . .

Prereq's for Creating:

  • Developing Self-Love
  • Building the muscles to practice the feeling that All Is Well (even when the proverbial s--- seems to be hitting the fan)
  • Expanding Humility (the awareness that anything that happens in life which is truly worthwhile happens through us, not solely by our own hands, which trains us to be deeply interested in being ever better Instruments for this Grace of Life to move and work through us)
  • Training ourselves to see/feel/know that we have a personality, we have prior conditioning -- rather than the old belief that we are our personality and are our conditioning (this sets us free to do rapid-fire, deep inner work, without taking the dark sides of our conditioning personally -- as personal problems -- and be fiercely committed to ongoingly evolving)
  • Actively Training ourselves to see more and more perspectives of any given moment in time; letting go of the impulse to make any perspective more 'right' or 'wrong' than another.
  • Learning to LISTEN more deeply (listening with the ears, listening with the body/nervous-system, listening with subtle senses -- hearing/sensing the whole communication, not just what's being spoken outloud -- some things just can't be communicated in words, some of the most Important things. . . we want to be able to notice and respond to these)

In case it's not yet revealing itself above, these Prereq's above are where we are learning to CREATE in the relationship with ourself. As we grow in CREATING the relationship with ourself, we'll naturally bring this to our relationships with other individuals -- which will then expand to how we are with entire Groups, Projects, and even the World and EVERYTHING it contains. . .

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot