Reading Corner

Links related to the weekly posts.

 

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In this week’s blog, we wrote about how to stay balanced in your life and relationships. These articles provide helpful suggestions and interesting research on the benefits of mindfulness.

7 Strategies to Face Life’s Challenges “In our personal lives, and on a global scale, we face challenges that test our emotional mettle — injury, illness, unemployment, grief, divorce, death, or even a new venture with an unknown future. Here are seven strategies to help carry us through.”

The Science and Practice of Staying Present Through Difficult Times “Research into mindfulness has shown the benefits of staying present, and of gently turning towards difficulty. Mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP) trains people with addictive habits to manage their cravings mindfully by staying present to the sensations of craving, rather than trying to distract from them, avoid them or defeat them.”

How to Face a Challenge With Confidence “Do not underestimate the power of being present. If you make a practice of facing your challenges—even in failure—with full presence and awareness, you will find most challenges are not challenges at all. Instead life’s challenges become messages from the universe. Meditation can help you cultivate silent awareness and is a good tool to help bring that focus to yourself during difficult times.”

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Our guest blogger wrote this week about starting life in a bad place, finding herself through bodywork, and finally realizing the need to move on from the past. These posts discuss that intimate mind-body connection and how to process your pain.

Connecting Emotions to a Felt Body Sense “The idea that the mind and body are inextricably intertwined is widely accepted in our field, but many therapists remain so focused on understanding the thoughts and feelings in clients’ minds that they forget about the pivotal information to be gleaned by paying more attention to clients’ bodies.”

How to Release Emotions Stuck in Your Body and Let Go of the Pain “We are emotional creatures, and we were born to express emotions freely and openly. Somewhere along the way, however, many of us learned to repress emotions, especially those deemed ‘negative,’ in order to fit in, earn love, and be accepted. This was my experience. I grew up in a home where the motto was ‘Children are to be seen, not heard.’ There was little emotional expression allowed, let alone accepted. No one was there to validate or help us process emotions in a healthy way. Anger was met with anger, fear went unacknowledged, and there was plenty of shame to go around.”

Why Releasing Pain From Your Heart Gives You The Freedom To Be Yourself “…you cannot hold on to feelings of sadness and disappointment because doing so means to inhibit life flowing through you. It is akin to building a dam from piles of rocks in a flowing river. Eventually, the force of the water will erode the rocks or find its way through it. Author Davidji writes in Sacred Powers: The Five Secrets to Awakening Transformation: ‘What has happened in the past can’t be changed. We can’t unring the bell, but we can move forward….and how you choose to move forward from this moment, is the choice that will determine the fabric of your life.'”

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This Valentine’s week, we suggested in our blog that you should celebrate every day of your relationship. Check out these authors for some ideas on how to do this.

Pay Attention. Is This The Simplest Relationship Key? “We all know how wonderful it feels to have someone else’s undivided attention. But for some reason it becomes very easy to the pay least attention to the one person in your life who loves you more than anything else. Of course, there are many reasons why we stop paying attention to our partners. But failing to pay adequate attention to their needs is a top cause of relationship breakdown, say the experts.”

20 Relationship Tips: Give Your Relationship the Attention it Deserves “The repetition in marriage/relationship advice suggests that there are important hard-and-fast principles that couples should pay attention to. So rather than searching for the golden goose that will magically send you down the path of marital or relationship bliss, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and give your relationship the attention it deserves.”

Is a Lack of Attention Costing Your Relationship? “The quality and quantity of attention each romantic partner gives their relationship influences the satisfaction both partners feel in the relationship. How you budget this attention matters. If there is too little attention directed at your romantic relationship then the flames of love fade. Poor quality of attention, such as barely listening because you are focused on social media, also costs the relationship.”

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This week we wrote about how to dissect the arguments in your relationship, find out what’s happening, and what you can do about them. Here are some other writers with helpful advice.

7 ways to end an argument with your partner “‘Clearing the air and coming back to love and compassion after each disagreement means those are the emotions left hanging in the air between us, and what could possibly feel better than that day-to-day?’ relationship expert Chantal Heide says.”

3 Reasons Why Couples Have the Same Fights Over and Over “If you’re married or in a committed relationship, you’ve probably noticed that some of your arguments never seem to get resolved. Rather, they get recycled. Why is this such a common occurrence? And why do these situations feel almost insoluble? Here are three common reasons:”

Resolving ongoing arguments with your partner “You’re having the same tiff over and over with no resolution in sight, and cracking it about dirty dishes quickly escalates to “You don’t love me anymore”. We know 20 per cent of married couples, for example, are strained at any one time. And because the experts say it’s not if you fight but how that matters, hitting reset on argument patterns can help. We went to the professionals to find out: how does one get off the argument hamster wheel?”

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In this week’s blog, we discussed the struggle to get to the place of no struggle in your relationship. Here are a variety of articles discussing the road to transformation.

How One Simple Mindset Shift Can Totally Transform Your Relationships “Whatever the impetus for your resolutions, most of us fail in our attempts to create sustainable change. Change is hard. It’s uncomfortable and it takes incredible persistence, perseverance, and patience — qualities many of us struggle to cultivate. As a relationship therapist, I’m always thinking about the changes I want to make in my relationships and trying to encourage and support changes my clients want to make in their relationships.”

Real Transformation Is An Evolution “Real transformation sneaks up on you. Maybe you have experienced that moment – that face-palm, slap to the forehead instant – when you realize you are in the middle of unplanned, unexpected, unpredicted life change. It can feel like all the air just got sucked out of the room when you figure it out because real transformation changes everything. What was can no longer be, not because you don’t want it but because it just won’t work in your life anymore. Who you were then is not who you are now… and the ‘now’ you cannot be put back into the smaller container of who you were ‘then’. We like to think that we can see what’s coming and adapt proactively.”

Change Doesn’t Happen Overnight: It Happens In These Five Stages “Although circumstances often change in the blink of an eye, people tend to change at a slower pace. Even the most motivated people who welcome change often encounter stumbling blocks that make transformation more complicated than they’d originally anticipated. Whether you’re hoping to lose weight, or you’re trying to convince your employees to embrace a new procedure, don’t expect immediate results. Instead, recognize that real change happens slow and steady.”

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