Being Ourselves, Relating As We Are

https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2018/02/14/what-causes-heart-disease-part-46/#comment-87895 

If indeed you are living the true of who you are, it will serve you better than any attempt to become someone you are not.

But if you need others to be someone who they are not, then that is a sign that you are not able to relate through yourself as you are. We generally hate in others what we cannot abide in ourselves. But of course we may 'get to know someone who is then revealed or recognised other than how we judged them.

The avoidance of stress can be the simple wisdom of a better choice engaged instead - or it can be a self-evasion of symptoms calling for resolution. No one else but yourself is to decide for you.

The term 'best friend' is a singular term. Your wife is a true friend, and that is surely life shared rather than isolation. Isn't this a potential 'life-saver'? Shared life is one of the characteristics of health because joy inherently extends or shines into each other, but then so will self-betrayal... A state of symptom-siege in struggle or worry is neither at ease nor open to the opportunities for appreciations that unite us in kind and in purpose, but not always in terms of social engagement.

The challenge to be in relationship AS ourself is the key to the secret of Life. Or to put that in reverse, a secret sense of self, protected and disguised, makes us (all) stranger to ourself, each other and life. The secret sense of self is the presumed right to judge everyone else. It is also the hiding or defence from those who trespass against us. If such thoughts were broadcast, how would you get on? (Of course if everyone's such thoughts were broadcast the noise would operate a jamming signal against a true thought getting through). What would be a true thought, but a shared thought, rather than private agenda.

Generally it is easy to see that relationships (in our current world) are often demanding, entangling, messy and a sense of disconnection - yet remain a source of actual connection, support, insight, wisdom and freedom. If we seek to use relationships, we not only don't (generally) get what we think we want, but also open ourself to being or feeling used.

To be in the company of another who accepts us as we are is to feel loved. Much of the time we seek reinforcements from others for a lack of worth in ourselves. Or cover over 'awkward' silences in which conflict may be feared but intimacy avoided.

Most all of our troubles are inherent to a mis-identification in fixed and limiting definitions assigned to living being. Relationship is more a dance, than a formula. That which truly moves us is where we align naturally - given permission and circumstance. Something so NATURAL cannot be taught, but the blocks to awareness of our nature can be unlearned.

Why exactly are we (humankind) increasingly aligning against the family based communitarian cultural support that every traditional society has exemplified, until modernity? Our thinking is itself the cause - or rather the thinking we accept and conform to instead of the impulse to live the movement of an acknowledgement, or appreciation.

Is tyrannous (fear-framed) thinking a death sentence? Even though conforming may seem the only way to survive'. I see that is the original meaning of 'the wages of sin'. Not a behavioural failure, but living from the wrong foundation and persisting at expense of true. Is not the 'going forth into the wilderness', symbolic of stepping away from conflicting or troubling thoughts to reveal their root cause as a false self-specialness?

Seeking to be 'better' can be a fear of being worse that brings on even greater humiliation, or a genuine willingness to improve our experience of life with everyone who shares in it.