Relationships: Focusing on Feelings Can Help Save You your Marriage
If you are unhappy, fighting difficulties in your relationship, or dealing with conflict from, stop a moment and be aware that there is not anything necessarily wrong with what is happening right now. It does not mean that you are flawed. Our life is a flow of alternating conditions, good and bad, day and night, times of strength and weakness, high tide and low tide.
As soon as we label a condition as bad or dangerous we go into an emergency mode and start our endless fight against what is going on. We demand that things turn out differently, exactly as we wish. This demand can make matters worse and block the natural balancing that all relationships go through. This balancing is usually blocked by misunderstanding of what is happening, and jumping into a fight.
The process of relationship balancing shows you how to look at what is happening differently and respond in a constructive way. This process bypasses the basic cause of our suffering; resisting or struggling against what is.
As we apply relationship balancing, rather than struggle to fix, control or analyze the situation, we work directly with our attention. The question before us always is: “What am I focusing on this moment? Where is my attention, right now? Is it upon the pains and wrongs I think the other has done me, or upon the simple reality that is presenting itself? Am I aware of that which needs doing right now? Am I willing to hear what the other is asking of me? Am I willing to listen to myself, as well, and ask for my needs? How much can I say yes to? What is it that I truly cannot give?”
There are various steps in relationship balancing. This article covers one step.
1. Return To Yourself.
Before you react in any manner, become silent, still, and get in touch with what it is going on inside of you. Listen to your thoughts, feelings, needs, dreams. Be present without judging yourself. Just pay attention to the world within. This attention is healing. It helps things sort themselves through.
Though this sounds simple, it is a primary step that most of us by-pass. Usually, our focus is upon what’s gone wrong, how we or the other have messed up. When something doesn’t go as we expect, accusations immediately fly. Our mind then starts spinning strategies for how to get what we want. Most of the time these strategies just get us in deeper than we were before.
Relationship balancing stops all this. Instead of allowing this to happen, we simply attend to all that is happening, and let it be for now. In this way we take the pressure and steam out and are less likely to react inappropriately, or misunderstand. By stepping back in this manner, we are actually giving the other a chance. We are giving ourselves a chance as well to see with new clearer eyes. Just as earthquakes and storms play a function in balancing the physical environment, times of turbulence and conflict can serve to re-balance a relationship, help it grow and become all it can be.
