Tag: relationships

Who others really are

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To relate to others compassionately is a challenge. Really communicating to the heart and being there for someone else…means  not shutting down on that person, which means, first of all, not shutting down on ourselves. This means allowing ourselves to feel what we feel and not pushing it away. It means accepting every aspect of ourselves, even the parts we dont like. Only in an open, non-judgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling. Only in an open space, where we’re not all caught up in our own version of reality, can we see and hear and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly.

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

Our dis-ease

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The nature of our dis-ease is this: we continually judge, reject and turn away from certain areas of our experience that cause us discomfort, pain or anxiety. This inner struggle keeps us inwardly divided,  creating pressure and stress and cutting us off from the totality of our experience.

We first learnt to reject our experience when we were growing up. As children our feelings were often too overwhelming for our fledgling nervous system to handle, much less understand. So when an experience was too much, and the adults in our environment could not help us relate to it, we learnt to contract our mind and body, shutting ourselves down, like a circuit breaker. This was our way of preserving and protecting oursleves…….In time, these contractions  form the nucleus of an overall style of avoidance and denial.

Thus our psychological distress is composed of at least three elements: the basic pain of feelings that seem overwhelming, the contracting of mind and body to avoid feeling this pain; and the stress of continually having to prop up and defend an identity based on this avoidance and denial.

John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening

Clearly seeing absolute and relative

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The practice of meditation leads us to seeing things as they really are. In other words, we come to appreciate the continual changing nature of things as they are directly experienced in the present,  the patterns which are beneath our choices, and the way we react, without thinking,  to certain factors.  When we do not see clearly the nature of what drives us and the nature of reality as changing, we seek happiness in mistaken ways and in the wrong places. We can persist in unsatisfactory ways of behaving. When we have a “wrong view” as to how things are, we persist in thinking that certain behaviours will guarantee us satisfaction and we remain fixed in them. We mistakenly believe that absolute  contentment can be found in things that we acquire or in the relative aspects of our lives which are subject to change and decay.  This can be true in so many areas of our lives, some of which are hugely emphasized in today’s society, such as our career, possessions and our relationships.

Ordinary human love is always relative, never consistently absolute. Like the weather it is always in continual dynamic flux. It is continually rising and subsiding, waxing and waning, changing shape and intensity.

….This may seem totally obvious. Yet here’s the rub. We imagine that others – surely someone out there! – should be a source of perfect love by consistently loving us in just the right way. Since our first experiences of love usually happen in relationship to other people, we naturally come to regard relationship as its main source. Then when relationships fail to deliver the ideal love we dream of, we imagine something has gone seriously wrong. And this disappointed hope keeps reactivating the wound of the heart and generating grievance against others. This is why the first step in healing the wound and freeing ourselves from grievance is to appreciate the important difference between absolute and relative love.

John Welwood, Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships

Encouragement

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I have always liked the person of Barnabas in the New Testament. He was known as the “Son of Encouragement”. I have always felt that I would love to be known like that, as one who encourages. We all need encouragement and know what it feels like when someone believes in us. Someone who sees us, not as we are, but as we have the potential to become. That gives us courage.

…… If I accept the other person as something fixed, already diagnosed and classified…then I am doing my part to confirm this limited hypothesis. If I accept him as a process of becoming, then I am doing what I can to confirm or make real his potential.

Carl Rogers

Our substitute life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The essence of the basic human problem is that we live a substitute life. From our basic human need for protection, security, and comfort, we’ve fabricated a whole maze of constructs and strategies to avoid being with our life as it is. And as a consequence of believing in this substitute life we are disconnected from awareness of our true nature, our naturally open heart.

Our substitute life is made of many different constructs: our identities, our self-images, our concepts of what life is, our opinions and judgments, our expectations, our requirements. All these we take as reality. As a consequence of these tightly held beliefs, we develop certain habitual behavioral strategies to deal with life as we interpret it.

All these strategies are based on core decisions that we made early on, about who we are and what our life is about. They are decisions we made to help us cope with the many inevitable pains of growing up.

Ezra Bayda

It’s quite simple really

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I spoke to my mother on the phone this afternoon. I had missed her call earlier in the week when she had hoped to persuade me to come home for a visit. And when she expressed that wish today I had to decline,  due to a busy schedule in the next weeks. She was disappointed and so I listened,  as best I could, providing a presence across the phone.  She spoke of the things of her day and the up’s and down’s of her week. Mainly simple things, a way of masking greater concerns. My job was to be silent. No greater work for those moments.

Ironically this week I had thought of helping in a bigger way. Sometimes I can think that life and support means grand gestures, a greater endeavour. And I spend my time planning for that in the future, to reach out more. However, what I realize this weekend is that the bigger picture can easily distract and become a way of avoiding. Even something as simple as kindness can take on  proportions that are not human. It misses the real family member who needs us. And then it is no longer love but rather our own day dreams pulling us away.

Real love encourages us to embrace the ordinariness of life. Whatever so distracts us from seeing and loving the familiar of the daily has the potential to be unhealthy. These distractions can appear in all shapes and sizes, many of them wholesome aspirations. However, they put our hopes for life elsewhere – on some shelf we may never reach – and pull us away from what is under our noses.

What is love? It is such a deep need of the human heart. Can it be as simple as being present to one another as fully as we can? I remember speaking to an old monk in Ireland once, who told me that life was quite straightforward really. It consisted of loving, he said, to the best of our ability, those whom we encountered each day. The people who were in our life at that moment.  Most of our days offer these simple encounters, little things –  dropping people off at the airport, making lunch and telling each other that things will work out. Maybe that is the essence of this life that I love – we are here,  we have each other, and do the best we can with what little time we are given. No dramatic gestures, no spectacular love, just ordinary stuff like partners, friends, mothers, sisters, phone calls and listening in silence.