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How to Spread Peace Through Your Relationship

Here we are in a season where women and men all over the world are celebrating, each in their respective ways, the desire for unity, peace, joy and love to spread and be manifest on our world between all peoples.

Simultaneously, we are living in a tumultuous and divisive time where many are suffering, sides are being rigidly defined, and people seem to be at a loss as to how to find their way to each other again. This is happening within families, communities and nations.

We, Maude and Phil, see this as the very time when our vision is most needed. We are promoting a simple and very attainable idea: Spread Peace One Relationship at a Time!

This is not a concept created in the mind that we have invented. This is a living reality; one that we experience and one we know can be learned, shared and spread.

Our story is a simple one. We live in a deep state of peace, both in our relationship and within ourselves. We have found that there are specific components of this state of peace and that they can be applied, not just to couples, but to all forms of relationships.

Yet people live on edge as if the world is a dangerous place. The evening news diet of murders, food recalls and immigrant invasions encourages this, grabbing your attention by relying on easily triggered fear responses.

Fear is definitely useful when you meet a bear in the woods, but in much of life, it is an unnecessary handicap from the past. Nowhere is this more true than in your relationship. A partnership should be cooperation, not competition. It can bring a state of great joy, deep security and an ever decreasing element of fear into your life.

It is the direction that all people yearn for; one of harmony with ourselves and with what is.

Some time ago, Phil created peacepoll.org to find out how many people would like to see world peace. Online polls are notoriously unreliable, but even including some commercial spammers who said no, the figure is still at 93%.

More recently, We have been thinking about how the cooperative nature of humans vastly outweighs their competitive aspect. (We wrote about this in a recent blog.) Test this out for yourself by listing 100 people you know well and counting how many of them would cooperate with you and how many are your competition.

We are all social creatures, and no matter what propaganda may be trying to spread concerning our differences, we are at heart all very similar. We want to be connected, we want to laugh and grow, be understood and feel accepted and loved. We all want to live in peace. Look around you. Is this not true of the people you know directly?

So how to do it? Start with yourself. Get to know yourself so you can express and share in a direct and clear manner what your wants and needs are. (We are suggesting gaining self-knowledge, not becoming self-preoccupied.) Then move to your partners and lovers, your intimate relationships, your social relationships, your community, your nation, the people of the world.

Yes, the world. We can change the world one relationship at a time by becoming practitioners of peace, recipients of the grace of peace, and people who share and create peace as we pass by. This does not imply that we will achieve perfection in living this out or that this is not a long process. Let’s all keep trying, keep the goal clearly in mind, acknowledge its attainability, do all we can and then learn to do more.

As we grow in life and experience, we all long for meaning and opportunities to be of service. This is our true nature and our underlying raison d’être. Won’t you join us in becoming an ambassador of peace by being a living example of what that is, and devoting yourself to shining it forth, thereby spreading peace one relationship at a time.

Happy Peace to One and All!

Photo credit: Andy Samarasena, Studio SB

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Successful Relationship Reading Corner

In this week's blog and the season of desire for peace on earth, we wrote about how to spread peace through your relationship. Here are some words of wisdom about this very important subject.

A Human Approach to World Peace "The premise behind this idea of universal responsibility is the simple fact that, in general terms, all others' desires are the same as mine. Every being wants happiness and does not want suffering. If we, as intelligent human beings, do not accept this fact, there will be more and more suffering on this planet. If we adopt a self-centred approach to life and constantly try to use others for our own self-interest, we may gain temporary benefits, but in the long run we will not succeed in achieving even personal happiness, and world peace will be completely out of the question."

13 Practical Steps to Inner Peace "In a culture that venerates busyness and constant stimulation, you have to make peace a priority if you want to reap the benefits. Finding inner peace is more about being than doing. It's about leaning toward rather than struggling against. It's about being fully present and focused on the task at hand."

World peace "World peace, or peace on Earth, is the concept of an ideal state of happiness, freedom and peace within and among all people and nations on Planet Earth. This idea of world nonviolence is one motivation for people and nations to willingly cooperate, either voluntarily or by virtue of a system of governance that has this objective. Different cultures, religions, philosophies and organisations have varying concepts on how such a state would come about."

Spreading peace one relationship at a time
Phil and Maude

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