Healing or harmonizing relationships

The two concepts are complementary, but not quite the same. Healing implies a sickness of something that used to be healthy. This definitely happens in human relationships of all types, whether male-female, mother-child, father-child, friendships, professional and so on. Harmonizing seems to refer to relationships that never quite get off the ground because the harmonious common ground hasn’t been found. The second case (harmonizing) is simpler to talk about: usually it is necessary to harmonize because the people involved try to make of the relationship something that it is not. For example, two friends might be trying to make their friendship into a marriage!  Or, to the contrary, they might be afraid to acknowledge their love and try to keep it to a simple friendship. We need to harmonize our relationships when we try to make of them what they are not. Usually, frank talk and hard looks are sufficient to accomplish this. Often our wishful thinking makes this hard frank conversation extremely difficult, but it isn’t very complicated, merely difficult to bring ourselves to do so. If you want help from Archetypal forces in harmonizing a relationship, either through meditative techniques or through ritual, or both, the following Archetypes will be helpful: Lilith first, for finding the guts to confront the situation and the Truth about the relationship; Venus-Aphrodite for expressing-defining the form the relationship should take; Vulcan-Thor for creating the harmonized relationship in fact.

As for healing a sick relationship; always first ask if it should be healed rather than abandoned! If the answer is “yes”, then proceed. But remember that as with some physical illnesses, quick surgery is sometimes preferable to other forms of healing! As in our physical bodies, no effective healing can be achieved without a diagnostic. The first all important part is to be able to define exactly what is sick! Remember, regarding healable relationships: even if you don’t want to admit it, no relational sickness can exist on one side only, it DOES TAKE TWO TO TANGO!  Therefore, if there is any guilt in there, it exists for both of you, but in different manners! When and if a relationship is sick only on one side of it, I mean that only one of the involved partners makes it sick (this DOES happen) there is NO possible cure. The “healthy partner” should run away from such a relationship as fast as possible!  The reason here is that in such a case the relationship is not real. It exists only in your wishful thinking! But if a real relationship exists and it is sick, then you may try to heal it. Then both sides will need to be healed. The first step would be to recognize that there is no guilty party here! This is not the same concept as stating that both are guilty! The very first step would be to become conscious that there is NO guilt; all I can tell you without writing a whole book about this is that sick relationships usually get sick because the involved parties stop looking at the other person as another person. I mean that you start wanting the other person to bring you what you think you need or want rather than loving the other person as a whole person who does NOT exist in order to fulfill whatever you need. You start loving, or wanting the relationship, rather than loving or wanting a person! It also probably means that you have stopped trying to become a whole person on your own, since you’re asking the other to fulfill you! So such a situation implies, most of the time, that, in fact if not in intent, you have stopped trying to become who you really are. That’s usually when we start trying to get the other person to fill in our own blanks! For some mysterious reasons this phenomenon usually happens to both persons at the same time. And trying to figure out if one of you started it (and assigning blame …) is usually just as useless as trying to figure out if the chicken came before the first egg or if the first chicken happened before the egg! If you seek help in such a healing from divine Archetypes, whether through meditation or ritual, the following would be of help. In a first step, each partner should try and become conscious of when and why they quit on their own development process of becoming themselves. This should be done separately, but with a fixed date, sometime in the future (at least a month) where the results of this search will be shared. In the sharing, no party should challenge the validity of the others’ findings. This is the hardest part: accepting what your partner has to say about him or her Self! The old saying applies here: “Judge not” Accept that what your partner in the relationship (spouse, mother, son, friend, etc.) has to say about him or herself just might be truer than your own perception of him or her!  Or course, this presupposes that each of you has a basic sincerity in the process. If this is not the case, we go back to the necessity for immediate surgery! The second stage of healing will involve change and transformation, both of each of you and of the ways and means of the relationship itself. What is to change can vary too much from one particular case to another for me to go in any detail here. (See meditation number 4 to Heal and Harmonize relationships at the end of the book)