Everything we do is the result of a relationship to something.
If you were asked to give directions you would use reference points to guide someone. ‘Turn left at the sign’, ‘at the end of the road’, ‘opposite the blue house.’ Each instruction tells you what to do in relation to something else.
If you were asked to describe a photograph, no doubt you would refer to how the different aspects of the image relate to one another, even if implicitly. For example, there is a car and two people are in it.
Even language helps us relate to the world, to verbalise internally and externally our experience.
When it gets abstract it becomes more grey but we are still relating. Likewise, when more perspectives are involved. Two people may have very different views on their relationship to one another or may use the same word and have different relationships to what that means. How I relate to the idea of friendship then affects how I relate to my friends and it may be different to my friends’ relationship to that word and so to how they relate to me.
If we are always relating to something, how does how we relate impact our lives and how we live and experience them?
Meditation teaching often compares the different ways we can relate to thoughts and feelings.
‘I am tired’ vs ‘I feel tired’ vs ‘I notice tiredness’.
Each one has a greater distance, that distance offers space to choose how we relate to it. In the first case we are the feeling, the second the feeling is part of us, and in the third the feeling is happening and we are aware of it.
Context can influence how we relate to something. The hungrier I feel the more I am hungry and consumed by that hunger and so I relate to the world through that hunger, which shapes my experience. Under pressure or when uncertainty is higher, how we relate to our environment and the world around us may also change compared to when we are relaxed.
The Conscious Leadership group developed the idea of above and below the line. When we are below the line we are in fight, flight or freeze and cut off from our resourcefulness and creativity. When we are above the line we have access to more of our resources, we are open, curious and more able to choose how we relate to the situation. We move above and below the line throughout our days and lives.
How we relate to things can highlight how we relate to us, which is possibly the relationship that influences our choices and experience of life the most. In the work I used to do with a charity called Universify Education, we would often support young people to consider their future based on their potential and their aspirations by taking them into a university environment, an environment they often believed ‘people like me’ do not belong. The process invited them to relate to university differently. It meant many more applied and attended but more importantly it helped them choose based on what they wanted for themselves, by re-relating to their lives and what was possible.
In life we are always forming and reforming relationships, big and small and they all have ripples.
I remember the moment in second year at university when I realised I could choose what I cooked. While it meant a very short lived and intense love affair with garlic bread, it also reflected a shift in my relationship to me. I can choose, from the small things like having garlic bread every day for a week (and then to choose that is too much and I need a different relationship to garlic bread) to the bigger ripples that shift makes possible, like when I work and how I work.
Our experiences can also shape our relationships to us and that has ripples. Feedback explicit or implicit from others or our environment can change how we relate to something, be it a hobby, a piece of work, how we dress, behave or allow ourselves to aspire to.
If we are always relating, how do we want to relate to ourselves?
How do we want to relate to each moment?
How can we practice the relationships we want to have to ourselves, to others and to the world around us?
What is the smallest thing that can illuminate how we relate to ourselves? With that new awareness how would you like to relate? What would that look like?
What are the abstract relationships that have the biggest impact on how you are?
For me I recognise my relationship to my expectations of me and my relationship to time have a huge ripple. Often they show that I do not always value in myself what I value in others, that I can relate with more self-compassion and that I can practice that in how I relate to time and expectations. For example, what I expect of myself in a day, how firmly I hold myself to expectations made before a situation changes, how much time I allow myself for me and how I talk about time.
We are always in a process of relating, and sometimes we can be more immersed in that than at other times. The more immersed the harder it can be in the moment to step back and choose how we want to relate, but still all we can do is reflect and practice.
Reflect outside the moment. How would you like to relate to yourself, to the world around you? What would you like to create in your life and the world and what are the relationships with yourself, with others and with things that will best enable this.
In the moment we can catch ourselves with the question: what relationship does this moment most need?
What would it be to be more aware of the ripples that result from the web of relationships we weave in our world?
What would it be to choose how to relate to each moment? What ripples could we create?
