Allow me to share with you a letter from a friend to his ex-fiancé. By sharing this letter with us, he hopes that the baggage that he has been carrying all these years can be dropped. What work is for you to see how you can relate it to your life.

“I’m writing this letter to let you know what I’ve been keeping to myself all these years regarding the break up of our relationship. I want to put the past into the past so that both of us can move on with our life.

I believe that I had made the right decision by breaking up our engagement. It was made in the best interest of both of us. It was not in my best interest to be controlled and it was not in your best interest if we ended up divorced. You are aware that our society looks down upon divorced women. I had made the assumption that should we continue with our engagement and got married, we would eventually be divorced. It would even be worse if we were to have kids. Thus it was justified for me to call off the engagement before it was too late. I also believed that you would be alright.

My heart knew those were not the truth. But my thoughts and emotions that arose from desire and fear believed that they were the truth. I wanted your love, support and space to be myself. But when I heard your words and looked at your actions soon after we got engaged, I saw what I wanted was all gone and what I feared appeared real. I felt that you didn’t truly love me but was treated as one of your possessions, I was not your companion but to serve to your every command and I felt suffocated. Subsequently I only heard you but I didn’t listen. I looked at what you did, but I didn’t see anything. What I listened and saw only the past that I had put in the future of our relationship.

When the cloud disappeared, it was clear to me that my decision was made for my best interest only, yours not included. The reasons that I told myself and my parents were just excuses to justify my decision so that I won’t look bad. However in actual fact, I knew that you’ll be affected by my decision in one way or another. On top of that, who was I to know what would happen in the future. Who knows, we might have a good relationship after we got married. You might change your way of being or I might accept you the way you were.

When I dug in deeper, I found that it was not about you. It was about my past that I had not completed, the past that I put into my future. I had a couple of failed relationships that were always there in my mind, which became a barrier in my new relationship. I was protecting myself from the pain of a broken heart.

It is clear to me now why I was afraid to make commitment in the relationships that I had before I met you. However the thing changed when I met you. I was being myself as an identity, not as my true self when I temporarily erase the past. I was being nice when I agreed to be introduced to you and later to propose to you as suggested by my uncle. If it was not for the assumption that my parents wanted me to take you as my life partner, I wasn’t ready to make that commitment. My hope was that you would love me and accept me the way I am and the way I am not. When it appeared to me that you couldn’t accept me the way I am not and tried to make me more like you, my second identity came into force. My identity of being independent saw there was no reason for me to continue with the relationship. Thus I told my mother that I couldn’t take it anymore and requested the engagement to be called off but I would abide by any decision that she and my father would make.

You are aware that I got married eight months after we broke our engagement. I met my old flame and she lighted up my life. I introduced her to my parents and they had no objection to our plan. I thought I could forget about the past relationship and build a new one on a clean sheet. However, unknowingly, I put all the pains suffered into the future of my relationship with my wife. The impact of this was there were barriers in our relationship. There are things that I afraid to say to her fearing that it will hurt her feelings and I’ll not get what I want from her. I am also easily upset every time she mentions things that I don’t want to hear. Life was not a bed of roses. I see that my past relationships have affected my present one. So for me to be able to move on, I’m having this “conversation” with you.

I am sorry and sincerely seeking your forgiveness for what had happened. I know that I was not being fair to you, and myself, by not giving you a second chance. Let put the past into past so that we can move on with our life.

The possibility that I’m creating for my self and my life is the possibility of friendship, self-expression, compassion and harmony.”

I was touched and inspired by the letter. When I look at my relationship with my wife, I can see ego runs our relationship. Our thoughts, emotions, and actions arise from desire and fear. The desire can be pleasure or material gain, recognition, praise or attention, or a strengthening of “I know more than you”. The fear will be the opposite.

“To love, and to be hurt often, and to love again - this is the brave and happy life. “ – J. E. Buchrose.

Allow me to share something about relationship that I got from a friend. What works is that to feel them within yourself as you read the posting.

Do you notice that how quick we are to form an opinion of a person, to conclude about him/her. We find it satisfying to label another person, to give them a conceptual identity and to pronounce judgment upon them.

Childhood experiences and cultural environment have conditioned every human being to think and behave in certain ways. What you see is not who they are, but who they appear to be. When you pronounce judgment upon someone, you confuse those conditioned mind patterns with who they really are. To do that is in itself a deeply conditioned and unconscious pattern. You give them a conceptual identity, and that false identity becomes a constraint in your relationship with that person.

When you let go the judgment, it does not mean that you don’t see what they do. It means that you recognize their behavior as a form of conditioning and you see it and accept it as that. You don’t construct an identity out of it for that person. That liberates you as well as the other person from judging with conditioned mind. The ego then no longer runs your relationships.

To many people ambition, money, power, fame, good looks, success, and sex are what life is about. However, if one takes this as the truth, one may not find happiness.  The seven things are not the purpose of life, but for the purpose of life. If you take these seven things to extreme, they can wreck your life.

When I look at my life before, it didn’t differ much from the masses. Money, power, sex, and success were my purpose of life. I found that life was a struggle and happiness was not everlasting. What is the real purpose of our life? Look no further, the answer is inside us. Deep inside our heart, we want to make a different to others. We will find everlasting happiness when we made a different to others. Why? Because that’s how we are wired!!!

Ambition; It is good to be ambitious, but for the development of the society. If it is for ourselves, we will become self-centered and lost compassion.

Money; money can’t buy love. But for sure money can buy happiness, if you give it away. Both the giver and the taker will be happy. If we are holding to it, money can be such a worry, and we never feel that we have enough.

Power; Great power comes with great responsibility (I’m a fan of Spiderman). There will be self-satisfaction if we use power to uphold justice and not for self-interest.

Fame; I never plan to be famous and I like to think that I’m not. Being famous can be a real inconvenience, seclusion is no longer an option. However if fame is use as a vehicle to cause transformation in people life, it will be a real joy.

Good Looks; If we are proud of our good looks, we will constantly worrying about getting old. Maintain a natural appearance and be happy as you are and as you are not. God know what is best for you.

Success; Do not make success as a destination since everything in the world constantly changes. Make success as launching pad toward purpose of life.

And finally sex; it is hot when it is hot. It is not when it is not. Take it as so, and you’ll be happy. Have sex not because of lust, but because of love. Love for your partner and love for continuous existence of mankind.