About relationships in short

I just re-read some of John Welwood's work and thought it would be nice to share some of the things that caught my intention this time around. I remember first reading this over a year ago and it was very interesting and inspiring, not only because of the situation I was in back then but all in all I can relate to it. I'm not going to say anything more about it, just let these quotes speak for themselves:

"Sometimes it seems that relationships almost want to resist consciousness. After all, they've been unconscious for thousands of years, governed and guided by roles, by social and family traditions, and always supported and rationalized in that context. But that framework hardly exists in our culture anymore. Because there are few external supports and guidelines for relationships today, each of us to figure out how to go about having sane, healthy, alive relationships. This means bringing consciousness to something that has been in the dark for thousands of years.

For thousands of years relationships have been like that—love in the dark, basically. And now we're lighting a candle to see, "Well, what are they about? What's going on here?" And to do that actually involves tremendous trials. To bring consciousness to an area that has never been conscious before is extremely challenging. It's a heroic journey.
A conscious relationship in my view is one that puts you completely to the test as a human being. It involves becoming clear about what we are doing with another person and what that requires of us."

"The problem with running away when a relationship becomes difficult is that it’s also turning away from ourselves and our potential breakthroughs. Fleeing the raw, wounded places in ourselves because we don't think we can handle them is a form of self-rejection and self- abandonment that turns our feeling body into an abandoned, haunted house. The more we flee our shadowy places, the more they fester in the dark, and the more haunted this house becomes. And the more haunted it becomes, the more it terrifies us. This is a vicious circle that keeps us cut off from and afraid of ourselves.

The other distortion is to make relationship into something familiar and totally safe, to treat it as a finished product, rather than a living process. This is the security trap. When we try to make a relationship serve our needs for security, we lose a sense of greater vision and adventure. Relationship becomes a business deal, or else totally monotonous. A life devoted to everyday routines and security concerns eventually becomes too stale and predictable to satisfy the deeper longings of the heart.

Neither of these approaches leads very far or provides a path. The illusion of heavenly bliss may allow us to ascend for a while, until we finally crash when the relationship inevitably comes back down to earth. The illusion of security keeps us glued to the earth, so that we never venture to reach beyond ourselves at all."

John Welwood is "a psychotherapist, teacher, and author, and has been a pioneer in integrating psychological and spiritual work for the past thirty years".

(I'll probably quote him more in future posts.)

Setting the whole thing of creating your own happiness etc aside - which is something I believe in too, not saying that this is even separate from that actually, but just to make it clear - I think this is something that people should be thinking more about because society is basically a clump of different kinds of relationships. There's no way anyone can avoid relationships of various kinds, so they are an important part of our world and trying to make the best out of them I reckon is one of the better things we can do in our human experience. I'm not only talking about partnership, but friendship and family, business relationships, you name it.