Ending Toxic Relationships

Ending Toxic Relationships

This is not the first time we’ve pondered toxicity and how toxic people enter our life.

We periodically revisit topics so you can see them through today’s level of awareness and note how you’ve progressed and what remains for you to sort out.

As both teacher and a student, we continuously seek to master our experience of being alive.

As we move deeper into our spiritual growth and development practices, we understand more comprehensively the various lessons we incarnate to learn.

We learn lessons like the unconditional giving and receiving of love. But, unfortunately, a barrier to unconditional love is dealing with toxic people.

When we have a toxic relationship with someone, it happens on an instinctual, physical level.

Spiritually speaking, toxic relationships do not exist. Toxicity exists in the instinct to survive at the physical level, not the spiritual level. So toxic people, the ones who seem to be the most difficult to get along with, are those who love things and use people.

And we’ve all been in a circumstance where we’ve felt used, or most of us, if we’re completely honest with ourselves.

We’ve had moments when we’ve used others to get what we want. So this concept of toxicity is putting things and experiences over connecting with others. So I’m going to give you a warning.

Warning: This Topic May Cause Upset

Today’s topic may be uncomfortable for you. If that’s the case, I want you to focus on staying in the eye of the storm with a quiet mind, calm emotions, and notice whether or not something comes up in your reaction to what we’re saying. It is not our intention to upset you. Instead, we intend to show you the path from upset to the other side of harmony, where you’ll find a connection.

If you find yourself upset, I recommend you start to journal. Please write in your journal, in your notes, what it is that upset you. If you’ve become very upset, stop watching today’s service and go back and watch it when you have time so you can pause and start the topic as you process its content.

This topic of ending toxic relationships, becomes less upsetting once you gain proficiency, understanding, and management of your thoughts and emotions.

What Is Toxicity

So as we look at the definition of a toxic relationship, it is related to a lack of shared trust, mutual respect, and acceptance. So these three things, if I walk into a relationship and there’s no shared trust, respect, or acceptance, it doesn’t go well.

And from my perspective, my point of view, I’m being used instead of appreciated. So as you allow yourself to experience whether or not something or someone in your life is toxic, I want you to permit yourself to trust your perception. Toxicity is subjective, and I say that very deliberately because you probably have others around you who do not perceive the same things you perceive in a toxic nature.

So this subjectiveness, this perception of toxicity, is unique to you, which is good news but hard to spot. It’s good news because we can transform perceptions.

As we explore this topic of toxicity, we must distinguish between an unhealthy relationship, a toxic, and an abusive relationships.

Not all toxic people are abusive, but all abusive people are toxic.

And this is, I think, where the frustration and the sense of upset come from this sense of abuse. Now, I want you to realize that abuse tends to be objective. Toxicity tends to be subjective. And what do I mean by that? If you are involved in any abuse of experience, the outside tangible real world can find agreement.

There are law enforcement and social services to help people in abusive situations. In addition, there are psychological services and other programs to assist abuse victims, but nothing exists for toxicity due to its subjective nature.

As we advance, we have several choices on how to deal with our relationships, whether toxic or abusive. When ending toxic relationships, we can quit, cope, or transform. I want you to understand that you cannot change objective reality at this early stage. So if you are involved in any objectively abusive physical, emotional, or psychological situation, you can’t transform that threat because it’s tangible and accurate and can cause you bodily harm.

While transforming toxicity is doable, quitting or coping may work best now (only you can know this). It’s up to you to clarify and distinguish between this.

The Abuse Cycle

Abusive situations need some clarification. They are cyclical. The abuse cycle starts with the abuser feeling tension, pressure, and a sense of being backed into the corner, causing the victim to feel threatened and unsafe,

Whether real or imagined, that building up of pressure or tension results in an acting out of an abusive incident, whether physical, emotional, or psychological.

Once the perpetrator commits an act of violence, the abuser goes into a reconciliation or contrition phase. They’re apologetic, promising to change, and never again act violently.

Reconciliation fades into a period of calm. But if this is a pattern of abuse, it’s the calm before the storm.

Eventually, life starts happening, and the pattern repeats.

The repetitive nature of this pattern of continual, repetitive abuse is an abusive relationship. Toxic, on the other hand, happens to be more holistic.

It’s all the time. It doesn’t go through this pattern. You walk into a circumstance and you we’re gonna discuss what it is. In this relationship, you don’t ever feel supported.

You feel you need to be more appreciated. You never feel accepted, and you never feel respected. And it’s always this one-sidedness to it of someone who wants to use you instead of respect you and loves things over you, and as you allow yourself to negotiate ending a toxic relationship with them, you never get a sense that you’re ever going to win.

Early Warning Signs of a Toxic Relationship

The earliest signs for me showed up are walking into a situation, circumstance, or relationship, and you always feel like you have to walk on eggshells. That nothing you can do is safe. You don’t even know when they’re going to react. This is very common inside an abusive relationship in that calm period.

You never know what will trigger the subsequent building of tension, period, pardon me. So as you enter a toxic situation, you find yourself constantly tired, always drained, always depleted, so much so that you become so exhausted and depleted but never find any reprieve that it makes it difficult to sleep in your health and well-being start to suffer.

As I reviewed, the other thing that showed up for me was my experience with toxic relationships and situations. Everything seems like it’s a little. It’s a competition. Competition for limited resources, whether it’s. Or material goods or, uh, emotional well-being. There’s this competition sense that adds to the fatigue.

So that is a basic understanding of, and definition of, toxicity versus abuse. And some of the tests in some of the early signs as we look at remedies, uh, how to handle toxic situations. Remember, abusive abusers are toxic, but not all toxic. Uh, people are, uh, are in relationships, are abusive. You can either quit, cope or transform.

And the only question that matters is what’s best for you now. So what’s best for you right now, at this moment in time? And as you start to explain and explore this, it’s important to remember as you consider your options to quit, cope, or transform the practical wisdom of the old parable.

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Most of us don’t, have never been told the second part of that equation, “or leave Rome.”

The decision to quit or cope is summarized in that parable when in a toxic situation. Do as toxic people do, or leave the toxic situation. You have a choice.

Whatever you choose in this experience, the only way the experience will be transcended is to go through a transformation process.

So as you look at whether you’re going to quit or cope or me, it comes down to do you feel safe. Do you feel threatened? Do you feel comfortable in the situation? If whatever your answer is there, trust and honor, is there a sense of partnership? Is there a sense of mutual ownership between the relationship, the situation, for the circumstance?

And if there’s a partnership, communication, or communication, you can find ways to grow and cope. Are the benefits of the situation or the circumstances worth it? Sometimes we decide we want to learn something. Let’s say you have a particular skill you wish to acquire, and the person who teaches that skill is a class-A jerk.

Ending toxic relationships, especially very toxic ones and somewhat abusive. But you need the skill, and this is the best person from whom to learn the craft. Many people who went through military training have experienced this. They knew the talent and dealt with what they had to do to acquire that skill. Once they have acquired the skill, they can make a different choice.

Sometimes this happens in relationships, living, and working situations where what you are gaining mandates that you pay the price to gain it by coping with the situation that may not be, uh, harmonious, which is toxic. So I never recommend staying in anything abusive.

But again, abusiveness is one of those things that, um, is, uh, decided by you. So the last part of this quitting or coping decision is whether or not you can get closure on or complete the circumstance.

Ending Toxic Relations With…

• A loved one
  • When asked about, “Ending a toxic relationship with someone you love,” start with loving kindness, then listen to your intuitive knowing.
• A boyfriend
  • When asked, “How to end a toxic relationship with boyfriend or girlfriend,” start with loving kindness, then listen to your intuitive knowing to discover the best way consciously complete your relationship.
• The last common concern is, “How to stop going back to a toxic relationship?”
  • Loving Kindness and Transformation work best.
• If you choose to quit or stay in completion and closure, allow you to detach from the circumstance and move on.

It haunts your memory if you decide to quit a circumstance and don’t feel like you can ever move on. If you or you choose to stay and can’t move on and get past the events informing what you are.

Your answers and perceptions to those questions inform what I should do. Now, here’s the most important thing about that question. If you are in a query about what you should do, I want you to understand that it is never a good idea to shoot at yourself. Instead, I want you to reframe that question from what I should do, past-based, ego-based, and instinctual-based, into a future-based, intuitively informed decision, and ask yourself, well, what could I do?

I got all this information. I got all these circumstances. I know what I am, how I feel, and perceive things. What could I do? After you go through this, think of what you could do. Then you can come in there and say, okay, these three things I can do, what can I do? There are three of them. Yes, I can do that one.

Instead of obsessing whether, ‘Should I do this,’ or ‘I could do that,” we know “I can do this.” I can do that specifically because I can see how it works. And then, you go to the actionable decision, which is the intention of Right Thought. So this is what I’m doing.

This is what I’m doing. Once you develop that actionable decision, we work on bringing that choice into reality. And the way we do that, whether you decide to quit or cope or stay in the process and work on transformation to transform something, is to cause a fundamental shift in the context from which you perceive and experience a circumstance.

So we’re looking to shift from an instinctual survival into an intuitive knowingness and transform your relationship with a circumstance or the experience or the situation could be a person once you decide to do that.

The fundamental piece of virtual transformation happens with ownership and responsibility for what’s occurring. Now, as I mentioned, there is no toxicity from a spiritual side once you get on the other side.

I’ve never heard of a spirit entity other than to add clarification to someone in the physical body. Use the word toxic. They use something like disharmony, undesired, and unwanted but never use toxic.

Toxicity exists in the physical world, just like some of the pollutions in our physical world are toxic. Your willingness to see your role in the situation has to be the outcome of a transformation. So spiritual transformation formation is being able to see and experience the world through the spiritual senses. So you enter the eye of the storm, you quiet your mind, calm your emotions, and detach from any sense of what could be, should be, or has to be.

You start to sense things using the language of spirit, using energy. And in this realm, there’s no toxicity because you’ve detached from all your emotional, psychological, and physical experiences of what’s happening.

It’s this spiritual transformation, that we can practice, the practices of a spiritual transformation or a spiritually transformative process. The spiritual practices for a spiritually transformative process are loving kindness, self, and self-acceptance. Now, the loving-kindness  is a Buddhist practice that’s very old and quite ancient.

While reviewing my past relationships and determining what was toxic and not, and my perception and my ownership and my, uh, spiritual transformation, that many of the things we do are inside the context of this loving-kindness.

The Loving Kindness Practice

It’s just the Buddhist loving-kindness practice is very explicit and easily practicable. And that’s what we’re going to talk about right now how do we start to transform toxicity, the experience of toxicity in our physicalness, using spiritual tools? And this loving-kindness practice happens in the period of a place of Right Thought.

We do our meditation. We quiet our minds. We call our emotions. We’re in a quiet reception space. We’re in the eye of the storm. We’re in a place of thinking tranquility. And we practice loving kindness. Sometimes you’ll get a direct result. Sometimes you won’t. But overall, as you become more practiced at this loving-kindness practice, your heart warms, and compassion increases your ability to perceive and understand your role in your ownership.

In any situation that is toxic starts to become clear. So loving-kindness transforms toxicity through compassionate self-acceptance. So as we become more practiced in this ability to stay fully present, engaged in this loving, kindness, meditation, meditative practice, we start to have compassion for ourselves.

And it’s this compassion for ourselves that allows us to create a space, to create a distance, to detach from the physicality of toxicity, and create a situation that is tenable where you can be fully yourself and get into that space of shared respect, shared or mutual respect, shared uh, love and acceptance.

Absence Healing & Loving Kindness 

Each week, if you’ve been here more than once, we practice a variation of this loving kindness in our absence healing practice.

Each week, when we send healing to several friends and loved ones, we stand in loving-kindness. And this is what I want you to understand. There is this golden thread of truth that runs through all these different practices, each one of them based on culture and based on, uh, the perspective of that practice.

Loving Kindness transforms how we end toxic relationships.

Talk about the same thing. And it’s this core set of standard practices that is spirituality. That’s the philosophy we strive to understand, embody, and bring forth into the world. So each, in a few moments, we will do an absence healing practice. So if you’ve done that before, think about the absence of healing practices you’ve been through as you listen to this next part of the talk.

If you still need to do an absence healing practice, we’ll practice one momentarily. So you’ll see a, you’ll see an opportunity for similarity. To practice this loving-kindness process, we first enter the eye of the storm. So you get in the eye of the storm, and then you’re going through a set of vibrations or experiences of others.

And for each one, you are going to bring forth an intention that each person is happy, each person is safe, each person is healthy, and each person lives life with ease. And as you bring forth each of these attentions, as you hold the space of another person’s vibration, it opens up your heart.

It allows you to access compassion for others from an intuitive perspective. You learn and present the language of spirit in your vibration as you’re holding the vibration of another. Do this a couple of times a week. It takes about 10 minutes or so, five 10 minutes. Do your meditation. Go to a quiet place within the eye of the storm, and first start with someone who’s effortless for you.

It could be a dear friend you’ve known for a long time. That is, you’re just some panico. You may have to use a pet because sometimes we don’t trust anyone who has a, uh, any human. But we can present this feeling of effortlessness with a pet. So you hold in your mind’s eye the vision or the vibration of someone easy to be with.

And as you’re holding the vibration, you start to say to yourself. I don’t have a problem. If you say it under your breath out loud, may they be happy? May they be safe. May they be healthy. May they live life with ease. And as you think about this person, animal, or pet that it’s easy to be with, you start to present these intentions.

Then you go to someone you’re that, that you respect, who you hold in high esteem. And it could be a mentor, could be a dear friend, could be, you know, a loved one, whoever it is. So you start thinking about them. You hold their vibration in your mind’s eye and say…

• May they be happy
• May they be safe. 
• May they be healthy.
• May they live life with ease.

Now, this seems all woo-woo. It looks metaphysical and all this stuff, but each time you do it, you’re extending into the universe while holding someone else’s vision: compassion, loving, kindness, unconditional love. And as you allow yourself to be fully present and engaged in this process, pay attention to what you feel and are experiencing.

Then we will do a little switch route. And now you think about, The person in the mirror. And as you think about the person in the mirror, think about seeing yourself, who you are, why you’re here, and where you’re going. And you say, may they be happy, may they be safe, may they be healthy. May they live life with ease.

And then I put a bit of a curve ball on this, which is different from the traditional loving-kindness practice, pardon me, which is other than the conventional loving-kindness practice.

With yourself (the person in the mirror):

• Third person self – “They”:
  • “May they be happy.”
  • “May they be safe.”
  • “May they be healthy.”
  • “May they life with ease.”
• Dissociative self – “Name”
  • “May Terry be happy.”
  • “May Terry be safe.”
  • “May Terry be healthy.”
  • “May Terry live life with ease.”
• First Person Self – “I”:
  • “May I be happy.”
  • “May I be safe.”
  • “May I be healthy.”
  • “May I live life with ease.”

And as I allow myself to present each variation of how I know myself and relate. You start to open up to compassion for yourself and acceptance for yourself. And after you get present for this intention, you go for it. Then you change the person to someone slightly more challenging but not a total a-hole.

Someone challenging but not a total jerk. And you start to, may they be happy, may they be safe, may they be healthy. And then you go to that one person who’s impossible, probably who have you listening to this topic in the first place or the situation or the circumstance. And you say, may they be happy, may they be healthy, may they be safe.

May they live with ease. And then the last one when you complete is may everyone, everywhere, be happy, say healthy, and live with ease. And as you present these intentions, as you experience the whole of humanity, you start to connect in the sense of oneness, including yourself, with everything. And everyone that is, I can’t say why it works.

I am still looking for the study resources that claim they have analytical data that prove it works. But for me, it works. I have shifted. Some of my perfectionism over the years used the spiritual variation of this. I’ve just started the Buddhist variation of it this week. So, uh, starting to, to get a little bit of a sense of connectedness and self-compassion.

But so far, I’m delighted with the experience I’m having. So, do this a couple of times during the week. Take five or seven minutes or whatever. Take two or three people. I recommend you write down the people you want to do because you can get lost in the emotion. And if you feel emotion, notice the emotion, feel the emotion, feel the experience.

Don’t judge it. Just experience it. And as you consider and ponder this transformation of toxicity in your life, the takeaway from today’s talk is toxicity ends as you start to accept the reality of what. So, especially with yourself and experiencing the world through this spiritual sense. And our whole practice of entering the eye of the storm is to access our spiritual perception.

And as you connect with your spiritual senses and set forth these intentions for others and yourself, something shifts. I am still determining what’ll change for you. I don’t know how far you have to go but love forgiveness. Compassion starts to bring forth in your vibration, consciousness, and a. I want to wrap up with one thing because this may have been an arduous and tricky process to ponder and consider.

Let’s Shake It Off

But I want you to shake it off, take your hands, and let go of it to be fully present. And after you let it go, make a cleansing sense with your hands, and let it go. And after you let go of all the stuff we’ve done, I want you to take a hand, and I want you to take that hand and reach behind you and tap yourself on the back and say, I love you.

And after you pat yourself on the back and say, I love you. I want you to take a deep breath in and feel the love. And here’s the part that touches me every time now, I want you to take the same hand, and I want you to place it over your heart. And I was hoping you could say it out loud. I got your back. And as you present yourself to self-love, self-compassion, and self-acceptance, knowing that you’re not alone and you got your back, enjoy this process.

The take away is, “What to say when ending a toxic relationship? — I bless you and leave you.”

In the Spiritual Realm, there is no such thing as toxicity which makes transforming toxicity in the real world possible by opening the Spiritual Eyes of our Soul to see What’s So.

My Highest Blessings. about