Divine practices and guidelines for maintaining healthy relationships


Q:  What are some of the divine practices and guidelines for maintaining a healthy relationship?
 
A:  It is very important to remember, first and foremost, this Universal Law:   There is nothing, and there is no one, outside of self. Your partner, just like everyone else on the planet, is you—the reflection of the many authentic and inauthentic parts of you. The concept of blame, projection, and finger-pointing has to be eradicated from your consciousness, from your life, and from your practices. Without that, your relationship is either:  a) doomed; b) going nowhere; or c) you will call it something that it is not and pretend that it is more than it is. You will never attain a true state of divine union and bliss if you are blaming, judging, and projecting onto your partner. There is no one there. It’s just you.
 
Secondly, it is important to be always in the spirit of compassion, forgiveness, patience, and tolerance. You need to bring these divine qualities to your relationship. If you want to have a divine relationship, then it has to have divine qualities. The more patience, tolerance, compassion, forgiveness, sacrifice, and selflessness you’re willing to bring into the relationship, the more divine it will become. This applies to almost everyone; even the best of relationships will, on occasion, have differences of opinion which might even take the form of altercations or arguments.
 
One of the golden rules of settling skirmishes, disturbances, or fallouts in relationships is what I call “avoiding the use of ammunition.” By “ammunition” I mean once something has been resolved, forgiven, and settled, and you have come to new agreements and recreated yourselves on that issue, you can never go back and use that as ammunition the next time. Let’s say that you had an argument:  you argued over who squeezes the toothpaste in the middle. You hash that out, you come to a new agreement, and you both make a promise:  a) for one of you not to judge; and b) the other one not to squeeze the tube in the middle. If it happens again, “using ammunition” is to come back with, “You always do that.” Those types of statements, the “You always…” or “It’s always been like this,” are arsenic to a relationship. If you do that, you are better off alone. It is a great violation of another human being to keep dragging up the past because you prevent that person from recreating him or herself.
 
Address what is on the table now. It doesn’t mean that all those other times don’t matter and don’t count, but that is a separate discussion. If, in your personal assessment within your own heart, you recognize that there is a pattern here that:  a) has never changed; b) is unlikely to change; c) it seems clear to you that your partner has no interest in changing; and d) the all-important one, it’s more than you are able to live with—then you have another discussion:  “Do I really want to be in this relationship?” Is it a deal breaker or not?
 
What are the things that you absolutely cannot live with? What are the things you’d rather not live with? What are the things that you can turn a blind eye toward? What are the things that are really not that a big a deal that you’ve been making a bigger deal out of? You have to be more mature and more honest and then you have to live by that moral code.
 
Sacrifice is also very important:  What are you willing to sacrifice and what you are not willing to sacrifice? You need to be honest with yourself. You can’t have everything your way. The wind does not blow the same direction every day. To expect that of someone else is very unfair and it’s unrealistic. It is certainly a road to unhappiness. When you make sacrifices for the ones you love, it helps inculcate within you the divine trait of selflessness, which is one of the noblest traits there is. Humility is born of selfless love.

Above all, the most important element to sustain and foster your love in partnership is to have honest, open communication between you two. If the honesty or communication breaks down, the end of the relationship is inevitable.

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