This insight is from Ellen Mogensen's Newsletter "Karmic Insights" and I thought you my lovely readers would enjoy it because it relates to how your current relationship with your sweetheart could be helping or hurting your weight loss efforts or really any effort you are making to becoming a happier healthier you. Ellen is a friend and mentor of mine, and yes I am a firm believer in the cause and affect of karma. What you put out is what you get back, and before I make any major decisions I think about how "like" energy can come back to me from the actions I take.
Guest post by Ellen Mogensen of Heal Past Lives
Relationships are karmic dances where the moves of one partner often dictate the moves of the other.
The best example of how the "Karmic Dance" works is detailed in "The Dance of Anger" by Harriet Lerner. A woman wants to see Lerner at a workshop she is giving but the woman's husband "won't let her" attend. Lerner pointed out to the woman that, unless he was physically restraining her with a weapon, etc, that she was actually choosing not to attend. The woman was furious, couldn't Lerner see that it was all her husband's doing?
As Lerner patiently explained, that the cost of her husband's anger was higher than the benefit the woman would receive from attending the workshop so she had chosen the path of least resistance. So it was not really that her husband would not let her come, it was that the woman had chosen not to take an action which was likely to result in him getting angry. This was their dance: the woman agreeing only to take steps in the circle that her husband had defined. She was agreeing to let him control her by believing it was "all her husband's doing."
How the "Karmic Dance" works is that one person allows another to call the shots by believing that "this is the way it is" and will always be.
The simple truth is that we are all the creators of our universe, that we have the ultimate power, and that we are the only one who can allow another to create for us and take away our power. Lerner calls surrendering our creativity and power to another "over-functioning" meaning that we are, do, and have less so that another person can be, do, and have more (or "under-function" by comparison).
In any given relationship, at any given time, one partner will over-function to support the other in under-functioning. Yet, these roles should reverse over time and, on balance, each partner should give and receive equally in the relationship. When one partner is always giving and the other is always receiving, this obvious imbalance will eventually tear the relationship apart (unless both partners are happy with the arrangement). So the next time you get frustrated with your partner who will not you let do [fill in the blank], remember that they are not in charge of your life, you are and may be it is time for you both to stop doing the Karmic Dance.
