Dialogue with a coaching client Dear Janet, I am wanting to write something to you about this whole issue arising for you around friendship, and the big questions we all need to answer about What is love? What is friendship? and How do I really want to be in relationship?

Just like you, I find it so difficult when people I think of as good friends do not come through for me when I am sick..

This has probably been one of my biggest challenges, because it’s such a vulnerable, helpless place, where we actually do need love and support. So I’m not speaking to you as though I expect you to rise up one fine morning and not have these feelings anymore. Not at all.

I think, for me, what has happened with my daughter over the past year has shown me that we can actually transform our deepest patterns and conditions, but only when we really see that they are no longer sustainable, and when we take complete responsiblity for how we create our own suffering, moment to moment.

I see myself falling back into familiar places, again and again with my daughter, but I know now that I can’t stay there. I am committed to calling on awareness itself to allow me to see what is going on, and to let the suffering release, by itself.

I can’t control what arises inside me, and sometimes the feelings are very intense. I feel hurt, abandoned, misunderstood, separate, invisible...all the feelings I’ve been trying to avoid my whole life are right there in front of me in such moments.

I can’t control these feelings and I can’t control what the other person is doing or thinking or feeling. But I can choose what I will give my energy and attention to. I already know what my conditioned mind will try to do with these difficult feelings. It will try to avoid them, change them, or it will give them energy, indulge in them.

Those are really the only 3 options I have on the level of my human conditioning. But there is always another possibility, I can stand present as awareness, and ask for help, ask for wisdom, ask for guidance. I can open myself to being with this person in a way I have never been before, and I can honour and respect myself enough to realize that this is possible.

Not only possible, but that this is what is calling me forward, what I am longing for, what so many human beings right now are hearing: “The old ways of being with each other are unravelling at a tremendous speed. Something from a new dimension is required, another state of consciousness, something quite different from what my conditioned mind tells me is possible. I cannot possibly know what this new way is from where I am now. All I can do is be willing to stay open, stay present, and let go, again and again, of what is not working.”

Janet: “Why is it always me that has to take responsibility? Why is it always me who has to let go of the old and embrace the new? What about them? Why don’t they change? Why don’t they wake up and smell the coffee?”

Shayla: The answer is so obvious isn’t it?  I have no control over the other person and what they may or may not see, do or understand..

And please remember, that the new way may very well include taking responsiblity for the fact that you no longer want to be in this relationship. Taking responsibility for ourselves does not mean that we have to put up with someone else’s crap. It’s actually the reverse of that. We put up with ridiculous behaviour only because we are not strong and clear enough to stand by our own boundaries and limits. We hold on to relationships for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with deep love and wisdom.

You know all of this, and so do I, but putting it into practice is something else!