Topics covered: Your disappointment in a relationship can't be separated from your expectations; No relationship can grow where blame exists; Every insight originates from a relationship; Understanding the true purpose of relationships and our life; Relationships act as a mirror of our own being; Life is always trying to give you a lesson...

There is no one to blame for a negative feeling that you don't want, that is, unless you think your waiter is responsible for the meal you don't like when you go out to eat.

Conscious separation from any negative state -- through the deliberate effort to observe that state -- is a very different bit of business than trying to insulate or otherwise protect oneself from it, whatever that method may be.

Classroom Talk: 7/23/2004 - Closing our eyes to where we may be in the wrong in that moment of any strained relationship does not make what is wrong within us any less of a burden to bear, but it does ensure that wherever we go we will find ourselves "bumping" into others and, for our pride-induced blindness, continuing to blame them for what we have refused to see.

The reason it's pointless to ask, or otherwise demand that someone explain himself to you for your troubled feelings over his words or actions, is because no one in the world can explain away a pain that you are creating for yourself.

One of the ways that pain perfects itself is through its incessant struggle to perfect others.

Trying to assign blame to the stress between you and the one with whom you are in a struggle... is like trying to judge which side of the rope in a tug-of-war is to be blamed for the tension (in it).

The next time you start to feel a burning sensation while busy holding someone's feet to the fire for having displeased you, take a closer look at those feet dancing around in the flames. That's right: they're yours.

Interview with Lance White, "The Zany Mystic" on 8/1/09. Topics explored in this dialogue: Pursuing what you love for the purpose of discovering your true self; You can't get negative without first resisting what you blame for your negativity; Letting go is the natural release that follows the realization that holding on hurts...

Other people do not create any disturbance we feel in the relationship. They are revealing to us in that moment the part of us that lays in the dark and waits to get disturbed so it can hide behind the cloud of war.

Part 1 Where fear dominates, love cannot flourish; when love is shackled, freedom is too. Without freedom, transformation only furthers fragmentation; and the more divided we are, the more reasons we find to accept the tyranny of fear, blame, and doubt. Part 2 Until we are willing and able to put ourselves in the shoes of another, we have not yet stepped upon the true Upward Path.

Trying to assess, and then assign blame to the stress that exists between you and whatever you may be struggling with in life... is like trying to judge which side of the rope in a tug-of-war is to be blamed for the tension (in it).