THE COURAGE TO STAND ALONE

"Relationships do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you."
- Eckhart Tolle

Your feelings, the energies alive in your body right now, were not ‘caused’ by anyone else, and nobody else can take them away. Nobody else is responsible for your feelings. This realization can end the blame game once and for all, and leave you standing in your true place of power - the present moment.

Yes, others may trigger pain and sorrow in you, they may contribute to the field in which your old, unresolved pain can resurface, but they cannot make you feel how you feel. Nobody can make you happy, nobody can make you unhappy. You are only invited, constantly, to meet what remains unmet in yourself, to touch what you never wanted to touch in yourself, to explore the field.

Making others responsible for how we feel is the beginning of all violence, both internal and external, all conflict between people, and ultimately all wars between nations.

Let others off the hook. Honor what is alive in you right now. Learn to hold your own feelings like beloved children, however intensely they burn and scream for attention. Celebrate the aliveness in your hurt, the vibrancy of your disappointment, the electricity of your sadness. Kneel before the power in your anger, honor its burning creativity.

From this place of deep acceptance, you do not become weak and passive. Quite the opposite. You simply enter the world from a place of nonviolence, and therefore immense creative power, and you are open to the possibility of deep listening, honest dialogue, and unexpected change.

In suffering you become small. In love, anything is possible.”