The Journey Of Relationships

I have heard that Hindsight is 20/20 vision. If that is the case, then going through the experience itself is surely a prerequisite to the insights in the first place, warts'n all.

Having accumulated my fair share of relationship encounters, I dedicate the following to those still seeking their ideal love or have travelled the path.

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Relationships are a tough terrain to navigate.
You may have in your possession a compass of past mistakes
And rubber soles thick from your heart's previous rips.
You may even have the "I will conquer this once and for all" attitude.

After the initial glee & excitement of a traveller setting foot on new land
After the novelty has eroded,
You find yourself in desolate unchartered territory,
Feeling alone, lost and afraid.

You question your decision to have come here in the first place.
Somewhere in the distance, you assume, you hope, there exists an oasis.
There, you would jump into pools of beautiful blue water.
There, you would find joy, wrap yourself in the luxury of laughter, your soul's true desire.

As the vision of this paradise fades before your eyes,
It is replaced by a sand storm, corrosive against your pupils.
Tears well up in the corner of your eyes as the excruciating pain of the dust stings your core.
And now the tears come from the depths of your struggling spirit.

Why had you come here?
Why had you foolishly subjected yourself to this torture?
And the pain... the sharp pain that is drowning your heart.
All for what?... for the unanswered promise of a happy land.

You let out a loud scream!
But your echos are drowned out by the howling chaos all around you.
You sob and sob. You wail and wail, releasing your desperate cries of torment.
But no one hears you.

You have lost all bearings.
You curl up in a fetal position on the ground,
Helpless, forlorn,
Surrendering to the cruelty of the desert storm.

Seconds and minutes go by,
Hours, Days,
You have lost count.
There is no clock.

As you re-engage conscious thought,
You realize that the sand storm has passed
And you are now surrounded by silence,
A peaceful calm seems to be holding you now.

Gradually, you lift your face from behind your own hands.
The wrath of nature has indeed disappeared
Substituted by the serene caress
Of a hopeful breeze.

You release a deep sigh, gather your strength
And take yet another step into the unknown lands,
Towards the direction of the Sun in the horizon,
Towards the image of the paradise you foresaw in your dreams.

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Two Rights Make Two Wrongs

In my experience, what people want is acceptance. That is, to be accepted and loved exactly the way they are and exactly the way they are not. Pretences, walls and strong suits (personality assets) are ways we have learned to masquerade who we 'really' are, in case we are rejected.

The world seems to contain too many walls, misunderstandings, rights and wrongs, all judgements. What if there was no 'one' right more than another, just different views? Person A standing in a box, facing the pink wall claims to person B that the wall is indeed pink. Person B faces the blue wall behind person A and swears by the shirt on his back that the wall is definitely blue, not pink. Who is right? They are equally correct. Both are in the same box, only facing opposite walls. Now imagine they begin to argue about the color, even call each other names and end up hating one another, all because they fail to turn around and see the box from the other party's point of view. Pretty riduclous, wouldn't you say? To the outside observer, this appears insane. Person A and B are in a deadlock, unable to zoom out and see the bigger picture. They are trapped in the disdain and disgust of their own myopic perspectives.

In my previous blog entry (1 October 2007) I spoke about anger, and how the anger was already inside of us and when triggered, there is a subtle moment, a gap in which we can choose whether to lash out at others or to let it go. I experienced this first hand this week. Last Saturday our house was in disarray. After an entire day of cleaning, I got fed up.
"Your shoes are all over the place! Why can't you help me clean up for once!" I barked at my husband. After 45 minutes of rampage and unleashing verbal abuse at him, he said,
"You are acting like a crazy woman! Where is all this anger coming from? You should read your own blog about anger."
Bam! It hit me right in the gut. I wasn't practicing what I preached. I had been staring at the 'pink' wall, blind-sighted by my own views, making him wrong for seeing a different colored wall, unable to surmise the scope of the box. I was immediately humbled by this apt reminder and retreated to the corner to lick my self-inflicted wounds of hypocracy.

Juilia Cameron (author of "The Artist's Way") says, we tend to practice what we teach. When my husband pointed out to me how incongruent my behavior had been to my writings, I was jolted back to conscious choice, stepped back and saw the 'box'. I continue to slip back now and again, more often than I care to admit. My objective is to catch myself more and more quickly each time.

Who You Really Are Is Like An Onion

If Life is like a box of chocolates, then who you really are is like an Onion. Have you ever contemplated the question who am I? Becoming aware of who you are is a process. You peel back a layer that you think is you, but turns out to be a piece of programming from the past. You then peel back another layer, and another and another, until you get to the center, your true self.

In Spiritualism, there is a process referred to as unfoldment. It's a process whereby you work on yourself to heal the aspects that are not yet healed. Once it is healed, you work on another aspect. This makes a lot of sense to me, except I don't think heal is the most accurate term. To heal implies that something is injured, which I don't believe to be the case. I would prefer to use the term awareness.

Are you consciously peeling back your layers? Or do you still believe you are the onion? I've been pondering this for a while. We are born with no previous conditioning, and so life is a playground. There are no concepts of shoulds or shouldn'ts. We climb on chairs, we scream when we feel like it, we cry and then we laugh the very next minute. There are no rules. There is no right and there is no wrong.

As we become older, we take on the programming of our parents, our peers, and write our own story of how we are supposed to be, the best way for us to behave. Most of the time. this occurs unconsciously. The programming is executing while we are in a walking slumber. Perhaps, just perhaps, it is time to awaken from the sleep and re-claim the driver's seat.

I see us (human beings) as a combination of machinery (the human physical components), combined with software (the thoughts that run the machinery) and the programmer (our conscious selves). If we are not aware of our own programmer, then the machine happily obeys the instructions of the software that is already running. It can sit there for it's entire physical existence running and re-running the software that is already running. The conditions that our parents installed, our peers installed, our school teachers installed, the guy at the deli, the neighbor, basically anybody who we've ever "bought" a concept from that has added to our suite of programs.

Once you are aware that you have access to the programmer-self, you can choose to delete certain programs that no longer serve who you are. You can even write new programs that serve who you are today, and who you want to be tomorrow.

How does this translate into practice? Once you are aware of these dimensions of yourself (machinery/software/programmer), you can begin to question, at any point in time, who is running your show? Is it the existing programming (your conditions of the past) or is it you, the programmer?

For example, you bought your wife some jewelry and she thanks you but didn't gush over it. You are frustrated because you feel that she didn't really appreciate it, all of the effort that you went through to select it. You resent her a little and even feel slightly under-appreciated. Was it really your wife that caused you to feel resentful? She is an external component, a peripheral device if you will, another person. What is the programming that you are running that tells you you are under appreciated? Perhaps your parents ooh'd and ugh'd over your achievements as a child, and therefore you only feel appreciated if people verbalize extensively their appreciation of your actions. Or perhaps it was the opposite, your parents never acknowledged you as a child for any accomplishment or thoughtful deed, and you still look for that in your adult life. What is the program that is churning? and does it still serve you? Can you delete that program because it makes you feel lousy every time? Can you re-write it so you don't require an external person (your wife, your co-workers, whoever) to validate you? Install a new program that tells you to feel happy because you did something nice for someone else".

Another example is

Somebody cut you off in traffic and your anger is triggered. It is not actually the driver of the other car that caused your anger. The anger was already inside you, and the person or circumstance simply activated it. Thus, you have to ask ourselves the question, what in my past caused my anger to flare when people behaved obnoxiously? You may see that back in school, some kid cut you off in the cafeteria line, or bullied you and you began to associate such circumstances with an angry response. Perhaps your memory does not allow you to remember anything that specific at all. The main point is that you are looking. The idea is not to find incidences from the past, although that helps tremendously. Rather, it is about shifting the focus of responsibility from being 'out there' to being 'in here' within yourself.

There could be a million reasons why the person cut you off in traffic, perhaps he was just obnoxious, perhaps he was oblivious, perhaps he was rushing to take his child to the emergency room. Know the why isn't as important as being aware of the trigger within you, and letting it go. Letting it go requires altering your state of being in the present moment. For me, I take a deep breath in through my nose, holding it for a few seconds and then exhaling through my mouth. I repeat this a few times. It also helps me by focusing in that moment on what I am grateful for, related to that particular circumstance. For example I'm glad I got out of this one accident free.

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I believe that the truth is in the eye of the beholder. It's all about perspectives and thinking outside the box. This is something I challenge myself to do. For me, it's a part of the entertainment of being a member of the human race.

The next time you look in the mirror, look at your reflection a little longer than you normally would and ask yourself, "Who am I"? I challenge you to challenge yourself to distinguish who runs your show. Is it the existing programs from the past? Or do you write your own programs?