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By Denise Palmisano
Week 1 - I introduced the concept that your destiny as a human being is to be in relationship with other human beings. You were born into the basic human need to experience love, acceptance and connection with other human beings. To resist this inherent truth will have you suffer on many levels. We are incapable of reaching our potential without being in human relationships. Therefore, relationships could be said to be crucial to our human evolution. Week 2 - I expanded on suggesting that each of the many types of relationships support us in authentically knowing ourselves. I claimed that each and every relationship has a purpose, a role and a reason for being what it is at this time in our life. Our actions or lack of actions in our current relationships are a result of our past associations, and prior programming of relationships in general. The mere mentioning of someone's name whether we know them or not, generates an experience and energy in us. Those experiences and that energy either opens or closes possibilities for the relationships in our lives. Knowing what opens and closes possibilities in any and all relationships will be a crucial step in co-creating, designing and sustaining relationships. I hope you had an opportunity to do the exercise. Week 3 - We took an external and internal look at the many filters we bring to a relationship. Those perspectives expanded your awareness to show you how filters further impact how we experience, enhance, or limit our many relationships. I talked about filters being a form of protection vs. a form of knowing or wisdom. Most of your suffering and limitations in relationships have more to do with filters, old programming, ego and interpretations than the TRUTH! Hanging onto filters that are not working for you are self-imposed disconnections, walls and limitations. I invited you to find your breath and that place inside of you where your internal stillness and wisdom reside. The exercise invited you to focus on your breathing without judgment as you asked yourself various questions about your current relationships. Overall, these exercises are intended to show you more about yourself and how you relate to others. Week 4 - There are many versions to the phrase if you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got. For most of us, co-creating, designing and sustaining relationships that work will require something different than we have always done. One of the first things I would invite you to do to end some of the repeated cycles in your relationships is to clear the chaos and clutter. This is the next step in making room for new and different relationships to show up even if that new and different relationship is with a person already in your life. From the exercises we have done over the last couple of weeks, you are probably seeing how you have co-created exactly what you have right now. Your filters, boundaries, stories, habits and beliefs have shaped where you are. What would be available if you were to use the question "Is This Working" to support you in sorting through these limitations. I will be brief. This particular exercise will take time if you really want to get the most out of it. This is about you taking responsibility. If your way of handling your relationships is to make it all about the other person by blaming them or things they have to do or how they need to change, sorry, game over. You will continue to get what you have always gotten. You are missing some steps in designing and creating that are crucial. It is like trying to get from point A to point B without ever getting off the couch. How likely is that going to happen? Not very! If you are ready to see a shift in your relationships as well as take responsibility, I invite you to participate in this exercise.
If you would like to schedule a 30 minute complimentary session to discuss this process or anything that came up for you, Clicking here. If you missed any of the other emails on Relationships, Click here. This 6 part series is winding down. I am facilitating a more extensive course in relationships April 24 & 25. This is an on-site course that will connect the dots that have been started in these weekly reflections. If you are ready to take responsibility for the quality of your relationships, Click here to register for this course.
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By Denise Palmisano
Week 1 - I introduced the concept that your destiny as a human being is to be in relationship with other human beings. You were born into the basic human need to experience love, acceptance and connection with other human beings. To resist this inherent truth will have you suffer on many levels. We are incapable of reaching our potential without being in human relationships. Therefore, relationships could be said to be crucial to our human evolution. Week 2 - I expanded on suggesting that each of the many types of relationships support us in authentically knowing ourselves. I claimed that each and every relationship has a purpose, a role and a reason for being what it is at this time in our life. Our actions or lack of actions in our current relationships are a result of our past associations, and prior programming of relationships in general. The mere mentioning of someone's name whether we know them or not, generates an experience and energy in us. Those experiences and that energy either opens or closes possibilities for the relationships in our lives. Knowing what opens and closes possibilities in any and all relationships will be a crucial step in co-creating, designing and sustaining relationships. I hope you had an opportunity to do the exercise. This week, I would like to expand your awareness to include the many filters that further impact how we experience, enhance, or limit our many relationships. Filters in relationships often stop us from experiencing possibilities. Filters are dual purposed. They only let glimmers of ourselves be shown and we are only available to receive or experience a limited amount of the other person at any given time. Subconsciously we do this to protect ourselves from further hurt, pain or suffering. We bring the hurts and wounds of previous relationships into the current ones. To make it worse, we bring all of the unprocessed emotional messages and wounds as well as our old programming since childhood into our adult relationships. We make it about the other person yet it is our stuff that we are projecting onto the other person. I am going to claim that trust is at the root of all relationships. If we were to tell the truth about it, it's not that we don't trust them, the fact of the matter is, we don't trust ourselves. Most of the time we are looking for evidence to be right about the stories, judgments, beliefs and interpretations we made up about our relationships. What if that were just more of the ego trying to protect you? Your ego can be slick. It can show up disguised as wisdom. Don't be fooled. Be on the lookout for this trickster. Let's go a little deeper. Think of what you might be protecting yourself from. Maybe you have trouble setting boundaries, or saying no. Maybe you think negatively of yourself and you don't think you deserve to be treated with respect or dignity. Maybe you don't believe you make wise choices in relationships. Maybe you were naive and trusted blindly. Whatever the excuse or justification you can find to make the relationship wrong is usually more about you than the other person. The facts of the relationship are the facts. Those facts only take on the meaning you give them. Most of your suffering comes from the interpretation you assign to those facts. Two people who observe the same fact could have a totally different interpretation. Therefore your interpretation is not the TRUTH. It is merely one interpretation. My point is that we bring many filters, walls and limitations to our relationships. Another thing to consider is that both parties in the relationship are doing the same thing. That makes it nearly impossible to experience any connection at all. These self-imposed disconnections are the walls we hide behind as we continue to experience loneliness, sadness, confusion, anger, frustration, resentment and resignation in the relationships of our lives for the sake of not being hurt. My question is, "IS THIS WORKING FOR YOU"? Let's do an exercise to demonstrate how many filters are in the way of a real or honest connection with the relationships in your life. From this awareness you will have some insight into what is getting in the way of the connections you want. With that awareness, you can choose to take actions or have conversations that will allow for deeper connections. With practice and a little time, you will begin to let some walls down and let other people in to love, accept and support you. Isn't that more of what you wanted in the first place? Take a few minutes to find a place that you can get quiet and be still. Close your eyes, take a deep breath and relax. As you continue to breathe, soften your face and shoulders and allow yourself to sink into the awareness of your internal world. If any thoughts or judgments are calling for your attention, allow them to be there without having to follow them and without judging yourself. Always bring your focus back to your breathing as soon as you notice your attention went somewhere else. The good news is that you noticed your attention went somewhere else. Now bring your attention back to your breathing. Some of you might still find it very difficult or uncomfortable to get still or quiet. Besides getting still and quiet, you might also find it challenging to experience an awareness to your internal world. Whatever is showing up, please don't judge it. Just keep breathing deeply and focus on your breath. You don't have to do the whole exercise in one sitting. If you are a beginner, it is more important that you practice the art and gift of getting still and quiet and being able to focus on your breathing. This is a lesson in itself so be gentle if you are trying this for the first time. You can gradually add the other pieces once you have learned to just be with your quietness, stillness and breathing. Focused breathing is also great for relieving stress, allowing a different perspective to emerge and taking a pause or calming down from an anxious feeling or situation. When you think you have gotten as still and quiet as you possibly can, take another deep breath. Don't force your answers. Allow the answers and experiences to emerge. For the sake of this exercise, trust me when I say, you have all you need to access your internal wisdom. Your internal wisdom is that part of you that knows what is best for your highest self to emerge. If you were able to listen to your internal wisdom from the perspective of your relationships, what would you hear about each one? Ask yourself as many of the following questions about as many relationships as you want to explore. Keep in mind that if you take this on, the degree to which you are willing to risk exposing the truth is the degree to which you will experience more connection, depth and intimacy in your relationships.
Send me your comments by Clicking here and scrolling down to the contact form and completing it. Your comments are confidential. If you would like to schedule a 30 minute complimentary session to discuss this process or anything that came up for you, you can also request that on the contact form. By Denise Palmisano
Last week I introduced the concept that your destiny as a human being is to be in relationship with other human beings. You were born into the basic human need to experience love, acceptance and connection with other human beings. To resist this inherent truth will have you suffer on many levels. We are incapable of reaching our potential without being in human relationships. Therefore, relationships could be said to be crucial to our human evolution. For the sake of this conversation, let's expand on learning how each of the many types of relationships support us in authentically knowing ourselves. I see relationships as any connection, known or unknown with another human being. It could be someone in your family, a significant other, a friend, a co-worker, a bank teller or your neighbor. It could even be with a public official, a movie star, a sports figure or the paper boy that you haven't personally met. I am going to claim that each and every relationship has a purpose, a role and a reason for being what it is at this time in our life. Even the relationships that we did not intentionally initiate, co-create or design have lessons and wisdom in them. Some of our biggest role models are people we don't know personally but feel connected to them by how they have motivated, inspired or appalled us. Our actions or lack of actions in our current relationships are a result of our past associations, and prior programming of relationships in general. The mere mentioning of someone's name whether we know them or not, generates an experience and energy in us. Those experiences and that energy either opens or closes possibilities for the relationships in our lives. So, regardless of the relationship, I suspect that when you bring a person to mind you have an internal experience. The range of that experience is anywhere on the scale from peace and joy to anger and resignation. Knowing what opens and closes possibilities in any and all relationships will be a crucial step in co-creating, designing and sustaining relationships. I am going to invite you to do a simple exercise with me. There are no right and wrong answers so please do not judge yourself as we practice. It is totally okay to feel what you feel. In fact I am going to suggest that the more you give yourself permission to feel, the more that will be revealed to you. Since, I would suspect you are more interested in your current personal relationships let's use those for the exercise. Recall -
by Denise Palmisano
Your destiny as a human being is to be in relationship with other human beings. You are born into the basic human need to experience love, acceptance and connection with other human beings. To resist this inherent truth will have you suffer on many levels. We are incapable of reaching our potential without being in human relationships. Therefore, relationships could be said to be crucial to our human evolution. So you might ask, if we all need the same thing why is it so difficult to find and create that love and acceptance we need to nourish our hearts and souls in the many relationships in our lives? If we are wired to connect, why do we feel so disconnected from ourselves and others. How do you find or create relationships and love worth nurturing? Then, how do you sustain it? Let me reassure you that it is possible if you are open to learning. So, if you aren't currently experiencing the types of relationships you want then let's agree that there is something that you could stand to learn about this complex area of life. Our purpose for being on this planet has us in search of living fully expressed, fully realized and fully actualized lives. Our interactions with other human beings allows us to experience our individual totality as well as our individual and collective purpose and potential. The degree to which you allow yourself to awaken to all there is to learn about human relationships is the degree to which you will experience your own wholeness and totality. Hence a depth of connection that is hard to imagine or explain unless you embark on this journey with an open heart and an open mind. Click here if you would like to read more. |
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