Offering yourself love and acceptance, unconditionally, is the baseline for your own happiness and health — and for joyful relationships with others. It’s a journey to get there, so on the way we are met with all the ways in which we have been blocking our own love within.
In relationships, the spiritual ego (which is synonymous with fear) tends to block love, and our access to our inner truth. As a result, we fall out of touch with what it feels like to have personal freedom. The ego’s habit is to blame outside circumstances and other people for how we feel; the ego convinces us that others are guilty or to blame, and that others (or outside circumstances) must change in order for us to find happiness.
When I lived in my ego, I felt hurt all the time. Ironically, no one was actually doing anything to me. My ego would make me the victim of whatever someone was withholding from me or not doing what I wanted them to do; my ego took everything personally and it made me feel powerless to change things.
But we all need to remember that the universe meets us on the level we’re at with ourselves. When my ego was ruling my life, I was living in fear and a sense of lack, looking for my relationships to fill me up. Because I was not in a space of self-love, I lined up with people who were emotionally unavailable.
In other words, if we have unhealed wounds and fears, we will align with the perfect person that triggers them so that we may heal them, if we choose to. But ultimately, it’s not about the other person, it’s about us and learning to change our world from the inside out, rather than seeking control, or being complacent in our current situations.
Everything changes when we begin to take personal responsibility for our lives. Taking personal responsibility for yourself and your actions is, perhaps surprisingly, the key to happy relationships. When we own our feelings we now have the ability to look within and do something about it rather than looking to the other person to all that we need, or trying to change them, creating codependency.