Session 6: Relationships Part 1
Positive Affirmation: Love and respect is currency in relationships. The more you put into your relationships, the more value they contain.
Seamus: In the book, you talk about three things that relationships have taught you. What were those three things that you mentioned?
Ned: I have noticed in my relationships that certain triggers can cause me to bring my past forward into the present moment. I would bring experiences from other relationships into my current relationship. I was dragging up old wounds, wounds that had not healed. Relationships have taught me what my triggers are. Knowing my triggers has been a good tool for me to go inward, look at my past, and let go of some of the things I am hanging onto.
Another thing I have learned from past relationships is how to control my emotions and to respond in a gentler manner. When we are in a cooperative relationship, it is not helpful to constantly react to triggers and then exercise our emotions on our partner. For me, that emotion was usually anger. My partner would always get the brunt of my anger and my impatience. By learning how to control my emotions I can now step back when they arise.
Seamus: When we first get into a relationship, that is generally a time when things are new and exciting. We are looking for acceptance from this person to see if they will be a long-term partner.
But I wonder why it is that once we become more familiar with that person, these things start to come up. Because that has been my experience. In the beginning, I am preoccupied with the fun and in learning someone new and getting to know someone new that I’m with, and no triggers come up during this period. It is not until I become comfortable with them that these things start to arise. First off, do you relate to that? Second, what do you think the cause of something like that might be?
Ned: Yes, I can completely relate to that. I think it may be a couple of things. Familiarity breeds contempt. Once you get used to someone, the things that are cute in the beginning may become slightly annoying and eventually feel like nails on a chalkboard. However, one of the most beautiful things about a new relationship is the level of innocence that comes out of you.
When you first start dating that person, you look at them with eyes that are looking, not knowing. Your eyes are looking to get to know this new person. This new innocence in you brings a sense of euphoria. That is one of the benefits of being in the moment and being present. We think it is this new person that is bringing up these feelings, but this newfound sense of wonder may be coming from your deep presence in the moment.
I believe we unconsciously seek to find ourselves in others. The relationships that we are drawn to will be ones that clearly reflect ourselves. Relationships that mirror parts of ourselves that we do not like are some of the most beneficial relationships we can have. Those connections reveal where you need to apply some healing or what you need to look at in yourself.
The third thing they have taught me to see a connectedness between myself and others. That was the deeper part of what I learned from relationships. I did not get to that until I started to get over myself. I had to get through a good chunk of my own healing. I had to clear out my ego in order to look at my partner more deeply. Then I started to see more and more of myself in others.
When I looked at my partner I used to think I was getting love from them. Then, when I began to explore love and relationships, I realized that when I looked at another person, the love that I was feeling was my own. Your partner acts as a mirror. You see yourself more clearly.
Seamus: That is an interesting concept. What kind of advice do you have on identifying your triggers and managing their negative effects?
Ned: When our emotions start to spike, it is time to examine what triggered that feeling. We will be going through our day with our partner, and then suddenly our emotions become overactive. The emotion can be happy, sad, angry, and all points in between. We start to identify them when we are conscious enough to catch what is happening before reacting.
If you can catch a trigger at its onset, it becomes information that you can use. You can take stock of what has just happened, look and ask yourself, “What is happening in this moment to cause an old wound to surface?” For example, if you are walking through the mall and you notice that your partner gazes at another person of the opposite sex, and you suddenly feel angry or jealous, in that moment, you can either go into what you feel and project that onto your partner or you can look at yourself and say “Why do I feel emotional about this scenario? What is hurting from my past? What am I hanging on to from my past, or what needs to be talked about in my current relationship?” Triggers let us know where we need to heal ourselves.
Seamus: Now, another thing that you talked about in the book is trapped emotions from traumatic events. I would love for you to explain how that affects our lives. These could be things that happened years before you ever met your spouse or partner, right? I would love for you to expand on the trapped emotions from traumatic events.
Ned: When I first met the doctor about whom I wrote in the preface, he took me to see a shaman. One of the types of healing work that shamans do is soul retrieval. As we go through life we have traumatic events. After these traumatic events, little parts of our self are left in our past traumas.
We have lots of experiences that are traumatic or difficult. The shamanic healer looks into you and brings back all those little bits and pieces that have been lost in your traumatic experiences.
This type of healing can be valid and very freeing. Personally I have benefited from the healing of a shamanic healer. I have also discovered that I can do my own healing work. I have a slightly different spin on soul retrieval, a more modern-day spin on how to do this for yourself. Our traumas can hold us in our past, so we must go back and release ourselves from our dramas or traumas.
If you observe people who have experienced a lot of trauma, they may appear somewhat vacant. They trip over things a lot, they are forgetful, their life is chaos because there is so little of them moving forward and so much of them trapped in the past. Every one of these little traumas that we have can create a string to the past. That is why often we will bring the past into the present.
You can imagine what a person would look like if they were stuck in dozens of traumatic events. When we are, it is like we have tied a string around ourselves and tethered that string to that past event. If you have endured many traumas, you would have dozens of invisible strings holding you to your past, making it difficult to move forward. The idea is that we go in and we start looking at our traumas and start to heal some of that so that we are not dragging them forward. We start pulling ourselves back so that all of us is moving forward.
Seamus: That makes sense to me. When you talked about people bringing their past into their present moment, I wondered if that is because they feel a need for resolve? I would think that once the past is resolved they can move forward much more easily.
Ned: There is a need for resolve.
Seamus: How do we find the ability and the strength to accept and move on if the trauma in our life was caused by someone else?
Ned: To heal ourselves and move on, we must bring the focus back to ourselves. While tattooing over the last twenty-five years, I have noticed that most people’s problems are about other people. There must be a willingness to turn that attention back to yourself. Remove the other person from your mind. That is a good portion of the equation and a good start to moving away from your troubles.
I did not share this in my book. It is something that is coming to me now. I think the very first step in resolving a problem is to eliminate the other person and say, “Okay, where is this my problem?” In order to experience the realm of healing we must learn to accept this fact. I had some problems from my past that I was carrying forward for many years. I tried to forgive that person because I thought I needed to forgive.
Intellectually, I knew it was important for me to forgive. I would say that I forgave this person and then next thing you know, I was still angry and there was a big part of me that would not accept what had happened. I thought that if I accepted it, that would make them right or I would be letting them off the hook. I justified the way I felt. I felt like, “Why did this happen to me?” When I stopped putting my focus on them and brought acceptance into the mix, there was an instant relief. My acceptance did not make the other person right; it did not make what I felt any less significant. It was just me accepting what had happened.
Seamus: What you said about how accepting what happened does not make them right—that to me is the crux of the biscuit. I think where people may have the most difficulty moving on is feeling convinced that the other person was not right. I can relate to that. I’m thinking that is why I got stuck. In the end, you are having an argument with yourself. It is not even with the other person.
Sometimes when we have conflicts with another person, a greater portion of the conflict is not even happening with them; it is one you are having inside your mind. You do not even see them, but you are having a relationship with them in your mind. You can easily get caught up with that because our emotions become engaged and we get caught in this vortex that keeps us centralized in being angry.
I can see clearly that we need to stop having this mental argument in our minds. I have had more arguments with a certain person in my head than in real life. What do you think about that?
Ned: That is the truth of it, Seamus, and that was my experience as well. When I look at the traumas that I was bringing forward in my life or reliving in my mind, it was because my mind was so focused on the other person. As I said earlier, I have watched my clients talk about their wounds and they want to tell me in intricate detail about how awful the other person is. At the end of the day, telling the story brings about no healing. It only keeps you trapped in the story itself. It is the story that keeps the drama or the trauma alive. It really keeps that alive in us, and it keeps us feeling like we have been wronged by this person and that they must pay for it. It also prevents acceptance.
Seamus: Yes. So, I wonder, can you forgive without acceptance?
Ned: I could not. It is not only acceptance that I feel is necessary; there must be a willingness to let go of our own anger, sadness, jealousy, hurt, or any other emotion you may have come up in us. In our acceptance, we are now drawing a line in the sand and we are saying, “Okay, from today forward I am going to accept that it happened. In my acceptance, I am going to step over that line. I will not replay my anger or other emotions for that person.” That was a very crucial step in healing the events of my past. I could not move on until I took these steps.
Seamus: That seems like an absolute thing, where you are drawing the line and then committing yourself to moving forward and not dwelling on them. Is it possible, though, that the forward momentum is an ebb and flow, a little bit forward and then a couple of steps back while you slowly move away from it? Is it normal, or could it be expected that some people might slip back into their story a little?
Ned: There is a good chance that you will slip back. I did many times because there can be a lot of momentum in our old stories. My experiences kept torturing me long after they happened.
Seamus: Just to fortify this—this is an important conversation. For anyone who has had a difficult relationship with another person, this really affects their ability to move on and have good ones with new people. A lot of this stuff sticks to us over time, and it can calcify into something that is difficult to shake off.
There is a line of text in your book that I want to add to this discussion. You say, “You do not require the world to be at peace for you to be surrendered to yours.” This could be difficult too, because what if that relationship was devaluing you to the point where you do not believe you deserve peace? Because maybe you have been told that, or you have been made to feel guilty for things that you have contributed to that bad relationship as well. Now you feel like you do not deserve to be at peace with that relationship, to accept and move on. I see that as being tricky.
Ned: I believe we need to stop projecting our problems outside of ourselves. There is no healing or forgiveness, there is no moving forward, when all our attention is placed on our troubled memories. There must be an inward reflection on your healing. It is not about the other person. It does not make the other person right. It does not make the things that have happened to you any less awful or traumatic. I am not invalidating anyone’s experience. But when it is relived daily and still causing problems in your current relationships, it is problematic.
I explored some of these concepts and wisdoms while writing my book Be Love. I learned about healing my relationships while I was writing because I was looking deeper and deeper into forgiveness and acceptance. I would throw these balls in the air and I would ask my soul, “Tell me about acceptance. Tell me about forgiveness. Tell me about trauma.” Things started coming back. Applying some of the methods that I was writing about allowed me to heal myself.
This is something that I have had to work on all my life. Some of the concepts in this book are relatively new for me, and I have had to test them out live, on the fly, and see the result for myself. Healing my past helped me open my heart. While writing my book, I needed to go into love. I needed to forgive all the people who I felt had harmed me over the years. I needed to really forgive them. My heart is now free because I have applied my practices to all my traumas.
Seamus: Also, in the book you say, “If you struggle with someone or something, make your healing about you and only you. Never place anything in front of your peace.” I have always had this conflict that it was my responsibility to fix someone else because I was involved in the relationship. If I realized it was beyond their means to fix themselves, I would go and try to find the wisdom or find the knowledge so that I could help them.
Ned: Here is the problem with that. If you are trying to make yourself better by fixing the world, it would be an endless pursuit that would keep you in constant search of the right answers for everyone. We must not put anything before our peace. Here is a concept that is almost always true: what bugs you about another person is generally your problem. Most of the time, maybe not always but most of the time, what is causing you to react is stuff you have not healed from. If you were healed, it would not bother you.
I have noticed how certain things that used to be very bothersome to me no longer have any control over me. When I see it in another person now, I am cool with it. For example, if somebody is angry, I’m okay with it. Yell and scream—that is fine. It doesn’t make me want to hang out and be friends with you, but it does not cause me to behave the same way.
Healing yourself is more help to the world than trying to be the world’s saviour. Trying to help others does not work. Change comes from within. If someone comes to you for help, then that is a different scenario than if you are butting your way into people’s problems. If you put anything before your peace, at the end of the day you are just sacrificing yourself. The world does not have to change for you to have peace. Peace is a solid, stable place found within.
Seamus: Just so that there is no confusion, you are not saying that if someone else has an issue that you cannot lend an ear, you cannot be of some help to them but rather that if you are at peace with yourself, you are not going to be hanging on to their baggage? Is that what I am understanding?
Ned: We can always lend an ear. The key is not to have any desire to change what is happening for the other person. People sometimes need their struggles and they also need to come to their own conclusions. It’s only our ego that desires anything.
I am more compassionate and helpful when I do not fall apart with other people’s problems. If your problems were being projected onto me and I did not fall apart in the process, I could just maintain a sense of love for you. If you sympathize or you start to feel other people’s traumas, you are grieving with them, now you are both suffering over their past. That does nothing for a person’s healing. Whereas, if you can maintain a sense of love, you call the forth the presence of God to come and be with you and the other person.
Seamus: Makes sense. It could be easy to misinterpret that. Some might think, “Well, you are telling me to be selfish. You tell me that I should not be feeling for other people.” It seems more common that if someone lends an ear, they end up clinging on to what is going on with you. That is something I have noticed.
Ned: It is the opposite of being selfish. It is being selfless. If you have a problem and you are sharing it with me and I take it on, now I am taking it from you and disempowering myself in the process. If you have a problem and I do not take it on and I just give love, now I’m giving to you.
Seamus: Great. That is a great way to clarify this.
Ned: Caring has more to do with love and compassion, not guilt and suffering. I used to feel badly for people. Nothing good or positive resulted.
Seamus: Well, I have had people share their woes with me and it is difficult if you do not have this knowledge and you really absorb it—especially if you are a compassionate person and feel what they are feeling. That sucks the life right out of you. Then, sometimes we end up avoiding them because the last time we hung out, they just dumped on us and it took a couple of days to get back from that.
Like you said, if you have the ability to be compassionate but remain neutral in some sense, you are not taking on what they are giving you, but you are giving them something, and then you are unaffected by their problems.
Ned: I think it is the mindset of trying to be a saviour. It is a different way to think about it and maybe it is not part of the common collective idea of how to help people. I have this saying that may sound harsh: “In a world of problems, make none of them your own.”
Seamus: Here is something that we touched on earlier, but we wanted to leave it to this session: the topic of emotional intelligence. It is an interesting topic I would like to explore. Could we talk about that a little bit?
Ned: This is a topic I have explored in depth. My information comes from Daniel Goleman. It is not my knowledge by any means. I would recommend readers buy Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. It is a phenomenal read. There is so much stuff in there. It helped me to understand and manage my emotions in a much better way. According to Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence, or EI, is defined as the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your emotions and to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others. Your emotions can influence your behaviour and, because they help you read others as well, allow you to affect people positively or negatively.
The five different components that make up emotional intelligence are Self-Awareness, Managing Emotions, Motivating Self, Empathy, and Social Skills.
1. Self-Awareness
The ability to identify what you are feeling and how you respond to your emotions as they arise. A good sense of self-awareness allows you to see yourself the way others see you.
2. Managing Emotions
Your ability to manage powerful emotions when they arise. Having control over what you say and do during difficult situations.
3. Motivating Self
Your ability to keep going and be a self-starter in all emotional situations. Using your emotions to your benefit.
4. Empathy
Having the ability to accurately read others’ emotions and respond to what is happening around you.
5. Social Skills
The ability to manage your emotions in social settings. Having emotional skills that help you with team-building skills as well as team participation.
Seamus: What is the benefit and importance of having control of your emotions?
Ned: By learning how to manage our emotions we respond more appropriately to what is happening around us. When we have control over our emotions they become a gift, not a burden. My emotions were a problem most of my life. I could not get a handle on my anger. I keep talking about anger, but that was my deal: I was Mr. Anger. If we do not have a good handle on our emotions, they can cut off our ability to communicate. They cut off our ability to connect with other people and to have meaningful interactions.
Seamus: I want to add here that you have run men’s workshops, talking to men about all kinds of things. I went to one of them once. Something I want to talk to you about is emotions. I think society is shifting a little bit—it is becoming more acceptable for men to identify with their emotions. Sometimes I feel like if you are an emotional male, then somehow you are a beta male. It is like an alpha male is never supposed to cry. They try to hold all the weight of the world on their shoulders, holding this view that emotions are weakness.
There might be some men out there that say, “Well, I do not show my emotions,” but I think that there is no way to not show your emotions. Are you picking up what I am putting down here?
Ned: I know exactly what you are saying. This is an example of how we submit to gender roles. That is a topic that I used to teach in my men’s workshops—understanding the gender roles that we take on as men, and how it can curb our behaviour, causing us to respond inappropriately to life’s situations. A guy that is not in touch with his sensitive side is weaker for it. I think it is a weakness not to be able to accept, to manage, to access all your deeper emotions. I have gained a superpower by learning how to be a soft and gentle man.
Seamus: As we evolve as a species, our sensitive side will be more and more accepted.
Ned: When I labelled my emotions, I would remain stuck in one emotion, or it would keep me stuck in the label that I had placed on it. When I learned to remove the label from what I was feeling, sometimes my initial label was not true. I made a chart about this in my book. In the past, something would trigger me to become angry—that was my go-to emotion. But if I looked at what I was really feeling, it was not always anger I was feeling. If I got embarrassed, I would present anger and next I would start screaming, or if I felt sad or annoyed, frustrated, any one of those emotions, I would just express it through anger.
When we label our emotions, we cut off what is beneath what we are labelling, and we stay trapped in the label itself.
Seamus: If we are feeling something such as sadness, that might not be the root cause of the emotion. How can people gain access to the true emotions? How do we learn about that?
Ned: It is by changing our vantage point in ourselves. When an emotion arises, look at it instead of jumping on the first feeling that you have. When your emotions are coming up or, like I was, you are angry, ask yourself, “Am I?” or “Is this true?” Sometimes our inquiry is enough to allow us to turn inward and discover something deeper. Sometimes you may feel disappointed, hurt or sad. Maybe we are not in sync with what is happening around us and we need to talk about it.
We can sometimes clear out the drama by pulling back and looking at what we are really feeling. Our emotions are information. They are telling us something. When we have good control over them and they do not dominate our experience, we can use our emotions as a tool. I used to say, “I am angry,” or “I am sad.” The truth is that you are not your emotions. Your emotions are happening in the body; it does not make them who you are.
Seamus: Right, because now you are personalizing them. It is just like what you said about self-violence. If you say, “That was stupid,” and then you personalize it with, “I am stupid,” you become what you are labelling yourself with. Is there a time to label our emotions, or should we never label them?
Ned: I think when we frame them by acknowledging that we feel angry, or we feel frustrated, rather than “I am angry” or “I am angry at you,” the emotions can then be talked about rather than just reacted to. It could be over trivial things such as your partner not setting the keys to the car in one place, and now you are screaming at them. Instead, it is a much healthier approach to say, “Look, I am feeling frustrated.”
Seamus: I think drawing conclusions about our emotions is a reflex. I have been trying to do exactly what you are talking about—readjust and give myself five seconds to assess a situation. Because when things frustrate me, immediately I go to being pissed. It is like a reflex.
What I have observed is that the reality of my feelings is far less significant. Reading your book helped me adjust how I approach my frustrations. I am easily perturbed; it does not take much for me to become agitated. I am not a very patient person, either, so it is good for me to assess things more critically rather than just jumping to the anger right away.
Ned: The problem with that is, when our emotions get over-stimulated we can go into an emotional hijacking.
Seamus: Yes. That is when you have almost no control over how you behave or what is coming out of your mouth. These outbursts can create some significant damage to a relationship. Learning the truth about our behaviours can be very challenging, especially when we do not want to hear it. You can become defensive because you do not like being told by another. It is one thing if you are self moderating, but if someone else is critiquing us, that can really challenge our ego.
What I would like to know is, how can we be more open to objective feedback from other people without our ego getting in the way and shutting down what is being offered to us?
Ned: It is important to understand that feedback is a valuable experience in our journey to awakening. I found this very challenging in my relationships. As soon as somebody started giving me feedback about what I was doing, instead of learning from what they were trying to tell me, I would go right into black-and-white thinking, an all-or-nothing mentality. In an all-or-nothing mentality, we feel like we are being attacked, so we shut down and turn on black-and-white thinking. For example, if someone says, “I think you talk a little too much,” you say, “Fine. I will just be quiet and never talk to you again.”
Seamus: Which is a problem with some people, is it not?
Ned: Yes, it turns you into a victim of the circumstance. We start to overgeneralize and become defensive. When we get into that black-and-white kind of thinking, we are less tolerant of constructive criticism. It keeps us stuck in bad behaviours and mindsets. In our awakening, we must realize that there are things that we need to learn along the way. There are behaviours and mindsets that hang us up. If someone is loving enough and has the courage to help us move forward, I feel we should welcome that into our lives. This is something that impeded my growth and healing because I was not willing to be objective in my thinking.
Seamus: What is an emotional hijacking, and how is it harmful to our relationships?
Ned: Emotional hijacking is also referred to as an amygdala hijacking. I learned about this in Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence. This little piece of knowledge helped me out considerably with managing my emotions. With this tool, I learned how to sit back and get through my emotional storms. You see, when we experience an emotional hijacking or amygdala hijacking, the amygdala goes into overdrive and it shuts down the frontal cortex of our brain. This blocks our logic. It is the physiological response of the “fight or flight” mechanism in the limbic area of the brain. The amygdala is part of the limbic system, and the limbic system is where the brain regulates emotion.
When we go too far into our emotions we can become trapped in them. If you have ever experienced getting so angry that you become uncontrollable and irrational, this is where the term “Seeing red,” comes from. We cannot access the frontal cortices of the brain. We are thrown into the hindbrain, or the primitive brain, where primal instincts take over. That is how the fight-or-flight mechanism works. Knowing that little piece of information was monumental for me because I had a lot of these hijackings going on in my brain. I would get mad and then I would become really mad. During these outbursts I would say and do things I did not mean. After I had time to cool down and resume a more logical mindset, I felt terrible about my behaviour and the things I had said.
If you ever feel trapped in your emotions and they become so overwhelming that you regret things that you say or do, understand that in those moments your brain has been hijacked. You need to stop talking. That is the very first thing we do in an amygdala hijacking.
1. We stop talking because in that moment we are longer able to be logical.
2. The next thing we do is breathe; start taking some deep, calming breaths.
3. The last step is to pull your attention into your heart. Think of the time when you felt loved or when you loved something, and just breathe.
According to the Heartmath Institute, there is a neural pathway that goes from the heart to the amygdala. Their research states that the fastest way to pull yourself out of a hijacking is through heart-centred breathing. Learning about this topic has been a real lifesaver for me in my healing and understanding of how to manage my emotions.
Here is an excerpt from the article “Heart-Focused Breathing,” by The Heartmath Institute:
Heart[JM1] -focused breathing is about directing your attention to the heart area and breathing a little more deeply than normal. As you breathe in, imagine you are doing so through your heart, and, as you breathe out, imagine it is through your heart. (In the beginning, placing your hand over your heart as you breathe can help you in directing your focus to your heart.)
Typically, HeartMath recommends that you breathe in about 5 to 6 seconds and breathe out 5 to 6 seconds. Be sure your breathing is smooth, unforced and comfortable. Although this is not difficult to do, it may take a little time to become used to it, but eventually you will establish your own natural rhythm.
Heart-focused breathing won’t take a lot of time out of your day, but it can add lots of benefits to your life. Many people find that heart-focused breathing is an excellent way to start and finish their days, but there are times in between when it is especially beneficial. Try it during a break on the job, at school or while working around the house.
Seamus: That is amazing information. I have experienced the hijacking and have been on the receiving end of a hijacking, and it is awful for everybody. Depending on how extreme the emotions get, people can become very fearful of you, and then like you said, they do come out of it. An emotional hijacking is like a state we go into. Afterwards you always feel bad, then the guilt can set in, with a cycle of thoughts that you live with for days after one of these hijackings. If you go too far into an episode, it can have a long-term effect on your relationships.
The next question I would like to ask is, what is your opinion on the quality of communication in today’s world?
Ned: Some people talk, but they do not listen. They are talking to get to their next point. By doing so we cut off our ability to have meaningful conversations.
It is our job to teach our children how to be better communicators. We need communication. It is one of the most important things in a relationship. Without communication there is no relation. We cannot get into relations with each other without communicating.
Seamus: What I have noticed is that some people do not really give you the space to retort. They keep talking and talking and then when they pause for a minute, they are only thinking of how to keep talking. What do you think are some of the reasons why someone might be like that, where they cannot share the floor in conversation?
Ned: It is our ego that cannot share the floor. When you cannot arrest yourself in a conversation, it is your ego running wild. As I learned to drop my ego I have become a better listener. What is the ego? The ego is your mind. It is the voice in your head that you think is you. Good conversation requires having a dialogue that goes back and forth. If all I want to do is assert my dominance over the conversation, that is just my ego coming out.
Seamus: That is all it is.
Ned: It is also because emotional intelligence is lacking. And a lack of connection with the moment—and simply bad manners. When you arrest your ego, you are okay with letting other people share the conversation.
There is basic etiquette in good communication. For example, leave pauses when talking; leave breaks. Try not to introduce more than two topics or speak longer than two minutes. When you are bending someone’s ear for ten or fifteen minutes at a time you are no longer taking with them, you are talking at them.
It is okay if the person in front of you wants to hear what you have to say, and they are really engaged and interested—maybe you could talk for two hours if that is the case. But if you don’t leave any space in a conversation for the other person to jump in, you are not communicating.
Seamus: I tend to have a very in-sync relationship with my wife, where everything is open. There is really nothing we cannot talk about. A lot of times she and I will think the same thing at the same time. It is the strangest thing. I will say something, and her response is, “I was just going to say that.” We rarely disagree on things.
It is not because we are submissive, because we are not. We are both strong-willed people, but we have this flexibility with one another. I think that because we have been in a relationship for such a long time, we have managed to find a unity between us. How do we find unity in our relationships with others?
Ned: I think it just ties exactly into what we have been talking about. Communication is the bridge to experiencing unity with another. Communication quickens our ability to experience unity with another. Unity is a consciousness that arises within you. It opens when we are in touch with our soul. When we are in touch with our soul, and we become better communicators, unity starts to develop between you and another more readily.
You will see that in friendships where there is a harmonious flow between two people. A friend used to help me out when I tattooed at events. I travelled a lot when I first started tattooing. I went to the military base where my brother was stationed. He would get me into the barracks, where I would tattoo for the weekend. I am quite nostalgic about my travels to the base. Over time, my friend and I started to experience this unity between us. By the second and third trip, we no longer needed words. We just worked harmoniously. He knew what to do, and I knew what to do. We flowed together; we were in sync. It was almost like we were one. Unity is a beautiful state of consciousness. It opens when we look deeply into another. When we do, we might just find ourselves looking back.
[JM1]If you can get your formatter to set this as a “block quote,” it will be indented slightly on both sides and more visually arresting to the reader.
Also, I am going to try this (the breathing, not the block quote… :D ).