Transforming Relationships

IT’S ALL UPTO YOU

The Key to transforming relationships lies in the process of transforming ourselves. 

Whether you experience a relationship in a positive or a negative way is determined by you – by your own beliefs and attitudes. This idea may at first seem hard to accept. Nonetheless, developing successful relationships begins with accepting full responsibility for your life and your role in those relationships.

“It’s hard to soar like an eagle, when you’re surrounded by turkeys”, reads a familiar bumper sticker,. Buddhism teaches that one’s environment reflects his or her inner state of life. Buddhism suggests that if you are surrounded by turkeys, it’s very likely that instead of the eagle you may think yourself to be, you are, in fact, a turkey yourself. And, by extension, your environment is a turkey farm. The problem is not, however that your fellow turkeys are preventing you from soaring. Rather, it is that you must transform yourself into the eagle you desire to be.

As each of us is, at the most essential level, a Buddha, there is nothing wrong with us. We are not impure or flawed. It is our unenlightened mind that is flawed. This is not the same as trying to say that the victim is at fault. Certainly there are people behaving badly, causing others, perhaps you, to suffer. We are not, however responsible for the behavior of others, only for ourselves. When you understand this, you will realize that there is something ultimately liberating in this idea. Since we control the choices in our own lives, we have the power to do something about our unsatisfactory relationships.

Nichiren taught us that sufferings arise from “looking outside of oneself” for the cause or the solution to problems. The fact that it is you who are suffering means that it is your problem to solve, not someone else’s. If you are looking for others to change, you may wait for a very long time. Still, people make extraordinary efforts to modify the behavior of others in an effort to make relationships work. But ultimately this is as futile as cleaning the mirror in an attempt to clean your face. The mirror will keep reflecting back the same image.

Through Buddhist practice, we start to see ourselves more accurately perhaps for the first time in our lives, with all our weaknesses and strengths. Day after day, we come to an ever-deepening realization (although sudden, remarkable flashes of self-realization are quite common) that the relationships we have formed are a reflection of our own state of life. Then we can embark on the steady, long term process of developing our wisdom and capacity as human beings.

The key to transforming relationships lies in the process of transforming ourselves. Since the only person whose behavior you can control is yourself, use that power to the utmost. Work from the inside out.

Buddhism teaches that false attitudes or beliefs about the self and others, which lead to misery and suffering, can be traced to the “three poisons”: Greed, Anger and Foolishness. In particular, anger, the poison compounded of equal measures of arrogance and self-centeredness destroys relationships. The poison of anger leads inevitably to strife and conflict among people, whether individuals, groups or nations. War too has its roots in the poison of anger.

Buddhism calls the poisoned self, the arrogant, self-regarding egomaniac within all of us, the lesser self. The ultimate purpose of Buddhist practice is to manifest a greater or true self. Understanding the purpose of relationships and purifying ourselves of the three poisons go hand in hand.

Source: The Buddha In Your Mirror (Pg. 127 - 130)