Here is the most fundamental solution you will find for any relationship problem. You may regard it as THE key to a loving, harmonious relationship. I call it Enlightened Mental Discipline. It involves three aspects. First, you have to recognize WHEN you are thinking about your mate or relationship. Next, you have to recognize THAT you are thinking about your mate or relationship. Third, you have to understand the creative function of that thinking. It is that simple. When you have these three aspects working for you, NOTHING can prevent you from having the relationship your heart desires.

Recognize When You Are Thinking

You cannot feel angry with your mate, or dissatisfied with your relationship in any way, without thinking about your mate, or your relationship, in a way that causes you to feel emotionally disturbed or discontent. This is an absolutely critical important point to realize. Relationships must head downhill toward destruction when the individuals involved confuse their ideas or mental visions with the actual reality of what is happening in the present moment. Your thoughts of your mate or relationship are like mental movies that you play in your mind. Your mate is not who you think he is. Your thought of your mate is your mental version of him. Your relationship is not what you think it is. Your thought of your relationship is a mental movie you play in your head. It is an imaginary image, a mental mirage that you view.

Now, every image that you hold in your mind has an impact upon you. Your thoughts are YOUR responsibility; they are not the responsibility of your mate, and not the responsibility of your circumstances. When you make someone or something else responsible for what you think, you give up your greatest creative power, because in life you bring about what you think about. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The cold fact of the matter is that until one takes responsibility for one's own thinking, an authentic, loving relationship remains impossible. Please re-read that statement because it is as true as any statement can be. You see, you actually create your relationship experiences in your mind, and creating a beautiful relationship takes mental discipline; it takes "enlightened mental discipline." But once again, I am getting ahead of myself.

Recognize That You Are Thinking

When you feel angry at your mate or dissatisfied with the relationship, you are actually reacting to your imagination, to what takes place in your own mind. You remember something by picturing it in your mind and that relating to that picture as reality causes you to feel disturbed. Notice what you just read in that last sentence. It is not your mate's behavior that causes you to feel disturbed; it is relating to your mental image of your image of your mate as reality that causes you to feel disturbed. As long as you blame your mate or your relationship for how you feel, you continue the unenlightened mental pattern of negative thinking that surely dooms any relationship.

Recognizing what you are actually reacting to is the key that starts to set you free. If you observe yourself honestly you will see that you actually feel dissatisfied in response to what you are doing with your mind. Recognize your thought as just a thought begins to set you free. You realize then, "I am disturbing myself here. This is something I am doing to me right now." Then, you can stop.

Understand What Your Thinking Does

Now we come to the third and final part of the key: understanding the creative function of your thinking. As I said earlier, when I was getting ahead of myself, you bring about what you think about. As long as you remain fixed and focused on the mental images of your mate and your relationship that disturb and dissatisfy you, your mind keeps you trapped in what you do not want. And you will never get out. Even a divorce won't release you because your habitual mental pattern remains out of your control, and that pattern is the creator of what happens to you.

You think about disturbing events out of habit, not out of need. You probably learned to this in your childhood, from a person around you who blamed others when he or she felt critical towards them. When you imagine someone doing something wrong, you do it only for the pleasure of escaping from what you do that you don't like. While speaking critically of another, you feel the pleasure of being right. But that does not actually make you right for yourself. It dooms you to negative relationship experiences, and a feeling of being powerless to free yourself.

Practice Enlightened Mental Discipline

To put this three-fold key into practice, the next time you feel anything but loving and grateful for your relationship, examine your mind. Look at what is going on in there until you see the thought that triggers your unhappiness. Realize that this is just a thought, and that as long as you hold onto it, as long as you identify it with whom your mate really is, you continue to make yourself miserable, resentful, and impossible to please.