RELATIONSHIP SPECIAL .....How to Create a More Loving Relationship PART I

How to Create a More Loving Relationship PART I

The following is an excerpt from the "How to Create a More Loving Relationship"

One of the most powerful things you can do to improve any relationship and to increase the amount of happiness you feel is to not get involved with your judgments. Be aware of judgmental thoughts (notice them when they arise in your mind), accept that they are there (don't think they shouldn't be there), and then choose to not dwell on them or give voice to them. Judgments are probably the one thing that interferes most with love and sustaining relationships. Judgments and the criticism that flows from them kill love. Even small doses of criticism when engaged in day in and day out can poison a relationship. They kill the love that is there and leave anger, resentment, and hurt in its place. So the very first principle for a more loving relationship is to ignore your judgments and don't express the criticism that is the natural result of judgment.

There are a several reasons why judgments are difficult to ignore. First of all, because they arise in our mind, we assume our judgments are true and meaningful representations of "our truth," while judgments actually come from a small, petty, and unwise part of ourselves: our conditioned self, or ego. Judgments never reflect our true nature, our essential self, or what I like to call Essence. We assume our judgments serve a purpose, but they don't achieve what we hope they will achieve, which is changing someone or something. People rarely change because they are judged, and if they do, that change comes at the expense of love and trust. Judgments are a way of bullying our partner to change in ways we want him or her to change, and that is not a loving act.

If love and relationship are important to you, which they must be, since you are reading this, love and relationship have to become more important than having your way, more important than your conditioning and how you like things done. The way you put love first is to refuse to get involved in the judgments that pop into your mind and, above all, don't speak them. The reason to not get involved with your judgments mentally is that doing so leads to believing them and speaking them. The more you dwell on a judgment, the more real and true it seems. Judgments cause us to feel bad about someone (and bad about ourselves), so we naturally want to do something to change that person so that we no longer have to feel bad.

There is a better and more effective way to feeling good, and that is to realize that you don't have to change anything or anyone except your relationship to your own thoughts. All that has to change is your relationship to the judgments that arise in your mind. You can believe them and try to change the world to fit them, or you can see the truth about them, which is that they have no intrinsic value or truth. If a judgment arises, notice it, recognize it as a judgment and as therefore not worth your attention, and then leave it alone. Put your attention on something else, like something you appreciate about your partner, or about anything else.

Another reason judgments are hard to ignore is that they give us a sense of being right and being better than or superior to another. This superiority and self-righteousness feels good to the ego. That is the payoff for judging and one reason we judge and continue to do so even when we see that judging and criticizing is not getting us what we want from the other person, including that person's love. When we choose to judge someone, we settle for this feeling of superiority and self-righteousness instead of love and the good feelings that come from being loving, kind, accepting, and understanding.

by Gina Lake