Maude: I’ve been facing challenges about healthcare and how Phil and I differ on handling it. This would seem like any other difference we could just deal with by communicating our feelings, and by total acceptance. But this time, it brought up all kinds of feelings that are difficult and charged.

Here are some exercises to break through bad patterns in your relationship. The purpose of these is to make things sufficiently different for a while that both people can glimpse a different way to relate.

It might seem that we only write about relationships. But what we’re writing about applies to every relationship from family to friends to fleeting contacts. There is a possibility of meaningful human contact with everyone. Do you approach them with the same love and caring as you would a partner?

Our commitment to the relationship creates complete trust in each other, and from that, nothing the other person does is unsettling. This trust and ease allows each of us to be free and creative and out in the world without any sense of stepping away from the relationship.

Instead of compromising in your relationship, come from a belief in the unlimited nature of what can be, rather than from an attitude of limited resources and possibilities. When things are approached from a feeling of shortage, this leads to the aspect of compromise. There is another way.

We have examined how we are able to have such an easy relationship and identified different aspects which together make up what we call Our Process. You too can apply this in your relationship, and the more you do it, the easier and the more enjoyable it will become.

You have to hold the same core values as your partner because if not, you’re going to clash over them again and again. But people clash over all sorts of things, from big to small. How can you handle those other disagreements?

Have you ever been in a relationship where the same issue kept coming up again and again? It was something the two of you could never resolve. That was a core value, and these must match for a successful relationship.

A relationship with another evokes feelings of kinship and love. The act of bridging the gap between ourselves and another is a transcendent act. We move past ourselves to the recognition that there is a self that is not us. This is the path to a relationship with the divine.

Have you both reached a level of maturity in your relationship where you can share goals and seek for mutual solutions? Do you celebrate the differences between you without trying to change each other? These are some of the markers that indicate a peaceful and conflict-free relationship.