A lot of attention comes our way when we turn on the Facebook button to announce to all our social media buddies that we are now ‘in a relationship’. Who is it, who’s the lucky man/woman, congratulations, well done, and so on. When the button is reverted back to ‘single’ it’s a different tempo of activity – a lot more muted and cautious. A bit like going to a funeral almost.
I’ve had a fascination with languages from a young age, having grown up bilingual at home. The English language is rich with metaphors and analogies, and phrases such as ‘your other half’ would perplex me. Was I not a whole unit? Was it a couple that was whole and normal, and a woman or man on their own some kind of deviation?
Relationships were an exclusive phenomenon, and one that I wanted to be part of. I did not want to be that deviation, I wanted to be whole and I got myself into one on one romantic relationships, what I thought was the be all and end all, from the age of eighteen and stuck with them almost religiously for the long haul even though they were largely dysfunctional, until the age of thirty-five. I could not fathom not being in a relationship. It would be akin to removing the safety net and falling into the abyss.
And then there were the other relationships in my life: those with my mother, my father – who had passed away years past but that I still held on to, my siblings, my cousins and friends. And that was about it – I had my circle of relationships and this circle was a closed one. It was finite and each relationship had its own closed up circle and its own conditions. Let’s explain this further – my relationships back then had a function, and an underlying expectation unspoken of but loud nonetheless that this function would be realised through this relationship. That was its modus operandi. Depending on the function itself, and the willingness in that arrangement between the two parties to meet that function, we would determine the limits the relationship would go to. I will do this for you, as long as you do this for me. I remember having this demanding expectation distinctly with my mother – be it in the guise of expecting a comforting warmed up meal or three when I would take a trip back home out of my not so cosy student pad, getting my washing done that I would leave piled up in a heap or, using my mother as a punching bag for the enormous frustration and unreconciled emotions I was in, knowing that mum would still be there with the warm meals and everything else that mum would provide at the end of it all.
As for the rest of the world, it didn’t occur to me that I was in a relationship with them. When I started part-time work in a pharmacy at the age of sixteen, it took me a while to remember everybody’s names and I kept a distance from the rest of the team. They were strangers – I was not in a relationship with them, nor with the many regular customers who came in.
But life back then was very sad, lonely and cold, far colder than the student flat I’d want to bail from, which looking back was an ironic representation of the lack of warmth in my own heart. Those people I worked and interacted with as they came into the pharmacy, I saw week upon week and they became a constant in my life. There was an opportunity there on offer, which I never took up.
I never took it up because there was no foundation for true relationship in myself that I could then offer another, regardless of whether they were blood-related, a colleague or a so-called friend or partner for life. I would interact with all the people in my life at arm’s length, and in so doing I would keep my own life jagged and on edge. I thought this was the way it was and perhaps would always be. And so I checked out even more, withdrew from myself and people even more, and my relationships became more and more transactional, functional and void of true care and respect, because ultimately I lacked this in myself.
In this realisation, I eventually found the key and the truth to what relationships can be and what they can offer. A truth that is hidden from us, by us, as we play the game of being small, of being those ‘halves’ trying to find the elusive whole.
I wandered across this barren abyss if you will, until the age of 35. It was then that I came across Serge Benhayon and The Way of The Livingness and what I observed was a completely different paradigm of what relationships can be. I observed a quality of relationships in Serge’s own life and in the many students of the teachings of The Way of The Livingness that melted me to the bone. In the place of unspoken contracts and needs being met there was a flow and an openness that I longed for. These relationships were full, alive and with a presence that was always fresh, as if they were meeting for the first time all over again and again.
In all of my withdrawal and shutting down of my own heart, I knew that I had been living a lie. I knew deep within that what we have accepted as a society as we play the game of being small and being those ‘halves’ trying to find the elusive whole in relationships that always seem to have some kind of problem and excuse for us to shut down all over and over again, is a mass distortion, a great lie that we have swallowed, about what relationships can truly be.
Relationship is communion. It is a sacred interaction whereby I have a relationship with whatever it is I hold precious and dear.
The Way of The Livingness offered me a very practical and simple runway to re-imprint my relationship with myself, and from there, naturally, with every other relationship in my life. Quite simply, I learnt that in order to have relationships that were precious, I needed to hold myself as precious. Otherwise how could I pour my love into the depths of another, when my own depths were downright absent?
As I started to nurture the relationship with me, I began to connect to my own depth. I realised this depth is limitless – it never stops, and it never ends – and by virtue of my relationship with it, I am in relationship with the essence of who I am and who we all are. I am in relationship, in communion, with my Soul, with God, and with the Universe itself.
Grand company in which I could never feel as a ‘half’ again.
Gone is the awkwardness, of standing as a goofy ‘half’ at a social gathering where small talk fills up the nervous spaces. Gone is the need for a relationship with someone, romantic or otherwise. Gone also is the abuse, the transactional and functional outplay that was based on the absence of relationship in truth. In its place now I have relationships that are limitless, relationships that keep going deeper, as I go deeper.
In the truth of what relationship can be, I have learnt we are in a bond that is held by the sacredness of what that relationship is based on. Each relationship is another angle from the universe, another constellation of Souls, with another God reflecting back the God within ourselves. The preciousness is out of this world, because relationships in their true form call us back to be out of this world, back to our true lodgings, where we are in relationship with the All – with the Divinity that breathed us forth and where we are returning to once again.
