Prosperous relationships
There are many things that come into play when it comes to making your relationships work for you.
Alas, your own happiness will always be the starting point. When you are not truly happy in yourself no one, absolutely no one can give you happiness. You can't fake it, you cannot buy it and you can't take part of your partner’s happiness and make it your own. If you are out of sorts with yourself, those feelings will always come home to roost, sooner or later.It is a tough lesson to learn, as I found out many years ago. When my marriage came to an end I began to realise for the first time in my life that I had been kidding myself. I used to think that a good relationship would create happiness in my life.
Actually, it is the other way round. Happiness is a state you need to acquire first, if you intend to have fulfilling, harmonious and lasting relationships. Be those relationships romantic or professional, it really makes no difference.The reason for this is pretty obvious once you understand the principles at play.
Apart from environmental factors, which have an impact on your well being and also your happiness levels, career and relationships, by far the biggest factor for your true happiness is how you feel about yourself. In other words, if you are basically happy with yourself and life in general, odds are that you will bring this state to all your relationships.
So, what happens when you have relationship problems and you believe that your problem is the relationship, rather than you? Taking responsibility for yourself is a painful concept, and many of us have big, big problems with the idea. After all, we are so used to run to someone in authority, be it our parents, a friend or a therapist for help, in the hope that they make take the burden of responsibility of our shoulders and sort our problem for us. Taking responsibility is scary, it feel alien and even downright wrong.
Of course, once you rise to the challenge and realise that it is actually a very cool thing to chose what is good for you and to choose happiness instead of all the other miserable feelings you have crawling around in the back cupboard of your mind, you begin to enjoy the immense freedom this empowerment brings you. My book Forgive, And Let Your Love Grow shows you many techniques that get you to this state.
Once you have experienced it once, it feels so amazingly good that you will automatically seek to have more. I know, this is how it was for me. When the penny finally dropped and I had unlocked the secret cupboard to my inner riches, I began to understand that there is actually very little that could really touch me or harm me.
Because I realised, in the end it is always down to me. I may not be able to change the past. It is done and over with, but I always have the power to do something, anything, right now.
A comforting thought indeed, when you are in the midst of a divorce, or are going through a tough patch in your relationship.
Happiness can be learned. Let’s face it, everything we do, be it in our relationships, our careers, for our friends or family, absolutely anything we do, is for one purpose only, to make us happy. We enter into new relationships because, we believe they will make us happy and we get divorced, because we believe that will make us happy, we make money, because we want security and that will make us happy, and, yes, we are sad, play the victim, feel sorry for ourselves, all because we think it will make us happy. We have learned to believe that this behaviour somehow will create happiness of sorts for us, or at the very least make us feel better then we may presently be feeling.
Of course, you do all this unconsciously. You are not aware how you create unhappiness for yourself when all you want is a happy life and a happy relationship.
When I finally woke up to this basic reality my view of life changed considerably. I began examining my true values and started clearing out all these suppressed incongruencies. I share these techniques with you in Forgive, And Let Your Love Grow
My life became better and better, bit by bit, as I implemented what I had found out for myself. People I used to have problems with either simply disappeared, because they could not unload all their unhappy stories on me any more or they changed.
I began drawing more happy people into my circle. It happened without my doing that much. Happy people just appeared. I can't begin to tell you how lovely a feeling this is, when it happens. It can happen for you too. I really wish that everyone takes their chance to have happy relationships. We all deserve it. We all have the capacity for happiness, but you have to be willing to allow happiness into your heart first. Open your mind and your heart and rejuvenate your life. Forgive And Let Your Love Grow will give you the inspiration and the techniques you need to get there.
