Teal Swan

Enlightenment is only the beginning, because after enlightenment you still have to engage with physical life, and physical life was designed to be a means for creating expansion. Physical life is a learning hologram. No one who is alive is exempt from expansion and so, no one is exempt from contrast. And as long as there is contrast, there is the recognition of what is unwanted as well as the recognition of what is wanted present within you.

Relationships are the real heart of expansion... Which means they are the most contrasting experiences we have in our human lives. They are the source of our greatest joy and the source of our greatest misery. Relationships create the means for our personal evolution. And so in order to have successful relationships, we need to learn how to flow with the current of that change. We need to learn how to cultivate harmony while allowing that change within us to take place.

Most of the fatal dynamics in relationships involve negative tailspins. These are dynamics where a pattern in the first partner causes a pattern in the second partner which exacerbates the pattern of the first partner, which exacerbates the pattern in the second partner and so on and so forth until the relationship in and of itself disintegrates. There is a common tailspin that occurs in partnerships. You see it occur most often between women and men. However it is a pattern that can occur in same sex partnerships as well. For the sake of this video, I am going to use the most common example of this dynamic, which involves a woman and a man.

To a certain degree all people wrestle with what is. We have an intolerance for things the way they are and so we want to change it. This tendency is a beautiful thing because it makes our lives and our world improve. If we tolerated the fact that we could not fly, we would never have invented the airplane for example. However, some of us don’t simply wrestle with what is. We are warriors. We fight what is as if our survival depends on it. Our unwillingness to accept what is, is a great source of suffering, especially when we can’t change certain things about what is. And in fact, it prevents us from getting what we need and want.

I’m going to start this article by just telling it like it is… People suck at relationships. Not that I blame most people for this. Relationships are the central part of life and also the hardest part of life and yet our schools teach us a minimum of 13 years of math and science and geography and history, but nothing about relationships and how to make them work.

For relationships to work, they have to feel good to both people in the relationship. This is true no matter what kind of relationship it is (friendship, partnership, family relationship, work relationship etc). Obviously this is much easier said than done. But one of the top reasons that relationships do not feel good and are unsustainable is: Incompatibility.

When most of us enter into a relationship, we do so because we can’t wait to be near someone. We get butterflies in our stomach. Wild horses couldn’t hold us back from them. We finish all of our other tasks so that we can get to what we really want, which is to just be with them; enjoying their presence and connection. But for some of us, at a certain point in the relationship, something changes. The pattern I am about to expose is a pattern I have seen in some women but it is by far and away most common amongst men. And it is a pattern that is the road to ruin in relationships. It is in fact the single biggest contributor to women deciding to cheat.

There is a little boy. His mom was a stay at home mom and his dad was a lawyer. His parents have decided to get a divorce. They move into different houses. The boy has to go back and forth. Because they got a divorce, the mother had to start working and so the boy is put in daycare. He only sees his dad on weekends.

I have been traveling the world and will continue to do so with the message that it is ok to not be ok. We live in a society that is obsessed with happiness. The message is that if you aren’t feeling happy, something must be terribly wrong with you. But today, we are going to look at another dynamic. We are going to look a barrier to happiness, which is when the only way to be ok is to not be ok.

As a race, human beings are experiencing a huge transition right now in their consciousness. They are going through a ‘hundredth monkey’ experience. The hundredth monkey is essentially a condition where one monkey discovers something new (like a new tool to use) and that monkey teaches it to another and that one teaches it to another until by the hundredth monkey, there is a shift in the entire species and they all are using the new tool. The transition that is taking place within the human consciousness is in the sector of relationships.