Releasing Other People

When we release people to God’s will for them and stop forcing agendas of our own, people feel it. They are often surprised. Our coercion had often been subtle but palpable. Now we truly are giving more than lip service to the notion of free will. “You are free to behave exactly as you choose” — our new attitude permeates the air. Where before we sought to wrest happiness and satisfaction from people by their doing as we saw fit, now we are coming to them open and vulnerable. We are dependent on God for our happiness and satisfaction. People can do as they please.

Freed from our agendas for them, people often surprise us by behaving with great generosity. No longer resentful of the subtle and not so subtle forms of coercion that we indulged in, people approach us with a new candor. We are able to meet them with a new openness as well. God is doing for us what we were unable to do for ourselves. God is forging relationships that are based on equality and respect, on dignity and autonomy. In our hearts, these are the bonds that we always hungered for but that always seemed to elude us. As we move toward God in good faith, good faith extends into the realm of our relationships. We begin to experience the heady excitement of seeing people as they truly are and not as we “need” them to be to fulfill our agendas. No longer merely ingredients in our self-willed recipe for happiness, people are exuberantly, magnificently, themselves. Seeing them in all their glory, freed from the cloak of our projections, we experience other people as far more genuinely lovable. They experience us that way as well.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 132

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