One question I’ve been pondering this year is the following: why is it that, for the overwhelming majority of us, relationships (of all kinds, shapes, and sizes) seem to be our toughest work?

After all, so many of us find ourselves griping over what our colleagues said, what our boss did, how our friends, family, and partner treat us, and at some point, even our relationship to the wider community gets called into question.

In this world of apparent duality, everything is in relationship with something else. The Buddha observed this phenomenon as interdependent origination. This means that “hot” could not exist without “cold” and vice versa.

In fact, we as individuals would hardly be able to strike our own unique identity without contrast. Who is the teacher without the student? The audience without the speaker? Nothing exists independent of anything else.

Yet, despite the natural interdependence that is so fundamentally and intimately entwined within all of existence as we know it, harmony seldom exists in man-made things, including and perhaps most especially in our personal connections with others and the world.

For myself, since my awakening, I have noticed how complex, emotionally-charged, and often insidious my own relational dysfunction is and how those often deeply ingrained patterns limit me or the other person in any given moment. For instance, I can see how my own fear of judgment or abandonment predisposes me to abandon and judge myself, in and turn, and how I frequently attempt to manipulate my environment, albeit unconsciously, to avoid both, which leads to less fullness and more contraction. More contraction leads, inevitably, to more fear and limitation.

On the spiritual path, however, I have often felt inclined to direct judgment outside of myself and lament over the fact that I believe that my environment does not support my growth and evolution.

Time after time, I have found myself thinking: if only I were in complete solitude and living in a cabin in the woods, like Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond, with decreased interaction with other people, I would feel more aligned with my inner essence, and my life would begin to radically transform in ways I’d never previously imagined.

However, I’ve simultaneously used my current circumstances to remind myself that perhaps I was put on this particular path to become my own kind of alchemist, to see and transmute old relating patterns that no longer serve me. What better way to do that than through making it damn near impossible for me to live completely alone? That way, relationships become my spiritual practice, or my Sadhana, if you will.

A month-and-a-half ago, after the 2024 United States election, I had a conversation with a close friend regarding Donald Trump’s victory, which she was mourning over.

“I am just so upset, shocked, and disappointed over Trump’s victory,” she told me. “I can’t believe those Americans haven’t learned their lessons yet!”

I felt my teeth clench and my shoulders tense. I wanted so desperately to evade this conversation, as politics normally disgusts me. Instead, I wondered: how could I use this conversation as an opportunity to become less defensive and more compassionate? How could I start to build new neural pathways and train my brain to become less reactive and more responsive? If I respond instead of react, I can attain true self-mastery. So, let’s try this!

I took a deep, slow, conscious breath, and replied.

“Try to understand that we exist in a much bigger and more complex reality than we can currently imagine. It is a quantum reality, a field, where time does not exist. Because a so-called ‘perfect’ world we envision already exists as a living and breathing potential, it is already here as the world that presents itself to us right here, right now, as we speak. But because we humans need to learn through contrast, this is how we grasp that ideal timeline. We can only come to know love after we’ve experienced it’s opposite.

I continued.

“This is how humanity must learn,” I said insistently. “Very few people are changed by the opinions of someone else, no matter how valid, how righteous, and how loud or insistent. We need to experience fear and dysfunction, over and over and in a myriad of ways, in order to transform our consciousness and then, eventually, our world. It’s the bitter truth that no one wants to hear, but that doesn’t make it any less true, regardless.”

Pensively, she evaluated my words, and then just as quickly dismissed them. Digging her heels in, she said, “But I hate Trump! And the American people should all hate him, too! He’s evil!”

“Truthfully, we are all capable of evil,” I hesitated. “It just depends on which master we choose to serve; that is, whether we allow ourselves to be swayed by the gentle hum of love, which leads to right action, or whether we allow ourselves to become pulled by that compelling yet familiar force of fear, which leads to inequality and more separation. Both of those potentials exist within us all the time.”

And it’s true. When we follow the common path of ignorance, greed, and fear, we are all equally capable of becoming our own rendition of Donald Trump, whatever that looks like for us. As I’ve quoted in a previous article, there is a poem by Thich Nhat Hahn, entitled, “Please Call Me By My True Names.” In it, he said:

“I am a mayflower metamorphosing

on the surface of the river.

And I am the bird

that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am a frog swimming happily

in the clear water of a pond.

And I am the grass-snake

that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin as Bamboo sticks.

And I am the arms merchant,

selling deadly weapons to Uganda.”

When we understand that, at our core, we are everyone and everyone is essentially us, our relationships become far less divisive. This allows our loving natures to express themselves through us in each and every thought and interaction. Sure, we don’t have to agree with everything other people do or say, nor will we when they aren’t aligned with our highest truth, which is love, but we can nevertheless choose to remain objective in our perceptions of others, lest we breed more division and more contempt in an already hostile world.

Shortly after the election, I took a trip to my local library and discovered the book to end all of my most burning questions about relationships. It is called, The Wisdom of Yogananda, Volume 3: Spiritual Relationships.

For those of you who are not familiar with Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda was born on January 5, 1893 in Gorakhpur, India. He was considered by many people to be the “Father of Yoga in the Western World,” and insisted on the unity and common thread between the belief systems of the East and West. In addition, he drew attention to the balance we must strike between the material and the spiritual.

Below are six quotes straight from the book to remind us all of our common core, and the importance of love and fellowship, which is more than relevant in our world today.

1. “You can’t love God and at the same time be unkind to your associates. You can’t love Him and be full of wrath. How you behave toward others both reflects your inner consciousness and conditions it.”

2. “Never imagine that you can win God’s love if you can’t win the love of your fellow creatures. As you love Him, so you should love Him in all.”

3. “God lives and breathes in all. We are Americans or have some other nationality for just a few years, but we are God’s children forever. The soul cannot be confined within man-made boundaries. It’s nationality is Spirit. It’s country is omnipresence.”

4. “Practice loving those who do not love you. Feel for those who do not feel for you. Be generous to those who are generous only to themselves. If you heap hatred on your enemy, neither he nor you are able to perceive the inherent beauty of your soul.”

5. “Relatives are those whom we think of as our own. To love our relatives trains us in expanding our consciousness and helps us practice loving all people as our relatives in God. For relatives and strangers are all equally God’s children. If you limit your love to your own direct family, you have Christ consciousness to only that limited degree. When you love your neighbour as your wider family, you express more of Christ consciousness.”

6. “Love must never remain circumscribed in littleness. Through the gates of friendship, conjugal affection, parental love, and the love of one’s fellow beings and all animate creatures, we can enter into the kingdom of Divine Love.”

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