RELATIONSHIPS

In this blog, I will explore how you can invite the energies of love and beauty into your relationships. These energies work together to enhance, strengthen, and add richness. If you want to know more about loving relationships, first it is of value to have a strong desire, and then to state that desire clearly out loud or in your head. When you state something and commit to it, you are more likely to both have the will pursue attaining it and to experience serendipitous events that contribute to it.

Let me say here that honor and respect are the foundation of all love and are crucial to building truly loving relationships. Unless these two aspects are expressed and experienced by everyone involved, whatever you create between you is built on sand. Every breeze or wave or trouble in the relationship can have the power to erode the foundation and put it at risk of collapsing.

Most take it for granted that their relationships will be good and strong; little time is spent in learning how a good relationship works. Although I talk from time to time about romance, this topic is not my main purpose. Overall, I focus more on building the energies of love and beauty themselves and then exploring what role they play in creating a well-lived life.

You’ll get good guidance in this and subsequent blogs on this topic. In addition, there’s a great deal of useful information available in books, videos, online courses and other places, as well. I encourage you to explore this, for it is through having good relationships you hold your love dear and can increase your experience of it.

From my point of view, there are four levels or categories of love that are relevant to relationships. We will explore them, one by one. These categories are love of God, love of self, love of others, and love of a higher or broader cause (sometimes known as love of all that exists).

First up is your relationship with your Higher Power. If you don’t believe in God, you may identify better with the term Higher Self or your own inner ‘voice of wisdom’. Children are born with a naturally loving connection here. Some people lose it very soon after birth; for some it may happen later. Suffice it to say that most people, if not all, lose that precious connection at some point. Therefore, it is useful, if not imperative, to seek to reconnect with your Higher Power in a substantive way.

You can rebuild your connection with your Source through either love or beauty. Approaching them together is very powerful. However, either one of these energies can stand alone as a path to your Higher Power. So why is this important, you may ask. Because it is here, at your God-source, that all love pours into you, and your love pours out from you into the world and to others. It is also here in your union with Source that you develop your true inner beauty.

Another aspect of having healthy relationships as a whole is to have one with yourself. This is not being narcissistic. A healthy and loving relationship with yourself comes about through having a healthy self-regard, and by respecting, honoring, and loving yourself. To build this kind of relationship, it’s helpful to have a sense of self knowing. Blog posts in the Knowing Self category on my web site give more guidance for this.

Building your connection with your own inner wisdom, your self-knowing and your relationship with a Higher Power are all powerful adjuncts to a healthy relationship with yourself.

Then let’s look at your relationships with others. Unless you’re a hermit in a cave you can’t escape interacting with others, right? So how do you engage in healthy loving relationships?

You are much more likely to be well with others when you seek to have a healthy relationship with yourself, and with your Higher Power, the first two levels.

However, for some people it may work the other way around. They come to a place of having a sound relationship with another person, and that supports and informs their ability to build a healthy connection with themselves. For people who have been deeply wounded at some point in their lives this then becomes an avenue to bust through their feelings or barriers they’ve erected.

As people gain adulthood and go into relationships with others not of their birth family, often they fall in love and explore being in a committed partnership. Sometimes these relationships result in the birth of children. Family life becomes the predominate place of focus for quite a few years, and justly so.

There’s much to be learned from being in a family with others. There’s certainly much to be learned through being a parent as well. When you teach children about love and experience beauty with them, you strengthen their bond with these energies. And this increased focus can’t help but increase your own. When you show them the honor and respect that are the foundations to love, you strengthen their foundation as well. We’ll explore more about this in the blogs about parents and children.

Then as people grow in their experience many seek to take their love, their appreciation of beauty, and their sense of well-being out into a broader purpose. They begin to experience not just the love of others but a love for everything that exists.

This includes the really difficult aspects of life, in your own and the lives of those around you. When you can envelope these things in your love and compassion, and let your love shine through, this is a courageous act and you approach fulfillment at its deepest level.

Why courageous? First, few people go here. And, by definition, the deeper into love you go, the more vulnerable you become. People are afraid of being this vulnerable, yet it is your very vulnerability that becomes your strength.

So. How to begin?

You can begin at any of the four levels. I want to challenge you with some simple questions. Look at these as potential places to start:

With your Higher Power:

• What is my relationship with my Higher Power, God, or my inner wisdom?
• Where does it work for me and where can I enhance that?
• Where has it broken down?
• Is there something I can do about healing it?

With yourself:

• How is my relationship with myself? Take some time to assess.
• How am I doing at this point in my life?
• Do I like myself?
• Do I love myself?
• Look to see what is working. How can I grow that?
• Look at what is not How would I want it to be different?
• What first step could I take toward that?

Relationships with others:

• Identify, what are my closest or most important relationships?
• What is working for me and for the others involved?
• And what might I do to enhance or build that?
• What is not working?
• What attention am I willing to put toward changing it?
• How might I engage those I’m close to in this effort?

Your relationship with a larger purpose:

• Am I willing to look further to discover my loving relationship to my world?
• What might be of interest to me now or in the future as a place of service to something greater than I am?
• What small step can I take toward that?

Whether you seek to actively bring the energies of love, beauty, or both more fully alive in you and your relationships, or you simply want to learn more about them at this time, I applaud you for your exploration and encourage you to continue on this path. You can find more on this and other topics at www.goddessvenusspeaks.com.