relationship

Treat your business relationships like friendships (or potential friendships).  Formality puts up walls, and walls don’t foster good business relationships.  No one is loyal to a wall… except the one in China.

It has become fashionable in therapy circles to hold two beliefs: (a) You can't change another person, only yourself; and (b) you shouldn't change yourself for a relationship or for another person... [But] we change each other all the time.  People change for those they love quite often... The relationships that call forth positive change are those that provide a ground of accepting the person... Relationships can illuminate flaws in one's approach to life by exposing one to other ways of thinking and doing things... [Through relationships] we can learn to recognize and change deeply unconscious patterns.

Making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool, the essence of human intelligence; to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationships, context.

 As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

 You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer; into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.

The truth is that we have all come from love, but our relationships have often been a detour from love… Love is the river, each human being a droplet of water, and together, in spite of our fears and resistance, we are returning to love, melting and flowing toward home. We’re all looking for more love. It’s that simple. In the end, nothing else really matters to us. In the beginning and in the middle, we’re connected with the forms of our relationships, what they look like, what our parents think of them, how they stack up in the eyes of the world, and whether we’re getting our share of the goodies: sexually, emotionally, and financially.

But in the end, we won’t care about the forms. The forms will be as multitudinous as the stars and all that will matter is the love that was in them. No one can escape the divine upheaval of love. I haven’t; you won’t; our neighbors and strangers and family won’t either. Love is coming to find us. All of us. Because love is our essence. Love is who we are.

~ Daphne Rose Kingma, "The Future of Love" ~

The future of love is true love, a great, sweet love that isn’t pain but joy, not small, but vast, not personal but spiritual. This is where we are going; this is our true destination. Our relationships are creating themselves in wild, new, beautiful, and terribly upsetting forms. They are creating demanding experiences that are necessary for us to expand as human beings and as spirits. All our relationships are in the process of melting, if not from without – as the form of marriage itself is dissolving – then from within, where we ourselves are melting down.

The soul is shifting our relationship focus from form to content, from rigidity to flexibility, from containment to expensiveness, from our emotional needs to love.

Love is a mighty power. It is light. It is the energy of life. It brings us into life and sustains us while we live and breathe. Love is an energy, not a substance. It is essence, not matter. You can’t contain it; you can't put it in a box, but you can feel it, taste it, and know it. Its presence is unmistakable. It is exquisite and profound. And when you are in love, nobody, not your best friend, your parents, or even your own parents, or even your own mind can talk you out of it.
~ Daphne Rose Kingma, "The Future of Love" ~

Love is mysterious and beautiful. It makes us happy, gives us hope, allows us to believe that the impossible can happen. And yet, it's inexplicable. It can't be defined or analyzed, catalogued or priced. Its premier property is that when it exists, it can never be mistaken for anything else, and nothing else, no matter how worthwhile or supposedly grand, can ever be passed off as love.