Mindfulness and Relationships
"Relationship: the way in which two or more people or things are connected."
How can we use mindfulness meditation to connect with people and simplify our relationships? Relationships is one of the areas where we can really put our mindfulness and meditation skills into practice and learn about ourselves: relationships can be our best teachers.
Mindfulness is a useful tool in that it helps us connect with and feel our emotions more completely. We also learn to observe and look at things closely. Mindfulness helps increase our ability to tolerate stress and helps relax the body to restore equanimity and equilibrium. We also learn to 'get ourselves out of the way' - disengage or bypass our ego - which is useful in relationships.
Based on Zen, the practice of mindfulness often turns things upside down (or is the right way up?) So when you think you're pretty sure about something, you can also be sure Zen will have a fresh perspective.
When we do take a look at our relationships, it's actually quite easy to see how our approach is fairly self-centred. If we're honest, in most of our relationships we expect the other person to "give us love". And we often think about relationships in terms of "how we can get love".
In meditation, we are encouraged to look at it from the opposite point of view. Instead of asking ourselves how we can get love from a relationship, or have the other person behave in the way we want, we begin by giving loving kindness.
We apply the Four Sublime States (Brahmaviharas): loving-kindness; joy, compassion, equanimity.
Ask yourself: How can I make others happy? How can I generate more love for this person? How can I generate more loving-kindness in this relationship? How can I generate more compassion, more joy?
The more we practice giving unconditional loving-kindness in a relationship , the more we generate this resource inside ourselves. And the more we have this resource, the more magnetic we become in our relationships. This is karma: what we put out is what we get back.
One of the reasons we don't do that in relationships is because we don't open our hearts and minds to other people. It's usually because they trigger anger, confusion or fear - or some other aversion in us. So we don't feel brave our capable enough to deal with the situation, and we back out.
Pema Chodron, one of my favourite authors, has a quote:
"Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know"
... Nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. Maybe the only enemy is that we don't like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from an obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations, until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves."
And lastly: earlier this week, after I had finished prepping these notes, the yoga teacher at the studio where I practice, read something at the end of the yoga class which just encapsulates it all:
"Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them: "Love me." Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops. Still, though, think about this. This great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a Full Moon in each eye, that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?"
