I once heard Marianne Williamson say, “What is not love is a call to love.” and it stuck with me for a long time before I understood it.
Eventually I understood that all the decidedly non-loving thoughts I’ve ever had were actually attacks on myself, keeping me shrouded in fear, blame and resentment.
I had thoughts like, “My mom never encouraged me to be who I truly am.” “My son doesn’t appreciate me.” And “My husband makes too many impossible demands.”
And then I learned that I have a choice about what I do with those thoughts.
I can repeat negative thoughts ad infinitum and become supremely dissatisfied with my life, or I can question them and choose new, better-feeling thoughts.
Clinging to our resentments may inspire those around us to show us sympathy for a time, or even to offer us temporary support. But it won’t create the kind of life we truly want. Only when we take full responsibility for loving ourselves and release anything that is “not love,” do we experience the miraculous.
Of course, letting go of our resentments may require us to forgive others. Oprah once said, “Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different,” and I’m not sure there’s ever been a better definition. Note that I’m talking about forgiveness here, and not about atonement, in which we ask someone to make amends with us through some kind of action or payback for the hurt they’ve caused. Forgiveness doesn’t require the other person’s participation. Forgiveness is something you can do all by yourself and it’s truly a gift you give yourself.
That doesn’t mean forgiveness is easy. I’ve struggled with forgiveness, myself, and what often helps is journaling about the undesirable event and what it could possibly teach me until I found the better-feeling thought – the thing that helped me move forward. I didn’t bury my pain, I didn’t repress my feelings of hurt, but I did listen to them.
So forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting, but it does change the way we remember. As Byron Katie says, “Forgiveness is discovering that what you thought happened, didn’t. You realize that there was never anything to forgive.”
There’s a tremendous amount of energy to be gained once you release resentments – just think about it: in physics, the law of conservation of energy states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant. The energy in that system can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it transforms from one form to another.
In the same way, once you’re no longer focusing your energy on what you don’t want, you can harness it and direct it to something you do want.
Simply put, the Law of Attraction states: “I attract to my life whatever I give my energy, focus, and attention to, whether wanted or unwanted”. Or put another way, “Energy flows where attention goes.”
The rub is that you can’t just state what you want; you have to make it to the “feeling place” of already having what you want.
Going back to the relationship with my mom – when I had released my resentment for her not giving me the love and encouragement I desired, I was able to focus my energy on creating a great relationship with her.
Back in 2009, I created what I called Desire Statements in order to create the reality I wanted. I sat down and wrote the following:
I want my relationship with my mom to be loving, supportive, up-lifting, and full of gratitude.
I am in the process of attracting all that I need to do, know, or have, to attract my ideal relationship with my mom.
I love how it feels knowing that my relationship with my mom is loving, supportive, honest and stable. We have great communication skills and we don’t assume matters or take things personally.
I love how it feels knowing that my mom and I respect and honor each other. We understand that we each have full lives and we want to help each other live our best lives. I love that she loves my son and wants to spend time nurturing him.
Do you see how much of this writing is getting to the feeling part?
I’ve decided that the relationship I have with my mom is wonderful, respectful, loving, and easy. I am grateful to have her in my life.
I’m excited at the thought of sharing my life with my mom. We love each other and we enjoy being in each other’s lives.
I loved reading these statements – they created the feeling I wanted to have in my relationship with my mom – and I read it over and over again until I felt my relationship shift. Until I felt my resentments transfer their energy into desire.
I can unequivocally state that the shift happened very quickly and that today I am enjoying a relationship with my mom that I created.
And the better our relationship—the more I choose the better-feeling thoughts that free my energy to pursue what I really want, the more I see my relationships as a mirror – as Joko Beck, an American Buddhist nun, writes in Everyday Zen: So a relationship is a great gift, not because it makes us happy—it often doesn’t—but because any intimate relationship, if we view it as practice, is the clearest mirror we can find.
In other words, relationships—if we approach them with an open mind and an open heart—have much to teach us about who we are and how we’re received in the world.
And so in the mirror that is our relationships, we are often presented with the image of ourselves as vulnerable, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
As in everything else, we have a choice: we can always shift our focus, see something different, and put everything together into a different story.
And once we do that, we will look in the mirror and begin to see someone vulnerable and strong, someone capable of learning from our frailty and making our relationships everything they can be
Is there any greater gift we can give ourselves, or the people around us?
