In her book “May Cause Miracles,” Gabby Bernstein opens chapter 4 with the following quote: “You practice loving God by loving another human.” – Olivia Harrison
She explained in this week’s live seminar, relationships are one of the hardest areas for many people to apply the principles of “A Course in Miracles.” It’s a lifelong practice, and we will all catch ourselves slipping into judgment from time to time.
“This is about tapping into the more loving place that we frequently detour from when it comes to relationships,” she told the audience. “It’s not about being perfect, or not being in judgment. It’s about realizing it [when we are] and being willing to reinterpret our non-loving response. I’m not asking you to be Buddha. I’m asking you to be witnesses and surrender to your inner guidance to change it.”
When we are in judgment, we are not only attacking another person, we are also attacking ourselves, said Bernstein. While the ego wants to separate us from others, the goal of relationships is create oneness.
“We need to look at our intentions in our relationships. Are we trying to get something from them? What do we want to get from other people? Sometimes these intentions create the reality. Without even saying a word, your thoughts create energy and your energy creates a vibe, and your vibe gets picked up by others,” she explained
It’s also important to look at the pretenses we put on other people and the stories we create around them. We often make others seem more special or less special then ourselves, and this happens often in romantic love.
“The special love relationship is the trippiest of all special relationships, because the ego convinces us that this one special person will save us,” Bernstein says in the book. “The ego substitutes the divine love within us with the special love relationship we’ve seen in movies or magazines. The special love relationship is based on the premise that something outside of us can fill up or compensate for what seems to be lacking inside.”
But we have the choice to surrender our perceptions to our inner guidance system. We can witness the stories we have created around these relationships and then surrender them, she told the audience.
“It’s about being honest. We are not saints, and I’m not asking us to be saints. I’m asking for us to be honest, and with that honesty comes healing, and with this healing comes new patterns and new behaviors … then comes new relationships or new viewpoints of our relationships. Love dissolves all boundaries,” she explained.
Lack of forgiveness holds us back in relationships, and Bernstein offers the affirmation: “I can see peace instead of this,” to interrupt our judging and attacking thoughts of others – whether its friends, family members or a romantic partner.
“In relationships, people bring up exactly what you need to have healed. Be it a partner or family member, when they trigger something, it is divine. The day we get triggered and we can say, “I wonder if I can see this differently. I can see peace instead of this,’ – that is a miracle,” she said.
We have the power to decide how we will react to others, and people will reflect back to us our intentions, Bernstein noted. We need to look how we are participating or being a match to the behavior or others.
“People will always bring stuff up because we are always learning and growing,” she said. “We just want to reinterpret it.”
Read our coverage of “May Cause Miracles Live Seminar Week 3.”
Read our coverage of “May Cause Miracles Live Seminar Week 2.”
Read our coverage of “May Cause Miracles Live Seminar Week 1.”
For more on Bernstein, her books and her work, visit www.gabby.tv.