Relationships

with Marianne Williamson

The purpose of our lives is to learn to love as God loves. There is no way to separate your spiritual journey from your relationship to other people.

Today's lesson is a bit of a reality check, as we'll begin to question the current way we look at relationships, romantic or not. How we see ourselves and our relationship to God influences our view of our relationships with other people. Today we're going to examine that view from a place of love.

The ego is a false belief about who you are. When you realize who you truly are, you'll also realize who other people are.

Together, we'll learn how to connect with our “true self,” as well as the importance of taking time out of your day to establish this connection. The more you can crystallize this connection, the more connected you'll feel with other people.

A miracle happens when you stop thinking with fear and start thinking with love. Your greatest power lies in your mind. To establish stronger connections, you need to go into every situation requesting to be an instrument of love. When you approach your interactions with love, you'll begin to have more miraculous relationships.

The ego mind is the voice inside your head that causes you to perceive without love. It's your self-hatred masquerading as self-love. 

In the following lesson, we'll discover how the ego mind influences both our way of thinking and our relationships. We'll also identify the unconscious barriers we've built that cause us to form these judgments and thoughts. That's where the problem is, and that's where the solution lies.

Relationships reveal the gap between how you behave and who you truly are. 

The focus of today's lecture is this: atonement. While we decided to act a certain way in the past based on our personality, we can now use this information to improve our current and future relationships.

True forgiveness is being willing to extend your perception beyond what the physical eyes see and the physical ears hear, to what the heart knows to be true. It is the realization that you are not the level of yourself that makes mistakes. In any situation, our function is to see and affirm the truth in other people.

A miraculous relationship is one where we see only the love in each other, and the love in ourselves. When we are willing to see the innocence in each other, that lies beyond the mistakes, everything changes.

The issue isn't what the person did to you, it's how you decide to react to it once they've done it. 

To truly grasp the concept of forgiveness, we have to be willing to see past the person's mistakes. The benefit we get from being more forgiving isn't that other people are going to be more forgiving towards us, it's that it won't affect us when they aren't.

There are two kinds of relationships. One is called a special relationship, in which you seek another person to help "complete" you. The other is a holy relationship, where you realize that you are there to heal—that's why souls are brought together.

In this lesson, we'll discover the significance of holy relationships. After all, souls are brought together for the purpose of enlightenment.

A majority of the pain in relationships comes when relationships are over. Why? Because the other person is no longer physically there.

The focus of today's lecture is this: relationships are never over because a relationship is of the spirit. When bodies separate, that just means that the relationship has changed in its form, but not its content. All the love you gave, and received, is real and is with you always.

Before you do anything, ask yourself this one critical question, "Am I doing this for love?" If you're doing it for anything else, it's a diseased thought.

The only reason you have a body is so that your hands can bring love, your feet guide you to love, your tongue can speak words of love, and your brain can think thoughts of love. The purpose of our physical bodies is to create love.

Love is a radical proposition in today's world, and the ego will minimize it in every possible way. The ego will call it weak. The ego will call it soft-brained. However, love is the greatest force in the world.

We are trained by the ego mind to think it's all about how other people act, and how we feel based on what other people did. To know that we're responsible for how we respond doesn't mean we're in denial, except in the most positive sense

Your greatest power is your thinking. Think with love—that really is the point of relationships, knowing that you have the power. And within that power is a choice.