Introduction
Today, we dive into the essence of sacred love, the honeymoon that lasts forever.
Understanding True Love
To love somebody is to see them as perfectly balanced and their actions equally balanced. When you love someone absolutely, you see both sides of them. You see the two sides of them. Instead of complaining, you endorse them. Then there is no reaction. You’re in the core that is your balance, your love. Then you can see that there is no emotion, there is only love. When there is a lot of emotion, we think there is love, but that is only half love.
Love is Not Blind
Love is not blind. It’s only emotion that is blind. Romeo and Juliet would never have died if they had truly loved. Instead, they were infatuated, and to balance it, they were resentful. Once you see the positive and the negative in every situation, your life can become a mirror of pure balance. You will see reactive negatives and detractive positives. Put them together in perfect balance, and a smile will appear on your face, with love overflowing.
The Key to Harmonious Relationships
A magnificent key to creating a harmonious, lasting, and sacred relationship is to understand that a loving person treats both people they like and people they don’t like with love. This is the spiritual aspect of it all. The true test comes when we are asked to love those who hurt us, those who are unkind to us.
Love in Relationships
In our relationships, our lover challenges us to be in love. We cannot become exclusive. We cannot pretend to be loving and open-hearted to one person and then judgmental and protective towards another. Love is not like a suit that we can put on and take off. Love is a way of living. It’s an attitude. We choose a relationship and become exclusive in our actions. To really be in love, we must learn to be in love without a partner as well as with a partner.
Being in Love with Life
We must become in love without someone to love. It is a loving attitude to trees, to children, to sunsets, being alone, in love with a movie, in love with your parents. To be ready to fall in love, we must be in love with our past and our future. Love is a state of being. It cannot depend on what you are doing physically or with whom you are doing it with. Lovers want to be beloved, to love only them, no one else. That essentially means that unless you can love all, you cannot love anyone.
The Exclusivity of Love
How can a lover who is not full of love for everybody be loving to their partner? To love is not exclusive. But from that love, we can choose to be in a relationship, an intimate, romantic, and beautiful relationship where we prioritize that person and choose to be open to them. This book focuses significantly on becoming that which we want others to be. Make your life an act of love.
Conclusion
I am going to finish here. It’s short and sweet today because next time, we will open up a can of worms called the ego perspective. There’s a lot to chew off here. So, make your life an act of love. That’s the name of today’s podcast. Sending my love to you. Ciao for now.
This blog post discusses the concept of family, emphasizing the importance of choosing one’s family carefully beyond just blood relations. It highlights the complexities and challenges of extended family dynamics and the necessity of maintaining healthy relationships. Chris stresses that relationships should involve support and challenges, providing opportunities for personal growth and addressing underlying issues.
Condensed Version (2 min Read) Redefining Family: Choosing the Right Connections
The True Meaning of Family
Good morning or good afternoon, wherever you are. Family is about being part of an extended sense of yourself, caring about others, and calling this group your family.
The Extended Family Conundrum
However, the common definition of family often includes extended family, such as in-laws. Embracing this extended family may not always be the wisest decision.
Choosing Your Family Wisely
Choose your family carefully. Instead of leaving a legacy, live a legacy daily. A healthy, psychologically balanced individual needs a family, but not everyone in your bloodline deserves to be in it if they bring negativity.
Defining Your Circle
Consider your closest relationships. For example, my wife’s father dislikes me due to our age difference, so I don’t consider him part of my family. My partner is my first link, and I choose who else belongs in my family circle, respecting my values, culture, and story.
Redefining Family
Family is crucial for everyone, and having a healthy family is even more important. Some clients I’ve worked with for a long time feel like part of my family. This isn’t just a commercial relationship; it’s about doing good and creating positive energy.
Navigating Family Dynamics
Some have labelled my actions negatively throughout my life, including my marriage to a younger woman. I respect their judgement as they protect their brand, just as I protect mine. This concept of choosing family means accepting people completely as they are. If someone behaves unhealthily, they should be out of your circle.
Beyond Bloodline
A family goes beyond bloodline. Many stay in difficult relationships for the sake of family, which can lead to emotional pain and challenges. When spouses stay together just for the kids, it puts children in a tough spot, making them emotional arbitrators, which can lead to issues like bipolar disorder and eating disorders.
Childhood Influences
Growing up, I didn’t accept my stepmother as family but as someone who took care of household duties. This transactional relationship influenced my view on family, where friends and non-blood relations can be family. After several marriages, I realised that a relationship must be healthy and loving to be part of my family.
Embracing Relationship Challenges
The purpose of a relationship isn’t happiness but support and challenge. Initially, the honeymoon phase makes support easy, but over time, challenges arise. These challenges are opportunities for growth. If a relationship doesn’t challenge us, we may take it for granted.
The Complexity of Relationships
Embrace challenges in relationships as opportunities to deal with hidden baggage. If your partner’s family doesn’t like you, it might be time to examine why you should be liked. Loving yourself enough means not worrying about others’ opinions.
Final Thoughts
Relationships are complex, but as long as both partners participate, they can grow together. However, constantly supporting your partner to gain their love doesn’t work.
This is Chris. Have a beautiful day.
Building Your Metaphorical Garden: The Key to Understanding Family Dynamics
Welcome to the office here at Ben Butler. Today, I want to extend a little further on the topic I discussed on the podcast this morning—family. This concept is rooted in my early work with First Nation communities in Canada, particularly in addressing youth suicide.
There is a Video at my Podcast on Spotify
Also watch here from Spotify Podcasts
The Concept of Your Personal Garden
Imagine a garden laid out in front of you. This garden represents your personal space; only you know what is in it. This garden can take various forms—a rose garden, a Japanese rock garden, a wild bush in a forest, or even a serene beach. The essence of this concept is that the details of your garden are known only to you.
Building Boundaries Around Your Garden
Given the unique nature of your garden, it becomes crucial to build a metaphorical fence around it. This fence represents the boundary of your personal space. Around this fence, you place people you trust. Beyond the fence, there are people going about their lives—playing football, surfing, and so on. These people are not part of your inner circle.
The idea of family is to have people at your fence—those who know you, trust you and admire your garden.
Understanding and Humanising Your Garden
Your garden, whatever form it takes, should represent humanity metaphorically. For example, a beautiful sitting chair represents peacefulness, a beach represents excitement, and roses symbolize beauty. This approach allows you to create a values-based understanding of your garden.
However, it is essential to remember that no one else will fully understand what is in your garden. Only you have that understanding, and with it comes the duty to maintain it.
Selective Family vs. Bloodline Family
This leads to the concept of a selective family. Unlike a traditional bloodline family, a selective family consists of friends, clients, and others you choose to place at your fence. These are people who love you for who you are and celebrate what you do. They respect your values and beliefs, even if they do not share them.
Choosing Who Stands at Your Fence
Not everyone, even within your bloodline, will be at your fence. This choice is personal and based on who will respect and value what you stand for. The first step is to create your garden and understand its composition.
The Importance of Boundaries
This metaphor provides a powerful way to think about family dynamics. By selectively allowing people to approach your fence, you acknowledge their presence and maintain a respectful distance. This approach ensures that your personal space remains respected and valued.
In conclusion, building your metaphorical garden and understanding its boundaries is essential for creating a supportive and respectful family dynamic. Have a great day!
Chris
LONG VERSION (10 Min Read) Redefining Family: Choosing the Right Connections
The True Meaning of Family
Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. When people advocate for the concept of family, there’s a brilliant, genius, wonderful concept being advocated: the importance of being part of an extended sense of yourself. Caring about other people, and we call that other people group our family.
The Extended Family Conundrum
However, there’s a downside to this, which is that most people perceive the definition of family as the so-called extended family. In other words, your partner in life, whom one may choose, will have a family. They will have a mother and father, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, and embracing that extended family is not always guaranteed to be the wisest thing to do.
Choosing Your Family Wisely
So I’m treading carefully on the words that I choose here this morning, usually I talk a lot faster, but what I’m struggling to communicate in this topic is choose your family carefully. Just like we say, leave a legacy, we need to reframe that to say, live a legacy, because leaving a legacy is just a waste of good energy. Living a legacy is really a definitive way to approach daily life.
The Importance of a Healthy Family
Choosing your family is a definitive way of going about daily life because we definitely, definitely, as healthy, psychologically balanced, and mentally healthy human beings, need a family. However, some of the people in that family may not earn the right to stampede all over your world because they don’t like something about you, or they’re jealous, green, or mean or something. And just because they have some bloodline that attaches you to them doesn’t necessarily mean they should be in what I call here today, for this conversation, your family.
Defining Your Circle
So let’s think about this for a minute. I am married to a person whose father doesn’t like me because I’m the same age as him. And therefore, he decides to behave towards his daughter, my wife, in an unattractive way. So as far as I’m concerned, he is not my family, even though my partner may feel it obligatory, and therefore, she is required to stay in the loop of her family to continue to welcome him in. That’s up to her. But for me, my wife is this first, my partner is my first link, my first step in what I call currently my family.
Then, I get to choose the next circle that I welcome into my family, and some of my bloodline is not in that circle. Now, that’s me choosing to respect what I stand for, what I do, what I believe in, what I embrace, my brand, my culture, my values, my story. Now, does that make me insular? Yes. It makes me self-insulated. It makes me define carefully the business that I have. Because I’m a self-employed person, my business, in a sense, is an extension of my capability to build a family.
Redefining Family
Family is really, really important. I think not just to me, but to everybody. Having a healthy family is even more important than having the requisite, like it comes in whatever shape or size it’s been delivered, to design your family. I have some clients that I work with and have worked with for a very long time that I fully embrace as part of my family. I really do not think it’s a commercial contractual relationship. I really feel like they’re part of it.
Now, they don’t do that to me necessarily because they pay me for my services, and that might feel a bit corny. But from my side, as the deliverer of service to somebody, the commercial side of it, I like to put aside, and I go, I’m here to do good. To create goodness, which is my aura, my energy around me. To do goodness is to deliver things that I think are good for people. And to be good, in other words, to be able to look at myself in the mirror and say I’m doing good things in the world. I’m not doing bad.
Navigating Family Dynamics
Now, some of the things that I’ve done along the journey of my life have been labelled by other people, including my current wife’s father, as bad. For him, marrying his daughter and being in an age-difference marriage is corruption. And I can respect his judgement because obviously he’s got some baggage going on in his dark story that nobody knows about, about this topic.
And he wants to keep his brand clean, and he doesn’t want to embrace what I do, lest it corrupt his own. So he’s doing the same as I’m doing. He’s saying, I’m choosing my family and Chris isn’t in it.
The Role of Acceptance
However, he’s also choosing to have his daughter in his family as a 40-year-old woman and still try to manipulate her by his actions and behaviour, which I find really, really sad. Because when you choose your family, you basically say, I accept you. I accept you lock, stock and barrel.
I accept you completely as you are, the way you are. Now, this concept of family extends to friends we love, to the work we love, and to the people we love. Nobody is asking us to accept or even judge somebody who’s in our family.
What we’re basically saying is I just feel a trust. I feel a connection. And that connection doesn’t exclude family members or bloodline, but it also means if somebody behaves in a way that’s unhealthy, they’re out of the circle.
And if they behave in a way that’s healthy, they’re in this circle. Now, we’re going to be, in the entirety of our lives, supported and challenged. That’s nature’s law.
Beyond Bloodline
So we can begin to define this vitally important thing as family way beyond the scope of bloodline. I have many, many consulting journeys with people who stay in relationships for the purpose of family. And that is a great example of how somebody can stay in a really hard place for something really important because it is really hard to come home to a house, to come home to your home where there is conflict or the lack of love or lack of respect or lack of joy.
All of these lacks are very painful because it takes people to work the next day tired, depleted, and often emotional and angry.
It means they get in a car and they’re not fully engaged when they drive because they’ve got emotions running around that still have been provoked. Plus, when our spouse, when the spouse is not in line with us and we stay in the marriage for the purpose of the kids, it puts the kids in this really difficult place because they become the arbitrators. They become the medium through which love between two people is expressed, and therefore, the kids are most likely to become bipolar, binary, extremely elated and extremely depressed because they will be loved from two directions for being themselves.
And that separation between husband and wife that stay in the marriage for the purpose of family causes the kids to become challenged as they grow into their early teens because they too become, the kids inherit that I’m loved for two different reasons from two different people in the same house. That splits them into a left brain, right brain or a top brain, bottom brain or an unconscious, conscious. It splits them into two sides of themselves, and they struggle to be able to unify themselves, and that’s where drug addictions and all sorts of eating disorders and all sorts of complications come in for a young person.
It’s because husband and wife, and I’m not talking male and female husband and wife, I’m talking about the parenting couple living in the house, don’t collaborate on the well-being and the unity of the kids because they don’t have love between each other. Therefore they have love to the kids. And they are trying, as we do, to take all the judgments they have and make sure that things that went wrong for them that they haven’t processed, their unlived life, their trying, an unfinished life, is they’re trying to make sure the kids don’t inherit that. And so they will give them the opposite strategy.
If they feel like they’ve had it too hard as kids, the parent will try to make it too easy for the kid. If they feel like they were not given every opportunity, they try to give the kid every opportunity. But two people don’t collaborate on the topic.
And so, unless they’re in love with each other, and when they’re in love with each other they unify, they become united, and especially united when it comes to the approach to the children. So, children who have most struggles from the age of 9 and 10 and 11 onwards in their life, come from a marriage that broke up but stayed together. The topic of this breaking up but staying together shows the value that family plays in everybody’s life because there is a really tough situation.
Two parents who don’t love each other, staying united, staying together in a family, which is a really hard gig. I’ve watched it and seen it and observed it over and over again and seen how people can almost, you could say, hate each other but stay together so that the kids get the benefit or so that the family becomes a unit. Now, I’m blessed because my mother passed away when I was 3 years old and I’m blessed because of that because it made me very transparent in my choice of family.
Childhood Influences
For example, my stepmother moved into the house, and I completely did not accept her as family. I accepted her as the person my father chose to be at the house, to do the cleaning, to care for me, and to cook. And so I had this transactional relationship with her, but I didn’t have what you’d call family.
So, for me, I have no problem welcoming a friend or the spouse of somebody else, not for sexual purposes, but I have no problem with forming a circle in which I say the people around that circle, on the edge of that circle, are my family. And I’ve run my business like that, I’ve run my home like that and I certainly, it’s proven itself to have its benefits and its drawbacks. For example, after my first marriage, I’ve been married 6 more times, and that means that when I’m in a relationship with someone, and it is not what I call healthy in a loving sense, then I actually start to work out how I can get that person outside my family because nothing’s ever missing.
I have a family and then I say, well, why am I with this, if I’m married to someone and they’re currently outside my family, why would we be together? And so I don’t have the child’s, the children complication I talked about before for justifying staying in a relationship that isn’t functional. This gets us to the last piece of this jigsaw puzzle, and that’s talking about the functionality of a relationship. The purpose of a relationship is not happiness, and any person who goes into a relationship thinking that the purpose of a relationship is happiness will be sadly disappointed.
Embracing Relationship Challenges
The purpose of a relationship is that the universe and nature created it; the purpose of a relationship is to support and challenge you. Now, the support part we all know because that’s called the honeymoon. When we meet somebody and it starts, we have no problem embracing the aspect of a relationship that says, I support you, I support you, I support you.
But over time, the realism of life means the person you’re with will also challenge you. They’ll say things you might not like. They’ll do things you might not like.
They’ll have friends you might not like, and they’ll have an extended family you might not like. And all these challenges become food, in a way, for growth.
So if a relationship doesn’t challenge us, we will soon start to disrespect it. We will soon start to take it for granted, I think is the word. And when we take somebody for granted, we don’t like their challenge.
We actually think that they should be, in a sense, we’re taking someone for granted means they’re a non-event. And we’re not grateful anymore. We’re not present anymore.
We’re not doing the things that make a relationship healthy. So, the most important thing in a relationship with another human being, in a love relationship, an intimate relationship, is to be able to embrace the challenge of it. Support and challenge are the borders at which love occurs.
We don’t need to talk about embracing the support, but to embrace the challenge of it as being an opportunity to either grow or not take them for granted or get grateful for the challenge. And if we get grateful for the challenge, it means it’s an opportunity for us to deal with some baggage that we may not even know we have. If an extended part of your family, if your partner’s family doesn’t like you, and that’s a worry, maybe it’s time for you to look at why you need to be liked.
Because if you like yourself enough, what people think about you doesn’t matter. So there’s a whole lot of opportunity that comes from the complexity of a relationship. And as long as two people are willing to participate in that, the worst thing that can happen is one of the two people in the relationship starts to think, support, support, support, support, support, support, support, support, support, support, support, support, support, support, support their partner in order to get their partner to love them.
Unfortunately, that just doesn’t work. This is Chris. You have a beautiful day.
Bye for now.
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