For most of you, the quality of relationships that you hold in your life largely decides the very quality of life that you live. When it is playing such an important role in your life, it needs to be looked at. So what is the basis of a relationship? Why do human beings need a relationship at all?
Whatever be the nature of the relationship, the fundamental aspect is, you have a need to be fulfilled. The needs may be physical, psychological, emotional, social, financial, political—they could be any kind. We may claim many things for whatever purpose we have formed a relationship, but if those needs and expectations are not fulfilled, relationships will go bad.
These needs within a human being have risen because of a certain sense of incompleteness. People are forming relationships to experience a certain sense of completeness within themselves. This piece of life is a complete entity by itself, why is it feeling incomplete? Why is it trying to fulfill itself by making a partnership with another piece of life? The fundamental reason is that we have not explored this life in its full depth and dimension. Though that is the basic issue, there is a complex process of relationships as such. There are expectations and expectations.
If you go about doing management with these things, there is no way you can gauge it 100 per cent. If you try to mind-read the other person and constantly try to fulfill their expectations, you will become a wreck. To some extent you have to do it, but that is not the basis of a beautiful relationship.
Fundamentally, why have we sought a relationship? You are seeking a relationship because you want to be happy, you want to be joyful. Or in other words, you are trying to use the other as a source of your happiness. If you are forming relationships, trying to squeeze happiness out of somebody and that person is trying to squeeze happiness out of you, this is going to be painful after sometime.
But if your life becomes an expression of your joy, not in pursuit of happiness, then relationships will be naturally wonderful. Shifting your life from the pursuit of happiness to an expression of joyfulness is what needs to happen if relationships have to really work on all levels.
Right now, your body, mind, emotions and on a deeper level, your very energies, are made in such a way that you still need relationships. If your body goes in search of a relationship, we call this sexuality. If your mind goes in search of relationships, we call this companionship. If your emotion goes in search of relationships, we call this love. If your energies go in search of relationships, we call this yoga. All
these efforts are just to become one with something else, because somehow, being who you are right now is not enough.
The whole system of yoga is about this. The word “yoga” literally means “union”. Whatever is the longing behind any relationship, you will never really know that oneness. But if you experience all this life around you as a part of yourself, now the way you exist here will be very, very different. Now relationships will only become a way of looking towards the others’ need, not about your own because you have no need of your own anymore.
Once there are no compulsions within you and everything that you do becomes conscious, relationships will become a true blessing, no more a longing, no more a struggle.
The writer is a world-renowned spiritual leader.
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