Talk about challenges!
Not only did we “birth” our newest book Red Hot Love Relationships, but we put our house up for sale during this month.Getting the house ready to show to prospective buyers has been no small task because we had accumulated a lot of “stuff” over the many years we’ve lived here.
So, the house and surrounding area looks great–except for one thing…
Our neighbor’s stuff!
Our neighbors, who are very nice people, have accumulated lots of things that sit outside their house and no amount of encouragement on our part has led to their cleaning up that area.
As you can imagine, in our minds (and what we’ve been told from perspective buyers), this is keeping us from selling our house.
Now in this situation we have a couple of choices about how to handle this. ..
We can keep blaming the neighbors for our house not selling as quickly as we would like and continue spending a lot of energy and holding on to anger and frustration about the way our neighbors are choosing to create their outside environment.
Or we can make a choice to take a much healthier approach and “relax into our frustrations.”
What’s all this have to do with you and your relationships and how do you “relax into your frustrations?”
More importantly– why would you want to relax into your frustrations in the first place?
We’ll explain it this way…
We’re guessing that you have at least one relationship in your life that frustrates you–someone who you know if they would just follow your suggestions, everything would be okay.
Sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes the people in your life don’t do what you think is best or what you want them to do.
In one of the chapters of our new book, we talk about how to not make relationships hard work. This pushing against someone else to follow your path is simply hard work.
So what do you do instead of pushing against?
You relax into your frustration and be in gratitude.
We’ll explain what we mean by using our personal situation…
When the thought comes up that we are never going to sell our house because of these neighbors and their “stuff,” we need to recognize that that thought is a faulty belief. We can ask ourselves Byron Katie’s question–“Is that true?”
In this case, the answer is “no.” When we take that new thought in, we can begin to relax our bodies. Because the truth is that we don’t know who the “right” buyer is for this house.
We can also be grateful that they are nice people who don’t pollute the area with a lot of noise.
Whenever frustration comes up again, we just keep repeating the process.
Is this moving the sale of our house along?
We don’t know. But what we do know is that we feel better when we do this and it’s a healthier way to live.
So this week, if you find yourself becoming frustrated because someone isn’t doing something that you think they should be doing–take a moment and ask yourself our question and “relax” into your answer.
We send you lots of love as you move toward what you want in your life.