“Am I in right relationship with _____?”
This question, if earnestly asked, will change your life.
The "blank" can be literal: With my body, the sunset, my father/brother/sister/mother.
Or more abstract: With the future, the past, my career, the change in season.
What this question does is bring our attention to relationship.
More important than considering an ideal, it invites us to notice what our current relationship is. Inquiring into what is, is more important than inquiring into what should be.
If we develop a habit of asking this question, it trains us to be increasingly sensitive to how we relate with all aspects of life.
The potency of this question depends on us feeling into it, rather than merely intellectualizing it. It should not be about a theory of what is right relationship. It is about an embodied sense of whether we are aligned or not. It’s like adjusting the pillow beneath your head at night. Your body knows what is right. It adjusts it automatically and naturally. There is a feeling that comes with alignment.
Is there something unfelt or unsaid here? Am I at ease? Do I feel clear and clean with this person? With this aspect of myself?
It’s a dynamic situating of ourselves within many different dimensions simultaneously. The right level of openness or reservation. The right level of engagement. It’s about doing what a situation calls for.
Like improvising music with others, we attune with the context, and then express ourselves with an attuned authenticity. The right loudness or softness, the right articulation, the right rhythm.
And like playing music with others, there is actually no one universally right way, there are many forms of expression that can harmonize with what others are doing.
I’ve been holding inquiries this year into how to be in right relationship with my body and with money. These inquiries have guided a range of new goals and process changes.
Part of this is that the question invites us to recognize in what ways we are in wrong relationship. Where is that pebble in my shoe that I’ve been avoiding?
Usually, when we can soberly acknowledge how we’re out of integrity or alignment, we spontaneously begin to self-correct.
Sometimes it’s not immediately clear what needs to be done, but if we stay present with the discomfort of recognizing wrong relationship, eventually a path forward will emerge.
Freedom, love, spontaneity, deep expansive breathing. This is our birthright. If we know how to listen, our body will guide us towards these states of being.
Inquiring into right relationship can serve as a barometer for where we need to direct energy and attention in our lives in order to realize greater harmony and balance.