Reading Corner

Links related to the weekly posts.

 

By Posted on Posted in Peace, Reading, Relationships, Successful Relating

This week, we invited you to create peace in the world, one relationship at a time. Here are some of our posts on various aspects of peaceful relationships.

The Five Fundamentals of Peaceful Relationships “For the last few weeks, we have been writing about subtle aspects of peaceful relationships. It is now time to describe the five principles for creating peaceful relationships, of which these subtle aspects are a part. These are: Knowing and Sharing Your Core Values; Recognizing the Uniqueness of Every Individual; How to View and Interact with Differences; Finding Total Acceptance; A Process for Dealing with Decisions and Disagreements.”

Promoting Peace: What Can You Do to Make a Difference? “This feeling of peace is precisely that: a feeling, and until it is recognized and described and labeled, you won’t be aware of it, you won’t be able to cultivate it and nurture it, you won’t notice its presence or absence. Look at those moments in your life when you can rest without agitation; look at the different feelings that different people bring out in you. There are words for feelings and emotions that don’t exist in English, like hygge or zeitgeist. Some have made their way into English; some haven’t. By naming a feeling, it is that much more tangible, and the same applies to the feeling of peace.”

How to Create Peace in Relationships and Life by Knowing Your Core Values “Your core values are those upon which you base your life, your actions and decisions, even when you are not clearly aware of what they are. This can occur because values are often felt rather than thought, and as a result you may not have actually put them into words for yourself. And yet they are so critical to your life, inner peace, and all your relationships. A knowledge and understanding of what yours are can be a great tool for creating mutual solutions to disagreements and misunderstandings in your relationships, as well as finding a more fulfilling way of applying them to what you do and how you do it in your life.”

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This week, we wrote that a true connection between people brings peace and joy. Here are some earlier blogs that cover the same issue.

Peaceful Relationships Really Do Exist: Make Yours One Of Them “Phil has a favorite quote “Optimism is a political act.” In the same way, knowing that peace is possible and that it exists, and can exist, not only within yourself but between people, is a powerful tool for facing the realities of today’s conflicts and challenges. Once you experience peace, and know it exists, keep moving in that direction and share it with all who you come in contact with. Speak it often; insist on it. You can change the world by bringing peace into each relationship you have.”

Why It’s Important to Speak Your Feelings in Relationships “At the same time, he also shared that he had been very self-focused for a bunch of weeks and that as a result, he felt he was not giving me, or the relationship, the attention we deserved. This pronouncement had a strong effect on me. I had indeed been feeling his lack of availability and presence. I knew what he was involved in, so I was comfortable to a degree with what was happening, although it was not a way of being together that I would want to go on for any length of time. As Phil put his experience into words, I felt any distance that was there disappear. It made me aware of how important it is to speak feelings in relationships. Yet, it is also important to wait and not speak hastily. If you say something too soon, before it has coalesced, it may be too full of ambiguity and confusion, and a general lack of clarity. If you wait too long, the other person might start to make things up about your behavior.”

It’s Important to Feel the Connection in Your Relationships “A cautionary word for relationships: Pay attention, be alert, stay aware of the experience of your connection. All too often, people become so used to the contact and connection in their relationships that they start to take them for granted. You presume upon that sacred gift. You stop really noticing the experience of that connection; how it makes you feel, why you treasure it, why it’s so important. The less you are aware of it, the less you nurture it and the thinner that connection becomes. Yes, there are memories of the importance, yes, there is fondness and love for what has been. But the actual experience can begin to fade. In its place grows distance, even a sense of estrangement. These feelings can easily give rise to fear and all its components. The first to go is that feeling of safety and peace that you derive from a living, vital relationship. One where the connection resides in the present; in an experience of the magic that occurs between two people sharing love and awareness and caring for each other.”

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This week, we wrote about how important it is to make fairness a foundation of all your relationships. Here are some other posts we’ve written that speak to different aspects of this topic.

Why Fairness and Trust are So Important to Your Relationships “There are relationships built on power and dominance, but those do not create or further peace. For us, the key is a balanced relationship; it is balance without a balance sheet that we are talking about. What does that look like? We don’t count up how many times either of us has done our part in the upkeep of life activities or who is doing more or less. We have a rather delicious sense of how varied each of our contributions are, yet how balanced they are in the larger picture of our life together. At the core of this way of relating is a deep sense and commitment to fairness. A relationship built on fairness engenders trust and a commitment to act from that trust.”

How Trust and Peace go Hand in Hand in Your Relationships “Trust. What’s my personal way of experiencing that? Well, I think that trust and openness go hand in hand. To feel seen and connected, you need to be open and show yourself; whatever you feel, you share. That may sound extreme, but the route there is that you open up just a little, take just a little risk, and if you are greeted with acceptance and offered some openness in return, then your trust increases and your openness increases until you reach the experience that the two of you are operating from the same place. It’s a wild experience for me still because it presupposes a different kind of consciousness, or identity if you will, and there isn’t a space in material thinking where that belongs, so I am very much in awe of it, and that stands in stark relief against the rational mind.”

How to Deal With Decisions and Disagreements in Your Relationship “But once you know that you share the same values with someone else, you can deal with decisions and disagreements without generating rancor. It takes time, trust, honesty, and openness. You have to be willing to listen to the other person and find out what their wants and needs are in the particular situation.
There are multiple ways to solve a problem, and by exploring, you can find a solution that works for both of you because it will fit with your shared values. There is a solution out there somewhere, even though you can’t imagine it in the face of that daunting 100 ft. cliff. Here’s where the fun comes in. You can find a path toward mutual solutions: a place where both of you are happy, satisfied, and even enriched beyond your original version of the solution. It is a co-creative process of listening, exploring, and searching for the values and important aspects of what underlies each others’ wants, and then finding a path to mutual satisfaction.”

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This week, we wrote about how to avoid reacting with blame and anger in your relationships. Here are some of our previous posts on different aspects of this topic.

How to Replace Blame With Honesty in Your Relationships “What I have learned is that, when I have strong responses to interactions in our relationship, it is important for me to look inside myself. It is an opportunity for me to understand myself better and to find out what is happening within me. It gives me a chance to process my feelings and see what is moving me. It also makes it very clear that whatever I am feeling and thinking, it is about me and not about Phil. This stops me from focusing on him, his words or actions.”

How To Avoid Relationship Conflicts With One Little Word “If you stop, what are you stopping? You are stepping away from being reactive in the situation. When you stop, the very first thing you will often find is that you can breathe. In these situations, people often start holding their breath without realizing it. Stopping pulls you into the present and gives you a moment to step back from being drawn into conflict, if that’s where your mind or the other person’s behavior is going. Most people have a variety of responses at the same time to any given situation, especially those that are challenging. Stopping enables you to make a choice of which of your responses represents the value which you want to give your energy to. It is not always possible to do this in the moment, but when you stop before reacting or responding, you get that moment to see what is going on, to breathe, and to bring your thoughts and feelings into the present.”

How to Create Peaceful Relationships by Balancing Your Differences “Besides looking at these differences, another way to handle differences is to look instead at similarities, of which everybody has many: we’re human, we breathe, we eat, we like stories. When you look at what you have in common, the differences don’t vanish, but they move to the corner of your vision….The act of each looking at not only the strengths, but also the goodness of the other, enriches the sense of how much differences add to relationships. The desire for balance in a relationship comes from the intent of goodness toward the other from each party in the relationship, and the application of one’s strengths to that end.”

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This week, we wrote about how to replace blame with honesty in your relationships. Here are some of our previous posts on honesty.

How Honesty Leads to Trust in Your Relationships “A relationship that is grounded in the experience of peace is a powerful support for your growth and well-being. It is so far removed from the fears and blockages that interfere with your happiness and ability to actualize your potential that it seems almost magical. It feels both extraordinary and absolutely natural. It seems to require no effort to relate in that space, to feel the sense of the connection; to feel the other person and know where to meet them. There is a strong pull in that direction. Peace is very attractive, and peaceful connections are fulfilling and alluring.”

How Total Honesty Makes For Harmonious Relationships “Total honesty is a major part of a harmonious relationship. Holding back in the sense of not presenting yourself totally means that you are not quite yourself when you’re with the other person. That produces a force that makes you want to be away from the relationship and find 100% of yourself again, even if you don’t act on it. Everybody has that need, even if it is buried deeply. To be in a relationship with total honesty is to be free of needing to scratch that itch. That might sound scary and risky. Are you going to be criticized or thought less of? At first, that’s a distinct possibility; you have to reveal yourself progressively to see what happens. Not everybody wants or can handle honesty. You have to get to know their attitudes and level of acceptance.”

Why is Total Honesty Important in Your Relationship? “One aspect is clear. In order to practice total honesty in your relationship, you need to feel safe and secure. What are we referring to when we refer to total honesty? Let’s first clear up some of the things it is NOT. It is not spewing forth the total contents of your mind at your partner. It is not an accusation fest, where you settle blame for what you are feeling on your partner. It’s not sharing a long list of what your partner should do and can change to make you happy in the relationship. Total honesty arises from working on yourself. You have to know yourself in order to share that with your mate. It starts by recognizing that what you’re feeling is about you and should not to be projected on the other person. You must come to understand that resolving conflicts is not about changing the other person, but rather looking at what the resistance on your side is about. The more information you glean about yourself, and what you are feeling and why, the closer you will come to being able to communicate with total honesty.”

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