Connectiveness

“Anybody on the outside of me is someone whom I can respond to, but they are never the definers of me, unless I have handed over my charge of myself to them.” Virginia Satir

When you love someone, your internal representation of that person enriches you, and becomes part of the internal world that you carry with you everywhere. But you gain much more than just taking in something wonderful from outside. You also discover yourself in all the wonderful responses that you are capable of. You discover yourself as you relate to that other person. If they had never come into your life, you might never have known about your own ability to care, and appreciate, or whatever else you discovered about yourself in that relationship. Every time you take in something wonderful from outside yourself that is beautiful and true, you also discover more about yourself, and you become greater than you were. The more you have inside,
the more you can appreciate what is outside.
Some people collect resentments, disasters, and other unpleasant memories and then live with them. Imagine what it would be like to put photos and paintings of unpleasant events all over the walls of your home and office, where you would see and respond to them every day. That would be pretty awful, yet that is what many people do in their minds — and unlike their homes or offices, they can’t escape from that.

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” Nelson Mandela

What kind of internal world do you carry around with you?

What experiences have you furnished your mind with?

How about building in yourself a personal quality of being determined to live in a mind filled with beauty, truth, and pleasure, and begin, now, to collect experiences that nourish you and assemble them, just as you do for any other quality in yourself?
In the teachings of many mystics and saints you often find that they strongly advocate staying connected with your enemies, and finding some way of making friends with them. “The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him into a friend.” Most of you are probably familiar with Christ’s teachings in regard to forgiveness and “turning the other cheek,” and the same kind of teachings exist in other religions. They knew that the kind of union with all that they were advocating was impossible as long as someone is divided internally.
When people kill other people, it is usually in anger or rage, and that involves disconnection and rejection. If you stay connected with the other person’s humanity, then if you decide in a certain situation that you need to kill someone to protect yourself or someone else, it would be with a sense of enormous sadness that this was necessary. That would make it much less likely that someone would kill. It is too easy to kill out of anger, disconnection and rejection, and I would like to make it as difficult as possible. If you need to kill, it should be with great sorrow, and never in anger. Anger separates, while sorrow maintains a connection.

BASED ON
Cultivating Connection
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 http://realpeoplepress.com/blog/cultivating-connection