Pure Love
Whenever you feel yourself having a reaction of judgment, rejection, or resistance, imagine the opposite. Instead of seeing an adversary, view your partner as totally on your side. Don’t focus on what he or she has done to irritate you; reframe it as an act of pure love, brought into being to teach you the perfect lesson you need to learn at just that moment. This isn’t a mind game or a trick: at the level of spirit your beloved acts only from love, holding your highest good at heart.
Resistance is like a wall, holding back the flow of love. Love is the wave that brings forgiveness, kindness, and trust from the level of spirit. You can’t create these things. You can only tune in to them, which is why you need to remake your daily battles into opportunities for spirit. Every sliver of time opens onto the timeless. Can you allow yourself to slip through?
First and foremost, this is about seeing each other in a new light. Needs don’t just go away. On the other hand, projections of blame should go away; there isn’t any reason, except in your perception, to make each other feel wrong. You must stop feeding the monster. This inner being who keeps screaming, ‘What about me?’ is a kind of monster, a distorted outgrowth of your ego.
Imagine the monster. The name of this beast is resistance. Now think of a situation where you absolutely didn’t want to go along with your spouse’s will. See this monster coming forward to defend you by putting up a wall of denial, a thousand reasons why you are right and your partner wrong, a ferocious display of withering disapproval.
How do you feel when this happens? Hard. Angry. Furious. Insecure. Empty. Alone. All are layers of the same response. On the surface the monster of resistance expresses anger and hardness, but this is only to protect the insecurity and loneliness lurking underneath. If you peel away the layers, you find that resistance is actually born of fear, and fear comes from having been deeply hurt in the past.
