I came up with this pyramid a very long time ago. I believe I was 18 years old and I needed to put together a presentation for one of my classes. When I came up with it and did my presentation the other people in the room looked at me like I had completely lost it. I was talking about relationships and why I believed people had successful relationships. I focused more on romantic relationships than anything else, however with the passing of the years I have realized that this pyramid can be applied to any relationship you will ever encounter.
I have not written a post in a while, but this one came to me yesterday as I was speaking to a new client. In my spiritual line of business I come across many different questions, people want to always make sure they are doing the right thing, but the questions that most frequently get asked are relationship ones. I have yet to have a relationship question that wouldn't be answered or solved with this one pyramid. I think someone was trying to point this out to me when I was 18 years young and until a few years ago I thought of it just as a thing I had come up with for a Speech class where no one else really got what I was trying to say (maybe it was that back then I didn't speak English as well as I do know... Who knows?).
Anyhow, my client yesterday reminded me of this very important pyramid and I felt I needed to write and express myself about it again. You see, with every single relationship you will ever encounter, whether it is a romantic relationship, a friendship, or a business relationship; the basis for each of them is COMMUNICATION. Yes, I put that word in CAPS because it is the most important part of any relationship. Without it, you have nothing! Absolutely nothing! Most of my clients have all these relationship issues and the more I help them, the more I realize none of them are communicating with the person they are having issues with. It is either because the other person is not listening, or because they are not finding the right words to express themselves and so they end up arguing.
However, most of the people I have spoken to focus on one thing and one thing only: LOVE. The feeling that you love that person more than anything else and therefore everything else does not matter. Here is the thing though: Love is not enough, it never is, it never will be. The reason why love is not enough is because (from a spiritual perspective) we live in a plane of existence that is guided and controlled by logic and love has very little logic attached to it. In this plane of existence we need trust and respect to build a relationship and those two things do not come without communication. If someone is not communicating with you, the first thing you are going to logically do is wonder why, the next thing you will logically do is try to find out if they are hiding something. That is the plane we exist in now.
Look at the pyramid just for a little bit and think about how you came to trust and respect each of the people in your life, no matter who they are. The first thing was that you were able to communicate with them. When it comes to your parents, you trusted them because they were able to communicate with you from the time you were a baby and that trust led to the respect you have for them. Those people with parents who never did that, have very little respect and very little trust for their parents. Think about your friendships, business and romantic relationships; they all started by talking, by communicating somehow. Everything else gets build on top of that.
When two people don't communicate and they love each other deeply; the top of that pyramid is too big and too heavy that once that base is gone, when it starts to crack or fall apart everything else crumbles with it. You lose respect and trust almost immediately. Think about this as the foundation of a house, the house being love and the rest of the pyramid being the foundation of the house. Once that foundation starts to crumble (when we stop communicating) what happens to the house? And what happens if the house is a huge house? It crumbles down and gets destroyed. The pieces will still be there, but the house is no longer useful, it is no longer livable.
So why does this happen? Why do we stop communicating with the people we love? Why do relationships tend to fail at this so often? In my line of work I have realized that when people are in a romantic relationship they tend to get comfortable with the person they are with. The level of being comfortable is so big that they forget to take care of the foundation of that relationship. By the time they realize that something is wrong, usually this is the time when there is one argument after the next, their foundation is so broken that they need to start to rebuild it. Unfortunately, most people aren't willing to do that. For many, the easiest thing to do is to build a new house with someone else. For others, they think the house should still be standing because of the love they have for each other, but at the end of the day they are left leaving in a broken house and with a lot of pain.
Love is not enough, relationships take constant work. We cannot let ourselves be immersed into our own worlds and forget about the other person. It does not have to be something where two people come together and become one. Each person can be their own being, that's actually healthy. However, we must always acknowledge that the other person wants to share who we are and what we do with us and we should be willing to reciprocate that just a little. If we could do that, then the foundation of that wonderful house will always be strong and no matter what happens, it will never allow the house to crumble.
PS: I tried to match the colors which spiritually represent each of the things that are on the pyramid. If you notice communication and trust share the color blue, while respect and trust share the color gray. Isn't it interesting that they are all in some way tied together? You cannot build one without the other and you cannot build any of them without the bottom one. Blessed Be!
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