Creative Relationships: Spiritual Practices to Build Healthy, Happy Relationships

A better title for this book would be CREATIVE RELATIONSHIPS: THE IMPORTANCE OF MIDDLEPATH NONDUAL THINKING. Relationships are the foundation of marriages, families, communities, and our global human culture. When our relationships are healthy they promote happiness, bring a sense of meaning into our lives, and increase our ability to be loving and compassionate. When our relationships are unhealthy, they are a primary source of conflict and unhappiness.

The insights included in this book come from Dick Rauscher's twenty-five years in private practice as a NYS licensed mental health counselor, relationship insights drawn from the nondual thinking found in ancient Eastern spiritual practices, and from his own personal life experiences.

The author shows how virtually all relationship conflict is created when our dualistic primitive childhood ego unconsciously distorted reality by building "ego maps" that reflected how we thought the universe should work. The maps we created to navigate childhood are almost always based on our early childhood experiences and social conditioning, our unconscious fears around intimacy, our unrealistic expectations, and those life beliefs we assumed reflected absolute truth.

Unfortunately, the maps our ego constructed in childhood were not based on reality. They were merely a collection of "maps that reflected our "personality".

The material contained in this book are powerful spiritual practices designed to help you drop dualistic thinking and awaken to a nondual consciousness, intentionally grow in self-awareness, and begin building healthy relationship with those around you.