Don't Give Up

Glacial Change

As you direct your energy toward cultivating mindfulness and connection in your relationships, you may find that you enjoy your life more and more.  At the same time those moments when you are reactive, arguing, or just vaguely disconnected stand out more than ever.  It's easy to feel impatient with yourself and others, knowing there is a more satisfying way to relate.

Often when you first begin to dedicate yourself to transformation through a new channel like Compassionate Communication, change is like an avalanche in your life.  Your beliefs, thinking, and behaviors change so quickly that you and those around you become disoriented.  You might find yourself scrambling to keep up with the change and inadvertantly dropping responsibilities in the process.  While avalanche change is not lacking in clarity about the magnitude, it also can create quite a mess in it's wake.

When you have been at something a while, change can begin to move at a glacial pace, you don't get the big clear feedback that an avalanche provides, but you are able to maintain some balance in the process.  

In my own process, I have identified most with avalanche kind of transformation.  If I am not careful, I can get attached to idea that "real change" is dramatic and if there are no avalanches, then I am not working hard enough.  I find I consistently need to refocus to meet slow changing patterns with compassion.  For me this involves noticing, relaxing, and reminding.

I notice the moments where I contract or distract with irritation.  This looks like holding my breath, tensing my muscles, an internal dialogue of self-criticism, or working compulsively.  These are my cues to pause and relax.

I relax by letting go of tension in the places I can let go.  Often this involves dropping my shoulders, relaxing my face, and breathing.  I can unstick muscles in the diaphragm by breathing out completely and then slowly filling with air from the bottom of my abdomen and upward and then deflating completely like a balloon, and repeating until it feels like my breath is naturally full again.

I remind myself that I am big enough to feel whatever discomfort I feel from a slow change process.  When I turn to face the discomfort with acceptance, it takes up less space.  I remind myself that the point isn't to move all the stuck places I would like to move.  The point is to greet those places with curiosity and compassion.

Consistently coming into compassionate relationship with your glacial paced change process allows energy to flow in support of your transformation as well as helping you to maintain balance with other needs and responsibilities in your life.

Practice
Take a moment now to name any place impatience is creeping in around a change you are working to create with yourself.  Take a few minutes to engage in your version of the process I named above:  notice, relax, and remind.

LaShelle Charde

 

What do we expect from love?

By  Nadia Khalil Bradley

Love. It is the most common word, topic, desire and privilege. I know what we say love is…but is it really what we think it is?

Love is an energy. Love is not a thing to be coveted and displayed like a prize.  We expect so much from love that love doesn’t have a chance to show us what it truly is, how it looks, sounds, and breathes around us.  We turned love into a bikini, a car, an image, a purchase, only to find out that love is best when it is left alone.

Love talks to us but we don’t hear it because we are too busy expecting things from love that it could never give us.  Then, we think we aren’t loved because our expectations haven’t been met.

Today I would like to ask you:  

What do you expect love to do for you?

Do you expect it to buy you things?

Do you expect it to make you love yourself more?

Do you think that if someone loves you, you can love them, even if you don’t love yourself in the first place?

Do you think that love owes you something because it let you down before… whether it was because of how your family was with you or your friends, co-workers, or relationships?

So what does love really look like?

Love doesn’t ask you to do anything. It just waits until you notice that it can heal. That it can bond. That it is here always. We want and expect many things from it, yet it stands its ground for the right to be itself.

Love has nothing to do with conditions. Love has nothing to do with material possessions. Love has nothing to do with who likes you or not. Love is you. Love is how you treat yourself, how you view life, how you share who you are and can be.

Love is how we talk to each other. Love is how we look at each other. Love is what we are willing to share with each other. Love is the time we spend with one another. Love is the food cooking in the kitchen for everyone to share. Love is the warm blanket you are covered with when you fall asleep on the couch.

Love is simple and very patient.  What does that look like in everyday life?  Imagine a situation where someone has upset you because of something they said or did and you feel all your systems ready to blow up at once.  Instead of screaming or putting the person down, you can just as easily take the path of love and ask, “What was your intention?” They will tell you. If it is a young child you can ask, “Why did you do it that way?” They will answer. Anything else will turn into a bigger argument or complete silence.

You see, we are all made of truth, love and purity. When either is pierced, then we will most likely spend our lifetime trying to fill in that hole. When we talk to each other with disrespect, with lack of love or integrity, we have just pierced that person and created a hole similar to the one that we already have in ourselves.

So what do we do when we feel pierced?  First we must remember that we CAN heal. All we need to do is make the decision to go back to the fork in the road and take the path of love. Just one decision, that’s all it takes.

That decision alone not only heals you, but it gives you the choice to not pierce the other soul. It will heal them by teaching them that they are worthy and deserving of love. You will witness both of your hearts open up and your souls respond. You get to have a productive and healing conversation rather than creating a standoff that sends everyone to their respective corners. If you remember that you can make the decision to go back to the fork in the road and repave it with love, you can use it the rest of your life and you can see the difference in yourself and in others.

Love is the only energy we want, and yet we found a way to push it away in fear that we would lose it. Oh, that silly fear. Love is waiting for you to say YES to knowing that there is only ONE LOVE in life and that is YOU. There is only one decision to make and that is to go back to the fork in the road and take the path of love.

We all know this already and in this day promise yourself, promise each other, that you will allow yourself to remember that you can make this choice. Love is waiting for you to live in the choice you make, and love wants to finally show you its real self. How patient love has been, waiting for its chance to be a part of your life.

Love is our first language.

Love is our one common language.

Everything that I think that I need to do is all only
in order to propel me to some place that when I get there,
I think I will be happier...
So, why don't I take a short cut and just go get happy?

~ Abraham, collective of entities, channeled by
American psychic medium, Esther Hicks

Making a Plan to Change your Partner

When you think you have done the best you can to ask for what you need in your relationship and still feel dissatisfied, you might find yourself making a plan to change your partner.  You start making suggestions to her or him to see a therapist, work out more, watch less TV, eat better, read this book or take that class, etc.  All the little things you suggest fit into your master plan of how to change your partner into a person who will meet your needs more consistently.  You might find yourself justifying your plan, saying that it really would be good for your partner to change, not just for you, but for him or her as well.

The point here is not or whether you are "right" about what would be good for your partner.  The point is that you have adopted an indirect and doomed strategy to meet your needs.  This strategy is doomed for several reasons.  

First, the more you focus on changing your partner, the more you lose touch with your own needs and begin to behave out habit and reactivity.  

Second, regardless of how subtle you think you are, your partner will perceive your intention to change him or her.  Consciously or unconsciously this will activate resistance and s/he will move to defend needs for autonomy, acceptance, and honesty.  

Third, you lose your power.  When you funnel your energy into the futile attempt to usurp someone's autonomy and change them, you don't have much energy for self-awareness, responsibility for your own needs, and direct action.  

Fourth, when you make a plan to change your partner you are living in an imaginary future in which you hope things will be better.  You have lost touch with the opportunity to meet your needs in the present moment.  

So if you are not going to change your partner, what can you do?  You can make small do-able requests connected to the need alive for you in the moment.  This sounds simple enough but can be difficult if you have a story (and/or experiences) about how your partner disappoints you.  Believing your stories, it's easy to collapse into hopelessness or resignation.  

For example, one gem reader told me how she complains that her partner watches too much TV.  She has complained to him for years and asked him to watch less, with little change.  She didn't realize that asking her partner to watch less TV isn't a present moment do-able request.  She thought she was asking for connection and he was hearing disapproval and demands.  

The next time she has a need for connection and her partner is leaving to watch TV, she could make a request in that very moment.  It might sound like this:  "Honey, I would love to relax and connect.  Would you be interested in walking up to the park to watch the sunset with me tonight?"

When you are feeling hurt, dissatisfied, or lonely in your relationship, the first impulse is often to blame your partner telling him and her all the ways they are messing up.  The next impulse might be to analyze your partner and concoct plans for changing him or her. These don't inspire your partner to connect with your needs and love you in the way you want to be loved.  

Your work is to bring mindfulness to those moments you want to lash out or lose yourself plans for the future.  Pause, name the reactive impulses, and ask yourself what you need and what you could ask for that would start to meet that need in the present moment.  If there is a foundation of caring and love in your relationship, then your partner does want to meet your needs and can best do so when they are revealed as they arise in the moment with a simple do-able request.

Practice
This week, practice naming your need and make one simple do-able present moment request of your partner each day and invite him or her to do the same.

LaShelle Lowe-Charde