Relationship by Jocelyn Graef: Part 5 in Great Awakening
Welcome. We are Li Chen. We are wishing now to speak to you about relationship.
This is the greatest aspect of your life. When you are peeling back all the layers of issues and concerns, dramas and events, interests and projects, you are left with the primary element of why you are in corporeal experience — relationship.
The personal truth of this is revealed in your stance to the world, your society, your community, those intimate with you, your relationship with self and ultimately God. All these interactions and attitudes are the result of your views and beliefs about what you are experiencing in your life. Fundamentally your experiences are viewed through the filter of how you are feeling and believing about yourself and God.
If you are perceiving that God is a great force outside of yourself, with no internal connection to you, you are made vulnerable by this belief. You are driven on your deepest subconscious level to seek a greater joining with those others who are outside of self. You look for deeper understanding of self through others. This is instinctive response to heal the perceived separation of individual experience as well as to procreate and be in community.
You were never intended to be alone in this world, for you cannot be alone through any aspect of life in body or beyond. In truth you are not now or ever alone. You carry God deeply within you. It is the source within you that gives you life. This source is also within all there is. Cannot be otherwise. This is your heritage.
If you are wishing to understand your deepest beliefs about your relationship with Godself, look outward to your relationships with all others and you will find your answer. The people immediately around you are your mirror to self and God. It is in your interacting with them that you will find the answer of where your fundamental relationship quality is lying.
If you are finding yourself in constant conflict with others, this is the reflection of conflict with self on deeper level. If you are seeking to heal others, this reflects desire to heal self. If you are desiring to teach others, this reflects desire to learn. And so on.
If you desire to have a greater understanding of what you are feeling about self, examine your responses to your world. Is world perceived as “evil” place? Are you feeling most vulnerable and fearful always about your safety? Are you feeling that if you “let down your guard” you will be damaged somehow? Go deeper. Understand that the picture you are seeing of the world is a direct reflection of your deepest beliefs.
Life as you live it, as you see it, is a direct acting out of your beliefs in order to come to a deeper understanding of self and your belief about and relationship to God. Your life view is a great mirror to self on deepest level. If your beliefs are not serving you, making your life more joyful, you have the choice to change your beliefs. This may not be easy, but is within your power and ability to achieve. When your beliefs are aligned with a greater truth the result can only be a deep joy and sense of connectedness with all that is. Let us look now at specific example.
Here we have woman who has great fear for her safety. She is feeling very vulnerable in all aspects of her life. She is living alone for she does not trust any man. She does not have close friendships for she does not trust people to not hurt her in some way. Her house and car are having many burglar alarms for she fears that people are only desiring to take from her. When she is ill she is seeking only medical machinery for diagnosis, and pills for treatment for she does not trust people to be accurate. She never allows any to touch her through massage for she fears their foreign energy will taint her.
Obviously this is a woman in great fear. Her experiences in life directly reflect and — to her thinking — support and validate her fears. She is only one in her neighborhood who has burglar system, yet she is only one who is robbed. Everywhere she is going she is seeing theft and crime of some sort. Therefore, world is not safe place. Must protect herself from robbers and attackers. When she is ill she is rarely seeking healing for she does not believe in the healing ability of others. What she herself does not possess she cannot allow others to possess. She cannot allow herself to believe she feels lack for then she must seek fulfillment. She is believing herself to be enlightened spiritual woman, yet she is avoiding any technique or situation that will take her more deeply within herself. She is not yet ready to break through her fortress of “protection” for this requires a trust and faith she does not yet possess. How to resolve this?
When there is aspect within her, recognized consciously or not, that is ready for a shifting, a releasing of her fears, she will experience something that will force her to be trusting of someone else. What she cannot give herself through seeking she will give herself in experience in the world. This will not be easy. She is knowing that her life is not working for her, for there is only distrust and fear. She has tried to seek growth but it always triggers fear and she runs away. She is fearing fear.
We have great compassion for this one for she is in such a darkness she seeks to protect herself from all. She is disconnected from self and has not the discernment to find her way. This will be healed in its time — coming soon — in a way that will give her no option than to rely on others. It will not be happy time for her, yet it will be the beginning of her healing. It will break for her the pattern of rejecting others (self) and allow her to see the greater truth of compassion and deeper connection to all.
There have been endless opportunities in this one’s life to accept the love that abounds within and with out. Because she has denied the opportunities to heal this greatest of her issues, it will be given to her in a way that will give her no possibility but to accept the beginning of her healing; to put her in a situation she fears most — vulnerability — so she can experience the kindness and love through others actions that she deeply longs for.
Her spiritual group that surrounds her is most loving and patient. They are dedicated to her success in achieving this goal that she has chosen to come and attain. This will be done in one way or another. It will be done at the time that she will be able to receive this as the gift it is, for if the lesson were given before she had ability to receive it, it would merely be wasted. Therefore, her spiritual teachers await the perfect moment of opportunity to give her this gift. Her final breakdown will be the greatest blessing of her life.
This is a small story of one who has no faith. It is her expression of her lack of trust in self/God that serves to show her this truth. Because she has no conscious understanding of this fact does not preclude her from her healing. Because her assistance is great, the likelihood of her success in greater joining and softening this resistance is also great.
Understand, however, that because of the active participation of free will, there is also the possibility that she will choose not to respond in a way that will open her to begin the healing process. This is her choice. If she fails in her mission to resolve this issue in the present lifetime, there will be other opportunities in other lives, for God guarantees a successful resolution for each of you.
Let us now look at a couple who are married to each other. Woman longs for the man husband was when they were courting — the man who is bringing flowers and listening with hunger to her words and stories. Man longs for the woman he married, for she no longer seems the tender and attentive woman who is so understanding and encouraging of who he is.
This is perhaps the most common of all scenarios in married life. There is a longing for the tender moments of awakening to the discovery of each other. This is a reflection of clinging to illusion as truth. A demand that what you are desiring be a static condition of your experience. This is a disappointment born of a shallow expectation. Where there is expectation there will always be disappointment, for these are sides of one coin. Expectation is quite different from foreknowledge, when one is simply KNOWING what will come.
Going deeper here, there is on both sides a lack of honoring self. Each partner is expecting fulfillment and care from the other one while not giving the effort to achieve this in their own inner life. This is resulting in a spiraling downward into greater disappointment and an acting out of this emotion in sharp words and actions and a widening emotional distance.
To stabilize and infuse this relationship once again with joy, it will be necessary for each one to honor their own deepest needs, quite apart from the other. If, for example, woman is artist, she must once again begin to give herself more time for her work, as she was doing before she was married. She must draw her boundaries of what she is needing for her personal enrichment and honor them for herself, as well as requiring others to honor them. This is no small task as she will find out.
By putting forth the effort to create the arena where her creative needs will be met, she comes to a greater understanding of the responsibility and work involved in feeding a relationship. Her relationship with self. Will then be far easier for her to honor her husband’s needs and interests, for she is knowing first-hand now what is involved.
Same thing for husband, with a different approach. Husband has always found it easy to seek self-fulfillment, for this has long been male position in relationship as expressed in patriarchal societies. By understanding the gift of encouragement that is given by his partner to his time alone or with friends, there will be a greater appreciation of the giving and likely the response of encouraging woman to seek that which fulfills her. A greater appreciation, a deeper honoring of self, always results in an intensified compassion and encouraging of others.
There is an opportunity here for each to awaken to aspects of themselves as shown by the other. For woman to awaken to and bring forward those qualities that previously were encouraged in men and prohibited in women — standing firm, making decisions on own, going forth to achieve, etc. And for man to awaken and bring forth those qualities previously encouraged in women and ridiculed in men — giving support and encouragement, care and feeding of others on many levels, sometimes giving up activities to fulfill need of partner or children, etc.
As the roles of gender have become more defined through the ages, there has been a gradual growing apart of shared territory and commonality, resulting in an imbalance within both genders. Both are needing the qualities of the other. This imbalance is being reflected in the world, as it has always done, yet is no longer supporting or serving the common good or societal structure as whole. This has been recognized in recent times, and women have been struggling to demand a greater balance.
For those who are feeling trapped within their gender — predominantly females who are increasingly required to take on many of the more traditionally male responsibilities in their lives — this is glaringly apparent, for this is their personal issue. Therefore it is the issue they are noticing most in the world.
Also time now for those in power in the world to accept and use to a greater degree these feminine qualities that have for so long been hidden and muffled. Time to bring them forward to help in the growing and emergence of a more balanced and gentle and compassionate world.
There is no degree of engaging with the world that does not directly reflect entire gamut of relationship. The essence of this, as always, is your relationship with God/self. Easy to say that the great majority of you have issues with God. As you heal this, you will find yourself living in a world that is not cruel and difficult and painful, but a world that is filled with joy and possibility and compassion and blessing.
Jocelyn Graef can be contacted through email at jegraef@comcast.net
Great Awakening: Part 1 by Jocelyn Graef
Great Awakening: Part 2 by Jocelyn Graef