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Relationships
Relationship Magic
The Book Brigade talks to spiritual guide Guy Finley.
Posted February 14, 2019
What is the purpose of a relationship? In their mutuality, and because of it, the best relationships become the mechanisms through which we can perfect ourselves as individuals. In that view, even failed relationships have their value.
Let’s start with the title. Creating a wonderful relationship isn’t magic; it takes awareness and often internal and interpersonal work. So what is the title intended to tell readers?
Relationships are mirrors, revealing in us qualities light and dark, high and low, some delightful and others self-compromising and self-limiting. Our relationships become magical as we realize that whatever remains concealed within us can’t be healed, and that our partner—our mirror in each moment—is actually the agent of these revelations that alone can release us from our limitation. Our resulting freedom not only liberates us but also liberates our relationship from its former boundary, allowing both of us to grow into better, more loving people.
How is truth related to love?
More than anything else, relationships serve a great single end: the ongoing revelation of the truth of ourselves. Our willingness to honestly examine what we presently love—and what we are becoming because of our relationship with it—is the beginning of not only learning to love what is truly gracious, forever good, and kind but also of loving to realize these truths about ourselves, whatever their nature. More than this, one cannot ask for; less than this is to miss the purpose of having been given life.
What role do you see relationships playing in individual growth?
The universe is set up to help us succeed with our wish to realize the next level of consciousness; in short, to grow into successively higher levels of being. A relationship is the vessel of that journey—a ceaselessly changing vehicle that shows us the need to grow beyond our present level of understanding while delivering the vital self-revelations that make our growth possible.
What is “full responsibility” for one’s relationship—and how does one take it?
Taking full responsibility for our relationships begins with recognizing that resentment, fear, and regret choke the life out of our chance to unconditionally love one another. Further, we must realize that running through these old patterns—while holding others accountable for the pain in them—utterly fails. Acknowledging this truth initiates the birth of being fully responsible for our relationships, realizing, if we wish to have true harmonious relationships with others, then it is we who must change.
What do bad relationships have to teach people, and what is a productive way to look at a bad relationship?
It is not in our power to change the nature of our partners in life. On the other hand, as their nature reveals in us what it inevitably does, those revelations empower us to change ourselves. Relationships, especially difficult ones, show us aspects of our own consciousness that would otherwise remain invisible, but, used properly, they can help reveal and then release us from parts of us we can see no longer serve us. This illumination is our liberation from any troubling relationship, whether with others...or ourselves!
What is the most important thing to know about love?
First: there is no self outside of a relationship, and relationships are how love expresses itself in this universe. Second: Our relationships not only reveal truths about us but, with each successive revelation give us to see that whatever quality we’re now aware of within us has always been in us; we just didn’t know it. In this way, we’re reunited with ourselves, self-realized by agreeing to let love show us our native wholeness. Love often shows us what is unloving within us, much as the light of the sun creates shadows. To understand this is to realize that even in the darkest moment of some unwanted revelation, we are never without love; it is always there, even if—as clouds sometimes hide the sun —it is momentarily obscured by our negative reaction to what we’ve been shown (about ourselves).
What do you consider the most surprising thing about love?
One of my favorite quotations is by George Washington Carver. He teaches: "If you love something enough, it will talk to you." Whatever we love will give us knowledge of itself, allowing us, as if by magic, an intimate understanding of it attainable in no other way. Therefore we find in the object of our affection not only something of ourselves but also that proverbial missing piece of our perennially empty heart.
Love seems to go bad so often in our culture, creating a great deal of misery. To what do you attribute so much wreckage; do people approach love with wrong expectations about it?
The main reason many relationships fail is the single—almost inescapable—false belief that our partner is responsible for our happiness. When they inevitably fail to live up to this impossible expectation, any fault in the relationship is easily blamed on them. The "magic" returns to our relationship as we realize the real culprit in our conflict with others is some impossible expectation we’ve placed upon them. As we see this and assume responsibility for our own negative reactions, resentment, and misunderstanding move out while new self-understanding moves in.
Blaming a partner for one’s own pain—so common, so counter to getting closer to love. Why do people do it, and what’s a better way?
Negative emotions cannot exist without having someone or something to blame for their punishing presence. The real root of our sorrow in life is not over what others have or have not done to us; our continuing stress over the "shortcomings" of others is simply what we have yet to understand about ourselves.
Refusing to blame another turns us into an objective witness of our own superheated emotions. From the safety of this higher awareness, we see about ourselves what we couldn’t see before because of all the inner fire and smoke. Now conscious of our actual inner condition, we “look before we leap” into any further mistaken conclusions. Taking this conscious pause—neither expressing nor suppressing any irritated thought or feeling—lifts us above the level of self that’s the real cause of our combustibility. Our self-command is not only restored but heightened.
Great relationships foster growth—of both individuals and of the relationship itself. How to foster that?
It is in conscious relationships that we gradually grow—individually—into all that is self-sufficient and good, because it is through them that we become stronger and wiser, allowing us to transcend our unseen self-limiting level of self. What this means is that wherever a relationship unfolds (marriage, family, job, etc.), it is always here and now that we need to work. Nothing speeds up our inner work better than working with someone who helps us realize the need for change! The closer the relationship, the more likely this dynamic exists. Our wish to work inwardly does not depend upon the compliance of anyone else, nor can any other human being impede it.
In a way, we are each both a jewel in the rough and the jeweler's wheel, all at once. One moment we are being acted upon asked to see facets of ourselves that need to be polished; a heartbeat later, roles are reversed, and we are the wheel that reveals what needs to be healed in our partner. This is what love has always intended for us to do and to be with each other: to work as polishing stones so that each of us exits the moment of relationship more perfected than we entered into it. The more we understand and agree to embrace these roles and their revelations, the more magical all our relationships become.
About THE AUTHOR SPEAKS: Selected authors, in their own words, reveal the story behind the story. Authors are featured thanks to promotional placement by their publishing houses.
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