• Accept the limitless possibilities of your relationships. Your thoughts, your soul, have no limits. Your relationships exist in that sphere without boundaries. Now you must stop looking outward at all of the people you have blamed for your sour relationships, and affirm you are without blame and consequently without limitations on what you can experience for yourself. That glow you once felt in your relationships, perhaps when you were a budding teenager, was created by your thoughts, not your hormones or the hormones of someone else. Know within that the only limitations you have to magical relationships are those you have imposed upon yourself. You have taught everyone how you are willing to be treated.
Now you can begin a new school, which has a curriculum of love and respect. That is all you study and share and it is all you will allow into the classroom. No limits, nothing but love. That is your mission, and you practice it in your classroom and by seeing the fullness of God in everyone you meet.
If you meet someone whose soul is not on purpose as yours is, you send them love and move along, trusting and knowing that the right soul mates will show up and meet you at the same frequency you are radiating. This is a very personal path, this journey of real magic and miracles, and it is up to you to have the knowing within that you can accomplish it each and every day.
• Practice trusting your intuition, that invisible inner voice that guides you in all things, including your relationships. Surround yourself with people who encourage you to be all that you are capable of being. You will know who these people are. If you sense that someone truly doesn’t want you to be around them, then follow that intuitive inclination. Your intuition will give you exactly what you need to know in the way of information about your relationships. Stop forcing yourself to make a relationship work; it cannot be forced. You may succeed in keeping some physical contact, but if your intuition tells you that this is the wrong time and the wrong person, then gently send them love and move along.
There are many soul mates, male and female, who will form spiritual partnerships with you. There are no accidents; these individuals will show up precisely on time. Those relationships that are one-sided have taught you all you need to learn. Continue to give love, but the people around you must be interested in assisting you in your spiritual development as well. Your intuition will tell you who these people are. Don’t ignore it unless you want to return to suffering as the way of learning your relationship lessons. You will experience your intuitive dimension in exact proportion to how much you value it. If you reject it, it will not be available to help you, and you will continue learning your relationship lessons the hard way.
• Ask for guidance in all your relationships by going within to the secret that sits in the center and knows. You will be guided to give. Do so freely without expectation. You can practice going within and listening daily, but you must be willing to change your belief that this is a “way out” way to get help. Your relationships are what you have created, and only by knowing inside that you have the power to change them can you access the guidance you need.
This very day choose one friend or acquaintance to relate to from this place of inner knowing. Rather than being in your old skin today, give this person precisely what you think they need, based upon how you would most like to be treated. Give to this person without thinking about their reaction to you and without judgment. Forget about what they say or how they react.
Most likely you have been taught to evaluate your actions based on the results of those actions. You have been taught to focus on outcome. The secret that sits in the center and knows cares nothing about outcome. This is your God within, the giving, loving soul that is immune to outcomes.
Next, try the same experiment with a child. Go within and ask yourself, “How did I like being treated by big people when I was a child?” Again, forget about the outcome of your actions, and listen to your soul, to the secret that sits in the center and knows. Give to that child what you as a child wanted from others. Then see how you feel, not how the child reacts.
Your relationships all exist in this secret place within you. It is the source you must learn to consult if you want to experience the blessing of real magic in your relationships. Cultivate the magic in that private invisible place, and then send it out. Radiate it toward others and let go of the focus on outcome. Just for today. Then assess in your own private way the difference you experience toward those people.
This is the way to miracles. It will never fail you. There is no failure in the secret that sits in the center and knows. Only loving guidance!
• Moment to moment, rid yourself of the doubt that you cannot have magical relationships. Affirm over and over to yourself, “I know I can make my relationships blissful.” Then, when you are about to be seduced into an argumentative stance, suppress your normal way of relating and quickly review in your mind what it is you want out of the relationship. A momentary reflection on how you want to relate to this person will give you the opportunity to send out love, or to quietly sit in silence rather than striking out. This is called learning through knowing rather than through suffering or doubting. When you achieve a silent knowing within you, you will act accordingly. When you doubt your ability, send out love or caring, and you will defuse your doubt.
• Shift from a human marriage to a spiritual marriage. This can be accomplished by deciding what it is that you desire out of your marriage relationship. Joel Goldsmith, a brilliant contributor to metaphysics and author of The Infinite Way, spoke these words after a marriage ceremony on November 18, 1959:
An individual remains an individual, not only from birth to death, but actually long before birth until long, long after death…. We never lose our individuality; we never lose our uniqueness…. Each of us is individual, and each of us has individual qualities, each of us has individual talents and gifts, and these are not to be surrendered in marriage. Therefore in a spiritual marriage there is not bondage but freedom, but this is not true in human marriage. It is true in spiritual marriage; where both recognize that in marrying they are setting each other free. This is the only thing I have discovered in thirty years of this work that will make possible such things as happy marriages, peaceful marriages, successful marriages; the ability to set the other free and each live with his own individual life, and yet share with each other without demanding…. Neither husband nor wife has any rights; they have only the privilege of giving, but they have no right to demand anything of the other.
This is a wonderful message for creating a spiritual partnership out of what might have been a human marriage with one partner beholden to the other. Live this creed, and you will know miracles in your spiritual marriage. Ignore it, and you will be erecting huge barriers to your bliss.
• Switch from wishes to intentions in your relationships. This is accomplished readily with specific affirmations of what kind of relationship you intend to create and how you intend to conduct yourself. The important point to remember is that you cannot intend for someone else to act in accordance with your desires. This will bring you nothing but frustration.
While you may decide to help someone else change, you can only do so “when the student is ready.” You cannot make someone else ready, but you can take responsibility for your readiness. This is within your power, and is what constitutes your intentions. Be ready to give what is necessary, do it with active intention, and then let go of the outcome. Your actions will flow from this intention and you will find yourself much more at peace with your relationships, however they work out in the physical world.
Your intention to have a blissful relationship requires you to act in ways consistent with that intention. That is the secret to making your relationships magical. Even if you cannot intend for others, you will often find that their reactions to this new you will result in having them shift their behavior.
For example, I have witnessed many individuals who are in a “human marriage” to an addictive partner. They despise the drinking or drug use, and feel
exasperated in such a relationship. I always advise them that they cannot intend for the other person to stop drinking, but they can have powerful intentions about how they will continue to treat their addictive spouse. “I will send love, but I will remove myself physically from their presence because I am too divine and significant to be the subject of any abuse.” “I will teach them with my behavior, not my words, that I am not willing to be their victim any longer, beginning now.” “I will offer my help if they are ever ready. I will not send judgment toward them and their choice to be self-destructive, but the most loving thing I can do is to no longer reinforce their addictive behavior. I will be letting them know I am not in bondage to them, and I am going to be leading my own life on purpose, rather than being an emotional slave to their conduct.” These kinds of loving affirmations will do more to help those in need than staying around wishing their behavior will change, or that they will someday see the light.
You are here to serve and to love, but that does not mean being a servant. Keep in mind what Abraham Maslow told us: “There is no such thing as a well-adjusted slave.” Send out love and let those who continue to abuse themselves, and you, do so to themselves if that is their path, but not to you any longer. This will do more to teach them what you are willing to have in a spiritual partnership than any amount of counseling and intervention you could offer. The great paradox here is that it is just this kind of shock, resulting from your own intention to no longer be a victim, that most often helps those abusers change their intentions from self-defeating to self-loving ones and consequently to a more loving, dignified, spiritual partnership. Your intentions create your reality, so be aware of them, and be willing to put them into practice in your world today.
• Remind yourself that peaceful loving relationships come first and foremost from your state of mind. You are in charge of your mind and you create all that resides within you. Once you have this knowing, you can surrender and simply let go of the conflict that exists in any of your relationships. For conflict cannot survive without our participation.
Your decision not to participate in conflict can come in a transformative moment. It does not require years and years of struggle. Satori is available to you right this moment. Instant awakening is a wondrous phenomenon. You can go through the gate and enter that garden of delights in all your relationships right now. If others in your life decide to continue in a conflicted, confrontational mode, you simply “pass” when that angst comes your way: “No thank you,” you say inwardly, “I no longer choose to wrap myself in that cloak of negativity. Unless it is love that is coming my way, I simply will not let it into my consciousness.” Miraculously, you have just experienced satori. You have created a miracle without changing anything other than your mind.
• Use the power of visualization to manifest real magic in your relationships. Keeping in mind that what you think about expands, try visualizing all of your significant relationships as already existing the way you want them to be in your life.
After a recent speech in Oklahoma City, I noticed a woman with tears in her eyes standing in line to talk to me. When the other people left she threw her arms around me saying, “Thank you, thank you, what you are talking about really works.” She related how her daughter had not spoken to her for over seven years, simply refusing all contact. About a year before, this woman decided to begin visualizing herself and her daughter, not only back on speaking terms but enjoying the loving relationship that once existed. In her mind she refused to see it any other way, and for one solid year, this was the vision she worked on. She actually began to live each day as if that were the physical reality of their relationship.
She described becoming a happier woman because of this internal picture that she carried around. She meditated on her image and began to smile and live without the suffering that had been tearing her apart for the previous six years.
Then, someone sent her daughter a copy of a book of mine, You’ll See It When You Believe It, with a note attached to please read the final chapter on forgiveness. Nothing more, simply a gift of a book along with a note, from a friend who knew the daughter was also living in pain. That was six months earlier, and now the two of them had not only reunited, but were in a closer, more loving relationship than existed prior to their falling out.
The mother was crying happy tears as she told me that she believed in the power of her mind to create the physical reality that she wanted so desperately. By acting in her mind first, and then her material world, as if all she wanted already existed, she felt she had created a miracle.
Thoughts are extremely powerful things. Thoughts held unwaveringly, that reflect in advance what you desire, and do not demand an outcome, are the ingredients of real magic. Try it!
• Pay attention first to your spiritual invisible self, and only secondarily to your physical self. This will require a dramatic turnabout, a full 180-degree about-face. Suffering does not take place in your invisible self, because that is a dimensionless, boundless, formless part of your humanity. To suffer, you need a body to give your suffering a place to be. It shows up in knotted feelings in your stomach, puffiness in your anguished, crying eyes, pains caused by your ulcers, dryness in your mouth, heavy breathing and sighing in your lungs, and so on.
Reverse yourself and be a soul with a body, rather than a body with a soul, and play out in your mind first exactly how you want things to go for you. Pay great and exacting attention to those images. They will be the source of what is to be played out in your physical body, and will determine either the suffering or blissful condition of your body. When you pay close attention first to your soul, listening and making contact with it, asking it how it wants to be nurtured, and making that the most significant part of your days, you will find yourself behaving in accordance with those positive, loving, giving thoughts your soul beckons you to maintain.
The choice is always up to you, and that choice is strictly located in the invisible dimension of your thoughts. It is up to you, in your relationships, and in every aspect of your life. It can either be, “Good morning God!” or, “Good God, morning!” The difference is in how you choose to process your life.
• Stop pursuing what you do not want. If you do not want conflict and pain in your relationships, keep in mind you are the one who is experiencing the pain. Assess what it is you are doing to maintain your anguish. If you often insist on being right, don’t permit space, make demands you know another person cannot fulfill, or participate in arguments, go to work on your own conduct, which is the only thing you have absolute control over. Keep in mind you can never get enough of what you don’t want. You will continue to pursue the pain and struggle you despise—just like the drug addict or the alcoholic continues to chase after what they despise—until you make up your mind that you are going to end the vicious circle.
Use whatever strategy you need to free yourself from seeking that which you despise. Practice shutting your mouth if that is what provokes your pain in your relationships. Practice removing yourself physically from potentially hurtful encounters. Take a moment of silent reflection before reacting. Become more intimate and reach out with love where it is an unaccustomed gesture, even if you have to fake it initially. Whatever it is that you do, practice your new strategies in your mind first. See yourself behaving in these new ways, all in the name of putting an end to the neurotic trap of chasing after what you don’t want in your life.
• In your own private, invisible, no-limit mind, ask nothing of those with whom you are in a relationship. This is one of the quickest ways to create miracles in all your relationships. Simply say to yourself, “I expect nothing, because I know they can only be who they are, not what I think they should be,” and proceed to act accordingly.
I find when I remind myself of this with my wife, I immediately release all of the reasons for conflict, and our relationship becomes magical. I always try to remind myself she is in exactly the right place, doing precisely the right thing she is here t
o do. It is a perfect universe, even if I do not comprehend why everyone isn’t behaving as I think they should. There is a lesson for me in any behavior she throws my way, and instead of being mad at her, I take the position of helping her along her spiritual path, and forgetting about my judgments. Only when I remove my expectation of understanding or even agreeing with much of what she does am I able to send her unconditional love.
Even with my children, I can guide them, assist them, hopefully teach them moral lessons and attempt to be a model for what I would like them to emulate, but I cannot expect them to be what I think they should be. I must learn to detach myself from my expectations for others if I am to create real-magic relationships. Of course this does not mean one overlooks outrageous or violent conduct, but I can, and do, control the expectation that it should not be there and the subsequent pain I experience because of that expectation.
You too can rid yourself of those expectations, which ultimately will be the barriers to your own magical relationship. This can be done in a thousand little ways each and every day, with virtually everyone you meet. By sending away the judgments about how others are supposed to be, you create a place within yourself for love, where judgment previously resided. Love of the unconditional variety is what you are working toward in your relationships and everywhere else in your life as well.
• Finally, meditate each day, and use a portion of that meditation to visualize how you want all of your relationships to be. Get a picture of yourself acting in these new ways toward everyone, and ask for divine assistance in being a giving, loving, nonjudgmental person. Review in advance how you see other people reacting to this new, miraculous you. Your meditations will give you peace and serenity for yourself, and will provide you with answers that may elude you otherwise.
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