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heard the man in the berth below him begin to moan, Oh, I m
so thirsty. I m so thirsty! After realizing that the other fellow
was going to continue complaining and that he would not be
able to sleep, the man sat up, climbed down from his berth, and
fetched the traveler in the lower berth a glass of water. Satisfied
that he had solved the situation, the man returned to the upper
bunk and stretched out once more. Just as he was drifting off
to sleep again, he heard the man in the berth below him say,
Oh, I was so thirsty. I was so thirsty!
If you think that when the thing you are complaining about
gets handled, then you will be happy, you are setting yourself
up for a big disappointment. Complaining is a habit. Complain-
ing just energizes the part of you that complains.
SOMEDAY IS HERE AND NOW
The relationship you currently have is the best that is possible
for you in this moment. If you are currently single, then the
relationship you have with yourself is the best it can possibly be
in this moment, and you can only have what you have (Second
Principle).
To create a magical relationship, you have to be willing to
be yourself now, exactly as you are and exactly as you are not,
rather than waiting around for some new, improved version.
Trying to improve yourself is a long and arduous road. And
perhaps you will eventually improve incrementally in cer-
tain limited areas and not in others.
When you have the courage to see yourself honestly and
do not judge yourself for what you see, then your life will
transform and your relationships will transform along with it.
Instantaneous Transformation is like the philosopher s stone
in alchemy that was purported to turn base metals into gold.
Instantaneous Transformation takes an ordinary, mundane rela-
tionship and turns it into a magical one.
An Interview with Ariel
and Shya Kane
By Randy Peyser, author of The Power of Miracle Thinking, for
Awareness magazine, May/June 2008
RANDY PEYSER: What is a magical relationship?
ARIEL KANE: One where you are not working on yourself or
each other.
RANDY: Is that humanly possible? Wasn t the whole point
of the personal growth movement to keep on improving
ourselves?
SHYA KANE: While that may be the aim of the personal
growth movement, it doesn t seem to work, does it? I see my
relationship with Ariel as being quite magical in that we don t
pick on ourselves or each other. We are not trying to change
or fi x the other person to get them to be a better something
than they are.
ARIEL: Our fi rst book, Working on Yourself Doesn t Work, sets
the groundwork for how to have a magical relationship. There
came a point about twenty-four years ago when Shya had an
epiphany: he told me he was done working on himself. He told
me that this was it and that this is what self-realization looked
like. It made me a little nervous. I thought people would hate
him if he said that. He said he didn t care because it was true.
171
An I n t e r v i e w wi t h Ar i e l an d Sh ya Ka ne
172
He told me that I had to see that working on yourself doesn t
work.
SHYA: The idea of working on yourself comes from the idea
that there is something fl awed or damaged in you that needs
to be fi xed. What if there is absolutely nothing wrong with
anyone?
RANDY: How was the quality of your relationship before you
had this grand epiphany and started living in this way?
ARIEL: Happy, with an undertone of bickering ready to flare
up whenever we crossed paths with something mechanical in
ourselves. We were totally capable of fighting over things like
who got the mail or whether to cross the street on the diagonal
or at the crosswalk. Minutia. That was normal for us twenty-
four years ago.
SHYA: When I stopped working on myself, I stopped work-
ing on Ariel by extension. There was no need to work on her
because I became okay with the way I was, and therefore, she
was okay with the way she was. We started relating in a much
more genuine, gentle, kind, and supportive way.
RANDY: So, it begins by looking at yourself first.
ARIEL: Absolutely. One of our premises is that in a magical
relationship each person takes 100 percent responsibility for
the health of the relationship. It s not a fi fty-fi fty deal. Magical
relationships happen when you discover how to be okay with
being yourself.
RANDY: Do you promote certain processes to get to that
place?
An I n t e r v i e w wi t h Ar i e l an d Sh ya Ka ne
173
SHYA: No. But we ve discovered that listening will pull you
into the current moment of now. We are not talking about the
kind of listening to see whether you agree or disagree with
someone, but actually listening to hear what the speaker is
saying from his or her point of view. That pulls you into the
moment.
ARIEL: And the moment is this magical place that creates the
basis for well-being within yourself and, subsequently, a magi-
cal relationship.
SHYA: When you are well in yourself, you bring that well-
being to a relationship. If you think you are deficient and need
a relationship to be whole, then you will bring your deficiencies
to the relationship.
ARIEL: Awareness is truly the key. Awareness is not a process.
It is a nonjudgmental seeing of anything.
SHYA: If you see any mechanical behavior and you don t judge
it, it completes itself in the instant that you see it. This is Instan-
taneous Transformation.
RANDY: What do you mean by mechanical behavior ?
SHYA: Those things you do over and over again, even though
you know better. For example, a person says something and
you feel compelled to respond aggressively or you take it per-
sonally. There s no neutrality about it.
RANDY: Recently, I had an expectation for my partner to act
a certain way, and she didn t comply in the way I expected. I
judged her and felt a lot of charge around it.
An I n t e r v i e w wi t h Ar i e l an d Sh ya Ka ne
174
SHYA: What if this charge is an always existent possibility
in you? What if it wasn t caused by that particular situation?
There is the always-present potential to have an explosive,
mechanical response to the environment not showing up the
way you would prefer. That is mechanical.
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