Life & Wisdom Quote by Shakti Gawain

There is a stealthy reversal baked into Gawain's line: the fastest way to get what you want from people is to stop needing them to supply it. It reads like a self-help koan, but its intent is practical, almost strategic. "Trying to be whole through others" names a particular kind of hunger: outsourcing your stability, worth, or identity to a partner, a friend group, an audience. Gawain is pointing at the cost of that bargain. When approval becomes your oxygen, you behave like someone bargaining for air: you people-please, you perform, you cling. The subtext is that this neediness doesn't just feel bad; it actively distorts relationships, turning them into transactions and making the very thing you crave (love, respect, ease) harder to access.

The rhetorical trick is the promise of reward without chasing it. "Give up trying" sounds like loss, but she frames it as a route to receiving. That pivot flatters the reader's desire for control while urging surrender: the internal shift is presented as both moral maturity and social leverage. Once you're not auditioning for wholeness, you're less reactive, more honest, harder to manipulate, and paradoxically more attractive to be around. People respond to that steadiness with what often looks like the "same" love you wanted all along, only now it arrives freely rather than under pressure.

In the context of Gawain's New Age-inflected work on visualization and inner growth, the line is an antidote to codependence: make yourself non-negotiably complete, and relationships stop being prosthetics and start being choices.