Perhaps the most important lesson that still needs to be learned is that relationships are everything. Our lives, our future, everything of this world — it’s all a co-mingling of relationships. So when questions arise about how to best respond to personal and collective challenges, relationships will be fundamental to the answers.
Because so many of our deepest needs and longings are relational, building and strengthening relational capacities is key to personal well-being and resilience. Our human longing for connection, ease, and belonging with other people is bottomless. And healing starts with seeing ourselves and others more clearly.
A lack of relational skills and capacity is also at the root of incivility and divisiveness at the level of local, state, and national politics. This also boils down to the failure to see others and our shared predicament clearly.
And in the international arena — injustice, violence, and suffering originate in the woundedness and traumas that keep individual decision-makers, and groups of them, locked in the illusion of separateness, self-interest, and toxic nationalism. The U.S. is a poster child for this, with most references to “national security” ultimately being about dominance and protecting corporate interests — not the population at large, not with a long-term view, and not with sincere interest in addressing the root causes of war, conflict, inequality, and suffering.
The Relationship Challenge
This points to an urgent need to rise to the relationship challenge. It’s a challenge the universe laid down for me 20 years ago and it took a divorce to make it very personal and immediate. It’s an ongoing challenge and I’ve learned to relish it because the payoffs have been so huge. Primary among those, is the sense that when I lean into relationships rather than disconnecting, I grow. I stay more conscious and break habits and patterns formed generations ago in the process. I feel better and I know I’m contributing something that ripples out in positive ways.
It’s taken me a long time to get here, to distill the root cause of violence and suffering down to the illusion of separateness, and leaning into relationships as the healing path. It’s taken a lot of practice to really experience and feel the benefits: more self-awareness and self-acceptance, more humility, better listening, more satisfying relationships, more resilience and capacity in the face of conflict, and deeper understanding of why people are the way they are and why the world is the way it is.
It’s taken time to clarity the relational foundations of Active Peace and how to present them, and it will never be a finished project. I am thrilled though to now be able to offer the kind of training and coaching I wish someone had offered me 40 years ago. Among other things, I offer five foundations and the mindset that supports the shift to a truly relational and regenerative way of being. Foundations and a mindset that are also key in navigating the collective challenges we face.
I’m currently offering these foundational trainings as free 90-minute introductory classes, as well a follow-up deeper dive. They all fit under the umbrella and the call from the earth and the universe to Rise to the Relationship Challenge. You can find more information HERE.
The much loved eco-philosopher Thomas Berry wrote of the importance of creating mutually enhancing relationships between humans and the earth, and he called this the great work of our time. Getting there will require deep levels of human collaboration, which in turn, will require levels of personal and relational capacity and resilience that humanity has yet to discover. This is the open field of regenerative relationships—an open field of self-discovery, co-creation, and emergence—and I hold it as the great adventure of our time.
Photo credit: Mario Purisic via Unsplash