I Trust That Every Relationship Is a Perfect Assignment
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I trust that every relationship is a perfect assignment Good morning and happy beautiful Day 40 + welcome to Relationships Week. This week the video lectures are simply about tools and teachings to work through dicult relationships and societal constructs. There is no real homework because you are doing this every second of every day most of the time—just look at most of the posts on the Facebook or recall any conversation from a Lab or Q&& call and you'll see we've been working on relationship shit since Day 0. But this week we go deep into how to work with the "Other People Things" and I also pair the emails and mantras with the work. Which is another way of saying: This week all the mantras are about relationships, some of them are taken directly from the lecture, and the homework is to try and apply these mantras as much as you possibly can this week. The work is using our lives to unfold the lessons. Fun right? I want to add one thing to this before we go into the story to set up this mantra (which is about me and the woman I at one point had the worst relationship with, and, through intentional work, now have one of the best relationships with). I’ve had some tough years, post sobriety, in terms of friendship and I've struggled with some of the friendships that actually came on line ater I stopped drinking. Much of it came to a head in early 2018, and so much of it resembled my old shit. My friend Scott Stabile who is basically like The Buddha called me on a day when those friendships were coming undone and I was cominghttps://turningmypage.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/challenge-accepted/ undone, and I moaned about how insane it was that ater I'd done so much work in all my relationships, I got what feels like the biggest fuck you from the universe. I told him that I felt like I wasn't grown up as I thought I was, that I felt like I was in this relentless skid backwards. To which he said something like: "It doesn't sound like you're going back. It sounds like your capacity to grow and stretch is getting bigger." He was right. I don't like conflict, I don't have much drama in my life these days when it comes to friendship relationships, I am careful to surround myself with people that I can process with and grow with. And yet trouble still finds me. And it's not because I'm some weirdo who can't really relate to people or some devil of a bitch who goes through people and friends (though these are always my first thoughts, because they are my first stories). It's because the Universe loves us so much that it wants to see us grow and liberate ourselves, and one of the best ways it knows how to do that is to send people our way that will bust us in the ways we need to be busted; or at least people who bust the parts of us that need to be*. I love you. Let's get some shit healed this week. H __________________________ February 14th, 2016. Today, I hung out with my sister and her family, and about 329 miracles took place. At 9:58 A.M., two minutes before the time I had promised to arrive at her house, she texted me, noting that per the GPS-enabled tracker of me on her phone, I was clearly going to be late, and had ruined our planned outing to the Starbucks. At 11 A.M., standing in a church, I teared up at the sound of the choir as she watched me, smugly, still ever-amused by my inability to hold back tears over consequential things like people singing, or the ending of the movie Overboard when Goldie Hawn swims for Kurt Russell. At 11:15 A.M., she asked me to make sure my niece Elia didn't fall climbing a tree, and as Elia stumbled to the ground face first, she mentioned something about my incompetence with children (13 times). At 12:45 P.M., I made the mistake of explaining to her that her post-birth TummyTightner would only make her gain weight, and at around 2pm, on the way to lunch, ater correcting her about how The Secret *actually* works, she informed her husband that they didn't need to think anymore because I knew everything. Over heart-shaped pizza, she laid on a guilt trip for not taking my mom with me when I travel (which worked, I took my mom to Rome), and reminded me Mom doesn't have forever!, as I reminded her that her baby could feel her stress which would most likely lead to his irreparable neurochemical damage. This is how we work. We're dierent. Completely dierent. But also, terribly similar. We are know-it-alls and we both know how each other should live our respective lives and we share these things with each other, impulsively, compulsively, matter-of-factly, unabashedly. So the miracles? The miracle? For the greater part of our lives this kept us apart, or needing to be drunk in each other's presence to not break things over each other's heads, or led to the breaking of things over each other's heads (seriously). But today? They are smirk-inducing. Quaint. Maddening. And perfect. I didn't leave lunch today thinking what a magnificent bitch my sister is. I let in love, in awe of how terribly lucky I am to be part of her life, and how no one gets me like she does. Sobriety is by far the best thing I have ever done in my life. But my relationship with her and the work that got us from her telling me things such as I would always be fucked up and I couldn't "yoga my way out of it" (when I was nine months sober) and how much she didn't want me in her kid's lives (when I was ten months sober), and me telling her things that I can't repeat here because it won't make it through your spam filters without alerting the NSA, to today, is probably the most important work I have done. Because it doesn't just end with our good (and severely dicult) relationship. The work I have done with her and for her, and the work I have done in general, extends to every relationship I have on the face of this earth. This week, we're diving into exploring some tools to help use relationships to our advantage, and to navigate social dynamics in sobriety. It's probably one of the areas that I have the most to say about, and the area I have learned the most from. Not in the way of Practice this everyday and see change! But in the way of using moment-to-moment, real-life, human experience to expand and grow and evolve. Hear me on this: How we show up in our relationships is how we learn to evolve. No question. There are more lessons in this area than I could ever enumerate, but no one more profound than the one that we dig into in this week's lecture, and the one that we'll use as our mantra today: Every relationship is an assignment. Every single encounter is a tool, a learning opportunity, a perfectly constructed lesson in human form, there just for you. For today, all you have to do is simply repeat the mantra as you move about your day, noticing who in your life this might ring truest about, and taking the small simple step to observe your most frictional and painful relationships as a place to grow—rather than a burden or a curse. This practice doesn't have to be dramatic or deep - it can be as simple as realizing that the bitchy girl at the coee shop or the guy who cuts you o in trac is there just for you to practice simple loving kindness. It extends to ALL relationships. As it went with my sister, this wasn't the end-all-be-all lesson. I didn't just say Oh, you're my teacher!! and that was that. There were MANY other lessons (hundreds) that came into the mix and we still struggle. This lesson here—this is where it started. And this is also where it goes back to when it gets hard. Every relationship an assignment. All my love. Hol "When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. As you see them, you will see yourself. As you treat them, you will treat yourself. As you think of them, you will think of yourself. Never forget this, for in them you will find yourself or lose yourself." —Marianne Williamson "The Universe only sends you angels." *I want to make sure and be clear that this work in no way EVER asks that you remain in an abusive relationship, or that physical or mental abuse must be tolerated for a second in order to prove a principle. Part of understanding how to work in relationships is also to work with ourselves to be strong enough to leave the ones that are toxic. I want to make sure you know that none of the things I ever talk about or we ever talk about translates to stay when it's abusive.