Now that Valentine's Day is come and gone I find myself pondering and reflecting again on my own journey and the connection with my relationships. Valentine's Day is a great reminder of the joy and happiness that is associated with love and romance and it is critically important that we never lose sight of the potential healing and growth that can be experienced in the fertile soil of our relationships with others. But, we also know by experience that joy, happiness, healing and growth are also achieved by way of struggle, conflict, and hardship. This morning during my reading I was reminded by David Richo that the process of transformation has it's own timetable which cannot and shouldn't be circumvented by our own desire and compulsion to get past the emotional pain often associated with our own issues and it's effect on our relationships. The following quote is not directed towards relationships but the implications are there nonetheless. This particular quote was taken from Richo's book, When the Past is Present.

The work of addressing, processing, resolving, and integrating our issues at hand cannot be rushed to the scene of our wounding so that we can “get over it” quickly. Some events teach us so much when we allow them to work themselves out in their own time and way. Some experiences have to be lived with for while before they can resolve themselves. Time is required between problem and solution, question and answer, issue and resolution. We grow from resting in ambiguity of that between space. We gain an opportunity to feel our feelings all the way…In the meantime, we may find our ego becoming destabilized, but that can be a path to a firmer sense of our adult powers. We can become stronger for the next time something challenges us in a similar way…The between-pause can expand us, balance us, deepen us. Those three benefits are more valuable than the remedy we locate when we address immediately, process too swiftly, resolve too suddenly, and attempt to integrate prematurely. The compulsion to clear things up too quickly does not honor the timing all things take and may lose us the gift that time can give. As we mature in spiritual consciously, we act more like farmers tending their crops than like generals ordering their troops…Timing is an essential ingredient of transformation and as we honor the timing of events and people, even our questions soften and change. We no longer ask, “What has this person done to me? but “What can this be for me?” We do not ask, “Why did this happen to me?” but “How has or can this help me grow?” In fact, every “Why?” becomes “Yes, now what?