"Each relationship you have with another person reflects the relationship you have with yourself." - Alice Deville.
You have a lot of personal and professional relationships in your life. Some relationships are loving, satisfying, uplifting, supportive and enrich your life experience. You love spending time with these people. They motivate and inspire you. Other relationships are tense, adversarial, problematic, strained, and exhausting. You don't like, or avoid, spending time with the people who drain the life energy right out of you. The funny thing is that all of your relationships, good and bad, are a reflection of the relationship you have with yourself.
How can that be?
It's very simple, really. You love the good relationships that you have because these people reflect what you like about yourself. They're kind, giving, nice, loyal, fun to be with, and all of the other attributes that you enjoy when you're involved in a good relationship. You dislike the people you have difficulty with because they reflect the parts of you that you don't like. In these people you see something in them, however tiny or large, that you don't like about yourself. If they're needy, they remind you of the times when you have been needy. If they're rude, they're a reminder of the pain you caused others by your own rudeness. If they're annoying they bring out the annoyer in you. If they are liars, they remind you of the time you lied, how that felt and the damage that lie may have caused you or others.
Pay particular attention to the people who bother you, get under your skin, for no apparent reason. These people reflect something within you that you have been unwilling to see.
I'll give you an example.
Several years ago I had a business associate, Naomi, who irritated the heck out of me. Naomi was a nice enough person, never hurt me, but every time I saw her my skin crawled. If she said, "Hi. How are you?" I wanted to run in the other direction. Any time she called with a business related question or invitation I couldn't get off the phone fast enough. Naomi frequently invited me to networking events and I always found some excuse to decline. For some unexplained reason I just didn't want to be around this woman.
Yes, I Found Excuses And Reasons (F.E.A.R.) not to like her. To me, Naomi was a pushy, needy, wishy-washy person who just wanted to cling onto me to advance her career. What I didn't realize at the time was that I had been a pushy, needy, wishy-washy person who clung onto other people to advance my early career. I'd grown up a lot since then and was no longer that person, yet I definitely once was that girl. And now Naomi was reflecting that behavior back to me. And it bothered me to even think of her. I did not want to be reminded that I, too, was once at that very same place in my personal journey of self-awareness and development.
You love what is reflected back to you that you love within you. You dislike what is reflected back to you that you dislike within you. You are neutral to what is presented to you that is not a reflection of you.
Examine your relationships with the people in your life. Identify the attributes you love and like in the people you have a good relationship with. You hold these attributes too. Acknowledge and own them. Love that part of you. Identify the attributes you don't like in the people you have a bad, or troubled, relationship with. You hold these attributes too. Acknowledge and own them. Have compassion and forgiveness for that part of yourself and of the other person for each of you are only doing the best you can given the light you have to see. Granted, some people have fewer batteries in their flashlight than others! Yet they are still doing the best they can. No one deliberately decides to exhibit unwanted behavior. Learn the lesson to add a few more volts to that flashlight of yours. Every relationship, good and bad, brings gifts in the lessons and the light they offer to you. Cherish the gift. It will empower you as you continue to move forward in the direction of living your rich delicious life.
"Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Valery is a Moxie Master who will teach you how to have the confident courage to go after what you REALLY want with unrelenting drive and passion. That's Moxie! Claim your truth, own your power & command your stage with her unique fast Moxie Therapy process. Get going. Get it done. Moxie Up! today! Get free tips at http://www.MoxieTherapy.com
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
A Conversation with Dad: The Shock that Rocked My World
When you show up with love in your heart, what is returned to you is pure love.
While I knew this piece of universal wisdom to be true, I never experienced it so profoundly as I did the other day. I flew to Miami to see my aging ailing Father. I have a good, although not very close, relationship with Dad. My childhood was tumultuous. My parents went through a long drawn out battle of a divorce that left a lot of emotional debris. My father, who was a renowned neuro-psychiatrist, went on to make some horrendous decisions in his personal life. His misguided thinking and its outcomes were splattered across the media headlines on more than one occasion. Other bad choices liquidated the wealth he had built up over his lengthy career.
I defined my Dad by these life-altering choices. Taking the lessons I learned with my as I watch his life experience crash and burn, I made different decisions – took different paths – in my own life. What I didn’t know, until the other day, that the greatest gift I would ever get would be from my Dad.
This week my Dad taught me the following:
1. You do not know what you do not know
2. The natural human spirit creates life and faces the end of life with grace and dignity.
3. As long as there is breath in our lungs there are gifts in the lessons that can be learned – we continue to grow.
4. When you show up with love in your heart, what is returned to you is pure love.
In earlier visits with my Dad I showed up as if I was fulfilling a family obligation. I had my expectations about what the short time we spent together would be like and got exactly what I expected. Year after year. All I did was reaffirm what I thought to be true about my Dad and my relationship with him; Dad was a selfish SOB and he never knew or cared much for me.
This time I knew it might be the last time I would see him while he was still lucid. He’s bedridden and cannot see or hear very well. I prepared his tiny meals and fed him as I would any infant. Sitting at his bedside I decided that I would give him the gift of closure, peace of mind, so that he could let go comfortably. I decided to arrive in a state of love instead of expectation.
I wasn’t prepared for what I experienced. Here was a man who I thought was devoid of emotional tenderness, any interest in who I am as his daughter, and full of himself. Who I experienced was a man stripped of all ego, all parts of him that he used to cope with his own inner pain, freely expressing his truth. It was the most profound awakening I have ever witnessed. The awakening wasn’t within him. This new perspective came from within me. I woke up to who my Dad really is at his deepest core and it rocked my world.
Dad expressed the lessons he learned, his love for me, my siblings, his wife whom he was once estranged and his love of life. While his Alzheimer’s made it difficult for him to fully communicate what he wanted to say he spoke of his appreciation for life and all that it had to offer. When his memory failed he would fill in the gaps with a little joke, a rhyme or pieces of an old song that surfaced out of nowhere. I was captivated and engaged as an observer and witness to the joy and delight that is my father. My time with him flew by and I longed for more.
I kissed him goodbye when I left. The flight home was tearful as I felt a wave of stuck toxic energy within me release itself. The resulting hole in my inner being was filled with love and appreciation for the resiliency, enormous power and inner wisdom that is the human spirit. I am grateful that I had learned enough of my own lessons to get out of my own way so that I could experience what I never thought possible….to know and love and be loved for who I am for and by my Dad.
I was completely wrong about who I thought my Dad was. His actions were always well intended yet his choices of execution were woefully misguided through his own Inner Critic, his own pain. Dad is a man filled with love for his children and his purpose in life, to heal others in pain. He never gave up his quest to become the man his heart longed to express. I was blessed to be a witness as he revealed his truth, all that he had learned, and all that he still had to share.
I invite you to show up with love in your heart the next time you visit with what you assume are your dysfunctional family relationships. Give yourself the gift of the profound power, energy and lessons that can be learned through the purest expression of the human heart.
Valery is an Inner Wizard Mindset Mentor & Coach who teaches people how to be the hero of their opportunity instead of the victim of circumstance so they can fully invest themselves authentically in their personal and professional endeavors. Empower the Wizard Within http://www.InnerWizard.com Free tips!
While I knew this piece of universal wisdom to be true, I never experienced it so profoundly as I did the other day. I flew to Miami to see my aging ailing Father. I have a good, although not very close, relationship with Dad. My childhood was tumultuous. My parents went through a long drawn out battle of a divorce that left a lot of emotional debris. My father, who was a renowned neuro-psychiatrist, went on to make some horrendous decisions in his personal life. His misguided thinking and its outcomes were splattered across the media headlines on more than one occasion. Other bad choices liquidated the wealth he had built up over his lengthy career.
I defined my Dad by these life-altering choices. Taking the lessons I learned with my as I watch his life experience crash and burn, I made different decisions – took different paths – in my own life. What I didn’t know, until the other day, that the greatest gift I would ever get would be from my Dad.
This week my Dad taught me the following:
1. You do not know what you do not know
2. The natural human spirit creates life and faces the end of life with grace and dignity.
3. As long as there is breath in our lungs there are gifts in the lessons that can be learned – we continue to grow.
4. When you show up with love in your heart, what is returned to you is pure love.
In earlier visits with my Dad I showed up as if I was fulfilling a family obligation. I had my expectations about what the short time we spent together would be like and got exactly what I expected. Year after year. All I did was reaffirm what I thought to be true about my Dad and my relationship with him; Dad was a selfish SOB and he never knew or cared much for me.
This time I knew it might be the last time I would see him while he was still lucid. He’s bedridden and cannot see or hear very well. I prepared his tiny meals and fed him as I would any infant. Sitting at his bedside I decided that I would give him the gift of closure, peace of mind, so that he could let go comfortably. I decided to arrive in a state of love instead of expectation.
I wasn’t prepared for what I experienced. Here was a man who I thought was devoid of emotional tenderness, any interest in who I am as his daughter, and full of himself. Who I experienced was a man stripped of all ego, all parts of him that he used to cope with his own inner pain, freely expressing his truth. It was the most profound awakening I have ever witnessed. The awakening wasn’t within him. This new perspective came from within me. I woke up to who my Dad really is at his deepest core and it rocked my world.
Dad expressed the lessons he learned, his love for me, my siblings, his wife whom he was once estranged and his love of life. While his Alzheimer’s made it difficult for him to fully communicate what he wanted to say he spoke of his appreciation for life and all that it had to offer. When his memory failed he would fill in the gaps with a little joke, a rhyme or pieces of an old song that surfaced out of nowhere. I was captivated and engaged as an observer and witness to the joy and delight that is my father. My time with him flew by and I longed for more.
I kissed him goodbye when I left. The flight home was tearful as I felt a wave of stuck toxic energy within me release itself. The resulting hole in my inner being was filled with love and appreciation for the resiliency, enormous power and inner wisdom that is the human spirit. I am grateful that I had learned enough of my own lessons to get out of my own way so that I could experience what I never thought possible….to know and love and be loved for who I am for and by my Dad.
I was completely wrong about who I thought my Dad was. His actions were always well intended yet his choices of execution were woefully misguided through his own Inner Critic, his own pain. Dad is a man filled with love for his children and his purpose in life, to heal others in pain. He never gave up his quest to become the man his heart longed to express. I was blessed to be a witness as he revealed his truth, all that he had learned, and all that he still had to share.
I invite you to show up with love in your heart the next time you visit with what you assume are your dysfunctional family relationships. Give yourself the gift of the profound power, energy and lessons that can be learned through the purest expression of the human heart.
Valery is an Inner Wizard Mindset Mentor & Coach who teaches people how to be the hero of their opportunity instead of the victim of circumstance so they can fully invest themselves authentically in their personal and professional endeavors. Empower the Wizard Within http://www.InnerWizard.com Free tips!
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