How To Create A Peaceful Relationship In A World That Says It’s Impossible

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MAUDE: Peace is a choice, as are peaceful relationships. It came to me this morning that, in the same sense, peace is a verb. Being at peace and bringing it into your relationships takes action. It starts with intention and belief. It is necessary to want to be peaceful, to intend to have peaceful relationships, and to create and maintain them.

It can be a challenge to imbue your relationships with the belief that they can be peaceful and loving. Society encourages the opposite viewpoint, pushing a belief that conflict is inevitable. Phil and I have the experience that it is possible, with intention, to find other ways of being. When core values are shared, there is a path to mutual solutions for differences and disagreements that does not involve conflict, separation, or distancing. All my deep and intimate relationships are built on this belief and intention.

I am active in finding paths to peace when relating. This also means working on my own inner peace. Regardless of the practice, whether it be through meditation, mindfulness, walking in nature, or becoming aware of the love that surrounds me, I am actively engaged in growing toward inner peace.

From this direct experience and its quest, I approach my relationships. What are the actions I can take to manifest this way of being together? Foremost are the actions of truly being with the other person. These involve awareness of the person, interest in them, and offering myself and my presence. It means paying attention, looking upon them with openness and loving kindness, without fear or defensiveness.

Such relationships are not built on the desire to be right or wanting to make the other person more like me. I have an abiding appreciation of the unique nature of each person and am alert to learn who they are, listen to them, and encourage a feeling of safety to share with me.

And then, there is the flow toward each other. This is a special energy that occurs when two people are practicing this way of being together. There is this entity that Phil and I often refer to as the “us”; a sense of the relationship that is palpable. With it comes a pervading sense of peace and goodness that becomes your shared reality: a peaceful relationship.

PHIL: Maude asked about the nature of a peaceful relationship and concluded that creating one is an active process.

My take on what makes for a peaceful relationship sounds like the opposite of that, which is that it requires stillness – a place of being, not doing. This is so uncommon in today’s world that it takes effort to achieve, which is why Maude talks about an active process.

I think this stillness is like a place that lies inbetween some desire, some emotion, some want, coming up, and acting on it. Of course you can act on it, but act on it consciously. and making that gap between the stimulus and response is where you gain a sense of self, free will, autonomy.

One of the things you have to do is to be meticulous with your boundaries. That is to say that you are responsible for what you do and what you say to other people and how you interact with them, but you are not responsible for what they do and think. You give the other person full rein to be themselves. By letting go of that need to interfere, you achieve peace by laying down that burden. Of course, to do that, you have to believe they are of good will. Luckily, that is generally the case with people. It’s how we are able to live with each other. Malice is the exception.

It should be clear by now that peace is not part of the relationship, but something you bring to it that lives within you. When the other person brings it too, that is what creates the peaceful relationship.

When we both do it, it’s a very interesting experience because there’s me and there’s Maude, and we don’t impinge on each other. But the very fact that we have no antagonisms, no sharp edges, no areas we don’t go, means that we have the ability to flow towards each other without limit, and so there is a dual experience of me and us.

The ways you choose to be peaceful are an active process, and that implies choice – an intention to be this way. You need to know where you are headed. Peace is a visceral experience, and to reach it, you have to believe that it exists. Just because there is much conflict and strife in the world and in relationships doesn’t mean that it is inevitable.

PHIL and MAUDE: What do you do to create peace within your relationships?

Photo credit: Phil Mayes
Photo note: Heart hedge in Harmony, California (pop. 18)

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