Most longevity studies conclude that the biggest factor determining a long, healthy life is not the quality of the food you intake or the thoughts you think. The biggest factor is the quality of your social life. That is how important it is to have friends and family around you, harmonious and fun relationships around you.
However, trying too hard to have a great relational life is also tricky. Quite often, good relationships with others come at the cost of you having to kill or suppress an aspect of yourself, you having to put up with some aspect of others that you quite fundamentally dislike. With that comes the aspect of compromise. There are good compromises and there are bad compromises.
Relationships do require ongoing adjustment and ongoing mutual forgiveness. So compromising per se is not bad. However, factors like how much you compromise and for whom you compromise separates a good compromise from a bad one.
As your consciousness evolves through inner work (or otherwise as a part of the ongoing ascension process for all of humanity), life invites you to keep filtering your contacts. All relationships are eventually about mutual resonance.
Once the energetic gap between you and somebody else widens too much, it will be difficult for both the parties to sustain a relationship. Such a relationship will conclude owing to some obvious outer factors, but the real reason lies in the energetic dissonance between the two parties.
This energetic gap is not only the gap between the quality of your respective consciousnesses or the gap between your interests or some physical distance between two people. This energetic gap could also be about whether the other person is able to be on the same timeline as you. The current humanity during this shift-of-the-ages can be largely divided into two categories – ascending and descending. Those on the ascending timelines will grow with time and those on the descending timeline will disintegrate with time. It will become impossible for those on the former to have much contact with those on the latter. Another reason behind an energetic gap is the karma (good or bad) with the person having come to an end. You no longer serve a purpose in each others’ lives.
On the outside these relational decouplings could happen automatically or may require to be consciously executed. When they need to be consciously executed, there are some standard criteria around which the call should be taken. The first thing to check is whether the person whom you so love is loving you back in the right way. Many are incapable of loving you back the right way. They may be way more selfish and way less selfless than you. There will always be a difference in quantum and quality of the way in which two people love each other. That is not a problem. The problem is when the difference is too high.
Until we are rooted in unconditional love, we come from conditional love and we should accept that whole-heartedly. In conditional love, we require another to love us back enough for the amount of love, care, concern and efforts that we invest in them. If the same threshold is repeatedly breached, such a relationship is worthy of being done away with, if practical to do so.
Then there are those who seem to be loving and respecting you a lot but still give you a hard time every now and then. On deeper investigation, you realise that they don’t love you as such but they love of version of you that they want to see in you. When you behave out of conformity with their yardsticks, they shun you in some way. They never loved you in the first place. They were only loving themselves through you. This is another category of relationships that is ideally dropped.
Then there is this third category of people who are generally insensitive to your needs but are gung-ho about their own needs getting sufficed through you. Such people should also be kept at a distance.
It should however be noted that even if relational choices are exercised and some relationships are culled out of your sphere, it would be ideal – whenever possible – to do the decoupling from a place of forgiveness, love and blessings. Except in rare cases, such feelings of forgiveness, love and blessings need not generally be outwardly communicated but need to be inwardly held.
Once the wrong relationships leave your energetic space, a vacuum is created to attract or deepen the right relationships as well as the right circumstances in your life.
As for the relationships that one should strive to attract, preserve or deepen, similar criteria prevail. Better to have deeper relationships with few people than superficial relationships with many. Better to double down on those who have demonstrated their love by being with you or for you in times of need. Better to double down on those who – though they don’t shy away from highlighting your flaws to you if required – are generally busy celebrating whatever is right with you. Those who don’t just have your back but are also busy cheering for you and championing you.
And the best are those bonds where both of you are constantly helping each other grow spiritually and materially by leaps and bounds, where shades of unconditional love are settling in, where the ongoing mutual support is always so much that one transcends the very act of keeping score of who has done how much for another.
