Day 423 - Hiding in a Relationship

There are some consequences playing out for me in my agreement-relationship, wherein I have fallen much more into my relationship tendencies than I have created agreements. In other words, I've been able to hide myself from myself through having another person to focus on and blame for my general life experience. I thought that by calling it an agreement meant that there was some automatic difference from a relationship...nope.

What I'm starting to realize now is how much work goes into manifesting agreement. In sales, the sales professional gets paid very well to apply effective communication to create shared understanding with the prospect. If my understanding is clear about the value of my proposition, we enter into agreement, and my prospect is transformed into a customer.

When my self-agreement, or understanding of my value proposition in and as LIFE, isn't exactly clear, reaching an agreement with another human being is (a) impossible, or (b) detrimental to the other human being.

Bottom line: Self comes first.

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I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that an agreement-relationship is a guaranteed, stronger than marriage, relationship.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hide the true nature of myself by projecting my shit onto the other person, instead of seeing, realizing and understanding who I am is reflected in the other by nature of how mind projection works.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to become less than my utmost potential by falling into my preprogrammed tendencies of trying to use the agreement-relationship as a relationship wherein I hide myself, from myself, by making it all about her.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not see, realize and understand my full responsibility to be an effective communicator, so that I can accurately name the game, create solutions, and then generate shared understanding/agreement.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to NOT first clarify for myself what I want to specifically create within an agreement-relationship. (Awesome support here: What did you Agree on?)

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to NOT see, realize and understand how by not clarifying my self-agreement first, I bring instability into the relationship and cause more discomfort and discord than harmony and agreement.


When and as I see myself reacting toward Garb, I commit myself to stop, and breathe. I realize that my programming to fight to not expose my systems is exactly the opposite of what I want to be doing in this agreement. I commit myself to speak the specific forgiveness statements, and continue to investigate myself in writing to find the root causes of my reaction patterns, effectively facing myself.

When and as I see myself hiding behind blame and projection, I stop, I breathe. I realize that I know how to bring the points back to myself, and that applying this tool is a form of essential self-application within my self-agreement. I commit myself to bringing every point of projected blame back to myself first and foremost.

When and as I see myself breaking my self-agreement and living in a way that is not best for all, I stop, I breathe. I realize that this process of self-honesty is a process, and the most challenging one in existence at that, so I commit myself to be gentle, yet steadfast, within my application of self-correction.

When and as I see myself speaking in energy, I STOP, I breathe. I realize that an effective communicator does not speak in energy, as this creates all kinds of barriers to hearing the actual points I intend to communicate. I realize that my intentions mean nothing, and that I should be measuring myself and my process by my application of effective self-expression of what is best for all, here, in this physical reality.

I commit myself to deconstructing all of my relationship tendencies, so that I may make room for substantial agreement creation in my agreement-relationship.

More awesome support here: http://wiki.destonians.com/Agreement

Day 400 - Self-Leadership in a Relationship, Part 2

The key insight for the success of a relationship:

Reorienting Self to Self

I got stuck in a subtle, long-term possession of sorts. Moving across the country to live with this lady person wasn't the plan. Two weeks later, it was. I prepared to leave my family over the next 5 months, and when the time came, I was in a completely new environment. Granted, I have had a lot of practice with this when in college. Each year I picked a new place to live and embraced the randomness of Craigslist to assign my housemates. Each year, I adapted, and in doing so, I significantly created myself based on who I was living with. My operating philosophy at the time: In order to be successful in the future, I needed to be able to handle myself in any living environment. I saw it as a challenge and a practice in flexibility; however, I didn't realize how much I was compromising myself by creating my character to be at the whim of my world. Perhaps I promoted harmony, but I didn't stand as the director of my reality.

Now, living with my LP, we're committed to becoming the directive principle of our lives in alignment with what is best for all. That's not an overnight process. Closer to 7 years. Walking with another process walker, we are constantly facing our minds, day-in and day-out. It's safe to say that this is far from the easy, go-with-the-flow style of living that I had been operating within most of my life. This has been far more real, far more challenging, and unquestionably more rewarding.

So what is really the difference? How I had learned to live was primarily through self-interest, meaning that I would dynamically alter my expression: thoughts, words & deeds, to get from life that which I wanted. The scope of my consideration was narrowly what I saw would best suit me. I enjoyed laughing and getting along with people, so one of my favorite characters was a humor-oriented personality. There is also a fear energy of not being accepted by others, so I was kind of hitting two birds with one stone. I had no idea how I was using my mind to create these well-adapted characters, nor did I have any idea of the consequences.

Creating harmony-producing characters is simply not working anymore. Those personalities function on a more surface level. My LP and I are committed to going deep, sorting out the false personalities, and getting to know the real Self here. This task is much more involved than creating a temporary personality, and this means it's not going to be all pretty and lovely-dovey all the time. The friction and conflict between us is much like tilling the earth for the next season of growth. This can be most uncomfortable! We're drudging up many of our personal 'truths', the ways which we've accepted and defined the world to be. But Hey, it's a new year, and they say the first year of an agreement relationship is the hardest.

I have already begun to see how we're shifting from 'fighting for our limitations' - which is how we say: fighting to be right or to protect our existing 'knowledge' - and into understanding each other, accepting each other, and moving to firstly change self. Letting go of her in a way, frees me up to focus on myself and my process through the mind. One of the most supportive tools I've been focusing on developing is: Listening. More on that to come.

There are plenty more tools to define and use, and I'll make a more sincere effort to begin sharing them with you here. Writing is so incredibly essential if you want to move forward into/as life. The mind will play games to no end if you let it. The coolest part about being in an agreement is that neither of us will let it happen to either of us. There is no question in my mind whether moving across the country was worth it or not. My life partner and I are going to Garb-Dan the world together :)