 Well, holy relationship is relationship where there's this joy and love and happiness but all sense of demand, all sense of desire to get, if you can imagine just erasing that beautiful love heart centered connection that you feel in romantic relationship and then if you could just take like the eraser and erase some other aspects that seem to be like an overlay that gets, the ego wants to draw on top and that's where the getting mechanism is so strong and then like with our time travelers wife, you know, the getting mechanism also brings about this sense of expectation. When you want to get something from somebody then you have an expectation and we all know how unfulfilled expectations feel, you know, there's a sense of emptiness, there's a sense of, no wait a minute, that's why I got into the relationship, you know, there's a bit of this, I'll meet your needs and you meet my needs thing and the needs, if you go down underneath the needs there are expectation and if you go underneath the expectation there's still that getting mechanism and so that's why he says on some pathways you travel gaily along for a while before the darkness enters in. When you start to look at the whole idea of relationships, holy relationship versus romantic relationship you start to realize that once you start to get into the realm of holy relationship it goes into a whole other dimension in the sense that for example like when we talk about romantic relationships you could even bring in the concept of like soul mates, that's very much in the realm of romantic relationship. We could say vibrationally that would be more the tippy top of the realm of romantic, that would be more the ideal. It could seem in this world like it's so rare that people sometimes doubt the existence of such things and then there are others that say well actually I have experienced that so it would be there. Then you go up towards holy relationship and that's when if you go to the teacher's manual of A Course in Miracles Jesus describes, he basically says that all relationships are the same, it's really like you're relating to yourself but he throws out three metaphors you know the casual encounters, the second level of teaching learning where two people come together for a fairly intense teaching learning situation and then appear to separate and then the third level is lifelong relationships where you're given a lifelong partner for teaching and learning. Now it would seem on the surface that the lifelong would probably fit over in the soulmate category until you read between the lines of what he's talking about because when you read between the lines and you say wait this can't be a soulmate relationship the two may find that there are hostilities between them and he says perhaps for life, hostilities perhaps for life, that's not a romantic soulmate relationship, that's not in any of my books on soulmates that's just not even there. So he's like pointing to it's higher than that and he says that but if they decide to learn it the perfect lesson is before them and can be learned you know it comes off on an optimistic note but the way he's describing it it's not describing it in terms of romantic soulmates so you kind of get that sense a little bit from a little bit from like Helen Shuckman and Bill Thedford you know their roles on in terms of worldly roles where they were at Columbia University Bill hired Helen so he was literally her boss of the of the research psychology department there and she was already married to Louie and so it wasn't the typical kind of you wouldn't say that was soulmate kind of thing that way and they did have a lot of difficulties they had a lot of hostilities that were coming up and it was starting back in the 50s you know up until the period when Helen passed you might say that they they did have a lifelong relationship at least during those years and there was a lot of hostilities and they did join together and were able to to bring the course and this great tool of awakening even though they had personal and professional challenges and a lot of hostilities that came into their relationship so in that sense it's it's more on the lines of collaboration like it's a it's a very collaborative relationship that's aimed at a high purpose and I've been talking about that lately in terms of it being undefined it's being guided and it being collaborative those are three words that that I really use as describing holy relationship and in that sense it's it's different from romantic because it's it's just has such it's so much dedicated to this higher purpose and but we all know the feeling of collaboration it feels wonderful and you feel like you're working together and you're collaborating and I would say the more pure that becomes the more you're doing it for the Holy Spirit and there's no egoic goals creeping into that you feel an intense joy in fact I really feel like my whole life has turned into kind of one giant collaboration where I'm collaborating with course teachers course students when I go off to other cultures when I went down to Australia they said I was staying at this woman's house in Sydney Francis and and after I stay with her for about several days she said well would you like to meet my guru and I said that sounds like a lot of fun and so she said well my guru has a kind of a combination named between Isis and raw her name is Isaira it's kind of Isis and I said very good side but she said well she's got a very very full schedule and I can see you're you're seeing all these people you've got a very full schedule here at my house got people coming and going all the time so she said we'll just try to arrange something and sure enough she finally came to me one day and she said can you go now I said yes she said okay she's got an opening to we went there and I went to visit her and she had come from the aboriginal tradition had long blonde hair and was known as the laughing saint one time I think she laughed for a period of like two weeks consecutively without stopping and and had come through the Buddhist tradition so we went there and it was just presence just beautiful divine presence just just lots of joy and laughter and just like meeting yourself in a very in the happiest sense possible and we were there for a while and then I told her well I'm actually doing an Easter retreat at a Buddhist monastery a Buddhist retreat center so I said on Easter would you come to the retreat center with me and I won't tell anybody I'll just tell them it's a surprise and so they work with they were with me a whole week it came to be Easter morning and here comes with the full entourage the whole thing came in glowing happy and they got a couple chairs so I sat down next to her and and they even had a like a nice white furry blanket so her feet you know wouldn't have to touch the ground during the talk and so forth and she she scooted it over she said you want some of my blanket I said yes so we both put our little feet on the blanket and and it was fun because I said this will be great it'll be symbolic we have the symbol of the male the female Easter at a Buddhist retreat center I said this feels like a divine orchestration of just sharing sharing sharing and we just had a ball actually if if you I think we've got the the CDs of that it's called Blue Mountains retreat down there we probably even have a copy of it at the end with us there and it was fun because I do remember at one point she started burst into laughter and everybody started laughing and there was a woman who'd been with me the whole week and she just kept waving her arm and going stop stop this is hurting my cheeks and the Syro just was like no the laughter is not hurting you it's like you know so it was really beautiful but it was it's so that's just an example of collaboration you know it's it's she actually had a Buddhist nun who was her they said her her her name is Lelani and she was her chief executive assistant and I just looked at my friends and I said how come I don't have a chief executive assistant but it was we just were so playful with the whole thing and then finally Lelani just came up to me and she just said oh this was so great she said you don't know how healing this is that we need more of this we need more teachers coming together side by side and letting the message come through I let it come through more and course and miracles vernacular that I was working with the people with and she let it come through more in Buddhist terms and there was just this joy and union and love and oneness and laughter which is what the experience is about it's not about this versus that it's just the an experience and so I feel like that's the way my whole life has gone it's it's very much collaborative I'm always you know whether it's a course of miracles teacher like Gary Reinhardt and I doing something together in in Hawaii or John Mundy and I did something together different ones or from other teachers and other traditions I often get invited when I'm traveling to ashrams and it's it's kind of fun I enjoy going to ashrams and going in there and just it doesn't matter what the vernacular what the language is it's love is the same so to me that that's one of the distinguishing factors of holy relationship it is highly collaborative we know where personal differences are completely set aside and you just yield into that experience of the love radiating you know that's that's really what it's all about