Inner Work

For the week of June 6, 2005

Barriers to Relating

Perhaps you can recall an experience with another person in which the boundaries between you vanished, in which your consideration for the other person equaled your consideration for yourself, in which the question “Who am I?” seemed irrelevant.

Our relationships with people matter on many levels. Physically we need others for the care and feeding of our body. Our highly elaborated society provides all our necessary and desired material goods and services, which we could not possibly produce on our own. Emotionally we need others to care for and be cared for by, to relax with and share with, to enjoy, to respect, to have compassion for, and to love. Intellectually we need others to learn from, to debate with, and to collaborate with.

Spiritually we need others to help us see beyond our egoism, to teach us the practices of the path, and to share our sacred work. Each of these brings crucial help on the way.

Yet despite our great need for others, we remain far from the true possibilities of relationship. To understand how and why this happens, we can look to see our own inner barriers that separate us from other people. These barriers come in a wide variety of forms, with each of us sporting a unique subset of them. A partial list includes inner criticism and negative attitudes, arrogance and aloofness, anger and animosity, jealousy and envy, fear and timidity, disgust, lust, neediness, hurry, worry, self-centeredness, indifference, talking too much, and not talking enough. More generally, we consider our own life, our own needs, and our own desires to be so much more important than those of other people. We fill our inner world with ourselves and leave little or even no room for anyone else.

All these walls of non-relating can dissipate if we do not identify with them and if we let them go. For that we need first to see them in action in ourselves and then not believe in our thoughts, emotions, and attitudes as speaking for or defining who we really are. Rather, we see this whole inner menagerie of our personality as a set of habitual patterns which need not direct or control us and need not separate us from others. By relaxing these barriers our connections with people naturally widen and deepen.

Distance from others is distance from ourselves. The self-centered life of separateness and isolation focuses on our egoism and neglects the truth of who we are. At a very basic level, we are not really separate from others. We can catch a glimpse of that by looking beyond our personal thoughts and emotions, to enter the pure consciousness we all share. So how we treat others, both outwardly and inwardly, is how we treat ourselves.

For this week, look at your relationships or lack thereof. Look at the quality and openness of how you relate to others, both the casual stranger and your loved ones. See and begin to let go of the barriers that keep you so separate from people.

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