Relationships are at the heart of life, from the start of life. There is no life with out relationship. Starting with the connections between the particles out of which everything is made., we have relationships with our parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends, colleagues, teachers, neighbors, ourselves, others and with God (higher power, divine, inner guidance). There is no way around being in relationship, even for people who say, “I’m over relationships. I just have a cat.”
When we have conflicts with people in our lives we suffer greatly. We spend a lot of time and precious energy trying to change the people we think are responsible for our suffering (including ourselves for not measuring up) and we exhaust ourselves trying to ‘fix’ things and rearrange reality.
I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t change anyone else. I’ve twisted myself into various shapes and sizes and that didn’t work either. I noticed that I kept playing the same roles in different relationships and choosing people who had similar qualities even if the packages looked different. At one point I realized I’d married my mother and that certain thorny issues that I had with one friend cropped up with other friends. I wondered why I kept finding myself in situations where I played second fiddle, met men who were non-committal and got upset around people I called “pushy”.
Despite lots of self-help books, therapy and a profession focused on helping people through tough times, it took discovering the Law of Attraction and A Course in Miracles to experience, what the course defines as a miracle, a change in perception. When I started seeing people in a new way all my relationships changed – for the better.
I remember struggling to stay in my marriage and having the wind taken out of my anger when I looked over at my spouse and, instead of seeing an angry out or sorts man, I saw a toddler with hair uncombed and his boxers sagging and – angry and in pain. My heart opened and softened and the anger dissolved into compassion.
I had a client who was troubled by a rocky relationship with her son and spoke, guiltily about her days as a young mother. She’d done the best she could but had made big mistakes. We spoke of forgiveness to open and soften her heart, clear the way for healing and welcome a new relationship with her adult son.
The Law of Attraction says we can only create in our own reality – not someone else’s. The best things we can do to enjoy positive, loving relationships are to:
1. Practice self love.
2. Focus on what we love in another.
3. Understand what we find distasteful in others is a projection of parts of ourselves that need to be healed.
When people ask me how I met my honey they want to know the name of the dating site so they can sign up and get a honey too. They are missing the point. I’m grateful to dating sites and cyber-cafes but I know that I met and am still with this same wonderful man because I’ve done a lot of inner work. I’ve uncovered a lot of unconscious limiting beliefs and assumptions that kept me from enjoying the kind of relationship I craved, and I’ve started to release them and take responsibility for who and what I attract into my life. I get that we are all deliberate creators, that the world is our mirror and the more we clean up what’s going on inside of us ( how we feel about ourselves, how we’ve dealt with past traumas, hurts and the resentments we’ve stored away for so long), the more the world reflects joy, well-being and love right back at us.
There is nothing more important than shifting the way we perceive and connect with each other. Our very lives and life of our planet depend on it. 
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