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.
© Michael Mamas, 1/06 |
