Hi everyone, welcome back! A couple of weeks ago I examined whether we should allow other people to walk all over us and mistreat us just because we are trying to be more mindful. This week, I want to examine our beliefs about relationships, personal as well as professional, because it seems to me that they are the biggest cause of dissatisfaction and unhappiness in our lives and somehow they tie back to our desire for standing up for ourselves.
Belief: How I feel is completely dependent on how others make me feel!
Long time ago, I once heard someone famous quote “the real gain is in mending a broken relationship instead of completely breaking it”. At the time when I heard this quote, I completely agreed with its wisdom and was fully convinced that the most important thing in life is a ‘relationship’ and also that it’s very important to save any relationship, personal or professional, by doing whatever it takes to make it somehow work! However, now that I have lived at least a decade more of my own life since I heard this quote and have seen other people live their own lives as well, although, I still continue believe that there is immense value in relationships, however, for me personally, the way I define a relationship has changed completely. In the past, I defined a relationship as an exchange of energy between 2 or more people and I don’t think I am going out on a limb when I say that most human beings define relationships this way. However, my biggest learning in all these years has been that there is one more relationship which I had no clue about – my relationship with my own self! And this is ‘the most important relationship’ which lays the foundation for my entire life! It defines whether I will be successful in my personal relationships with other people, whether I will be successful in my professional relationships, whether I will live my best life or not! So, let’s first explore what does having a relationship with our own self looks like and then understand how it can help us live our best lives.
This is how I understand my relationship with my own self. Having a relationship with my own self means that I am able to love myself even though other people around me think I am unlovable. Having a relationship with my own self means that I am able to encourage myself even though other people are too distracted to give me that encouragement. Having a relationship with my own self means that I am able to praise myself even though other people don’t see a thing in me that they can praise. Having a relationship with my own self means that I am able to forgive myself for the mistakes that I make even though others can’t find reasons to forgive me. Having a relationship with my own self means that I am able to show myself all the kindness in the world even though others don’t show me that kindness. And when I am able to live this way and love this way and be kind and forgiving to my own self, I will stop looking for all these things from these other people that I am in relationships with and as a result my cup of life will be full with goodness and happiness and I won’t be dependent on other people for my own happiness. And when my cup is full, I will not by very ‘needy’ of other people’s love or kindness or encouragement or praise or anything else for that matter. Thus, I will stop needing other people to ‘make me feel good’ which is what holds us back from living our best possible life – needing all these things from other people to make us feel happy and peaceful and loving and worthy! Now, I will have the opportunity to make myself happy!
I know some of you or maybe a lot of you would be thinking, what is the point in having any kind of relationship with anyone else then if we can simply live happily just by having a relationship with our own self. Well, there is! This is my take on it. So, if you already have an amazing relationship with your own self and you don’t need other people who you are in relationships with to behave certain ways to make you happy, you give them the space to be themselves and because you give them that space, they don’t feel controlled and manipulated and as a result don’t feel the need to constantly defend themselves and stand up for themselves. And folks, this is exactly the reason why anyone even thinks about standing up for themselves – because they feel controlled and manipulated and they don’t like it! But I know that even if you have gained all this wisdom on how important it is to have an amazing relationship with your own self, yet, this other person that you happen to be in a relationship with may not have acquired that kind of wisdom, or they may have come across this wisdom but they choose not to believe it, then, that may be the time to quit that relationship because life is too short to spend with people who make you feel less than you who really are. Don’t you think?
I am not kidding but the first time I heard about having a relationship with my own self, I could hardly understand it let alone believe in the power that it gives the person who tries to live this way. And I could not understand it because I was not raised this way and I know most of us are neither. But then, our parents and their parents and so on were also not raised with this understanding. So, my hope as I end today’s post is that not only will I practice living this way with myself but my daughter will also learn from my practice and in time, it may very well become the best gift I ever gave her!
And as always, feel free to leave a comment, if you feel like leaving one. And until next Friday, live life 🙂
