Conversations With God, Chapter 8 – Relationships
Neale Donald Walsch
(excerpts and limited paraphrasing) SLM
[Note: If you're familiar with these books and the work of Neale Donald Walsch, this is a good brush up on relationships. If this is new, enjoy! I like to think of it as divine practical philosophy, useful every day.]
Relationships are constantly challenging; constantly calling you to create, express and experience higher and higher aspects of yourself, grander and grander visions of yourself. Nowhere can you do this more immediately, impactfully, and immaculately than in relationships.
Once you clearly understand this, once you deeply grasp it, then you intuitively bless each and every experience, all human encounter and especially personal human relationships, for you see them as constructive, in the highest sense. You see that they can be used, must be used, are being used (whether you want them to be or not) to construct Who You Really Are.
That construction can be a magnificent creation of your own conscious design, or a strictly happenstance configuration. You can choose to be a person who has resulted simply from what has happened, or from what you’ve chosen to be and do about what has happened. It is in the latter form that creation of the Self becomes conscious. It is in the second experience that Self becomes realized.
Most people enter into relationships with an eye toward what they can get out of them, rather than what they can put into them. But the purpose of a relationship is to decide what part of yourself you’d like to see ‘show up’, not what part of another you can capture and hold.
Relationships do not ‘fail’, they change. When they no longer produce what you want or when they change in ways no longer conducive to their survival, they may end. But these are the wrong reasons to be in a relationship. There can only be one purpose for a relationship – and for all of life: to be and decide Who You Really Are.
It is very romantic to say that you were ‘nothing’ until that special other came along, but it is not true. Worse it puts incredible pressure on the other to be all sorts of things he or she is not. Not wanting to ‘let you down’, they try very hard to be and do those things until they cannot anymore. They can no longer complete your picture of them. They can no longer fill the roles to which they have been assigned. Resentment builds. Anger follows.
Finally, in order to save themselves (and the relationship), these special others begin to reclaim their real selves, acting more in accordance with Who They Are. Its about this time that you say they’ve ‘really changed’.
It is very romantic to say that now that your special other has entered your life, you feel complete. Yet the purpose of relationship is not to have another who might complete you; but to have another with whom you might share your completeness.
Two people join together in a partnership hoping that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts, only to find that it is less. They feel less than when they were single. Less capable, less able, less exciting, less attractive, less joyful, less content. This is because they are less. They’ve given up most of who they are in order to be – and to stay – in their relationship. This losing of the Self in relationship is what causes most of the bitterness in such couplings.
When you lose sight of each other as sacred souls on a sacred journey, then you cannot see the purpose, the reason, behind all relationships. The soul has come to the body, and the body has come to life, for the purpose of evolution. You are evolving, you are becoming. And you are using your relationship with everything to decide what you are becoming.
Your first relationship, therefore, must be with your Self. You must first learn to honor and cherish and love your Self. And so I tell you this: be now and forever centered upon your Self. Look to see what you are being, doing and having in any given moment, not what is going on with another. It is not in the action of another, but in your re-action that your salvation will be found.
When you do get hurt by the actions and words of another in a relationship, you must honor your feelings, for honoring your feelings means honoring your Self. If your first feeling is a negative feeling, simply having that feeling frequently is all that is needed to step away from it. It is when you have anger, have the upset, have the disgust, have the rage, own the feeling of wanting to ‘hurt back’ that you can disown these first feelings as ‘not Who You Want To Be.’ Mastery comes from living through enough experiences to know in advance what your final choices are. The master is one who always comes up with the same answer – and that answer is always the highest choice.
What is the highest choice? It is the same to answer the question ‘What would Love do now?’ No other question is relevant, no other question has any importance to your soul. And the answer – the highest choice, what Love would do, is that which produces the highest good for you. It may take lifetimes to understand this but the highest good for you is the highest good for another.
If you ask ‘What promises should I make in a relationship, what agreements must I keep? What obligations do relationships carry? What guidelines should I seek?, The answer is simply ‘none’. You have no obligation in relationship. You have only opportunity. Opportunity, not obligation is the cornerstone of relationship, is the basis of spirituality. Never do anything in a relationship out of a sense of obligation. Do whatever you do out of a sense of the glorious opportunity your relationship affords you to decide and to be Who You Really Are.
Do not confuse longevity of a relationship with success. The success of a relationship is measured by the amount of opportunity for mutual growth, mutual expression and mutual fulfillment, no matter how long or how or short.
To have a good relationship, be sure you and your mate agree on purpose. If you both agree at a conscious level that the purpose of your relationship is to create an opportunity, not an obligation – an opportunity for growth, for full Self expression, for lifting your lives to their highest potential, for healing every false thought or small idea you ever had about you, for ultimate reunion with God through the communion of your two souls – if you take those vows instead of the vows traditionally taken, then the relationship will have a very good beginning.
Know and understand there will be challenges and difficult times. Don’t try to avoid them, welcome them. Gratefully. See them as grand gifts from God; glorious opportunities to do what you came into the relationship – and life - to do.
Extend the depth of your vision to see more in your partner than what they show you. For there is more there. Much more. It is only their fear that keeps them from showing you. If they notice that you see them as more, they will feel safe to show you what you already obviously see.
Expectations ruin relationships. But opportunities help them flourish. People tend to see in themselves what we see in them. If we limit our vision of them to fit our expectations, we limit them. Yet the grander our vision is of them, of what they can become, the grander their willingness to explore the part of them we have shown them.
Is that not how all truly blessed relationships work? Is that not part of the healing process – the process by which we give people permission to ‘let go’ of every false thought they’ve ever had about themselves and reach for the opportunity they have to become their True Self?
The work of the Soul is to wake yourself up. The work of God is to wake everybody up. We do God’s work in a relationship by seeing in others Who They Are and reminding them of Who They Are and we can do this best by being Who We Are. That is all you need to remember.
