Quotes about Relationship

Relationships don't work the way they do on television and in the movies: Will they, won't they, and then they finally do and they're happy forever -- gimme a break. Nine out of ten of them end because they weren't right for each other to begin with, and half the ones that get married get divorced, anyway. And I'm telling you right now, through all this stuff, I have not become a cynic, I haven't. Yes, I do happen to believe that love is mainly about pushing chocolate-covered candies and, you know, in some cultures, a chicken. You can call me a sucker, I don't care, 'cause I do...believe in it. Bottom line...is the couples that are truly right for each other wade through the same crap as everybody else, but, the big difference is, they don't let it take 'em down

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should
Work is not all of life. Your co-workers shouldn’t be your only friends. Schedule life and defend it just as you would an important business meeting. Never tell yourself “I’ll just get it done this weekend.”

Under the right circumstances, it is not difficult to have a powerful experience of meditation, to taste the indescribable peace, bliss, rapture, and stillness of the Ground of Being-like a still forest pool, in which you sink ever more deeply, where your mind is not moving at all. It is very important to taste the inherent liberation of your own infinite depth, but that kind of experience in and of itself will not necessarily teach you how to have a liberated relationship to the chaos of your own mind and emotions. Sinking to the depths of your own self is always profoundly inspiring, but it's not enough. It is equally important to know how to stay on the surface when a storm is raging and have no relationship to the chaos. And that is what the deliberate practice of meditation is all about. For most of us, learning to do that is ultimately a source of greater confidence and soul strength than the spontaneous experience of infinite depth. And in fact, from an absolute or nondual perspective, being at the surface is no different from being at the very bottom of the pool. Even if it doesn't necessarily feel that way, in time you will come to understand that it is the same. That is the secret of freedom.

I have never found a problem with people from different religions
praying together. What I have found is that people are just hungry
for God, and be they Christian or Muslim we invite them to pray with
us. There is a large percentage of Muslims in our mission houses in
Spain and France and they want to pray. So that is our main focus,
to encourage them to pray, to have a relationship with God, however
that may be, because when you have that then everything else will
follow.

We will have meaning beyond meaning & happiness beyond happiness because we will keep looking & doing what is needed...

"We're two Lost Souls Swimming  in a Fish Bowl Year after Year..."

Something in us doesn't want to be civilized, linked too closely with Apollo and all his humanitarian accomplishments--medicine, music, ideas. It doesn't want any kind of union, but desperately tries to preserve its individuality and integrity. Something in us wants to be wooden, untalkative, and impenetrable. It wants to revert to dumb nature. Something in us doesn't want to be loved or desired. A tree's beauty is purely unintended and purposeless.
Daphne is wooden. She is that which doesn't want to be communicative, available, friendly, present, or articulate. Instinctively she flees from the most noble of attentions, the most humane of admirers. She would rather be like a tree than a person, an it rather than a thou. The Daphne spirit is so pure that it has no use for the sentimentality of relationship.
Modern psychological thinking doesn't appreciate the necessity presented in this myth. We consider it normal and healthy to be intimate with each other and communicate well. We interpret flight from intimacy as neurotic, abnormal, and practically immoral. But within this myth, flight from interpersonal contact is the norm. Resistance to humanitarian sensitivity is valid. Disappearing from the human scene somehow protects and preserves Daphne in a completely acceptable way.
Rather than judge each other and ourselves for our failure to be sociable, we might reconsider our biases and assumptions, even our sentimentality, about relationship. Perhaps some of our narcissism is a symptomatic attempt recover as strong unrelated sense of self. How can we reach out to another anyway, if we don't have strong devotion to our individuality?

Forget relationships and learn how to relate.

In a better world, with more meditative people, with a little more enlightenment spread over the earth, people will love, love immensely, but their love will remain a relating not a relationship.

If you enjoy being with somebody, you would like to enjoy it more and more. If you enjoy the intimacy, you would like to explore the intimacy more and more. But it has to be a commitment from one heart to another heart. It has not even to be verbalized, because to verbalize it is to profane it. It has to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, heart to heart, being to being. It has to be understood, not said.

~Osho

My Soul’s Marriage

A commitment to your own and
the world’s transformation.

For the Benefit of myself and All Beings.

I,            (my ego & personality)

Do solemnly swear
to love, honor and obey my soul,
my path to realization  and
relationship with a higher,
deeper creative power,
for better or worse,
for richer or poorer,
in sickness and in health,
from now and forever more.

Love happens.  Yet, Romance, like any skill, improves
with practice.  So, practice, practice, practice!

A healthy relationship is being with someone because you want them, not because you need them.

In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it. 

Hunger for Connection Brought to "The Seeker Academy," by L. D. Gussin


Yes, the characters in L. D. Gussin's "The Seeker Academy" are "hungry for the truth" as Christopher Noel says on the book's cover. But, these characters are even hungrier for connection, as symbolized by the Gorganzola-and-fig pizza at the book's beginning.

This hunger for connection extends in every direction. Their hunger grows vertically--into the world of the spirit (upward), and it extends into a wish for greater depth within themselves(inward and downward). The hunger grows horizontally and outward into relationships with romantic and married partners, family, friends, community, and casually encountered strangers. The masterful contribution of "The Seeker Academy" is laying these hungers for connection vulnerably bare and deftly showing the multitude of ways we human beings push and pull through,and often past, our desires. I frequently found myself pausing to make a mental note as I recognized a comment in the text that pointed to a tendency in myself.

From a writing craft standpoint, one of L.D. Gussin's greatest achievements is in his credible and warm fleshing out of leading lady Grace Hudson, and telling the story through her eyes. Grace, a middle-aged drama teacher in a middle school brings impeccable observation and a tendency toward wry mimicry into her roles as matron, mother, care-taking aunt, and then among the elders of the temporary staff at the Seeker Academy.

What better guide could we have into the culture of the Seeker Academy? ("Grace wanted to dismiss this coded talk.... But she also felt Sophie to be thoughtful and sincere.") Gussin doesn't go for satire, but neither does he go for whole-hog idolatry of New Age spiritual shopping. Very gently, Gussin reveals the wounding and natural human yearning that has drawn these people into the world of the Seeker Academy. Gussin also reveals, in a balanced way, the extent that this world of spiritual mélange delivers healing for wounds, and rapture for transcendental yearning--and to the extent it does not.

An amazing feature of The Seeker Academy is its encyclopedic knowledge of holistic healing and the history of spiritual seeking communities in America (since Thoreau, the Transcendentalists, and Chautauqua) and in Europe with the Romantics. Interwoven among the book's conversations and theatrical performances is a compendium and classification of New Age Philosophy. Make no mistake, Gussin has done a great deal of homework which undergirds The Seeker Academy. In addition to the broad swath, there is even practical, detailed information on how to perform sitting meditation.

Gussin's style in its slight formality, occasional sentence inversion, elegance, and wording of chapter titles reminds me pleasantly of the early 20th century books that crammed our bookcases when I was growing up in the 1950s and devoured books from an earlier generation. ("Grace knew that her body would ache the next day, as her heart ached from the winter in hell, but she was glad for the struggle.") There's a graciousness here that serves Gussin's tale well. I love the lyrical thread of poetic imagery that weaves through the book.

Grace Hudson lives up to her name, embodying as she does the quality of grace and carrying the surname of a great American river. Grace enters the Seeker Academy as a person willing "to give life a chance." Her "role-the-dice openness" helps her navigate the turbulent waves of her Seeker Academy experience with its not-yet-digested emotions and ideas.

Although Gussin's book is a novel of ideas, the relational strand of connection most compels me. The message I take away at the end of "The Seeker Academy" is that yes,"this life is a guesthouse" and in every moment we have the choice presented to us to be the decent human beings we essentially are.

Visit Janet Grace Riehl's blog "Riehl Life: Village Wisdom for the 21st Century" (www.riehlife.com) to share more of her thoughts on connection through the arts, across cultures, and within the family. Janet is the author of "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary," a downhome love story beyond death. You can read sample poems on her website http://www.riehlife.com/

Relationships may change throughout the gift of time, memories stay the same forever in my mind.

You have to do it by yourself.  You can not do it alone.

The Dance

I have sent you my invitation, the note inscribed on the palm of my hand by the fire of living.

Don't jump up and shout, "Yes, this is what I want! Let's do it!"

Just stand up quietly and dance with me.

Show me how you follow your deepest desires, spiraling down into the ache within the ache, and I will show you how I reach inward and open outward to feel the kiss of the Mystery, sweet lips on my own, every day.

Don't tell me you want to hold the whole world in your heart.

Show me how you turn away from making another wrong without abandoning yourself when you are hurt and afraid of being unloved.

Tell me a story of who you are, and see who I am in the stories I am living.

And together we will remember that each of us always has a choice.

Don't tell me how wonderful things will be...someday.

Show me you can risk being completely at peace, truly okay with the way things are right now in this moment, and again in the next and the next and the next...

I have heard enough warrior stories of heroic daring.

Tell me how you crumble when you hit the wall, the place you cannot go beyond by the strength of your own will.

What carries you to the other side of that wall, to the fragile beauty of your own humanness?

And after we have shown each other how we have set and kept the learn, healthy boundaries that help us live side by side with each other, let us risk remembering that we never stop silently loving those we once loved out loud.

Take me to the places on the earth that teach you how to dance, the places where you can risk letting the world break your heart, and I will take you to the places where the earth beneath my feet and the stars overhead make my heart whole again and again.

Show me how you take care of business without letting business determine who you are.

When the children are fed but still the voices within and around us shout that soul's desires have too high a price, let us remind each other that it is never about the money.

Show me how you offer to your people and the world the stories and the songs you want our children's children to remember, and I will show you how I struggle, not to change the world, but to love it.

Sit beside me in long moments of shared solitude, knowing both our absolute aloneness and our undeniable belonging.

Dance with me in the silence and in the sound of small daily words, holding neither against me at the end of the day.

And when the sound of all the declarations of our sincerest intentions have died away on the wind, dance with me in the infinite pause before the next great inhale of the breath that is breathing us all into being, not filling the emptiness from the outside or from within.

Don't say, "Yes!"

Just take my hand and dance with me.

Every relationship requires sacrifice.

As soon as the love relationship does not lead me to me, as soon as I in a love relationship do not lead another person to himself, this love, even if it seems to be the most secure and ecstatic attachment I have ever experienced, is not true love. For real love is dedicated to continual becoming.

"The common expression is 'I love you.' But instead of 'I love you,' it would be better to say, 'I am love — I am the embodiment of pure love.' Remove the I and you, and you will find that there is only love. It is as if love is imprisoned between the I and you. Remove the I and you, for they are unreal; they are self-imposed walls that don't exist. The gulf between I and you is the ego. When the ego is removed the distance disappears and the I and you also disappear. They merge to become one — and that is love. You lend the I and you their reality. Withdraw your support and they will disappear. Then you will realise, not that 'I love you,' but that 'I am that all-embracing love.'" ~Amma

In the business world, unwise men take more that they give. They do not realize that they are breaking the Universal Law which will eventually break them to an equal extent. It may not be balanced in the form of dollars and cents but in the loss of good-will upon which their future business depends.
Man’s ignorance of the Law of Love in personal and world relationships will not serve as an excuse to save him from disaster. Wealth cannot be acquired from others by might, for wealth thus taken will impoverish him who takes anything which is not given. Nor can power be thus acquired, for the weakness of the despoiled will prevail against the might of the despoiler.
Everywhere in the world this law is seen working out its inexorable certainty. Empires built by might are dissolving. Rich world treasuries are disgorging their gold and piling up debt. The blood of every man killed by the sword has been paid for by ten – perchance ten times ten – of those who killed. Nations which have fattened on the food taken from others are starving amid the ruins of palaces in which they feasted.
A new world – one world – cannot grow out of a universe built on the foundations of hate and fear by unbalanced taking.
A new world must have new foundations. An eternal foundation is not built as one whole – it is built lovingly stone by stone. Thus must man rebuild his world.

It has often been declared that the human mind could never comprehend God. That statement has been based upon the assumption that the reason we could never comprehend God is that our senses could not detect God.
It is true that we cannot see God but we can KNOW Him. And therein is the essence of New Age thinking. The next hundred years will see as great a spiritual advance in the culture of our civilization as it has seen physically during the past hundred years. That which we cannot see, we can KNOW. We can see the bodies of men but we cannot see man, for the supreme Being within man is invisible. He cannot be seen. He can only be known. For the same reason we cannot see God but we can know Him, and we can know the nature of God by knowing His laws and creative processes.
When we know the nature of God sufficiently to reflect His nature in us, we become God to the extent of our ability to reflect His nature in us. By knowing the secret of Light, we will know the mystery of life and death – of reincarnation, of matter and space, and the relationship of suns to planets.
The more we know the Light, the more we shall realize our purpose in manifesting that Light gloriously. Every moment of life in the Light is a moment glorification in the awareness of our omnipotence in manifesting the Light.
Someone once asked Toscanini’s son: “What was the highest point in your father’s life?” The answer was: “Every point in it is his highest point. He lives gloriously and fully every moment of his life, whether conducting an orchestra or peeling an orange.”
That is what we must do when we fully know the purposefulness of life – live it gloriously by living it ecstatically. We can live it ecstatically only as we know the ecstatic nature of God and become like Him through being continually inspired by communion with Him. To become like Him, we must become aware of our identity with Him. We must know Him as Creator of all that is, and in so doing know ourselves as creator of all that is.

In the space which thought creates around itself there is no love. This space divides man from man, and in it is all the becoming, the battle of life, the agony and fear. Meditation is the ending of this space, the ending of the me. Then relationship has quite a different meaning, for in that space which is not made by thought, the other does not exist, for you do not exist. Meditation then is not the pursuit of some vision, however sanctified by tradition. Rather it is the endless space where thought cannot enter. To us, the little space made by thought around itself, which is the me,is extremely important, for this is all the mind knows, identifying itself with everything that is in that space.

And the fear of not being is born in that space. But in meditation, when this is understood, the mind can enter into a dimension of space where action is inaction. We do not know what love is, for in the space made by thought around itself as the me, love is the conflict of the me and the not-me. This conflict, this torture, is not love. Thought is the very denial of love, and it cannot enter into that space where the me is not. In that space is the benediction which man seeks and cannot find. He seeks it within the frontiers of thought, and thought destroys the ecstasy of this benediction.

 " A powerful connection between two people is a
potent psychic factor that exists regardless of either
person's opinion about the relationship."

I believe we're going to find that respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them.

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.

"If we do not learn to live together as friends, we will die apart as fools."

Relationship is a mirror in which you can see yourself, not as you would wish to be, but as you are.

People like people who like them. - Kare Anderson