Successful Relationships Reading Corner
This week, we suggested paying attention; it’s how to best support each other. Here are some other blogs we’ve written about paying attention in your relationships.
Make Sure You Pay Attention to Your Relationships “Strangely, there is a tendency to stop seeing and appreciating that which becomes familiar. With time, you might even stop feeling and valuing the connection within your relationships. To keep those connections in the present, you have to create shared experiences and take time to just be and to relate to one another. There are many ways to do this. To bring a relationship into your current experience, you must bring it into your present life.”
Why is Attention Important in Your Relationship? “your relationships with other people, whether acquaintances or your lover. If you’re not paying attention, you won’t see them. If you’re continually switching attention, you will only see them a little. When you give them your full attention, they become, for that time, your entire world. You see them for who they are, though of course filtered by your beliefs and prejudices. And this other person, whether a checkout clerk or your lover, can feel your gaze, will respond to your attention, because our reactions are very much social in nature.”
How to Remove Tension and Find Peace in Your Relationships “From this kind of mutual willingness to meet and embrace each other’s wants and needs, and not see them as oppositional or challenging to your own, an uncharged atmosphere is created that encourages openness. A gentle path emerges where talking, making decisions, and finding solutions is not fraught or loaded with resistance. The potential for a minefield is removed, and in its place is ever-increasing intimacy and connection. You can communicate your desires much better if you know what they are. It helps to listen inside yourself and really find out what you want in a particular situation. Once you’ve done that, you can more readily find a way to put it into words to share with another.”