Winner: 2015’s Blog of the Year #7
Are you a couple with issues? Not violence or psychological torture, just some serious issues. Do you see the same problems coming up over and over and over? Do you want them settled once and for all? It doesn’t seem unreasonable to want someone to understand and appreciate your view of something and then respond to it does it? So what do you do?
I actually have super-good news for you. As I’ve been able to demonstrate with lots of other couples, this problem can in fact disappear in no time flat. But they can also reappear just as quickly and easily. The fortunate part is–that’s all up to you.
Think of your consciousness as a jar of water. When it’s clear you can see in every direction clearly. But every single jar on this Earth has a bit of sediment at the bottom left over from its creation–from its childhood. These are things that interfere with the clear functioning of our consciousness.
The inevitable occurrence of challenging circumstances will jostle our little jar and cause some of that busy thinking to float up into our consciousness. But we must remain calm and understand it belongs there as an aspect of the jar and it will naturally settle again if left alone.
If we battle against these reactions, if we want and desire and otherwise agitate our consciousness in an attempt to shake it out of us, we only serve to further decrease our clarity and further block our view of the outside world. At the same time, to the outside world we only look darker, more chaotic and less inviting.
A relationship is two jars sitting touching each other. When things are good and calm it’s easy for each jar to capture the light travelling through the other jar. This is the light of the very universe itself and we see it filtered through a person we love clearly. Our vision of that light is at the heart of our feelings of love.
If we develop an egocentric personal sense of events around us then we begin to think that our partner’s sediment is our sediment. We then begin to shake ourselves in order to shake them in the vain hope that this new-to-us sediment will go away. We start to think the agitated sediment shouldn’t be there, rather than the truth; which is that we must accept that it is there and understand our role in agitating it into something we now have to deal with, just as our partner must contend with the messy details of our childhood.
In relationships the sediment gets called a problem. And rather than accepting what is, we all want to fix the problem. But there is no fix for the sediment there is only acceptance. Because every time you try and make it go away you’ll only serve to agitate it further. It’s like trying to pat down water waves to make them go away. It just makes them worse.
The best example I know of this is when a couple argues over something that happened the previous day. Okay, so it’s already happened. You can’t go back in time and unmake it happen. But people will often wake up the next morning, see the sediment from the previous day lying there inert, and instead of leaving it alone they’ll shake the other jar, activate the sediment and then blame the partner! There is nothing to fix. Nothing to sort out. Nothing to be understood. It’s crazy. It would have just laid and done zero damage if the person wouldn’t have shaken it.
There are no actual problems in relationships. There are only current agitations of thought created by the desire to live within a different reality. But until that thought-based cloudy thinking settles, our own light and the light of our partner will be obscured. The more we shake it to be different the darker everything will get.
Accept that your partner has sediments just like you do, and accept that those get agitated occasionally by life. That’s not something being wrong, that’s being alive. You don’t fix that. You calmly know that by doing nothing things will naturally settle and that the light you see in your partner will always return. Because after all, that light isn’t actually them. When it’s unconditional love what you’re seeing is the undisturbed light that’s at the heart of the very universe itself.
Have a wonderful day.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is a writer, mindfulness instructor and communications facilitator who works with individuals, companies and nonprofit organizations around the world.
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.