Written by Guy Finley

We all know how it feels when another person – especially someone we say we love – does something we don’t like. What happens to the love in a moment like that? It flies out the window as we resist what the other person is doing. They are bringing up reactions in us that make us uncomfortable, and so we push them away, criticize them, and blame them for the way we feel.

It’s a common response, but when we do that, we’re wasting an opportunity for our own transformation. In that moment I’m being introduced to qualities that I’m presently asleep to in myself: my insistence that things go my way, the part of me that gets easily threatened, etc. Only by seeing these things, can I ever change.

Until we recognize that relationships serve to reveal hidden aspects of ourselves that have been a limitation to enlarging our life, we will not be transformed, nor can our relationships be perfected.

Can I resist any moment in my life and learn from it at the same time? No. If I reject the lesson, I reject life, and if I reject life, I reject the love that’s giving me both life and the lesson.

I’m denying the teacher knocking at my door because living within me is a false teacher, a false body of ideas, that tells me that only what I believe is for me is actually on my side. That level of consciousness has divided life up into good and bad, light and dark, up and down. It draws a line between myself and whatever has come to reveal what stands in my way of knowing an authentically unconditional love – a love that embraces every lesson life brings regardless of how challenging it feels in the moment.

Consider for a moment, what is it about any event that’s troubling to me? When you think about it, it isn’t really what that person did. I’m troubled because what they did is stirring in me something I don’t want to see – like my selfish insistence that everyone must align their behavior with my preferences.

If something’s troubling me, it means I came into the moment with that unseen nature, just waiting to be stirred into action. The condition doesn’t create the negative consciousness I experience. It reveals the consciousness that’s always there.

If the event reveals the consciousness I’ve brought into the moment, and that consciousness can only resist the moment or someone in it, then that’s what I need to recognize. Blaming the event or that person for how I feel changes nothing. If I blame, I miss the lesson in the moment that could transform the nature that makes impossible demands, and then suffers for them.

We’re unhappy when we live from a body of unseen psychological demands that require balancing and harmonizing. But so often when the moment of revelation comes to help us harmonize these unseen aspects of ourselves, we reject the teacher and instead, stand with the old, habitual nature that lives in us, insisting that people and events must be what we need them to be so nothing ever bugs us. And in that way we’ve already assured there will soon be a situation where we get bugged.

So, the real question is, how deeply am I willing to learn in these moments? How willing am I to let the moment change the whole of me, instead of me trying to change a part of you so that I can be at peace?

When we approach our relationships with others with this new wish to learn and be transformed by them, then we will change, and our relationships will be perfected as they’re meant to be.

Guy Finley is the best-selling author of more than 40 books and audio albums on self-realization, showing men and women everywhere how to find a life of freedom, enduring fulfillment, and true purpose.  Guy is the founder and director of the non-profit Life of Learning Foundation Center for Spiritual Development in Merlin, Oregon, where he offers free, twice weekly live-streamed classes.