Do not forget to love yourself in a relationship

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Ascended Master Paul the Venetian through Kim Michaels, September 5, 2021. This dictation was given during the 2021 Webinar for America –Towards Golden Age Relationships.

I am the Ascended Master Paul the Venetian, Chohan of the Third Ray, often seen as the Ray of Love.

What is the offering that I want to give you? Well, first of all, I want to express my gratitude for the fact that so many of you around the world have been willing to give these invocations from my book. It truly is an unprecedented event, where so many people together have given these invocations, and it has had a profound impact on the collective consciousness. You have my gratitude for this, and I am grateful for those of you who have made use of my book, in terms of working on your relationships.

What do I want to give you in terms of relationships, from the perspective of the third ray of love? Well, if you look at the world, you can of course see that one of the central relationships is what you normally call a love relationship, most often of course between a man and a woman, but there are other configurations as well where people are genuinely loving each other. You have this love relationship and there is a certain mindset in the world that in order for you to be in a loving relationship, you need to be loving, you need to love the other person, often that you need to be more concerned about the other person than about yourself. This is of course, not an invalid viewpoint.

Love relationships work best if both partners are giving more than they are taking. But what I want to give you here, in terms of the third ray of love is this: Do not forget to love yourself. Do not forget to love yourself in a relationship. What does this mean? Well, many things of course. But what we are giving you, you are surely beginning to see, as the Chohans, is a very practical approach for working through the issues you have with relationships, the issues you personally have, the issues that you need to overcome in order to attain maximum growth and qualify for your ascension. The issues that you wanted to force yourself to confront in this potentially your last embodiment.

And when it comes to loving in a relationship, well the practical step you can take is that at least for a period of time, you are saying: Let me focus on loving myself. What does it mean to love myself? And here you will see that there is an entire consciousness in the world that will be in opposition to this. As I am speaking this dictation, if you could see the astral plane, you will see that there are demons, there are entities, there are fallen beings, who are howling like insane beings, which they truly are: that this is wrong, that this is false, that I should not be saying this, that people should not be believing this, that you must not love yourself, because it is selfish, it is egotistical, it is against everything that a relationship stands for.

Well, I have nothing to say to these beings because they will not be willing or able to hear it. But to those who are open to hearing it, I want to pose this question: How can you truly love another human being if you do not love yourself? It simply is not logically possible. You see many, many relationships in the world where one partner will be absolutely convinced and perhaps even will loudly proclaim that they are loving to their partner. But if you look more closely, you see that this is what the world sees as love, which is really a possessive love, which is really a control game. You will see that many people are playing this control game with their partner.

Now, I am not here trying to condemn people, because I see the deeper cause behind control games. These people are so deeply wounded in their psychology, that all of their attention, all of their mental capabilities and resources are tied up in protecting their wounds. It is as if you have a person who has this open wound on their physical body and they are sitting there in the heat of the sun, trying to whisk away the flies and prevent them from landing on that open wound. Well, many people have such a wound in their emotional bodies, their mental bodies, their identity bodies, that their entire lives are consumed by protecting that wound so that other people cannot stir up that wound so the pain becomes overwhelming to them. And in order to prevent people from stirring up the wound, they are subconsciously trying to control these people so they never do or say what stirs up the wound.

There are relationships where people have in a lifetime, had this unspoken agreement, where: I do not stir up your wounds, you do not stir up my wounds, and then we can live together and fulfill some of each other’s needs in the relationship, and we can coexist, our wounds can coexist. This is of course, not a growing relationship, because what does it do to heal the wounds? When you look at these kinds of relationships, you might say: ‘Oh, but these people are so harmonious, they get along so well, they are never arguing, they are never talking down to each other, they are so supportive of each other.’ And they may be from a certain point, but from the point of growth, they are not growing, so is it really loving? And you can see that these people are not actually loving each other, they might behave in ways that the world considers loving, but they are not really loving each other. They just have this unspoken agreement not to do this and not to say that, and they are very strict in keeping themselves and each other to that agreement.

What is real love? Well, real love can only happen when you have a certain resolution of psychology. If you have an open wound that you need to protect in order to avoid being overwhelmed, you can not be loving, you can not even feel love, you can not open yourself to love. I say in my book, that, and we have said in other contexts, that you cannot produce love as a human being, you cannot produce love. You can only open yourself to letting love flow through you. For that matter, that of course applies to all of the seven rays. Whatever characteristic of the ray, whatever energy of the ray, you cannot produce it, it comes from the spiritual realm.

What you can do is open yourself up to it but in order to open yourself up to it, you must remove the blocks that prevent the flow of love through your four lower bodies. This is why I say love yourself, first and foremost. Because if you really love yourself, you are going to look at yourself and say: “What are my wounds? What are my illusions, especially concerning relationships? When I look at the relationships I have had in this lifetime, what do they say about the wounds I have from past lives about relationships? What do they say about what I wanted to force myself to confront in my divine plan? Which is why I put myself in relationships with the people who stir up these wounds. And what then is the most loving thing I could do for myself?”

Well, is not it to heal those wounds so that you no longer have them, you are free of them? And when you are free of those wounds, does it not stand to reason that you can let love flow through you and you can direct this to your partners in various relationships. In other words, once you have loved yourself enough to heal your wounds and you can feel love flowing through you from your I AM Presence, that is when you can be truly loving to other people. From a broader perspective, what is the most loving thing you can do to other people? It is to love yourself so that you heal your own wounds, you overcome your own blockages to the free flow of love through you.

And what does this mean? Well, it can mean many different things for different people in different situations. But it does mean that you have a right to step back and to say: “What do I need to do right now in order to go through this process of healing the wounds that I have about relationships? What do I need to do to heal this?”

And then you have a right to make whatever changes you need to make in your life, and to make whatever changes you need to make in your relationships, to go through that healing. This is not selfish – it is ultimately unselfish. Other people, your partners in various relationships, may see it as selfish. Especially if you feel it is necessary to break off the relationship with them, at least for a time, or to minimize your contact with them. They may see it as selfish, they may accuse you of being selfish, but what I am telling you is, you have a right to do this and for many of you, it can be necessary to do this, in order to heal and come to a certain point, critical mass of healing, where love can flow through you.

This means you will then be able to engage in more loving relationships, either with the partners that you have now, or you are free to find new partners in different forms of relationships. I am not just talking about love relationships, I am talking about relationships to your parents, to your siblings, even to your children when they have reached a certain age, where they do not physically need you to be there. For many people, it can be not only valid and constructive, but even necessary to put a relationship on pause for a time and say: “I will either break off contact or minimize the contact with that person so I can focus on healing myself.”

So many times, you see in relationships where there is this attitude from the world that you are supposed to be the one who will sacrifice yourself to make the relationship work. This especially is the case for children, but also for parents and spouses, that you need to be there for the other people. But again, how can you fully be there for other people if you have not been there for yourself?

Truly, this is for some of you, I am not saying for all of you, but for some of you, a very important idea: Love yourself enough to take a look at what you need in order to heal yourself, and then have the courage to do what you need in order to heal yourself, and go through a more intense period of healing, where if it is necessary, you set aside certain relationships. You rearrange your life so you can focus on this healing and minimize any other obligations you have.

I am not saying you necessarily need to quit your job, abandon your family, and go live in a cave in the Himalayas or go participate in some kind of workshop, but I am not saying you can’t do some of those things either. This is something that you have a right to decide, because you are after all, a mature being, you are potentially in your last embodiment, and even if it is not your last embodiment, you are in a pivotal embodiment for your future service for the golden age. You have a right to do this.

You have a right to love yourself enough to say: “What did I decide are the important elements of my divine plan? And what do I need to do to fulfill those elements? That is truly loving myself, but also truly loving other people.” You can even take a pragmatic approach and say: “I am in relationship with this particular person, I have certain wounds that affect that relationship. Would it not be in the long run more loving to that person that I focus on healing that those wounds, so that I can have a better relationship with that person? Would this not be better than continuing our current relationship for the indefinite future, perhaps for the rest of this lifetime? What is really the most loving thing I can do for other people?”

And the reality is that the most loving thing you can do for other people, is to heal yourself. Because this will improve your relationships with them, it will give them an opportunity to heal themselves, and everyone has an opportunity to grow. Now, of course, some people may not take this opportunity, they may blame you for this, they may become angry and resentful. But the thing is my beloved, when you heal your wounds and love yourself, you can set yourself free from other people’s reactions. You can set yourself free to let them have their reaction, but it is not going to control you, your state of mind, or your life. You see, it is all well and good to have relationships to other people, it is of course a part of life, it is part of the spiritual path. But the reality is, as we have said before, you are an individual human being with free will. You will ascend as an individual. And especially when you are in your last embodiment, you have a right to say: “What do I need to do in order to ascend?” And you have a right to let everything else in your life revolve around that goal of your ascension. And that means that you have a right to say: “My first and foremost priority, my top priority in this lifetime is my ascension. Everything else is secondary.”

This is loving yourself. It is in a sense, also loving other people, because by you ascending you will pull up on other people, even on the collective consciousness.

Ultimately, the ascension is not an act of selfishness, it is the ultimate act of selflessness, where you love other people. You love other people more than yourself, because you are willing to give up the self, the outer self, in order to ascend as the pure being that descended from the spiritual realm. That is ultimate love. The world, of course, will not see it that way. Most likely, other people will not see it that way.

But my beloved, take what I have just said: You made a divine plan. You chose to put yourself in relationships with certain other people, so that you could force yourself to confront something in yourself. Does it not stand to reason that these other people also have a divine plan, also made a divine plan, and they also made it from a higher level of consciousness than what they have right now. It may not have been as high as yours, but a higher level of consciousness than they have right now.

My point is you have asked yourself: “Why did I put myself in a relationship with these people? What did I want to learn from it?” But they did the same thing. It is not so my beloved, that you can sit there in the etheric realm, look down on your next embodiment and say: “Ah, yes, I am going to pick that person and that person and that person to be my personal teachers, to force me to see issues in myself, and they have no say over it, they just have to accept it.” That is not how it works. Free will must be outplayed. So, you have chosen to have a certain person as your child, for example. But that child also had to choose to have you as their parent. And they did this because they saw that having you as their parent it would be an opportunity for them to confront something in their psychology.

Now, it may very well be that you are open to the spiritual path, you are open to looking at yourself and working on your psychology, but your child or your parents or your spouse are not open to doing this. But that is not your responsibility. You are not responsible for their choices. Take what we have said: You make your divine plan from a higher perspective, which you then forget when you come into embodiment. Therefore, it is possible that you cannot reconnect to your divine plan, or you are not willing to learn the lesson. So you may very well have a spouse or a parent or a child who is not willing to follow their divine plan, and therefore they become angry with you when you follow yours. In reality, especially if it is children, they were meant to be inspired by seeing you follow your spiritual growth and your spiritual progress.

We have seen for example, in previous dispensations where the parents were so enthusiastic about finding the spiritual path, that they wanted to bring up their children in the teachings, so that the children from an early age had a foundation in a spiritual teaching. But in many cases the children became resentful of this, felt it was forced upon them, and therefore rejected the teaching, rejected the spiritual path and became atheists, drug users, alcoholics or in other ways became angry towards any kind of spirituality and their parents. But this was not the highest choice that these children made in their divine plans. They chose to embody with these parents, because they wanted to be inspired by their parents to pursue their own spiritual growth.

Now, some of these may still, later in life, come to that conclusion, and again pursue their spiritual growth. I am not saying that the parents always did the right thing, that they were not sometimes too forceful towards their children but nevertheless, regardless of the situation, your children had a reason for accepting you as their parent. And that was that they wanted to be inspired by you, and learn something from you. And if you are pursuing the resolution of your psychology, you are giving the children the perfect example to inspire them to pursue the resolution of their psychology. If they choose not to do this, if they choose to deny the opportunity, if they choose to reject you, your spirituality and become angry with you, that my beloved, it is a choice they have a right to make. But you also have a right to say that you will not let your life be affected by their choices.

So you see here, there is never a relationship where both parties have not chosen to be in that relationship. And they had a reason for choosing it. Your concern is not whether the other partner is fulfilling their reason for choosing to be in a relationship with you. Your concern is: Are you fulfilling your reason for being in a relationship with that person? And if you love yourself, you will do whatever is necessary to achieve the growth, learn the lessons, have the healing that you wanted to have. And then when you have done this, you have a right to love yourself to the point where you set yourself free to evaluate: Will I continue to have a relationship with that person? Will I move on?

In a sense you are also setting that person free to evaluate: Will they learn the lesson from being in a relationship with you or will they not? But it is not your concern. It is not your responsibility what they choose.

What am I saying here? I am saying that when you truly understand love, you understand that the world has a misconception of love. And therefore you can see that when they accuse you of being selfish, you are not selfish. You are being loving in a higher way, not only loving to yourself, but actually loving to other people as well. Because you are not allowing them to derail your pursuit of your divine plan. And they of course should ideally not allow any human being to stop their pursuit of their divine plan, which is what they chose, it was not forced upon them. Your divine plan is never forced upon you. All you can do is give people the opportunity, the example, the inspiration, and that is the ultimate act of love.

So with this, I have given you what we wanted to give you from the third ray. I am again grateful for your use of these invocations from the book, and therefore I seal you in that free-flowing because it is unconditional love of the third ray that I AM.

Paul the Venetian I AM