Relationship Change
What else is there? We are social by nature. Our brain literally cannot grow or function without relationship, contact, care and connection. We have mirror neurons in our brains that allow us to understand all kinds of information as regards other people’s body language and non-verbal communications, thus setting up the capacity for empathy. This empathic capacity allows us to survive through staying connected in a web of understanding and commonality.
Usually we think of relationship as being that which exists between individuals. However, we can also explore relationship as regards any aspect of our lives. Examples can include how we relate to the weather (a popular New England discourse), money, our body (body image), food, etc. We can have a relationship to our inner states, emotions, feelings and sensations. Through a gentle allowing process we can become more and more aware of our relationship to our inner life, which ultimately begins to enable the very thing most of us desire most: freedom. We crave freedom of choice. Yet we find that we repeat old patterns of behavior and thought, even as we say we want to do things differently, feel differently, think differently. Our lives are not our own in a certain sense. This is what Sigmund Freud and his offshoots brought to light many decades ago when he highlighted the power of processes that are not under our conscious control. Psychotherapy continues to revolutionize ways of revealing deeper process in the service of helping people overcome trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction and more.
Through conscious, mindful awareness that attends to experience, sensation, and feeling with limited judgment and condemnation, we can slowly come to understand more about who we “are”, and break the fantasy we tend to hold about who we “think” we are. With this kind of awareness, freedom of choice over our actions and perspectives becomes more possible. There may be pain involved with coming into relationship with our lived, visceral experience of life, and many people would opt to not open this can of worms. However, there is no doubt that the opening of these aspects of awareness and consciousness leads to a more profound and lively sense of one’s life experience.
Challenge: Spend 4 minutes a day allowing your awareness to settle into the body, simply attending to experience, sensation, emotional tone; suspending judgment. Use a timer so you don’t have to check the clock. See what happens over time.