How would you decide if you want to be with this person who’s on your mind?

How would you know if this relationship is perfect for you?

How would you get your head around the fact that even though there are things about this person that you love, there are also other things about this person that you absolutely hate?

Maybe, we are looking at the wrong parameters. Maybe, the characteristics we like or dislike about a person are not the most useful things to think about when considering a relationship with that person.

You see, as a transformative coach, I understand and appreciate the fact that our experience of life is inside-out, not the other way around. Our experience of life is not coming from cameras capturing what’s going on in reality. Our experience is created through the projector of our mind, as it projects our thoughts into what appears to be reality. In this sense, all the things that bother us about our partner probably have more to do with us than them, because the quality of our reality is dictated by the quality of our personal thinking at any given moment.

So what does this mean for us? The implications of this truth in the context of our relationships is profound. It means that instead of looking at how the other person is, it makes more sense to look at how we are. This might sound like common sense, but there’s more to it. Let me ask you a question: 

If you already had all the love and acceptance in the world, would you still want to be with this person? 

How would you do this differently if you found yourself experiencing limitless love and acceptance within yourself?

This is a powerful question if you take the time to answer it with honesty. It highlights an important distinction: 

Being with a person because they are fulfilling a particular emotional need for you vs. Being with that person just because you appreciate sharing that time and space with that person.

It can be that there’s an element of both present in your relationship. Look deeper and find out which one is stronger. If you realise that what you like about the relationship the most is how they fulfil your emotional needs a.k.a. make you feel a particular way, know that you have immense possibilities for your own personal growth in this area.

When you experience limitless love and acceptance within yourself, your reasons for being in a relationship become very different. You come together from a space of wholeness and work together to create something beautiful, instead of coming from a space of lack and expending energies in the illusion of trying to make each other full.

When you are in the latter, it appears very important for your partner to have certain characteristics and abilities that you think can make you feel respected, loved, appreciated or cared for. When you are in the space of wholeness within you, when you fully understand that these feelings are from within you and not from an external source, what becomes important is whether your partner is able to tap into that space within themselves too. If not, maybe you can help them do their own inner work.

The best of relationships are not formed from two incomplete people working on each other. They are formed from two people who – by working on themselves – have already realised their completeness, and then decide to come together.