As a species, people are in the process of progressing towards the actualization of the awareness that in a relationship, there is a you and there is a me. People tend to think that in any moment, it is either you or me. Meaning that people tend to feel like in any situation, they get to act in the best interest of the other party or in the best interest of themselves, which makes their relationships either an exercise in self-sacrifice or a zero-sum game. Either way, it is a guarantee that relationships are painful. We need to master the me and the you too in the relationship equation with regards to best interests. And today, that means becoming aware of the you element of relationships.

There are a great many patterns that can cause a person to lose sight of the “you” in a relationship. To give you just a few examples: If you felt like no one was ever going to act in your best interests, you may have decided that the only way to survive in your life and to get your needs met was to do the same thing that they do, but in reverse. To stop caring about their best interests and simply fight against them for your own best interests. When we do this, we go into a narcissistic perceptual reality where we only ever think about ourselves.

Or for example, you can be indoctrinated into not caring about something that is “other”. A person growing up in a culture with an enemy is often taught to disconnect from that enemy and see them as other and have no concern for their best interests at all. Or a person growing up in a religion that teaches that only people have a soul, learn to relate to other living beings as objects that exist for their pleasure alone. They become normalized to having NO consideration of anything except themselves and maybe other humans.

Or for example, you may have felt totally powerless in your childhood and as if nothing you ever said or did had any impact on anyone or anything in your life. When this is the case, you adopt the false belief that you have no power to impact or affect anyone. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do. As a result, it may feel like the ripples of effect only go out from other people to you, not the other way around. Therefore, you don’t even consider the impact that something you do has on someone else, only the impact it has on you.

You may not like to hear this, but everything you think, say and do has an impact on everything else in existence. Most especially on those things closest to you in any system that you are a part of. You need to see this power that you have, rather than to minimize it. To not see one’s power is a very dangerous thing. Lack of awareness of your power relative to other people and things will lead to negative results. To understand this, imagine a surgeon. When a surgeon is performing a surgery, he or she absolutely must be aware of the power that he or she has in that situation. If the surgeon does not realize that he or she has as much power to kill as to save a life, the surgeon himself or herself is dangerous. The surgeon would approach the situation from outside reality. And because of this, he or she might approach the situation from the wrong perspective, with the wrong energy and make choices that have severe negative impact and influence on other people as well as themselves.

Another example is to imagine that we have no awareness of the fact that someone is very connected and attached to us. If we don’t realize this and if we don’t realize that this gives us incredible power to harm them, we may simply leave them because we are chasing something that we think is best for us; without understanding the incredible negative impact we are having on them and their life trajectory.

It is a guarantee if you think back on your life, especially those times when you were the most vulnerable (such as in childhood) you have experienced what it is to feel like the other person only had a “me” and not a “you”. It is easy to see just how impacted we were by that. It is also easy to see when someone had a “you”, not just a “me”, how safe that made us and how positively impacted we were by it.

It is also a guarantee that if you think back on your life, you have experienced the horror of watching someone who did not have a “you” and the amount that narcissistic state of being damaged another living thing. For example, you may have watched a person drag their crying child into a store by one arm, not caring about the child’s experience, only about how they want their child to behave for their sake. Or you might have watched a person smash a spider simply to feel safer themselves. Or you might have watched a person have fun putting salt on a slug to watch it dissolve. Or you might have seen people injured, killed or separated from those they love in a war time, all because some leader somewhere wanted more power and didn’t care about the collateral damage.

The people who do not want to recognize the “you” in a relationship usually deeply fear that if they take responsibility for their impact on other things, they will lose their “me”. And as a result, their life will always be painful. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: Am I Responsible for How Other People Feel?

To have a “me” is to have awareness of your own personal feelings, personal thoughts, personal integrity, personal desires, personal needs and therefore most importantly, your personal best interests and personal truth. And to care about it. To have a “you” is to have awareness of the other being’s personal feelings, personal thoughts, personal integrity, personal desires, personal needs and therefore most importantly, their personal best interests and personal truth. And to care about it. When you have committed to conscious living and to awakening, both must matter to you, regardless of whether they matter to the other person. But for a relationship to be a truly mutually beneficial one, both must matter to you and to the other person as well. If both the me and the you matter to both people in a relationship, the door is open to identify what the highest and best option for both parties is. From there, the action you take will be the most in alignment with a win-win possible in the given situation.

All this being said, an important step in your personal progression is to develop an awareness of “you”. To consciously consider what the positive and negative impact is, of anything you think, say and do, on anything around you.

To be completely honest with you, the survival of mankind is dependent on the development of a “you” within human consciousness. And that is a truth that I want you to sit with this week!