Relationships Start with YOU!
Relationships are not something separate from you; they are the very extension of you. The best relationships start when you have a great relationship with yourself. If you are unable to be in restful awareness, if you don’t have the ability to sit with yourself silently, you should know that you do not have a good relationship with yourself. First you have to build your relationship with yourself.
If you are feeling powerless in your relationships, be very clear that you are powerless in your relationship with yourself. Your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others both happen from the same space. If you are feeling powerless in your relationship with others, you will be suffering from the same powerlessness in your relationship with yourself.
Just look in, see the ideas you carry about you. How many of you suffer with a deep distrust over yourself that you cannot raise yourself to a higher level? Why? Understand, this is because you are not consistently, continuously enriching yourself and raising yourself to the next level. You gave up on yourself. Your relationship with you, by you, lacks enriching. You are not in completion with yourself.
Raise Yourself By Yourself!
Lord Sri Krishna says again and again in the Bhagavad Gita:
“Uddhared aatmana aatmanam na aatmaanam avasaadayet
Aatmaiva hyaatmano bandhur aatmaiva ripur aatmanaha”
Raise yourself by yourself.
If you are continuously raising yourself by yourself, you are your friend; if not, you are your enemy.
You need to feel empowered and powerful in your relationship with yourself and others. Tirelessly facing your own inauthenticity and aligning yourself to your responsibilities is the only way you can build your relationship with yourself. If you are not ready to face your inauthenticity, who in the world do you think is going to face it? That is why everybody turns their face away from you. You continuously cry, ‘Everybody is turning their face away from me, nobody loves me, nobody relates with me’. There is so much inauthenticity in you that even you don’t want to look at it, then why will anyone else look at it? Only when I was able to be completely comfortable with me, the world was comfortable with me. When you are complete with you, the world will be complete with you. When you are incomplete with you, the world will be incomplete with you. Completion with your own self is Satori; completion with the world is Samadhi (high consciousness state of oneness with the world). Completion with your own self is Pratyag atma Chaitanya Jaagrati (awakening of the individual consciousness); completion with the cosmos is the experience of Brahmanyam Bahuputrataam (I am the favourite inheritor of the cosmos)!
Conflict in Relationships
Your inauthenticity is again and again exposed to you whenever there is a conflict in your relationships. You need to take up integrity as a principle to live by, as a space from which you operate. I am not making a statement that integrity should be there just in your actions. Integrity has to be there in the very space from which you act; the space where your cognition happens. When you bring integrity, you will heal all the damage you caused inside you as well as outside you due to the relationships. It will remove the ignorance you had in the zone of relationships. Your ignorance in the space of relationships not only causes damage in others, it causes damage in you also. When you cause any damage in your spouse, mother or father, be very clear, you cause damage in yourself also. This is because your father, mother and spouse – all the relationships you have – decide the confidence and the energy you have about yourself.
One of the important healing factors in relationships is the other person feeling confident that you are transformed, that you are going to be different in the future. To tell you honestly, nobody is too serious about the past hurt. Everybody is only interested in the future. If you give them the confidence and assurance that the future is going to be really transformed, there is nobody who is not ready to heal their past or drop their past. Everyone is waiting to drop their past and relate with you in a new way. When you bring integrity, first thing that will happen is that you will give the confidence to others that they can expect a new you in their life, a new transformed being in their life. Then, suddenly even you will trust that your transformation is real.
How You Can Be Integrated In Your Relationships!
The first thing you should do when you start living your life is to find the root thought pattern which is causing you suffering and complete with yourself, do svapoornatva (a spiritual process given by Nithyananda which involves talking to your own self in front of a mirror*). That completion gives you the courage to relate with people with integrity and authenticity. People are afraid to relate with other human beings. Even when you go to meet your friends you prepare all the statements you have to tell him. Why can’t you be spontaneous? Even to meet with your friend why do you need so much of preparation? Why do you need so much of inauthentic strategy planning?
It is so unfortunate the trust level between friends has dropped because your trust on yourself is compromised. You are afraid even of your own self. You don’t sit spontaneously. Even with yourself, you rehearse and talk. That is why you can’t talk spontaneously with others.
What is Personality?
What you believe yourself to be (mamakara), what you show to others as you (ahamkara) and what others perceive you to be and expect you to be (anyakara) – all these three put together is your personality – your being. Living in your peak capacity in all these three is authenticity, shraddha. It is raising your belief about yourself, aligning it with your projection of yourself, and fulfilling others’ expectation of you. When you stretch yourself to fulfil all three to your peak capacity, you are being authentic.
Why Should I Fulfil Others’ Expectations of Me?
Many times people ask me, ‘Swamiji I am responsible for what I feel as me and what I project as myself to others. But why should I take the responsibility for others’ expectation about me?’
In the inner consciousness of everyone who has expectations towards you, you yourself make them expect things from you. Some of your words and body language is responsible for them to have that expectation from you. That is the reason why you need to take responsibility for others’ perceptions and expectations about you.
I want all of you to understand an important truth. Some part of you which is suppressed by you, which wants to realize itself, goes and sits in others’ heart. It becomes an expectation about you, so that the suppressed part is realized. When you are not ready to listen to your own heart and expand, divine helps you by creating the expectation in others so that you can expand.
The Path to Self-Realization
I have seen in my own life, from my own experience I can tell you, when I decided to fulfil others’ expectations about me, when I started stretching myself, I realized this is what is my own expectation about me also! When you fulfil others’ expectations about you and realize that this is also your expectation about you, you reach the space of self-realization.
As long as you think you are stretching yourself just to fulfil others’ expectations you will carry a continuous irritation, agitation and heaviness. When you realize that this is also your own expectation about you, then you will have fulfillment, the joy of renunciation, the joy of sacrifice, the joy of vairagya – this is vairagyananda, tyagananda.
People may ask, ‘How can renunciation be joyful, how can tyaga be joyful?’ If renunciation and sacrifice is done because of others’ expectation it will only be painful. But when you click with the truth, when you start stretching yourself to others’ expectation and you realize this is your own expectation about you also, then it is no more anyakara! You are expanding for your mamakara and ahamkara. Now nobody else is forcing you!
Life Happens Outside!
You need to understand that life happens to us outside us. Consciousness may be inside but life is happening outside. That is why you need to enrich anyone who comes in contact with you. Enriching means you taking the responsibility with integrity and authenticity that you are committed to continuously expanding yourself and the life in and around you. If you were just inside a deep jungle in a cave, where you eat some forest fruits and drink the Ganga water and sleep, and you don’t see people at all – then you may not need to enrich others. But even then you need to enrich the tree which gives you the fruit and the river which gives you water. In our practical life, life is happening to us outside us. Let us do manana (contemplation) and understand this.
For example, think of all the identities you carry about you, which put together you feel as you. It can be daughter, mother, wife, daughter-in-law, friend, teacher, student, devotee, entrepreneur etc. Different identities occupy a certain percentage of your being. So now, the identity you feel as a daughter will get fulfilled, it can become complete only if your father is enriched. Life can happen to you in the ultimate form as a wife only if your husband is enriched. Only when each person involved in your personality, with whom life is happening to you, only if each of them is enriched will your life be complete and enriched. You can never be complete or fulfilled if all the people who are involved in your life are not complete and fulfilled. Only when you enrich others you are enriched.
Experience Love!
When you decide you can never fulfil others’ expectation in your life you literally destroy yourself. I am not saying that you can fulfil everyone’s expectation about you but I am saying when you decide that you can’t fulfil others’ expectations about you, you are dead, you decide to be dead. You stop allowing life from happening in you. Life happens to you, brings you excitement when you go on stretching yourself to fulfil others’ expectation. Taking the responsibility to fulfil others’ expectation even if they are not fulfilling, not ready to fulfil your expectations, is love.
Take the responsibility for love. That is where a relationship starts. Do not say ‘I love you’ to anybody unless you are ready to take the responsibility to fulfil their expectations about you, without bothering whether they are ready to fulfil your expectations or not.
Love is the Best Strategy Plan for Life!
Even if others’ expectations from you is limiting you or them, you need to expand, stretch yourself to fulfil them first. Then make them understand that they need to expand; not before that. Only then they will understand their inauthenticity. Others are ready to listen about their inauthenticity from you only when you first prove that you are authentic.
The energy which you use to defend yourself from others and the energy that you need to stretch yourself to others’ expectations, both are one and the same. You need less energy to stretch yourself to fulfil others’ expectation than constantly defending yourself from others. Even a glimpse of love makes you expand yourself for more and more love. The best strategy plan for your life is the decision to love and build relationships!
Taken from Nithyananda’s Daily Discourses on the subject of love & relationships delivered in March, 2013 in Bidadi Ashram, Bangalore, India