Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. For just a minute, stop and think about your relationships. Think about family, friends, coworkers, and even those with whom you have only a nodding acquaintance. Don't leave anybody out, not even your pets.
Relationships are essential for ongoing spiritual growth and development.
Learning to love is the first lesson in Spirituality 101. The connections we make as we live our incredible lives offer us the opportunity to acknowledge and connect to the divine in ourselves as well as in others. Instead we need to find new and better ways of walking the soulful path of awakening, by integrating the heart of love in every aspect of our lives. In this way we learn to dance gracefully with life. It is a fundamental Buddhist tenet as well as a larger, more general fact of life that we are all interconnected and interdependent on each other.