By Brian Weiss, M.D.
When you look into eyes of another, any other, and you see your own soul looking back at you, then you will know you have reached another level of consciousness .
Relationships need nurturing and attention. Detach from your fears and negative emotions. When you need to talk or communicate, reset your priorities. Devote time and energy to the other person. Bring your full awareness and attention to the relationship and its problems. The relationship is more important than that television, magazine, or newspaper. Eliminate distractions. Turn off the television; put down the newspaper. Respect the other person.
Do not take anything for granted. Do not stay in your rut. Renew the relationship through loving actions. The relationship is living, alive in the present. It is not a thing of the past .
Allow the soul to enter the relationship through awareness and understanding. This promotes an alchemy to deeper processes: soul/right brain in harmony with ego/left brain. Soulful relationships bring true joy into our lives.
It is safe to love completely, without holding back. You can never be truly rejected.
It is only when the ego is involved that we feel bruised and vulnerable. Love itself is absolute and all- encompassing. The concept of loving completely and without reservation may seem risky or even dangerous to many.
I am not, however, talking about self-abrogation in a relationship, nor enduring a relationship that is abusive or damaging . Doing so is not loving to yourself or to the other. Staying in a destructive relationship is not an example of loving without reservation - instead it maybe more a manifestation of low self-esteem and lack of self-love than anything else. People can be dangerous, but love is not.
Reach out with love and compassion to help others without concern for what you may gain.
Whether you reach out to a few or to many is not important. The numbers do not matter; the act of reaching out with caring does. Sometimes when a physician touches a patient with compassion and healing, the physician benefits more than the patient. All of us are physicians of the soul.
Come from the heart, the true heart, not the head. When in doubt, choose the heart. This does not mean to deny your own experiences and that which you have empirically learned through the years. It means to trust yourself to integrate intuition and experience. There is a balance, a harmony to be nurtured, between the head and the heart. When the intuition rings clear and true, loving impulses are favored.
The more you practice listening to that calm inner voice, intuition, or "gut feeling," the more accurate and clear the voice will become.
Trust. You can trust in love. Individual decisions may appear harmful, but love is not. When the bigger picture is grasped and appreciated, the loving intent becomes clear. Your child may not understand that the antibiotic injection is a loving act. You are concerned and will spare nothing to protect your child from a potentially dangerous illness. In the child's mind, however, the injection may appear to be a hurtful act.
In a more complex scenario, you may have to send a loved one away because the relationship is destructive, or his or her drug problem demands hospitalization for the person's own safety, against his or her will. These are just examples of the necessity for grasping the overall picture before judging the individual decision or actions.
Like many other men, I tend to think that romantic gestures have to be of the grand sort, such as jewelry, flowers, a big night out, and the like. However, I have learned that sometimes the smallest things can mean the most.
Many years ago, I was resident in psychiatry in Connecticut. Our son, Jordan was a toddler at the time, and Carole worked on a part-time basis. Often I had to work late at the hospital. On one extremely hot summer night, I left the hospital at around eleven at night.
On a whim, I stopped and bought two ice cream cones, one for Carole and one for me, and brought them home. Carole and I had not had a chance to talk to each other so I had no idea that it had been a particularly trying day for her, both at work and at home. We sat and ate the ice cream and shared some time together in the quiet of the evening.
She has told me that my thinking about her and bringing her that cone has always been a favorite loving memory of hers.
Help the other along her life's plan and goals. Security in a relationship comes from present, loving actions.
Extract from Messages From The Masters by Brian Weiss, M.D. Chapter 4, page 71