This article by John-Roger was first published in Rod & Staff Summer 1987 issue Vol V. All relationships are ultimately your relationship with yourself and are often reflected by someone else. How well (or poorly) you get along with yourself will be directly mirrored by how you get along with others. Of course, if you are not doing well with yourself, you may not recognize this and may do the traditional thing—blame it on someone else.

I suggest you decide to break the patterns of unhappiness and helplessness by accepting a simple truth: when you leave that someone else (and it could be a lover, a spouse, a colleague, a boss, a parent, etc.), you are still stuck with whatever is inside of you that causes unhappiness. That doesn’t make you bad or wrong. In fact, once you realize that the source of your unhappiness is within you, then you are in a position to change and transform that source.

Living on planet Earth can be an art based upon a scientific premise. The art is to approach life as a spontaneous experience. Part of the scientific premise is that you validate your experience.

The choices are to live in the present, be bound by the past, or be anxiety ridden about the future. That person you will meet tomorrow has nothing to do with what you didn’t get from your father 14 years ago. Your mate’s response last night has nothing to do with the restrictions imposed upon you 22 years ago. Your boss’s attitude toward your project has nothing to do with the con­ditioned fear you brought in with the work. Yet you may go to one another, hurling conditioned ghosts in the face of emotional demands. Do you know who is relating? Not you. Not the original you. You may be relating through the ghosts of your past and, possibly, the fantasies projected into your future.

When you find yourself in emotional pain because he said something that hurt you or when you find yourself furious because of her behavior, guess who is out of balance? It is you, playing with your ghosts (or fantasies) in the haunted rooms of your life. When you were a child, you might have celebrated Halloween once a year and loved to be frightened. As a conditioned adult, you may be playing Halloween every day of your life, and if you are not in touch with love, it can be frightening.

Too many of us, too many times, make the pain of our lives someone else’s fault.  My husband didn’t remember, my girlfriend ignored me, my mother shouldn’t have, my father should have, my boss is making me crazy, the President did this, the Senate did that, it’s all their fault and I’m so unhappy, it’s all because of them.

If you do this, you are relating to them as cause and making yourself the effect. As in Pavlov’s experiment, you gave them the bell to ring, and now you choose to be the dog that salivates.

I have heard so many people say, “But all I want is to be happy.” Be happy. You can’t buy a pound of “be hap­py.” No psychiatrist, religious or political leader, parental figure, author of how-to books, or spiritual master can grant you the power to be either happy or sad. But you can be what you are now and get to what you want by doing what it takes to get there.

If that sounds confusing, let’s talk about something specific, such as weight. Are you overweight, under-weight, or perfectly balanced right now? One of the things you might want to be right now is honest. Odds are that you think you are somewhat out-of-weight, right? The obvious thing is that you can get to be thin, fat, or balanced, depending upon what and how much you choose to eat.

Relationships work the same way. It is yours to choose that which contributes to being emotionally thin, fat, or balanced. It is your choice to be happy or sad, in a fulfilled relationship or one of emotional pain. The table is set out there with sources that can make you thin with hunger for more or fat from gorging; or, by choosing wisely, you can arrive at a satisfying balance that is appropriately nourishing. (This includes your relationship with your body, yourself, and other people.)

Our “natural” state is loving. We don’t have to wait for any divine miracle to occur. The fact that you are here, now, alive, breathing in and out, wanting to know how to become fulfilled, is a miracle in itself. The miracle is here, present, right now, if you are willing and courageous enough to avail yourself of it.