If our parents didn’t love and understand each other, how are we to know what love looks like? … The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness.
Our parents may be able to leave us money, houses, and land, but they may not be happy people.
If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all.
When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness.
Understanding someone is the best gift you can give another person.
Understanding is love’s other name.
If you don’t understand, you can’t love.
This goes for your work too.
Understanding a person is leading them.
This is why we break large audiences into teams and groups, in order to understand them individually, better.
A leader must understand 20,000 people if they are the sum total of employees, suppliers and customers. If not, the leader leads without love. And that’s doomed.
At the heart of my Innerwealth teaching is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name” — that to love another means to fully understand him or her, or they, or them.
To try to understand another person using psychological mumbo jumbo assumes that diversity is illness. We become psychologist with no training or experience and judge people.
Second guessing someone assumes you know them. You don’t.
The universal laws let you understand all humanity. If you know how humans evolve, you know everything. People become transparent. Then you can love them, understand them, better than they understand themselves. This is what I do.
But you have to know that with great power, knowledge comes a great responsibly. You know what’s going on but you must stay silent about it. Knowing, understanding others, does not mean blurting out what you know and pushing cream pie in their face. You need to learn patience with this awareness.
So understanding another person at work is only half the story, what if you understand that your boss is having hell at home and that they are being mean and aggressive at work as a result.
What do you do then?
Let’s see. If you let them be mean and aggressive, you are an enabler of bad behaviour which will eventually backfire on your boss. But if you push back and inform them, you’re likely to get a bad review at the end of the year.
The solution, when you are ready for it, is to blame yourself. If you are not the cause of something, how can you ever be the cure for it?
Your boss’ mood and their attitude to you must become your fault.
This transcends all psychology and pop culture. Fixing a problem with your boss assumes your boss is the problem and you might have a solution. Nothing could be more fake.
Let’s start with the premise, known for centuries and recently ignored especially by YouTube psychology… nothing happens outside of us that isn’t happening within. Your innerwealth causes your outer reality.
So, if someone is disrespectful to you, that’s you being disrespectful to you inside your self-talk. If someone is kind to you, that’s you being kind to you in your innerwealth Self-Talk. So, nobody does to you more or less than you do to yourself. In other words, stop blaming your boss, partner, kids, company, environment, house, car for giving you not what you want. It’s just a mirror. And in reverse, stop giving credit to others you deserve to reward yourself with.
Now, let’s go back. Your partner is giving you hell. Your boss is giving you hell. You can go into battle to fix it with them or own it. They are the mirror and ask, why, where, how am I talking to myself like a loser, like a weak person, like a self-depreciating, half living human. And that we can easily fix.
But sometimes we get lazy.
Often, we get hopeful of being treated well by others not because we truly love or understand them, or even want to perform well in their eyes, but to distract ourselves from our own suffering. So, instead of expecting to be treated well, we might ask, why am I suffering?
Maybe we need to learn to love and understand ourselves and have true compassion for ourselves, first, and then we can truly love and understand another person, and then there is no grumpy boss. We know, if there is a grumpy boss or partner, what to do. We do our home work – our Inner wealth.
How you treat yourself when you are mean and aggressive to yourself is always reflected in the world around you. Sure, there are some people who will try to rescue you, but those people are typically being mean to themselves and don’t like the look of it in you.
Ask yourself: do you treat yourself with love and understanding or be critical of yourself?
Learn to treat yourself with love and understanding and then you will automatically be treated well. Unless you do it this way, you are just playing trickery and you’ll be caught.
Sometimes we feel empty; we feel a vacuum, a great lack of something. We don’t know the cause; it’s very vague, but that feeling of being empty inside is very strong. We expect and hope for something much better so that we’ll feel less alone, less empty. The desire to understand ourselves and to understand life is a deep thirst. The most important thing here is to know where to look and in contrast, where not to look.
This is the very same thirst, the deep thirst to be loved and to love. We are ready to love and be loved. It’s very natural. But because we feel can feel empty, we try to find an object of our love. Sometimes we haven’t had the time to understand ourselves, yet we’ve already found the object/person of our love.
But when we realise that all our hopes and expectations of course can’t be fulfilled by that person, we continue to feel empty.
You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day!
The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness.
Chris Walker
You can be the sunshine for another person. But, you can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. You can’t bring sunshine to another person if you don’t bring it to yourself. Otherwise you are just giving sunshine to get sunshine, expectations and those expectations of getting back what you give, block love.
So the suggesting from me, and nature, is to build a home inside yourself – your Innerwealth, by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself. Learn how to practice mindfulness in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment. Then you have something to offer the other person. You give away the excess.
If you cultivate enough understanding and love for yourself, then every moment — whether it’s spent making breakfast, driving the car, watering the garden, or doing anything else in your day — can be a moment of joy.
This is not as complex as you might think. it is only about the choices you make.
In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are them and they are you. Your suffering is their suffering. Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. What happens to your loved one happens to you. What happens to you happens to your loved one.
In true love, there’s no more separation or discrimination in your innerwealth. Their happiness is your happiness. Your suffering is their suffering. You can no longer say, “That’s your problem.”
When you love someone, you have to have trust and confidence.
Love without trust is not yet love.
Of course, first you have to have trust, respect, and confidence in yourself.
Trust that you have a good and compassionate nature.
You are part of the universe; you are made of stars.
When you look at your loved one, you see that they are also made of stars and carry eternity inside. Looking in this way, we naturally feel reverence. Love becomes a sacred practice. True love cannot be without trust and respect for oneself and through this, for the other person.
When you love someone, you should have the capacity to bring relief and help them to suffer less. This is an art. If you don’t understand the roots of their suffering, you can’t help, just as a doctor can’t help heal your illness if they do not know the cause. You need to understand the cause of your loved one’s suffering in order to help bring relief.
The more you understand, the more you love; the more you love, the more you understand. They are two sides of one reality. The mind of love and the mind of understanding are the same.
However, if you follow the path, what you can see is that if they’re suffering, anger, envy, frustration is pointed toward you, you cannot talk them out of it. You cannot buy them out of it. You cannot make enough apologies to remove their suffering if it is directed toward you because their suffering is only a small measure of what is going on inside you. Your voice to yourself is louder than theirs, always.
Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by itself alone.
A flower can only inter-be with all of us… Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that their suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is their own happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering.
In the next article I will talk about choices.
With Spirit
Chris
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