From Relationships to Communion - Awareness is the Key

One thing relationships do really well is teach us about ourselves. They expose all our intolerances, prejudices, judgments and attitudes. After the initial honeymoon period, where most people do their best to impress with patience, love and tolerance is over, the real journey begins. This is usually the part where all the romantic movies end, as the two lovers sail into the sunset. The end, or in real life, the beginning.

There probably have been thousands of books written by experts on how to improve our relationships and how to understand men and women, who seem to come from different planets. So it is a hot topic. After working as an intuitive healer with thousands of people from all around the world, I think it is safe to say that every person experiences life differently and there is no one formula that everyone is going to apply, but there are some home truths.

Control
The main problem that many of my clients constantly talk about is how they can change the other person so that they can feel better. This is something I have heard from my mother most of my life, "if your dad was different then I would be happy and at peace". This is of course the easiest way to give up your power and start the game of control and manipulation, which is a double edged sword.

You can spend years exhausting yourself and your energies being worried about the behavior, success level and health of your partner, sibling, parents or friends. The question is, does it assist them to change or does it keep them locked up in their patterns with you focused outside of yourself. It also hooks you into being controlled. If they behave the way you like, you will be pleased for a while and if they don’t, you will be displeased.

Pleasing Others
Trying to please people is a very stressful experience physically and emotionally. It can often cause people to feel unwell, especially if they have been doing it for a long time. A woman recently came to me and she had major back pain. She could hardly walk and found it quite difficult to walk to my office, which is on the second floor.

During the session I told her that she was carrying a lot of anger towards her family, who were taking advantage of her generosity and desire to please them, and that was causing most of her back pain. I conducted her healing session and suggested she make some changes in her life. She said she was already starting to feel better as she left.

Two weeks later I watched her walking easily into my office with a big smile on her face. I told her that it looked as if she had no pain. She said that in fact all her pain did leave, when she told all the people who were draining her energy and making her feel angry to take their complaints and demands somewhere else.

Once she took responsibility for herself and stopped buying into other people’s problems and demands, which were crippling her, her back healed and she felt empowered. She told me that when I had mentioned that her giving away her power to others could be the cause of her problems, she discounted it, it couldn’t be that simple, she thought. However, her pain had been so overwhelming she was ready to try anything. She said, "It was like a huge weight that had been pressing on my back for months was suddenly lifted." Just as controlling others is painful, allowing yourself to be controlled or taken advantage of can be very distressing.

Searching For Happiness From Others
Recently a friend was talking to me about her break-up. She said that if she could not have everything exactly the way she wanted from her partner she would rather have nothing. She seemed to forget the simple truth that no one can make you happy. People can give you love, attention, money, gifts, time and care. They could even do all your chores and you can still be miserable.

Love has little to do with someone else and everything to do with yourself. If you try to gain love from someone else you will be unhappy because you will think that love is about them exclusively. So you will allow yourself to feel it when you are around them and then get into the pattern of feeling like you don’t have it, and need them, when they are not.

What You Experience Is Your Choice
Everybody and everything around you is an experience. You will experience people according to your beliefs. If you believe a wealthy person is above you and needs a lot of respect and attention that is how you will treat and experience them. If you believe your partner never listens to you, that is how you will experience them. If you believe a beggar is below you that is how you will feel around them.

This brings me to the point that you can choose how to experience anyone or anything in your life, if you begin to pay attention and develop an attitude of exploration with yourself. For instance, what would happen if you allowed your partner to be just the way they are and didn’t waste your energy trying to change them? We generally think that the key to a great relationship is knowing the other person well, understanding them, etc. It is learning and discovering. It is taking the attitude of not knowing, sometimes referred to as ‘beginner’s mind,’ which can be the most expansive and enjoyable.

Awareness Shows You Where You Are Stuck
A person’s energy and beliefs can be like a magnet. Often you and your partner can take on different polarities. You say right, they say wrong, you say white, they say black. Occasionally they may even agree with you but still push your buttons. All this does is just shows you where you are stuck in a belief, in a limited point of view.

A powerful way to connect to someone is to recognize that their beliefs and behaviors are not who they are. The less judgments you have on yourself or other people the more you can connect with their true essence.

Look Beyond The Form – Exercises To Connect
A great exercise to do, which I have done many times in the courses I teach is to look someone in the eyes and try to see past their appearance into who they truly are. It can often feel like you are looking into someone’s soul.

You may also want to write down all the ways you judge someone and then try to see how you also judge yourself in a similar way. Then you can ask yourself; does this belief / judgment lead me to expansion or limitation? What would my experience be like if I dropped this belief?

It is also great to check if your body relaxes or tenses up around your partner or people who are close to you. Experiment with how differently you respond to people when you are tense compared to when you consciously relax your body.

Validation
In my workshops people have shared with me that one of the most healing things they have experienced was being heard and validated. When you really listen to someone and hear what they say, without any preconceived ideas or judgments, it gives them an opportunity to connect to their own inner healing, knowing and wisdom. Often people just need someone to listen and connect to, to know that they are OK and their experience is valid.

One of the biggest gifts you can give yourself and people you connect with is to see them freshly, without the past or the future but in the now. The old cliché that people don’t change or that it is hard to change is simply not true. It is as easy to change as you want it to be, all you need to do is to let go of a limiting belief and allow an infinite possibility into your life.

It is truly incredible to connect with people on a heart / soul level. This does not have to be just a wish but a possibility we are all capable off. All you have to do is to stop believing that it’s hard and start to see what is great, wonderful and unlimited about every person you come in contact with. Then you will move from having a relationship with someone which is about the distance between people, to experiencing a communion, which is unity with them.

Inna Segal is the creator of Inner Kiss™ Healing and Visionary Intuitive Healing™. She is a highly sought after healer, speaker, actress and journalist. Her best selling CD is titled Create Perfect Health and has recently released Success, Money and Prosperity. Information on Inna’s healing work, workshops, further articles and a free e-zine are available at www.innerkiss.com or call (03) 9578 8979 Inna will be touring Australia, running Visionary Intuitive Healing™ Courses.