Everything Is Relationship
Here is what I mean when I say everything is relationship:
I bought some new bowls. 8 of them. They each had two stickers on the bottom, pain in the ass stickers with perforations to make them more difficult to remove.
The removal of each sticker required painstaking honor and reverence for the relationships involved. The strength of the paper, the adhesive properties of the glue, the locations of the perforations and connections, the resistance of the bowl’s surface, the portions of sticker I had already unstuck, hovering dangerously near the bowl again.
My own goddamn waning patience.
e v e r y t h i n g is relationship. Everything is in relationship, and every single thing is a wholeness built of relationships.
Developing acuity with relationships will change every facet of your life. Treating every challenge in your life as a challenge of relationship will provide you the tools you need to navigate and transcend those challenges and learn a ton in the process.
I started calling myself a love coach, because the result of shoring up your relationship skills is experiencing steady and continuous love, and because when I said that I’m a relationship coach, people thought I meant I only work with couples.
I teach skills and truths about relationships of all kinds. Romantic relationship is a convenient and relatable allegory I use often, but in my work I am often helping people see truths about themselves via their relationship to their work, business, or mission, their family, the parts within themselves, and their politics.
By working with me, people come to apply effective tools, complete truths, and exquisite skills in their relationship with themselves—their values, their standards, their flaws, their assumptions, their projections, their definitions.
Romantic relationships are one viewing angle for the relationships within ourselves, but any relationship with the outside world has something to show us about our relationship to self. Relationships with the world externalize our relationship with self in a way we can’t ignore, in a way we can grasp, visualize, experience at the correct distance. If your face was the tv screen, it would be hard for you to watch tv. This is why we have relationships, this is why distinction is valuable and necessary.
Without distinction there is no experience. The oneness is ecstasy, but we are not there in this moment, and it’s not necessarily a more valuable or ecstatic state than clear distinction. Skillful, clean, conscious experience of distinction is aliveness, play, excitement, rawness, authenticity, connection. It is not necessarily comfortable, but the good news is it doesn’t have to be comfortable to be enjoyable.
It’s the ride we are on—might as well ride it.