Over the weekend in a workshop of absolutely delightful people who came to do The Work together for an afternoon, a question came up that I’ve been asked before:
What if I want to keep my belief? What if I like my belief?
I like how Byron Katie suggests that you don’t need to question beliefs that you love, that you enjoy, that bring you happiness.
They’re working for you, so leave them alone, right?
(And they’ll all probably fall away eventually).
The Work doesn’t even have a step that asks you to drop a belief…..all it asks you is to identify the belief you’ve got when you’re upset, and then examine whether or not its really true for you, and what it might be like without it.
It takes great sleuthing, though, to understand the protests that the mind will make about giving up a belief.
These protests, fears, worries about giving up beliefs can rise up clearly when you are asked that famous fourth question in the process of The Work:
Who would you be without that thought?
Who would you be if you couldn’t even think that thought in that situation you’re in that you find troubling?
If your answer is: I would be lost, unhappy, enraged, terrified, lonely, confused….or any number of stressful feelings…
….then you may have found a goldmine for investigating your idea of how the world should look, and where you are against Reality.
For example.
When my former husband had left and I was sitting in my little cottage all alone, desperately missing my old life and my children (who were with him) I wrote down the thought: it is best when people get married if they stay together their entire lives.
I grew up with this belief. I learned it from everyone around me.
It seemed obviously true. I had hardly questioned this thought.
I still believed it, in that moment sitting on my couch full of such sadness that my vision of marriage was broken into bits.
With the thought, I cried, I raved and ranted. I went from panic, to fury, to grief.
It felt like my world was coming to an end. I was not going to have the happy ending I had imagined in marriage, where two people are by each other’s side, both with gray hair and wrinkled skin.
But I knew that while I held that vision of the “best” case scenario in my head, then when things did NOT appear as this scenario…I was frightened.
I wasn’t even sure what I was actually frightened of, oddly enough. I just felt terrified, abandoned, wrong, unlucky and miserable.
As I sat with the vision, I realized that the list of rules about “good” relationships was quite long.
And relationships like this list were very rare.
And very conditional. As in NOT unconditional.
The conditions being, it had to be this way, or else THUMBS DOWN.
- Both people should want to stay with each other until death
- Both people should be attracted to each other exclusively forever
- Both people should not be attracted to anyone else
- Both people should share the same dreams of the future
- Both people should care for each other in times of lack of health, lack of money, loss, or distress
- Both people should support and love the other one’s family of origin, friends, community
- Both people should think, care about and consider the other in everything they do.
This may be a lovely picture of truth for some relationships.
The problem is, when it doesn’t go this way, but you think they should.
There I was, all alone, and feeling great pain. I knew to do The Work.
Is it true, I asked myself, that people should stay together their entire lives when they become committed to eachother? Is it true that this is the BEST way?
Yikes, no idea.
It appears that many people do not have this “ideal” long-term stay-together experience.
In fact, most people do not, come to think of it.
Oh.
What’s the reality?
It appears that a whole lot of the time it’s people coming and going in relationship, changing partners, not remaining together for life, unexpected things happening, goodbyes, hellos, mystery.
So, no, it is not true that marriage, or commitment, and remaining together is The Best Way.
And who would I be without the thought that The List (of Good Relationships Are) is the best way?
I would be open to all ways being interesting, loving, beautiful.
In that moment on my couch, I would notice right there in that present situation that the silence was magical, that I wanted more time to myself and now I had it.
When I turned around the thought to look at the opposite, it was “This way is the best way for a relationship to go, for me.”
I could find out why my relationship life did NOT match the one on that old list.
I could find out why it was better for me, for other people, and for the world that my life did not look like the one on that list, when it came to relationships.
Today, I have more confidence, independence, esteem for my ability to understand and earn money, more passion, adventure, willingness to try new things, more friends, more love for myself, more freedom than I ever, ever once had.
These amazing qualities came out of the fire of burning in a relationship ending.
Now, I am willing to enter into fire….that’s the difference in my life.
I see the way the phoenix can rise up.
“If you are a friend of God, fire is your water. You should wish to have a hundred thousand sets of moth wings, so you could burn them away, one set a night. The moth sees light and goes into fire. You should see fire and go toward light…” ~ Rumi
Anyone can do this.
You can dissolve what you believe are the rules of Good Relationships, and you may feel uncomfortable, ungrounded, like you are entering unknown territory.
But you will get used to it.
Freedom is so sweet, you will see the value of questioning your thoughts about relationships that hurt.
You can keep the good ones, if they are working for you, and keep doing The Work.
“It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.” ~ Nisargadatta
If you’re ready to take a deeper look with the support of a group, then the 8 week teleclass Turning Relationship Hell To Heaven starts Sept 13 on Thursday mornings 8 – 9:30 am. Join us! Click here to read about it or register.
Love, Grace