Today pt 3 of Relationships and Mindfulness: we focus now on expectations
All of us have an intense desire to be loved and nurtured. The need to be loved, could be considered one of our most basic and fundamental needs. Since we were babies we feel the desire to be held and touched.
This need is important and it isn’t surprising that most of us believe our happiness is whether we feel loved and cared for.
Having healthy relationships, is for most of us the top goal—on par with the goal of leading a happy and fulfilling life.
A relationship has two parallel streams at the base: one that moves constantly and is about desire, wants and needs
and another more deeper and slower that is about the conscious feeling of love for the other person.
Every long term relationship goes through 3 stages:
- The first stage is solely based on needs; you are in love and the neurological storm in our brain enhances the strong desire to be with the other and
you need physical touch and want constant affirmation the other feels the same. This is all about you and your own needs.
- In the second stage a more healthy exchange appears where both partners try to meet each other’s needs and have mutual respect
and love for each other, behaving like equals, the relationship is now about you and him or her.
- The third stage is conscious love, where you love even when your needs are not met and where the love for the other becomes part of your
identity. Unconditional love, the love you feel naturally for a child or a pet, also comes into play. Here the relationship becomes all about him/her and no longer
about you.
Some people have serial relationships one after another, staying in stage 1 forever and driven by this constant urge to search for love.
A relationship that reaches stage 2 has a bigger chance to succeed and become committed and fulfilling. If partners evolve through the stages
differently the relationships can be very painful for one of them. For example one stays in stage 1 and the other one grows in stage 3.
Love is so awesome until it is not,
Love is the best feeling in the world until it’s the worst.
Love feels eternal in the moment till you break up.
There is a lot in love that feels very contradictory.
When we get into a new relationship we always arrive with high expectations, we project all our wants and needs onto the other and ignore the red flags just to surf the wonderful storm of feelings going through our minds and bodies.
Who of you has felt disappointment in his/her relationship in the past or now?
Not so long ago all marriages were arranged by parents to serve economic and social ends, by the 20th century
the feeling of romantic love became the base for making a lifelong commitment
Our current expectations are based on our culture's concept of romance
Hollywood's happily ever after romantic comedies carry the implicit message
that if your relationship isn't ideal in all ways then it is second rate.
For many people, a relationship is considered successful only if all of their sexual and emotional needs are fulfilled,
or their economic and social status aspirations needs to be met.
Obviously, most of the time things don't work out in this manner,
and often there is a feeling of disappointment in the relationship.
Many men and women have very unrealistic expectations about relationships and they
make themselves miserably by comparing their situation to how they think love is supposed to be.
There is no connection to the idea that love itself could be the actual reward.
Human beings are designed to get used to the good things and get used to the bad things,
it has to be this way or we would go crazy.
Unfortunately this has an effect on our long term relationships. What first was exciting and wonderful we take for granted
after a while, we get bored and get back in stage 1 thinking.
Our hardwired negativity bias kicks in, we start to focus on the flaws of our partner, we ruminate on things from the past, the story
of our relationship changes and that story can become anxiety and toxic. Most of us have experienced it, nobody is immune to it.
So how can mindfulness help in this?
A lot of people when they think of mindfulness they think of meditation,
or some pro guru sitting legs crossed on a cliff overlooking the ocean meditation all day
But that is not what it is, mindfulness is an approach to life, it's an approach that says whatever experience I have I try as much as possible to be present for that experience to be focused in the moment and to non judgmentally accept that experience.
There is nothing that I experience that is good or bad it is just an experience.
What will serve me, my survival and happiness, is to see that experience clearly.
Because this week I am talking about Mindfulness and Relationships I want to share this beautiful book with you:
From Shel Silverstein, the celebrated author of The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends, comes The Missing Piece, a charming fable that gently probes the nature of quest and fulfillment.
It was missing a piece. And it was not happy. What it finds on its search for the missing piece is simply and touchingly told. This inventive and heartwarming book can be read on many levels, and Silverstein’s iconic drawings and humor are sure to delight fans of all ages.
So it set off in search of its missing piece. And as it rolled it sang this song— Oh I'm lookin' for my missin' piece I'm lookin' for my missin' piece Hi-dee-ho, here I go, Lookin' for my missin' piece.
The missing piece is a triangle looking for her perfect match, trying to find the pacman shaped Mr Right that will make her feel complete and they can be 'whole' together. Then she meets Big O.
This companion tale to The Missing Piece is an inventive and heartwarming book where the missing piece is in search of its perfect match.
The missing piece sat alone…waiting for someone to come along and take it somewhere. All it wants is to roll along with its perfect match, but some are too small, others too big, and some fit yet don’t roll. The missing piece feels sad and lonely until it meets the Big O, and learns that all it ever needed was a little encouragement and determination to fulfill its dreams.
Today second part of relationships and Mindfulness. This part shows a light on how we often mirror our family culture and how that can negatively impact our relationships and life.
In the 60's and 70's a lot of groundbreaking research was done about attachment theory (Bowlby and Ainsworth to name a few) and from that many psychological researchers have examined the different ways secure and insecure attachments with our parents or caregivers affect our attachment style as adults.
If your parents showed you love, responded to your needs and validated your feelings, you will more likely develop a secure attachment style. You then seek out and desire the same attachment style as an adult.
If you had an insecure attachment with your parents, then you may have a fragmented sense of self, which leads to low self-esteem, anxiety in relationships, doubt to trust others.
You will seek out relationships that mimic that same attachment style, not because it feels good but because it feels familiar.
The relationship with your parents is the very first one you have and the most influential example how to interact with others and communicate in a romantic relationship. The way love is expressed between parents, the way parents show love to their children. Playfulness, hugs, word of admiration, affection.
Those similar patterns you use to show love to your partner.
The ways in which anger and conflict were managed in your family plays a large factor in how you communicate with your partners today..
Whether or not you express your emotions openly or hold emotions in, especially negative emotions, parallels how your parents communicated with each other and with you as a child. For example, conflict may be dealt with in the family by talking openly and assertively or by not talking about it and perhaps expressing the negative emotion in passive aggressive ways.
Conflict may be expressed in direct yet verbally aggressive ways like yelling or name-calling.
Your styles of communication are formed by observation and direct experience of your primary role models in childhood.
Poor conflict management is the number one predictor of divorce in couples.
Same-sex parents serve as a model for your own behavior and opposite sex parents are projected into potential partners. This also works in reverse, in the sense that you may search for the opposite of a father who was stoic and uninvolved. Another example, a person may be very sensitive to criticism and argue frequently with partners because their same-sex parent had difficulty advocating for themselves and became a "doormat" in the relationship. We tend to want to emulate our parent's relationship when it is perceived as healthy and positive.
Are we doomed to play out these patterns or can we change this?
Yes! Change starts with self-awareness! Start to identify where patterns of communication, thoughts, and feelings originate. Reflect on your childhood and try to remember the patterns you had in interacting with your parents. How was love expressed? How was conflict dealt with? How were negative emotions expressed or not expressed? Therapy is a great tool for this process. Problematic reactions and behaviors can oftentimes be traced to unhealthy parental interactions. External messages from our families about communication, self-worth, and a host of other issues become internalized and assimilated into our own thoughts.
When you have negative thoughts and self-criticism, ask yourself: Whose voice is that?
Is this what you think and believe, or does it come from somewhere or someone else? If your parents are still living, you can also start to notice how you interact with your parents today, and then see how those patterns may be playing out in your romantic relationships. After you become aware of your patterns, learning about other ways of interacting is key, and then applying those new ways is imperative. This part is difficult! But Mindfulness will help you. In the first week we talked about the narrative and story
in our head and how to stop believing this propaganda and just see them as thoughts, nothing more.
Meditating will help you become more aware of those thoughts and patterns and you can train your mind to step out of it.
And because we are talking about this in the spirit of Mindfulness I want you to look at your parents or caregivers with compassion. Just as you are formed by your genes
and upbringing, your environment and experience, so are they, they are playing out their own patterns. Not fully aware of the consequences of their actions. Perhaps unable to change. Look at them with compassion and forgiveness.
You are aware, you examine and break the patterns, you grow as a person and that is something to be grateful for ♥
Anyone of you listening to this that suffers great trauma, Mindfulness can help you but not give you the professional help you need. Be sure to seek out help in rl ♥
Today at the Kindness Club we watched this short 7 minute video called The Great Bell Chant (the end of suffering). It’s read by Thich Nath Hanh and chanting is by brother Phap Niem.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Today we explore more what emotions are and how they steer our reactions and our life.
Let's take a look at the evolution of our emotional programming and processing.
Emotional competence is a developmental process that has 3 components: 1) emotion expression; 2) emotion knowledge; and 3) emotion regulation As we grow up we go through different levels of cognitive ability.:
As a newborn baby we are not aware we exist, emotions are purely based on survival, to influence our caregivers and surroundings.
Often you can see on a baby's face how nature trains the right muscles to communicate the emotions they will need to express themselves later in life.
Come join us on Discord and write in our Gratitude Diary what you are grateful for today
https://discord.gg/xw9u7ME
'Gratitude is like most desirable traits and qualities in that it is usually not enough to simply decide to be grateful—we must actively practice it to cement its place in our lives.
There are many reasons why gratitude is such a desirable quality, aside from its inherent goodness. As we recently wrote in a piece on the benefits of gratitude, performing simple daily acts of gratitude can have a big impact on your health and happiness.
These effects are particularly evident in the practice of gratitude journaling. It only takes a few minutes a day, but it can give you a lasting mood boost that can take you from feeling “okay” to feeling “great” on a more regular basis." ~https://positivepsychology.com/
Today we watched a video called, "Seek Life’s Purpose with Your Guardian Spirit," by The Honest Guys. They are two brothers from the UK who have been creating meditations since 2009.You can find them on the web and they also have
a channel on YouTube.
Like most of us, I have often
asked myself – what is my true life purpose? Am I fulfilling
that purpose to the best of my capacity, or do I avoid it by being busy and
distracted out of fear of failure or not measuring up?
When I was a mother of young children,
my purpose was clear – take care of their needs, teach them good values,
encourage their natural curiosity, and love them in all the best ways I
could. At other times, I found satisfaction and personal fulfillment by writing, being a mentor to those in 12 step programs, activism in social justice causes, and being a loyal friend and confidante to loved ones. But were these really my life’s
purposes?
Yes, because one's true purpose
is about recognizing your own gifts and using them to contribute to the
world.Pablo Picasso once said, “The
meaning of life is to find your gift.The purpose of life is to give it away.”
We are all continually evolving and growing as we make our way through life, and so it is important that we remain open to continually discovering - and giving away - our gifts.
The Center is an immersive experience that allows you to take a step back from all the stress and strains in your daily life, the soft ambient sounds and hazy colors allow you to focus on your meditation or just relax to regain your balance and spiritual well-being. We are here to support and inspire you therefor we placed the mailbox at the landing spot, (ctrl drag your notecard to the box) we want to hear your story, comments, suggestions and questions ♥
However we are not professionals so if you find yourself in a crisis situation and need rl help or support we added the need help button, on touch it will give you a notecard with useful links to sites, information, chat, phone numbers for your region.
On Friday late I had a conversation with someone who asked me if Mindfulness makes you a better person and if that means she had to
transform in a Sister Theresa like personality.
I have two answers for this question. Mindfulness makes you a better person and no, you do not transform into a saint.
In our Western world Mindfulness has evolved to a wellness type movement focused on being better, working better, feeling better etc.
In Buddhism the Pali word for "mindfulness" is sati. Sati can also mean 'retention, recollection, or alertness. Mindfulness is a whole-body-and-mind awareness of the present moment. To be mindful is to be fully present, not lost in daydreams, anticipation, indulgences, or worry.
Mindfulness also means observing and releasing habits of mind that maintain the illusion of a separate self. This includes dropping the mental habit of judging everything according to whether we like it or not. Being fully mindful means being fully attentive to everything as-it-is, not filtering everything through our subjective opinions.
Here the big difference is we completely let go of the ego and therefor feel no judgment towards others as we see them not separate from ourselves
therefor love and kindness for everyone becomes possible. What you perceive as yourself you can not harm.
This state of enlightenment is hard to achieve for most of us as we run the treadmill of our Western society and are bombarded with so many things constantly fighting for our attention. That does not mean we can't adopt and integrate the beginnings of these teachings in our lives.
The reason why I share this with all of you is that even those small beginnings do change our life. And no, not to turn us into saints.
Human life is suffering, on top of all things most of us have to go through there is the awareness of our own inevitable death.
This death anxiety subconscious influences our behaviors on a psychological, spiritual, and cultural level.
There is a relation between human violence and death.
Yet in our society aging and death are almost a taboo and we all join the race to ignore it and not talk about it. Infinite youth is a relic and worshiped
as the ultimate goal. And this while facing and/or discussing death can actually be a meditation for living fuller lives.
Mindfulness can not cure any of the challenges we face as human beings but it can help us how to perceive them and how deeply we let them affect us.
If you have a car accident today and your car is wrecked, this can be an example human suffering. In Buddhism the car accident is not the suffering, the car accident
is an experience, what the mind does with the experience is the suffering. You can feel depressed and lost in negative thoughts for a week about your car or
the trained mind would be grateful to be alive, that it was not worse and learned from the experience.
This is two perspectives of the same event.
Most of us do not have the trained minds of Buddhist monks so we will probably feel the more negative experience. Mindfulness can make it less worse, because
we are in the moment and aware of our thoughts and get faster out of that state of mind and at the end perhaps come to the conclusion we are grateful we are healthy and no one got hurt.
This example goes for almost everything in our lives. You will still feel sad, angry and disappointed even if you meditate every day and practice being in the present moment a few times a day. The same misfortune and negative events will still happen to you. Mindfulness will help you perceive them from another angle,
be aware of the thoughts you have and adjust those thoughts to what is helpful.
So this does make you a better person over time and those around you will benefit from it and notice the change in you. It is however a process of win and fail and learning every time. The good thing is every day is a new day to start over ♥
