The teachings and tools for a true relationship
PRINT PAGE
The teachings and tools for a true relationship
Last month I got married. At age 52, for the first time. While the marriage was a spectacular, heavenly experience in itself, the road to marriage was perhaps even more special. The marriage was, next to a commitment to a relationship with an ever-deepening love, also a celebration that we had gotten to this point of getting married.
This article is a sharing (in English as my second language) of what I have come to understand about love and true relationships.
It was not that I did not believe in marriage – I very much do – but I had never simply got to the point that there was so much love that marriage was just the next logical thing to do. It was also not that I did not meet any beautiful interesting partners, because basically all of my life I had encountered beautiful, interesting women, with whom I started promising relationships.
But every time, after a spectacular start, falling in love massively, the love – what I thought was love – faded away, and mostly me, ended the relationship. At the end of every relationship I did not feel any love, so it was easy to walk away.
After having had many relationships with women that I thought had started off really well, and then ended after a couple of years, I had let go of the belief that perhaps I hadn’t met my ‘true love’, or ‘soul mate’ as it is called in society. For many years I had blamed my partners for the fact the relationship had not lasted – saying to myself, and to them, that they were just not ‘the one’. But in my thirties I started to realise that there was work to be done on my side of the equation.
So I started having sessions with psychotherapists and following many personal development courses. I got many insights and learned to manage my unproductive behaviours, but the end result in a relationship did not change. They always ended after a couple of years, where I left the relationship feeling totally justified because I did not feel the love anymore.
I then entered a spiritual school which was a combination of modern psychotherapy and a sub-branch of one of the well-known world religions. My main objective was to at last solve what was blocking me in having a long-lasting loving relationship where I could keep on feeling the love.
After another failed relationship, with again a truly beautiful and inspiring woman who, from hindsight, had it all to make our relationship work, and being a ‘good’ student for years, I quit the school immediately. I became very honest: they simply had not offered me the ‘tools’ to make a relationship work … basically it was just very advanced entertainment and knowledge that did not truly advance my life one single bit, and certainly not on the relationship part.
But one good thing happened during that last relationship: my partner at that time introduced me to Serge Benhayon. The encounter with this man would turn out to be a life-changer.
I thought that by following his courses, studying his teachings and undergoing healing modalities that perhaps I would get some extra help in making my relationship work. While still being a committed student of the school I was attending, I tried to fit what Serge was presenting into the teachings I had received from this spiritual school. It did not work; the teachings did not match at all.
On the topic of relationships, Serge Benhayon presents a very simple teaching. Nobody can bring you love, you can only build love in yourself – and we are love, each and every one of us – and that love is the love you share with another.
We are love but there are layers around us that make it that the love cannot come out.
Following on from his teachings, I also understood that the massive falling in love I mostly experienced at the start of a relationship was not love at all, but the filling of the huge emptiness I had inside me with the attention from the energy of another. That is what we call attraction! And this is what is massively promoted by society in books, films and almost all the pop songs on love. I had signed up unconsciously to one of the big lies that society promotes and had made a strong belief out of it – if there was no massively falling in love, that it wasn’t good.
So, I had to build love in myself. But how do I do that? It started with simply caring more about myself, for example by honouring the signs my body was giving me and not overriding them with ideas from my head. For example, if I was tired I would rest, instead of eating something salty to stimulate me, or going out for a run.
I started to see that my body is always my best friend where I should listen to, and that the thoughts in my head about what I should or shouldn’t do are often proven to be harming after a while, whether in a big or smaller way. Not only harming, but also blocking the flow of love that is naturally within us. I began to understand that the head does not know love.
I attended also the healing courses Serge was offering. I realised that behaviours and hurts are ingrained in the body, but that they are energy first and you could let them go with the support of these healing modalities, and the willingness to feel it and let them go myself. That is why it is so difficult to control unwanted behaviours with our heads – the behaviours are in the body, and at best you can manage these behaviours with your head. I tried that one for years and discovered it simply does not provide a true solution for getting rid of the root of such a behaviour. And a key discovery; not having love in my body, not feeling love, is the end-result of many unloving behaviours which I had been living for years.
After a couple of years on working on the teachings and healing modalities of Serge, I thought I was ready for a new relationship based on true love. I started a relationship with Sylvia, the woman I have just married.
I knew we would get married from the start; it was a deep knowing. Sylvia had it all to be my wife: the sweet love I could trust, beautiful, witty, very very sensitive, incredibly wise and the most important factor, she did not expect me that I brought her love, but that she had to build the love in herself as well. The latter was the most binding ingredient, and I knew with that commitment and with the tools and teachings that were now at our fingertips this would – or should I say – could work. You can never predict the future – we do not know how people will change – but we shared the same principles on what was love and what was a relationship truly about, and in that we were rock solid consistent.
But it was definitely not an easy road. The relationship started very well from love. We had been friends for many years, and she was a friend I trusted and loved very much.
But after a smooth loving start, the difficulties started coming in. I, we, ran into many behaviours we had adopted which were very counterproductive to a loving relationship. I also realised that the strategic behaviours I had picked up as a child, to counter the family life that had been void of love, was much more blocking the relationship than I had imagined they would be. There was a lot of work to be done.
Along the way, Serge Benhayon and his teachings supported me and us very much. Every time a non-productive behaviour surfaced, I realised, “this is not me, this is not love, and I am love”, and I worked on healing and letting go of that behaviour. Again, and again. By letting go of these behaviours, more of the love which I am could come out. And stayed out!
It was hard work, but the hard work has been done, and now there is more and more love between us every day. The glorious years have begun! And then of course we got married.
Yes, we did the hard work ourselves, but without the teachings and tools of Serge Benhayon, and all the healing courses he offered, it would not have been possible. With our background, the relationship we have now and the fact we got married in and with true love is a miracle that we celebrate each and every day.
The saying from Serge Benhayon underneath we received on the day of our marriage, as a gift in-scripted in glass from the aforementioned ex-partner, the one that introduced me to Serge years ago. It says it all.
"There is no off button to love.
Serge Benhayon
Only more love to deepen into."
Love indeed is endless, and our journey in deepening that love has just begun.
Filed under
