Relationship Q&A With Heather Parrish

Heather Parrish offers relationship counseling.

 

Rather than being captured in a definition, a healthy relationship explores the infinite harmony of unconditional loving. Unconditional means we suspend our assumptions about each other and about relationship. We use the process of thought with awareness, rather than with a habitual and mechanical reaction to each gateway moment's opportunity for change.

Because love is not an idea. Rather, it is an actuality that invites the freedom of creative expressions that manifest our original meaning and being.

Sometimes we forget to hear and to see each other with fresh ears and eyes. We take ourselves, and each other, for granted. When this happens, a sense of discomfort reminds us to wake up from the unpleasant reality we are projecting, in our search for something other than what actually is. We can learn how to suspend our assumptions about ourselves and others, while considering whether or not they are true. We don't want to defend the false assumptions, and the true ones need no defense.

Here are some more tools for redeeming relationship: appreciation, apology, and forgiveness. After 67 years, I have learned that these magic keys, to this gateway moment, begin within each of us, and then flower into the "others."

Forgiveness is the nourishing psychic shower that cleanses our hearts-minds of mis-takes. It generates the freedom and creativity that informs a fresh approach to each new gateway moment. Change happens here, rather than in an exploration of the past, or projection of the future. In this analogy, burying our feelings is like wearing heavy perfume, instead of enjoying a warm shower. The difference is unmistakable. Buried feelings smell as bad as last week's fish!

Let's inquire into this profound question. Is relationship work, or is it actually shared awareness of our essential wholeness? Let everything else go. "Let it go. Forgive yourself. I will wait for you to forgive me."

The immediacy of this moment is new. Our relationship, here and now, is new. Mis-taking this moment for yesterday and/or tomorrow manifests the suffering and the sorrow that warn us to open our doors of perception into this gateway moment - and its freedom from mis-takes.

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