love and relationships | Rohini Ross - Part 6

The Key to a Better Relationship

If you want a better relationship forget, about your partner and forget about working on your relationship. It is all about you!   This is not selfish in the typical definition of selfish being lacking consideration for others and concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure. It is Selfish in the sense of putting your true nature first and letting the rest take care of itself.   What does it mean to put your true nature first?   Only you can decide that for you. What it means for me is to have a sincere intention to wake up to who I am beyond...

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Remember This The Next Time You Are Upset

I no longer have a personal prayer. I have the prayer of aligning with that which is -- the impersonal flow of the divine that starts beyond space and time. We live in the experience of the illusion, and we forget about the divine. The clouds of thought disguise who we really are. As Hafiz so beautifully wrote:   You are God hiding from yourself. Remove all the “mine” -- that is the veil. … You are God in Drag!   Waking up to this is the direction I want to look in.   Not only are we God hiding from ourselves, but we also become attached to the hiding.   We...

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You Can’t Shout Someone Into Wellbeing

Angus and I have been moody buggers this week!   We are sharing our experience of losing the plot and finding our way again as a means to normalize the experience and to point to the temporary nature of this kind of experience.   This week for whatever reason we got gripped. It all started over soup. I was working late and Angus kindly made us soup for dinner. All good, until I didn’t like the soup and didn’t want to eat it. I am not usually a picky eater, but for some reason, the texture of the soup turned my stomach.   Angus took this...

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Help For Relationship Reactivity

I’m working with a young man related to success and performance. However, as part of our conversations, his relationship came up. He was feeling bad about his behavior. He had a lot of insight into why he behaves reactively at times. He recognized that when he gets insecure he loses his temper and becomes controlling as a way to try and stabilize himself. When angry, he feels compelled to behave that way and feels justified. However, afterward, he is filled with shame and remorse for his actions. He was feeling discouraged because he hadn't been able to change his behavior....

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Would You Be Happier If Your Partner Changed?

The Answer Might Not Be What You Think   We just celebrated the Thanksgiving Holiday in the U.S. It is a wonderful reminder to look at what we are grateful for in our lives. The results of this are so heart-opening. For me, it was also a reminder to look at how I am giving in my life. What ways am I being of service?    In the area of relationships, we are often preoccupied with what we should be getting from our relationship and from our partner that we forget to look at how we are showing up in the relationship. It is...

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Beyond Fear of Intimacy to Embracing the Wild

There is an incredible depth of feeling and love experienced in intimate relationships. As Bruce Perry’s book title highlights, we are born for love. We are all drawn to the experience of love. That is our natural state. That is who we are.   If this is true, why are intimate relationships hard for so many people?    Just because we are born for love on the psychological level and our essence is love on the spiritual level, it doesn’t mean we always feel love. Our personal experience can feel like the opposite of this at times and when it does we often believe that things...

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The Myth of No Upset In Healthy Relationships

Healthy relationships have room for each person's humanness. We don’t need to improve ourselves. In fact, the more we allow ourselves to be with what is in the moment the more room there is for love to show up. This doesn’t mean we are going to be loving with each other all the time. But it will be more likely. The less we try to change what is, the less suffering we have. The less suffering we have the more likely we are to show up with an open heart. This is easier when you remember that experience comes and...

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Releasing Contempt — It Is More Dangerous For Relationships Than Conflict

When people talk about relationship challenges people usually think about emotional volatility. High conflict couples let the fur fly as they navigate their differences. As challenging as these kinds of interactions are, this kind of conflict is not a negative predictor for relationship longevity. According to John Gottman and his research on marital stability, contempt is far more damaging to relationships than volatility.   Couples who have high levels of contempt in their relationship may not have high conflict. Often these are couples who say they don’t fight. Their relationships are often characterized by distance. There is frequently functional stability that allows the...

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Psychological Innocence

Everyone is doing the best they can at all times, and our best does fluctuate. Seeing this is what allows us to see our own and everyone else's psychological innocence. There is freedom in that. Judgment and blame naturally fall away and we drop into our natural state of love. Angus and I can find ourselves caught up in blame and judgment at times, but it is helpful to know that the freedom from suffering has nothing to do who or what we are blaming and everything to do with us forgetting who we are and that our wellbeing resides within. Whenever we...

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Expectations Are Harmful To Relationships

Relationships are hard when we look to them to get our needs met. It is inevitable that our partner is not going to meet our needs in some areas some of the time and in other areas consistently. And it seems that couples pick the perfect partner for not meeting their needs, or perhaps, we react in such a way that it is inevitable that our partner will eventually respond in a way that doesn't meet our needs.   Rather than relationship work being focused on understanding each other's needs and increasing expectations that our partner will meet our needs, what about...

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