How To Keep A Relationship Strong – Guy Finley
SUMMARY
Why are relationships so difficult and how to keep a relationship strong? This is the question that most of us deal with in our everyday lives and we’re not only talking about relationships with our partners, but also, relationships with ourselves and with life. Guy Finley, the best-selling Letting Go author, shares his powerful insights on relationships and how to keep a relationship strong. He explains how relationships can be used as a magical space for transformations and incredible shifts. If you are wondering how to keep a relationship strong, keep reading!
KEY TAKEAWAYS
We are standing all the time in front of a spiritual gold mine that we don’t recognize as being such, and that is our relationships. Knowing this help us know how to keep a relationship strong.There is absolutely nothing more plentiful, nothing more pressing and ultimately, nothing more powerful than understanding that the relationships we have with one another are mirrors.Relationships are a full contact sport that once we begin to understand the real purpose of a relationship, then we also understand what it means to be present and the powers that are there that can help us begin to in ourselves, the transformation that we seek.Relationships are the instruments through which we are introduced to ourselves in the deepest and most meaningful way. Knowing these instruments will help us understand how to keep a relationship strongWe are revealed to ourselves and within ourselves by our relationships. Knowing how to keep a relationship strong depends upon how good we understand ourselves.In our consciousness that we are by and large asleep within, we have almost no consistent recognition of these divine celestial characters that helps in understanding how to keep a relationship strong.You’re drawn to a man or a woman in your life because when you’re around him or her, you get to meet parts of yourself you like which is important in learning how to keep a relationship strong.We are drawn to the relationships we’re drawn because they help complete in us what we can’t yet have as a full time experience of our own consciousness. This is how to keep a relationship strong.We realize these deeper, truer, more fulfilling aspects of ourselves through our relationships with others because when we’re around them, there is an unmistakable stirring in our soul and a subsequent realization that quality is being something that we’ve been looking for to learn how to keep a relationship strong.If you look to another human being for only those beatific, gently, and loving qualities that when you’re around them, then, you begin to look at that other person as necessary and required for you to experience what you do. Out of that, a terrible dependency is born.Those moments in our lives where we blame the relationship for what we’re feeling have to be recognized as being under the exact same law as those relationships that we find to be beatific because of what they reveal in us. This helps us to know how to keep a relationship strong.Relationships are equal opportunity mirrors. They don’t judge, they reveal how to keep a relationship strong.The relationships we’re in with one another are intended to reveal to us what we don’t know about ourselves and that includes the characters in our consciousness that have continued to hide themselves in us by blaming others for what we feel when we’re around them.Relationships are the ground of revelation. Each moment is the seed of revelation that teaches us how to keep a relationship strong.We have a tendency to summarily reject or resist the realization of the parts of us that stand in the way of these deeper revelations and realizations.Until we can recognize that relationships serve to reveal within us what has remained hidden in us and that stands as a limitation to enlarging our life and our relationship with life, then we will not be transformed. Knowing this aspect is important in order to learn how to keep a relationship strong.We are not transformed by the active side of love. We are transformed by embracing both expressions of it and the other expression of love isn’t just what I am drawn to but what love draws to me through those people, places, and problems that I don’t want that I might awaken to what stands in the way within myself to that fuller, more deeply, perfected relationship.This life is not a race to win. It’s a school for our higher education where we really need to know the basics of how to keep a relationship strong.If we resist the moment or anyone or anything in it, then we are resisting the lesson that moment has brought to us.The only thing that bothers us about any other person in our life is what we want from them.If something’s troubling me about the moment that means I came into the moment with that troubled nature. The condition doesn’t create the consciousness that I experience. It reveals the consciousness I am experiencing.Our enemy is anything and everything in us that’s summarily rejects or blames the moment as being the cause of our unhappiness. Figure it out to know how to keep a relationship strong.If the moment presents something that brings conflict into your heart, your responsibility is to bring all of that that’s in your consciousness. You’ll let this moment change you by showing who and what you have been up until this moment and it will be a new you that comes out of that moment because you’ve let the revelation of the relationship produce the energy and the possibility that exists in no other moment in no other way. This helps in knowing how to keep a relationship strong with ourselves.
TRANSCRIPTION: HOW TO KEEP A RELATIONSHIP STRONG – GUY FINLEY
How To Keep A Relationship Strong
Luis CongdonOn today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how to use your relationships for transformation and how to keep a relationship strong. Your relationship with everything in your life is a deep reservoir, oasis for spiritual and personal transformation. Today, we’ll be talking about that with Guy Finley.
Kamala Chambers On this episode, we’re here with Guy Finley who knows everything about how to keep a relationship strong. He’s the best-selling author of Letting Go and, he really focuses on social issues about relationships, success, addiction, stress, peace, happiness and freedom, and a way to lead a higher life.
Luis CongdonAll right, Thriving launchers. Here we are with Guy Finley. It’s such an honor to have you on the show today. I’ve been in touched with your work for quite a long time. Guy, are you ready to launch?
Guy Finley 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Luis CongdonHe is ready. Awesome! We are excited to deep dive into how to keep a relationship strong.I know one of the things that you’re really jazzed to talk today is how to keep a relationship strong and the power of relationships and how that’s an un-ignored or ignored piece of self-development, spiritual healing, and growth. I’d love to jump into that with you.
Guy Finley Yeah. That’d be a great topic for us to look at together and we have some wonderful supportive material to go along with how to keep a relationship strong, you lead and I’ll follow there Luis.
Luis CongdonYeah, what’s one of the first things to know how to keep a relationship strong? When we talk about relationships and the power of a relationship to help us heal and help us grow, what’s one of the first things that you really want people to know or to teach and help people understand?
Guy Finley We are standing all the time in front of a spiritual gold mine that we don’t recognize as being such. That is our relationship with self which is important to know how to keep a relationship strong.There is absolutely nothing more plentiful, nothing more pressing and ultimately, nothing more powerful than understanding that the relationships we have with one another are mirrors, which further teaches us how to keep a relationship strong. They’re intended to help us begin the process of another kind of self-discovery that isn’t much based in a lot of the platitudes, the pleasing ideas that we have as aspirants but rather, I like to say that truth, relationships are a full contact sport that once we begin to understand the real purpose of a relationship, then we also understand what it means to be present and the powers that are there that can help us begin to in ourselves, the transformation that we seek.
Guy Finley As an example, I’m sitting here in my little house on this mountain in Oregon, and just outside my window, I have my bird feeders and its fall. The colors are absolutely striking.Now, when I bring my attention, take it away from thinking about maybe even what I’m going to say. I see the forms, the colors, and the light. In that relationship, if I’m attentive to it, I can feel things in myself and see things in myself that ordinarily, I’m not present to at all. I see the leaves that are beginning to lose their color and drop to the ground and maybe a breeze picks them up and makes them race across the lawn. I see a tree stripped of its leaves, bare and uncovered. Keen observation helps us to learn how to keep a relationship strong with nature.Every last one of these impressions, when they’re received as the relationship that they are in the moment, produced an indelible impression in my life which helps in knowing how to keep a relationship strong. That impression gives me feelings that are otherwise unavailable to me in the moment. So that it’s the relationship with the color, the shape, the form, the movement, whatever that maybe in the moment that awakens in me similar qualities that I didn’t know lived in my consciousness until I’m present to the relationship outside of me that reveals these things to me about myself. That would be the first thing I would say.We all get that idea of how to keep a relationship strong with nature. We’re drawn to the timelessness of a night sky, the gentleness of a mother doe with her new fawn, the timidity of a hummingbird and that these moments give us the most profound sense of ourselves and in truth. It’s why we seek those things.If we’re a naturalist, we love nature, why do we go out in the nature? I love the ocean. Why do I like to sit beside it? Because, in that moment of relationship being stirred in me, are those exact same timeless qualities, the vastness of my own consciousness that I can’t experience so much or at least not very often without the presence of the physical relationship outside of me. This is how to keep a relationship strong with nature.So, we get that idea that we are revealed to ourselves and within ourselves by our relationships.
Luis CongdonThat’s really magnificent. Love the way you explained how to keep a relationship strong with nature.It really reminds me of when people say that we need a mirror. It’s through the reflection of others or any relationship that we have that helps us understand how to keep a relationship strong. It doesn’t even have to be other people or the other beings. Just a reflection from a tree or the ocean, we understand ourselves because of that contrast and because of the relationship.
How To Keep A Relationship Strong With Others
Guy Finley Yes, because in our consciousness that we are by and large asleep within, we have almost no consistent recognition of this divine celestial characters that helps understanding how to keep a relationship strong.The timelessness of a night sky that draws me to look up at it isn’t that I’m looking at some void field with little pinpoints of light but rather through the relationship I experience what is timeless in myself or I couldn’t be drawn to that night sky. Knowing how to keep a relationship strong with nature so important to be happy in life.That gentleness, I get to know it in myself and it is a celestial character that helps how to keep a relationship strong. It’s not my character. In truth, it’s not even the character of that little buck outside my window. It is a celestial attribute that we are awakened to through relationship and most of us get that. We’re drawn to one another the way we are. I’m drawn to a man or a woman in my life because when I’m around him or her, I get to meet parts of myself I like which helps us to know how to keep a relationship strong with ourselves.When I’m with you, I feel this bubbliness. When I’m watching you, I see a strength. I experience a force that ordinarily, I don’t seem to have access to but I can see it exists in me because when I’m around you, you move me. You move that same character in me. We love this idea even if we’ve never been able to adequately express it or realize it in our lives. We are drawn to the relationships we’re drawn because they help complete in us what we can’t yet have as a full time experience of our own consciousness.
Kamala Chambers This is such a beautiful journey you’re taking us on in this world of mirroring.I’m excited to hear what you have to share next about how to keep a relationship strong with ourselves. I don’t even have a specific question because I don’t know what’s going to unfold in the next segment.
Luis CongdonBefore you jump into the next piece, I also really want to validate what I’m hearing and not only validate it through my own experience and say that I absolutely love what you’re saying but also bring in somebody I really love and admire, Dr. Harville Hendrix. He says that it is only in loving others that we truly learn how to love ourselves which is essential in knowing how to keep a relationship strong with ourselves. Somehow that quote from Harville really resonates with what you’re saying as well.
Guy Finley Yes. Of course, that’s true in knowing how to keep a relationship strong.Not knowing the gentleman, I can only hope or assume that his understanding includes the following:We’ve agreed that we realize these deeper, truer, more fulfilling aspects of ourselves through our relationships with others because when we’re around them, there is an unmistakable stirring in our soul and a subsequent realization that quality is being something that we’ve been looking for.That’s the same situation in that movie with Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger.
Kamala Chambers Jerry Maguire.
Guy Finley Yeah.
Luis CongdonBingo!
How To Keep A Relationship Strong With Ourselves
Guy Finley In, Jerry Maguire, we get to this marvelous endpoint where he says to her, “You complete me. Being around you has helped me discover in myself what I’ve been looking for in my whole life.” That’s what wonderful, sentimental, emotional view of this idea that you mention this doctor speaks of. Without the other side of it, it’s not only meaningless, it’s actually harmful.If I look to another human being for only those qualities that when I’m around them, awaken me to similar beatific, gentle, loving qualities, then, I begin to look at that other person as, in one respect, necessary and required for me to experience what I do. Out of that, terrible dependency is born. An attachment not just to other person but to what I expect that other person to be so that I might be what they help me to see in myself. We have to go deeper than that.We love the idea that looking out at nature, looking out at Titus, this little buck, or the humming bird, or the beautiful person that I’m engaged to or going out with or my own wife as a case maybe. But these people, these places, these relationships helped me realize what is true noble and everlasting in myself.However, the exact same principle applies to every moment when I’m around someone or something in some place that is disturbing me, causing me anger, to feel afraid, to be worried, to feel anxiousness, or even hatred. Your environment has a massive impact in learning how to keep a relationship strong. Those moments in our lives where we blame the relationship for what we’re feeling have to be recognized as being under the exact same law as those relationships that we find to be beatific because of what they reveal in us.
Guy Finley The relationships we’re in with one another are intended to reveal to us what we don’t know about ourselves and that includes the characters in our consciousness that have continued to hide themselves in us by blaming others for what we feel when we’re around them.We have to take both sides of the equation that helps us to know how to keep a relationship strong.
Guy Finley The revelations serves the purpose of introducing me to qualities, characteristics high and low, light and dark that I am presently asleep too in myself. Naturally, we love recognizing and realizing these beautiful parts of what is divine in us but we have a tendency and as a euphemism to summarily reject or resist the realization of the parts of us that stand in the way of these deeper revelations and realizations. Knowing our divine strengths is important to learn how to keep a relationship strong with ourselves.Here’s where we’ve gotten to. Until we can recognize that relationships serve to reveal within us what has remained hidden in us and that stands as a limitation to enlarging our life and our relationship with life, then we will not be transformed. We are not transformed by the active side of love. We are transformed by embracing both expressions of it and the other expression of love isn’t just what I am drawn to but what love draws to me through those people, places, and problems that I don’t want that I might awaken to what stands in the way within myself to that fuller, more deeply, perfected relationship.
Kamala Chambers These are such powerful concepts you’re transmitting that could help us how to keep a relationship strong. I feel the transmissions coming through. I would love to hear some really practical ways that we can apply this in our daily lives.
Guy Finley Absolutely.First of all, let’s look at a one last broad principle Luis, Kamala. Can I resist any moment in my life and push it away because something in me has decided it’s against me? Can I be against life and learn from it at the same time?
Luis CongdonI hope this is a trick question.
How To Keep A relationship Strong And Avoid Resistance
Guy Finley For a lot of people it’s not. Most of us don’t have a living context to our relationship in this life. The living context is that, as Mr. Howard, a great man I used to know before he passed away, this life is not a race to win. It’s a school for our higher education. And if the context and purpose of our existence as individual beings is to discover through a broader set of relationships that life doesn’t just make possible but that brings to our door.When the student is ready the teacher appears these lessons. Then, if I reject the lesson, I rejected life and if I reject life, I reject love that’s giving it to me.
Guy Finley We’re denying the teacher that knocks at our door because living within us is another kind of false teacher, a false body of ideas that tells us only what we feel is for us is actually on our side. That level of consciousness has divided life up into good and bad, light and dark, up and down in such a distinct fashion as to draw a line between us and whatever it is by the way, that has come to reveal to us what stands in our way of knowing a love that is authentically unconditional because it embraces without question every lesson that life brings to us regardless of its seeming nature.
Luis CongdonYou’re really making me think of and I want to get personal and I hope this share is okay with you Kamala. Kamala and I were recently at an event and she was struggling with enjoying herself at the event. She was struggling with really being there and I know that after a while, I got really upset and I got really frustrated and I really wanted to pull her out of what she was feeling and wanted to change her feelings.Looking back on it, it’s like that’s totally wrong to want to change someone’s feelings and then later, I actually blamed her for my inability to really have a good time or to really be present at the event. I feel like this is what you’re talking about is because I was so against her experience and blaming her for the experience that she was having, I lost an opportunity to really learn.
Guy Finley Yeah and all that.For maybe a long time, we only can see these lessons in retrospect but just to be able to recognize what you’ve described is a marvelous step in the right direction.The only thing that bothers us about any other person in our life is what we want from them which is an essential aspect of how to keep a relationship strong. I get negative with somebody unless they are aligned with my wishes in the moment, they’re bombing me out. Not so much that I want or to enjoy something as it is that she’s keeping me from enjoying myself and rightfully, in one respect because I’m there to share this with her.Where we get lost in these moments is misunderstanding the moment of that relationship and I don’t just mean with our significant other. What is it about any given moment that’s troubling to me? Is it the moment itself? Or is it that’s its stirring in me, something that’s troubling me?If something’s troubling me about the moment that means that I came into the moment with that troubled nature. The condition doesn’t create the consciousness that I experience. It reveals the consciousness I am experiencing. Do you see the difference?
Kamala Chambers Absolutely.
Valuing Relationship and Understand How To Keep A Relationship Strong
Guy Finley If the moment reveals the consciousness that I have come into the moment with, and that consciousness can only resist or hate the moment or someone in it, then that’s what I need to recognize. Not to blame the moment or that person. This is why Christ said “Love thy enemies”. He was referring to that fact that life continually prepares a feast in the presence of our enemy. And in this instance, our enemy is anything and everything in us that’s summarily rejects or blames the moment as being the cause of our unhappiness.Our unhappiness is because we walk around with a body of psychological formations, creations of the past that were never reconciled properly that instead of going before us to make to connect to that place.Because we live from a body of unseen psychological demands, some of which without knowing it as part of our essence, require balancing and harmonizing. But when the moment to harmonize through these revelations comes, we reject the teacher and instead, stand on the side of this old man, this old woman that lives in us and that continues to insist you, meaning Kamala, this event, this temperature, this color, this form, you be what I need you to be so you don’t bug me.
Kamala Chambers Wouldn’t that be easier? But no, it’s not.
Guy Finley No, that’s hell.
Kamala Chambers Exactly.
Guy Finley That’s trying to control one another. That’s trying to change circumstances to fit what we say through comparison would be much more comfortable for us.Everybody listening, all of us understand to some extent what we’re talking about. The real question is how deeply do I want to learn in these moments? What will change the whole of me instead of me trying to change a part of you so that I could be at peace?
Luis CongdonSo, what would you recommend in that situation where I am wanting Kamala to change so that I can be happy? Which I know is totally wrong but I’m lost in those tracts, now, I’m moving forward. That moment has passed but one thing I know about life is if didn’t really get the lesson out of it, I’m going to have plenty of opportunities to practice.What would you recommend to me?
Guy Finley Here’s one of my favorite ideas and by the way, for those of you that are religious or spiritually-centered, you’ll find this idea at the heart of all true teachings.Have you ever gone out Kamala, Luis with a group of people, friends, or maybe acquaintance at business enterprise? You’re sitting at a dinner table and you’ve all ordered what you like and maybe when you’ve looked at the menu, I know this is true for me, you think, “Oh my God. How can they charge $42 for a salad?” and then, you’re sitting there and the waiter comes up with the bill and nobody reaches for it. And, maybe it’s clearer look, we’re all going Dutch or maybe someone made it clear at the start “This is on me,” but eventually, someone has to take the lead. And maybe at some point, someone says, “You know what? Look, let me get this one,” and everyone at the table has this small sigh of relief. “Let me get this one.” We get that idea, don’t we?Here comes a moment. There’s a real uncomfortableness because life has brought along a bill and nobody wants the whole bill but the bill has to be paid. The parallel would be, here comes a moment in life and whether we understand this or not, life continues to present moments to us that by their nature, are comic.Life itself continues to bring us into a moment where we are invited as human beings infused with what is divine to do the divine thing in this planetary body and amongst these personal relationships, which is what? “I will flip the bill for this moment.” “Let me get this one.” “You’re negative.” “I don’t why this is going down the way it is and I want to complain.” “I want to blame. I want to get angry and frustrated.” “I want to pay back the guy that cut me off on the freeway by tailgating him.” All of these negative emotions. And no negative emotion appears in us that isn’t preceded by resistance to the lesson that’s presented in the moment.So here I am, and ordinarily, I demand that you Kamala, pay the bill. Get on my side. I demand that person see they’re wrong. Why don’t they know they’re wrong? So I try to command you by getting sullen or irritated or aggressive to get you to change your attitude so that whatever ache is in me will go away.But now, I understand. I can’t change you. It’s not just a mental affirmation anymore. It’s a weariness. It’s a deep seated suffering that I’ve gone through 5,000 times and seeing that when I asked you to pay the bill, all that gets bred is resentment. So I’m going to step up and do the thing I never thought was possible which is I’m going to use this moment of my relationship to let it reveal in me the parts of me that want to run away from the revelation. I’ll pick up the bill. I’ll be changed. I will lay down my life and I’ll feel that power. This is how to keep a relationship strong with ourselves and people around us.What a beautiful song that is. But you won’t, until you agree to lay down your life too. No greater love has a man or a woman that he or she who lays down their life for their brother and their brother is not just their husband, their wife, their business partner, the stranger on the street. The brother is inside of us that is revealed by our brother.If the moment presents something that brings conflict into my heart, my responsibility is to bring all of that that’s in my consciousness rejecting that revelation into a summary understanding that I’ll pick it up. I’ll let this moment change me by showing me who and what I have been up until this moment and it will be a new me that comes out of that moment because I’ve let the revelation of the relationship produce the energy and the possibility that exists in no other moment in no other way.
Luis CongdonThat is powerful.
Kamala Chambers Really powerful stuff. Guy Finley, it’s been so fantastic having you here with us on the Thriving Launch podcast. We loved the insights about how to keep a relationship strong.
Luis CongdonI want to say, I feel like we could keep that conversation going for such a long time. Guy Finley has much to share about relationships and using relationship as a magical space to perform alchemy, transformation, and incredible shifts.
Kamala Chambers Yeah. It’s such an honor to have you on the show and we been here, talking about relationship magic.
Guy Finley If you want to learn a little bit more about some of these ideas regarding how to keep a relationship strong and the material that we have been talking about, you can go to my myrelationshipmagic.org.
Luis CongdonThank so much for coming on the show today Guy.
Guy Finley I’m delighted. It was a wonderful chance to look at some of these deeper ideas and to resonate as I know we did. I thank you and be well.
Luis CongdonThank you so much.
Guy Finley And I hope to speak with you again sometime.
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