Peaceful Relationships Really Do Exist: Make Yours One Of Them

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MAUDE: I was speaking with one of our readers recently, who said that often, after she reads our blog, she thinks wistfully, “If only this could be.” She often feels what we describe – the different shades of peace – and yearns for it to be a more widespread reality.

Phil and I started this blog 13 years and hundreds of blogs ago because we were having such a visceral, continuous, direct experience of peace, and we felt a drive, almost a responsibility, to share and spread what peace is, and how you can live it in your relationships.

We originally started writing for couples, as this was where we began recognizing and verbalizing the components of peaceful relationships. After a while, it became obvious that these same principles applied to all relationships.

It is easiest to first use these practices in your close and more intimate connections. Once you know that peace is a reality, you can begin to stretch further afield, and eventually into all your encounters with others.

This is how our mission statement, Spreading Peace One Relationship at a Time was birthed. We find it is most effective one-on-one initially. This experience changes all who have it and they become centers of peace that carry this wherever they go and with whomever they interact.

Phil has a favorite quote “Optimism is a political act.” In the same way, knowing that peace is possible and that it exists, and can exist, not only within yourself but between people, is a powerful tool for facing the realities of today’s conflicts and challenges. Once you experience peace, and know it exists, keep moving in that direction and share it with all who you come in contact with. Speak it often; insist on it. You can change the world by bringing peace into each relationship you have.You can change the world by bringing peace into each relationship you have #peace #Relationships Share on X

PHIL: We write this blog because we have a direct experience of a peaceful relationship, we’ve had it since our early days, and it has remained completely consistent. It is something that neither of us had before, and it is so different from our previous relationships that we feel compelled to write about it. Our message is that it exists, therefore it is possible. Because of its very existence, it means that it must be a possibility for anyone. It follows inexorably, like “I think, therefore I am.”

It’s an attitude of peace, and I can’t say when that happened; it just crept up on me, yet I still think that it’s a reframing that can happen in an instant. I was in Texas with a friend one summer. A lawn in a raised bed had long leaves of grass, and from their tips, tiny spiders were spinning threads that caught in the hot wind and shimmered in the setting sun. It was beautiful and unusual; I pointed it out. My friend couldn’t see the threads. Again I pointed them out, and again she couldn’t see them, and then suddenly, she could.

What we talk about here is a sense. It is something that exists just like many other things in the world: tables, fresh air, heartache, money, food, other people, work; we experience all of these, and peace is another experience that is real but sometimes, like the spiders’ threads, is not recognized at first.

So we have described our experience of a peaceful relationship in as many ways as possible in our many different blogs, with the hope that you will recognize that experience and make it a practice.

If you are a newer reader, let me try to describe it. One of the things for me is that I take great joy from the sense of not being constrained. Certainly, I think we make adjustments to live with each other that partly happen at an unconscious level, and when they are conscious, they are freely done, rather than exacting a cost. Maude chooses to say it in different terms, but we always understand what the other is describing, every time. The only way that this can happen consistently over our many years together is because we are speaking about the same thing. This very experience has a magical quality, like the peace in a giant redwood grove.

I believe that when I, or we, exist in this place, its quality affects other people. Their response is different when there is no sense of criticism or attack, and hopefully some of that carries over in their response to other people. This is what we mean when we say we can change the world, one relationship at a time.

Photo credit: Andy Samarasena, StudioSB
Photo note: Phil and Maude

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