Tag: relationships

Healing Relationships

We have talked about relationships quite a bit over the years. But today, I want to discuss how we heal our fractured relationships. We all have relationships that are not where they need to be and we must repair and heal these relationships.

But that starts with improving our relationship with ourselves. We need to accept ourselves, feel good about ourselves, and not identify with our faults and limitations or delusions.

They did a study and asked people out of 10 thoughts they have, how many of those are uncontrolled or unwanted. To my surprise, people said 9 out of 10 of their thoughts were uncontrolled. These uncontrolled thoughts are what Buddha calls delusions. A delusion is a state of mind that arises from inappropriate attention making our mind uncontrolled.

We need to learn to develop happier relationships with ourselves. We need to learn to control our thoughts. We need to believe in our pure nature, our Buddha nature, that golden nugget we keep talking about every week.

So this is the foundation for our ability to make spiritual progress, or any ability to let go of our faults, limitations, and delusions, and any ability to see others as precious, and important, and cherish them. At the moment, if we keep thinking other people are inherently awful, faulty, nasty, and deluded. And that is their fault. And they’re to blame for everything that goes wrong.

It’s very hard to improve our relationships with others when we really can’t stand them. If we think they’re faulty and horrible and awful, it’s impossible to improve our relationship with them.

Improving our relationships with others comes from understanding that others are at heart just like us and that they suffer from delusions just as we do and they want to be happy just as we do. We need to understand when people harm others, they are controlled by their delusions.

Gesla says delusions are distorted conceptual thoughts that arise within the mind like waves on the ocean, just as it is possible for waves to die down, so it is possible for our delusions to end.

Buddha compared our nature to a golden nugget in the dirt. No matter how disgusting a person’s delusions may be the real nature of them is like pure gold.

In the heart of even the cruelest and most degenerate person exists, the potential for limitless love and compassion and wisdom unlike seeds of our delusions which can be destroyed, this potential is utterly indestructible. That is the pure essential nature of everything.

When we meet other people, rather than focus on the delusions, thinking you’re awful, you’re greedy, selfish, you’re this, you’re that. Rather than doing that, we focus on the goal of evolution, I see you, I see your potential, I see that you have a pure nature. So this will not only enable us to regard them as special and unique but also help us to bring out their good qualities.

Another way to improve our relationships with others is to change our perspective.

Geshe-la says to imagine someone whom we regard as especially precious, such as our child, partner, or mother. This person seems to have unique qualities that make him or her stand out from others. We treasure and want to take special care of this person who has good qualities like from their own side is just precious. And even when they’re acting out, even when they’re being horrible. We see past that because we know that they have these qualities. There was a decision that we made somewhere along the line, to love this person, you may be in any different number of factors including Karma that came into play. But at some point there was, you know, I’m just committed to viewing this person in this way.

And we can choose to see everyone as having special qualities as being worthy of love as being worthy of happiness. Alternatively, we see someone and we think they’re horrible and mean and messing with our plans, and unkind and manipulative and whatever however we’re seeing them, then it can be very helpful to think, Okay, I’m seeing them like that, they seem to be filled with horrible qualities. Right? There definitely in the way of my happiness, they are my problem, not my delusions, them. But we can actually look at them from a completely different angle. We can think, for example, other people are looking at this person. It seems someone really special and lovely. This person may have a husband or a wife or dog, who looks at them or their mom looks at them and thinks they’re just the most special, beautiful person in the world. And when they think that mother, for example, that husband looks at me looking at them thinking they’re awful, they’re like, they don’t get it. This person is not awful. This person is lovely. You’ve got it wrong. Whenever we shift our perspective, broaden our perspective. Then our thoughts change, and our whole attitude towards that person shifts naturally shifts.

If we start looking at people who we find have difficulties with through the eyes of someone who doesn’t have difficulties with them, something shifts in our mind. Something loosens up and space opens up in my mind because there is nothing inherently awful about them. If they’re behaving badly towards us, it’s their delusions making them do that. But they’re not inherently awful if they were inherently awful, everybody who looked at them would see the same awful person. But actually, there’s probably no one who sees them in exactly the same way we see them.

So if we understand that we are not our delusions, we can come to understand others are not their delusion. So that’s one way of shifting our perspective and getting on better with other people. Another way is to think that people were inherently awful and deluded everybody would see them that way. But they don’t. And actually, think how this person views them and actually try and maybe put ourselves in the position of their husband or their mother or whatever and look at them through those eyes, actually see what’s happening shift. Start seeing their redeeming qualities. Let the light in.

It Takes A Village

I am sure you have all heard this classic phrase “It Takes A Village” that ended up becoming political about 15 years ago. It’s the messenger stupid! All kidding aside, I think it is important to recognize that there are so many people involved in the smallest of things that we are trying to achieve on a daily basis. In other words, without the kindness of others, a lot of what we are used to will vanish in a heartbeat.

In a sense, post covid we are already seeing the effect of that. Let me explain. Before COVID, we were all used to a certain level of price stability. We expected things to cost a certain amount and if it went up it went up reasonably enough that it did not break people’s budgets. It did not make life difficult for them in general. What happened during COVID-19 is really an eye-opener. People in certain industries started to retire. Let me give you a couple of examples. People in the railroad industry, the hard-working people who held blue-collar jobs made sure that the turn tables were manually turned when necessary for trains to run smoothly. Now, it is a hard-working job that requires one to travel hundreds of miles every day up and down the railroad track. It is not a fancy job and there were no newcomers for these jobs. No one in the management thought about recruiting future generations of these blue-collar workers—they probably figured how hard can it be to find someone to turn these things. Well, during COVID, a lot of these workers retired. As a result, the railroads could not find enough people at any price it seemed. They offered whatever it took to keep the trains running. The oil and gas industry is having a similar crisis. Because of the stigma attached to the industry not enough people were joining the petroleum industry. All of a sudden all these retiring engineers created a real shortage. Now, they are offering upwards of $200K to a recent graduate to make sure there are enough engineers in the field.

Why does that matter to you? Well, it matters because it resulted in the runaway inflation that we are experiencing. The plumbing job that used to cost $85 now costs $300. That changes people’s lifestyle. So I come back to the kindness of others. Without the kindness of others, we would not be able to live a comfortable life that we are used to.

Let’s look at an example. When you woke up this morning, you went to brush your teeth. You opened the faucet and water came out. You did not put any thought into it at all. That’s what is supposed to happen. But think about how many people are involved in getting that water to you. It starts with raw water. Depending upon your water source, it is either coming from a reservoir or a water well. Someone had to design that reservoir or a well and build one. Then someone put together a pipeline to bring that water to a water treatment plant. Someone designed that plant and built one. People operate the treatment plant 24 hours a day to make sure that all the particles that are not supposed to be in your water are taken out and water is safe to drink directly out of the tap. By the way, that itself is a luxury as the majority of the world’s population does not have clean drinking water right out of the tap. So you see, quite possibly thousands of people were involved just to make sure that you get your water first thing in the morning when you turn your faucet on.

And this is just one example. This is true for everything that goes on in our lives on a daily basis. In short, we need others for our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. And without others, we are nothing. And this is not just a figure of speech. It’s the literal truth. Now you can think about well, I am paying for all these things and people who are involved are all getting paid. And you are right. But here is the thing, as we saw in the example of railroad workers and petroleum engineers, what if they start working? They have a choice. What effect that would have on our daily lives? As we speak, there is a strike by auto workers. If the strike lasts long enough, there may not be enough cars for people to buy resulting in price increases. So you see, it’s true you are paying for these products and services but we must remember the kindness of others in bringing these goods and services to us.

So this is telling us something so interesting about who we actually are. Because self-grasping and self-cherishing think that I’m independent of everything. I’m there, I’m findable, I’m solid, I’m real. And I move around in a ocean of other real things and real people, with no connection at all. Occasionally, we notice the connection. But generally, we don’t notice that we only exist in relationship to others. In fact, we’re totally dependently related. That’s how we exist and dependently related is the opposite of being inherently existent or independent. It’s the literal opposite.