On Friday, I attended my first Hindu wedding ceremony. It was conducted in one of the most ancient languages in the world, Sanskrit; and as the mother of the bride reminded me, it’s not about whether you understand every word, it’s about the vibration of the words and the feeling they create within you.
How true! Love, indeed life, is all about our vibration and, specifically, how good we feel. The better we feel, the better our vibration and the better the things we attract into our lives. The same, unfortunately, is true of negativity.
On this particular day, the love the bride and groom felt for each other, the care and devotion onlookers showered on them and just watching the beautiful ceremony unfold made me happy and vastly improved my vibration.
It also got me thinking about great marriages and relationships in general; and how these might be affected by our vibration. Even great relationships are not about how other people’s behaviour affects us, but about how happy we can be regardless of that behaviour.
They’re about cultivating positive emotions and the concomitant vibration, which in turn affects what we draw into our lives.
Most of the time, when we first fall in love with people, they can do no wrong. We idealise them and find the idea that they could be less than perfect, or be interested in anyone other than us, laughable. It’s easy to look at them and be filled with positive emotions. Their effect on our vibration is overwhelmingly good.
Then something happens. With time, we become habituated to the new relationship and we begin to take certain things for granted. Instead of looking for those simple things that make our stomachs flutter with excitement, we notice how much time our partner spends with other people; and we complain about how much they’ve “changed.”
Be honest, did they change or did you? Do you appreciate your partner as much as you used to? Appreciation is one of the most positive emotions; and appreciating anyone or anything will not only make you happier, it’ll also improve your vibration and bring you even more things to appreciate.
Then, you’ll realise that your happiness really doesn’t depend on other people, but on how much positivity you deliberately cultivate in your life.
You shouldn’t rely on other people, or any external factor, to build you up or make you feel loved. The key to any happy relationship is to love and appreciate yourself. That will free you from seeking love or approval from anybody else, regardless of how good it feels when you do receive it.
How will this affect your relationships?
Well, for one thing, it allows you to ease up on other people because you don’t make them responsible for your happiness.
Far more importantly, it empowers you, because you realise that your happiness depends on you and you alone. And so as you enter into relationships – because let’s face it, relationships are important and we really do benefit more from being with others than being alone ÔÇô you start from a much stronger, much healthier footing.
As you look at your relationship and wonder what you can do to improve it, try being sensitive to the way you feel. Are you harbouring negative thoughts about your partner or the relationship in general? You’ll know this by the way you feel.
If you feel negative emotion, replace the unwanted thought with one that you do want; and feel the negative emotion transformed to one that is positive. This, in turn, will transform what you attract into your life and make it more positive.
Also, appreciate your partner and tell them how proud you are of them. It makes them want to become even better and to strive toward the ideal that you’ve described. Psychologists call this ‘the Michelangelo effect’ after the great artist Michelangelo who began his timeless sculptures with nothing but a block of marble and an image of what he wanted to create in his head. Don’t focus on your partner’s annoying tendencies. Instead, hold the image of your ideal partner in your head and it will positively affect what you draw out of them.
Of course, in life, no amount of imagining the perfect relationship is going to lead to its success. To have a wonderful relationship, both people must want it. Once a relationship has been established, in order to continue it, both parties must continue to give it positive attention or it will deteriorate and simply drift out of their experience.
For this, good communication is indispensable. Talk about what you want, your dreams and your values. Do not expect your partner to know what you want if you don’t tell them. Remember that as you are changing, your individual desires may also change, so make this a dialogue about what you want a continuing one.
Even if some of your desires seem completely incompatible, life has a miraculous way of giving you what you both want. You don’t need to fight about it, or try to force the other person to accept your point of view.
Also remember that no matter how close, no two people are identical. So the key to having a harmonious relationship, romantic or platonic, is not to find other people who are exactly like you. It’s to focus attention on the points of harmony, as opposed to disharmony.
On a daily basis, evaluate what you want and visualise your world, including all your relationships, exactly as you would like them to be. Avoid focusing on what you don’t want, or cultivating thoughts that bring you negative emotion.
Make strong and clear statements of what you want and as you do this, you will begin attracting other people who are in harmony with your thoughts.
Don’t take that special someone in your life for better or worse ÔÇô take them for better and better! Giving thought to what you want furthers its creation.
