Celebrate relationships.
Just a reminder that I am asking all of us to experience inner celebration as an honoring of being human, of the daily success at incarnating self into the unfolding of your life. Celebration done consciously becomes a consecration, a making sacred. Our lives are filled with little, simple, sweet, yet profound acts of consecration. We need to pay attention to them. We need to more consciously engage in self-celebration.
The first three of the six celebrations of being human – the celebrations of nature, nativity and riches – are celebrations that feel safe. What do I mean by “safe?” I mean they are relatively free of personal shadows and dilemmas. Yes, we can be scared of spiders or lightning, be a little clueless about sensing the divinity in all things, and we can be a bit out of balance when it comes to sensory delights, but overall these celebrations do not confront us with the messiness of our karma and the pain of our desires.
The next three celebrations focus on our connections to others, our own early biography, and our own inner development. These celebrations ask us to attend to our inner experiences with interest, compassion and objectivity. To fully celebrate we need to notice and attempt to release any sentimentality or shame, pride or regret, resentment or resignation as these feelings will cloud and distort our celebration. We can honor and revere without conditions and judgments. Maybe we can begin to feel a little inner freedom through conscious celebration in these challenging intimacies .
I do realize that the last paragraph is a doozy and feels like it needs at least several pages of development and explanation and a lot of inner contemplation to really “get.” Basically, if reading and contemplating the Celebration of Relationships, the Celebration of Childhood and the Celebration of Selfhood cause squirminess of soul come back to the third sentence in the above paragraph and notice! and do your best to release!
Relationships are the joys and agonies of our lives. Relationships are the great teachers of our lives. Life is all relationship, even avoiding relationships is relationship.
One simple dictionary definition for relationship is “the way in which two or more people or organizations regard and behave toward each other.”
What are the ways we relate with regard and behavior? Here are some possibilites:
We relate in a whole range of closeness, from fusion to utter separation.
We relate in a whole range of duration, from a brief passing to our entire lifetime.
We relate in a whole range of impact, from superficial to deep and life/soul-altering.
We relate in a whole range of feeling, from indifference to love/hate.
We relate in a whole range of responsibility from being cared for to taking care of.
We relate in a whole range of reality from fantasy to the manifest, from the spiritual to the practical.
Celebrate Relationships in all the different ranges, consider regard and behavior, and discover the sweet and bitter and always meaningful lessons of the heart.
