Tag: relationships

Relationships & Honesty

The healthiest relationships and friendships are not necessarily the ones that look happiest to the naked eye.

They aren’t necessarily the ones where two people are always found holding hands, giggling, dancing and singing with the butterflies on Instagram, where nothing ever goes wrong and love is beautiful and blissful and perfect.

External ‘perfection’ can easily mask internal devastation, disconnection and that awful, unspoken desperation to be free.

The healthiest relationships are the honest ones. And they might not look so ‘happy’ or ‘carefree’ from the outside. They might not fit the image of what a relationship ‘should’ or ‘must’ look or feel like.

Here, two people tell the honest, painful truth about today, and continually let go of all their preconceived ideas about each other. The relationship is forever renewed in the furnace of authenticity. There may be ruptures, misunderstandings, even intense feelings of doubt and disconnection, but there is a mutual willingness to face this seeming mess head-on! To look – with open eyes – at the present rupture, and not turn away or cling to the past. To sit together in the midst of mutual shattered dreams and expectations, and work to find a place of reconnection, here, now, today.

Here, relationship is seen as the ultimate yoga – an ongoing and ever-deepening adventure and rediscovery of each other, a constant letting-go and a constant meeting! Love is not a future destination, conclusion, point of arrival, or a convenient story to tell others. Love is alive.

As Eckhart Tolle says, relationships aren’t here to make us happy – for true happiness lies within. They’re here to make us profoundly conscious.

To break us, to humble us, to make us whole again.

~ Jeff Foster

Joni Mitchell – Monogamy

wise words.

“I don’t know if I’ve learned anything yet! I did learn how to have a happy home, but I consider myself fortunate in that regard because I could’ve rolled right by it. Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line.

“But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over.

“You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.”

~ Joni Mitchell.

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photo by Annie Leibovitz

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