Any time you sit, think about, and “stew” over what someone did to you, or simmer in anger about some past event, the real reason for your pain is because you’re cooking your own goose!

Have a Happier Relationship with Life

All relationships suffer when stagnation sets in; whether in a pond or our personal dealings with others, everything must be continually refreshed in order to realize its true potential. For us this means each re-appearance of some old resentment, fear, or regret, chokes the life out of our chance to love one another, which is our spiritual responsibility. What’s so hard for us to understand is that the real reason these old painful patterns go on as they do isn’t because other people don’t change. The truth tells a very different story if we will dare to listen.

Here’s why we continue to run through unwanted patterns in our relationships with others: our continual attempts to resolve the pain within us — by holding others accountable for it — has utterly failed.

Any new course of action we arrive at by considering what’s wrong with someone else transforms nothing other than the way we will again have to suffer that relationship. Trying to resolve our problems this way is like looking out at a field we have planted on our own property and wishing, every day, something other than what grows there would take hold and flower. If we wish to have true harmonious relationships with others, then it is we who must change. We must assume responsibility for what our relationships reveal to us about us, and then do the interior work it takes to plant the seeds of a new Self.

If we are ever to realize the integrity and consistent kindness of our True Self, if we long to know something of heaven while we live on earth, then we must sow the seeds that bring that higher life into fruition. One cannot expect to reap what one does not sow; and merely hoping for a higher life is not sowing true spiritual seeds, any more than climbing an imagined mountain is the same as reaching its top.

To sow spiritual seeds means that we do spiritual work. Spiritual work is always interior work first, even if, as a matter of course, this work becomes

manifest through exterior action. What is this interior work by which we sow the seeds of the celestial within us? Following are four ways to sow the seeds of a higher relationship with life:

1. We must work to not burden others or ourselves with past regrets, disappointments, or fearful future visions, even as we learn to ask truth for more insight into those unseen aspects of our present nature that are reaping their regrets even as they sow more of the same dark seeds.

2. We must learn to sit quietly with ourselves and wait patiently for the light of God’s peace to replace those dark, noisy thoughts and feelings telling us that we have too much old baggage to make the journey home. Each time we sow these seeds through some quiet meditation, we reap the strength that comes from realizing that this silence that comes to us is our true home.

3. We must deliberately remember our intention to start our whole life over every moment we awaken to find ourselves reliving some past conflict. To cultivate this refreshed outlook, born of remembering that our true life is always new in the Now, is to let go of who we have been and to begin reaping a life free of anger and fear.

4. We must learn to look our fears, weariness, and anxiety directly in the eye, and instead of seeing what is impossible according to their view of life, sow the seeds of a new self by daring to doubt their dark view of things. Our refusal to identify with self-limiting negative states reaps us the reward of rising above their inherent limitations.

– Guy Finley