April 15, 2025

You, your body, people, the world, and your business are in a relationship.

We understand ourselves through relationships. We experience ourselves through relationships, and we function in relation to self, others, and the world.

But what exactly is a relationship?

When you look up the definition of "relationship," you get the following explanation:

Relationship =  a thing's effect on or relevance to another.

The way in which two or more people or things are connected, or the state of "being" connected.

To be in a relationship is to be connected—or to be in the “state” of connection.

Relationships are so central to our lives that we can become blind to how important they are and to our own influence on them.

When I looked up the definition of relationship, I was deeply struck by what it said: "The state of being connected."

How many people do we know who are in relationships, but the state of being connected is not present? Yes, they live in the same house, have conversations, and eat together, but there is only a fraction left of the once-there state of connection that started the relationship.

Or think of the single friend we have, who, even though she meets 50 people every day, still feels lonely and disconnected—not in a state of relationship with people, self, or the world.

Or the business that is thriving to make more money but loses contact with their customers, ultimately driving the business toward failure.

People live in relationships, but the state of the relationship often gets overshadowed.

We adapt beliefs that now live between ourselves and all that we can be in relationship with. I might carry a belief that I am not lovable and now put this thought between me and people being nice to me. I might think, "They’re just being nice because they want something. Why else would they be nice? I’m not lovable anyway."

Life and its happenings, along with our automatic ways of interpreting life’s events, can lead us to carry all sorts of constraints and limitations on our ability to connect with life.

We mistrust because of past pain, we retreat because of a failure we had, we don’t open up because we know what it could lead to. So, we go through life with armor that protects us from anyone or anything ever piercing through.

And then we wonder why we don’t feel like a child anymore when we see the sunset, why we don’t feel the same love for our partner that we once felt, why we can’t seem to find anyone who satisfies our idea of a relationship, or why we don’t even want to find anyone anymore...

We close the doors to fantastic love entering, to customers who could become your biggest fans, to being childlike in love after 30 years of marriage—backed by amazing explanations for why, great reasons, and agreements from the world around us, which is living the same lack of connection in their lives.

Relationships are central.

They are enormous, they are the privilege of living, they are the highest form of love, and yet, they are given up on all the time.

Taking on the task of mastering the domain of relationships is to take on the task of mastering life. You allow yourself to get hurt, get touched, get blown away over and over again. You live with the certainty that life is uncertain and that you have one basic choice: to be connected to all of it while you are here, or to close the door and live a life where you try to manage the world to fit your idea of what it should be, instead of meeting it as it is.

Where have you given up on a relationship yourself?

Where is your relationship with yourself damaged? Have you taken the time to clean it up?

How open are you for your relationships to be transformed?