Our belief that we are separated from God is most persuasive when we feel alone or are in pain. Yet, we are truly not alone. The belief in our separation has perpetuated our fear, and led us to patterns of isolation.

God is present in every moment of our lives. When we invoke God's help through prayer and alignment, we acknowledge this ongoing relationship, and commit to a higher Will than our own as we ask for Divine assistance. At the same time, we take responsibility for playing our part in the unfoldment of our destiny, as we wait for whatever guidance may be offered. In doing this, a loving response from God is assured. Our challenge is to trust that grace will manifest, and that help will come in the way we need it most.

As we reach out toward others for help, we also break through barriers of fear and isolation.  And yet we must practice discernment in asking for guidance. Whether our reaching out is to spiritual teachers, helping professionals, sponsors, or friends, we must rely on our inner sense of truth to tell us how pure and selfless the help is that is being offered. Both help and loving support can come from many directions. It is up to us to take great care in deciding whose hands we  place ourselves in and who we open our hearts to. Praying to know and to be shown the quality of love and help being offered to us finds its own answer; it can deepen or confirm our sense of rightness in the choice we are trying to make.

Determining when to reach out is also a matter of discernment. Too much isolation and distancing creates needless suffering. Regardless of how much pain we may feel, there is healing value in the support that comes from joining with others. We can choose to be present for another in their time of need; we can also choose to accept the gift of another's presence with us in our time of need. This reciprocal process helps heal us both as it moves us, step by step, through longstanding feelings of separation and loneliness.

Just as the fourth principle emphasized an ongoing process of being present in the moment, the fifth principle emphasizes our ongoing relationship to God and to other beings.

Critical to our individual and planetary healing is the importance of changing our unconscious ways of interacting with others - ways that encourage and support fear, denial and projection and detract from the pursuit of wholeness.

Active addictive process is a gauge for the level of our fear. If we are in denial, we often become highly invested in protecting the denial of another. This behavior becomes an insidious form of insurance that we, too, can remain unconscious. Similarly, if we validate the fear of others, there will be less likelihood that our own fears will be challenged. The same is true of supporting another's projection and its reliance on blame. If we support blaming behavior in another, we are entitled to keep our own right to blame. This cycle of mutual enabling,⁵ rooted in the energy of darkness, needs to be penetrated by the force of our awakening consciousness. The most extreme form of this type of interdependence occurs when the issues within us needing purification become projected onto another, leading to addictive process within the relationship.

The object of reaching out for help to others is not to find someone who is perfect or completely free of traces of unhealed portions of themselves. Rather, in reaching out, we seek companionship and support from others who have a high degree of honesty and integrity.

Integrity allows each person to recognize where they are with their own purification, and which issues continue to need healing. The integrity of another in facing the truth within themselves supports our own integrity in doing the same thing. It does not require our perfection. It requires our courage to face ourselves in truth.

The overriding goal of our healing relationships is the sharing of our essence - the core of who we are. The extent to which we can be present for each other in our core truth is the extent to which we can allow God to work through us. Heart-centered relationships are healing because of the inevitable consequences of sincerity for ourselves and for those we love. Our truth, truthfully perceived, allows others to be who they are, and to recover their essence as we share our spiritual reality.

Our relationships are enhanced by the practice of spiritually aligning together and opening to the Divine assistance that is available to us. As we align, we share qualities of the heart including compassion, forgiveness, innocence, loving acceptance, and vulnerability or softness.

Heart-centered relationships can also be characterized by a desire to place God's love in the center of the relationship, and to strive to bring that love into the love between two people. This aspiration helps both individuals in the relationship to feel and remember their divinity.

Many of the difficult tasks of these principles become more gentle with loving support. Our spiritual companions can help us move through self-delusion and denial, through projection and withdrawal. They can help us to endure pain and to safely release emotions.

Our commitment to become bearers of light in the world, rather than to remain in darkness, anchors a vibration of truthfulness within us that can have a profound rippling effect upon those we know. Standing firmly in truth is contagious for souls who hunger for honesty in their lives. The truth of one supports the truth of another, and a whole new basis for trust can be created between partners, among friends, within families, and within the larger world.

As we purify, insights into the purpose and meaning of our present lives arrive spontaneously and are often Divinely inspired. They come to us in God's time and in God's way. Helping each other trust the process of waiting is a gift that we can give to one another as we jointly share in our experience of the unknowable. Moving in this direction, we begin to find those others - our true life companions - who affirm the value of waiting, of being in truth, and of living with integrity. Our lives begin to draw to us those who seek to meet us in our depth, from the same deep place within themselves.