Key
to Success: Relationship with...
I
was once driving down the road and another driver pulled his car
right in front of me, running me right off the road onto the shoulder.
I was mad and thought, “What a jerk.” But then the
next moment I began laughing. There is the reality that the guy’s
a jerk. But, then again, you never know.
The
Relationship with… principle permeates everything.
All too often, the current state of the object of our attention
receives too much of our attention. In actuality, the quality
of our relationship with that object is critically important.
A healthy Relationship with… is the key to success. This
is true of our relationship with people and situations, be they
personal, social, or global.
A
healthy Relationship with… is not just an attitude
or philosophy to cling to. Developing a healthy Relationship
with… starts with cultivating a healthy life—a
life freed from conditioning.
The
creation of a healthy relationship with yourself is of critical
importance. It is not so much about getting rid of your conditioning.
It is more about cultivating a healthy relationship with your
conditioning. This includes aspects of yourself that you do not
like, such as anger. Having a healthy relationship with anger
is the best way to heal it. Oftentimes our unhealthy relationship
with anger can include the attitude that it is never alright to
be angry. How deeply is your anger conditioned and impregnated
into your being? Is it a result of deep stress in the physiology
or is it just a facet of a normal life to occasionally get angry?
In
the example above, it was normal and even healthy for me to get
angry for a moment. But it was also healthy to see beyond the
anger. The driver could be a wonderful and noble person who had
a momentary lapse of judgment or something could have blocked
his vision temporarily.
If
you cannot see beyond the anger, that is, if your relationship
with it is not healthy, you might spend the rest of the day steaming
or snapping at people because people are such jerks. On the other
hand, if you say, “What a jerk,” but feel bad about
yourself for calling somebody a jerk for the next three weeks,
you do not have a healthy relationship with your anger either.
Creating a healthy relationship with your anger permits you to
realize that at one minute you could call the guy a jerk, and
the next minute you could laugh about the absurdity of doing so.
Your
anger is not the problem. Your relationship with your anger is
what needs to be explored. If you have been conditioned to get
angry, exploring your relationship with anger can help dissolve
away your anger. On the other hand if you are trying to just get
rid of your anger, you may be attempting to align with some idealized
yet invalid notion of a healthy and evolved person, turning yourself
into a conditioned automaton. You will never live up to it because
it is out/in—it is not really who you are. However, this
must not be used as an excuse to get angry any time you want.
Lack
of money is a much bigger problem when your relationship with
that lack is not healthy. If your relationship with it is healthy,
money can be acquired. Likewise, the notion of death is far more
problematic if your relationship with it is unhealthy. Our difficulties
with other people generally have more to do with our unhealthy
Relationship with… than with the flaws of the other
person.
It
is a relationship with life in general. It is not the result of
a philosophy. It is a physiological state that births an appropriate
philosophy for any given situation. For example, Steve longed
to be wealthy. His longing was at first so intense that it crippled
him. He resented people with wealth and was so overwhelmed by
his lack of it that he couldn’t move forward. The whole
problem seemed too huge. The wealth he longed for seemed so far
away that to work toward it seemed hopeless. As a result, he lived
his life in devastation, psychologically impaired by his unhealthy
relationship with money.
In
contrast, a healthy relationship with the desire for money enables
the person to take a long-term, methodical approach to acquiring
wealth. When the relationship with money is healthy, the longing
for it inspires one to move forward in a practical manner.
Greed
too, can be another unhealthy relationship with the desire for
wealth. Greed for wealth can be the seed for irrational attempts
to attain it. Greed can alienate you from the people who would
otherwise assist you in attaining wealth. What an unhealthy relationship
with money or anything else looks like is highly individual. In
the case of desire for wealth, things such as greed, fear, resentment,
preoccupation, sense of personal failure, pride and superiority
can all be examples of an unhealthy relationship with money.
Think
of a problem you have in your life. Ask yourself what your relationship
with that problem is. How does that relationship compound the
problem? How does it retard your progress? How does it interfere
with your resolution to the problem?
Oftentimes
one’s relationship with a problem is so unhealthy that it
puts one in a doublebind with no perceivable solution. For example,
let’s say you see yourself as able to handle any problem
that comes your way. If a big problem occurs, it might be tempting
to try to be more than you are (superhuman) and also feel like
no one can know that you’re not really on top of things.
It’s a no-win situation with no perceivable solution.
Taking
the time to develop a healthy relationship with something can
be far more beneficial than trying to change that something. Paradoxically,
shifting your relationship with “the way something is”
can be the most powerful means by which you can transform that
something.
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