From Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God:
“There is a way to be happy in a relationship, and that is to use it for its true purpose, rather than for a purpose you have invented for yourself…
Relationships are a constant challenge; they constantly call you to create, express, and experience ever-higher aspects of yourself—ever more expansive ideas of yourself, ever more magnificent versions of yourself. There is no place where you can achieve this more directly, more flawlessly, and with greater impact than in your relationships with others. In fact, without relationships with others, you cannot achieve this at all…
Once you understand this clearly, once you grasp it deeply within yourself, you will intuitively bless every experience, every encounter, and especially personal human relationships, because you will see them in their highest meaning as creative…
When human love relationships fail (relationships never truly fail except from a strictly human point of view, when they have not led to what you wanted), they fail because you entered into them in the wrong way.
Most people enter love relationships looking at what they can get from them, rather than what they can contribute to them.
The purpose of relationships is to decide which part of yourself you would like to bring forth, not which part of the other you can seize and hold…
It is not about having someone to complete you, but about having someone with whom you can share your wholeness.
Let each person in a relationship be concerned with the Self—what one is, what one does, what one has, what one seeks, creates, and experiences—and then all relationships will wonderfully fulfill their purpose and serve those involved…. Let each person in relationships be concerned not with the other, but only, only, only with oneself…
The day will come when you will no longer be hurt.
That will be the day you establish and understand the true purpose of relationships and the true reason for them. This is part of the evolutionary process.”
— Neale Donald Walsch
A beautiful lesson from the “lessons of love”: be concerned only with yourself and with which part of yourself you would like to express in a given relationship.
A clarification from me: often, the part that is being called forth to be expressed in a given relationship is precisely the part we do not want to express, because we do not want to be “bad.” Yet the purpose of relationships is to be a mirror for ourselves, and it is good to see all our parts in that mirror, not only the pleasant ones.
And if you still find it difficult to decide which part is being called forth to be expressed, simply choose to be real. Authentic truthfulness is not easy at all.
∗ Translation from the Bulgarian website.
