Successful Relationships Reading Corner
This week, we wrote about how mutuality leads to peaceful relationships. Here are some of our many writings to this topic.
Why is Mutuality Important in Your Relationships? “The cornerstone of peaceful conflict-free relating is the practice of mutuality: the certainty that it is possible to find mutual solutions and the act of creating them. This requires the ability to search beyond differences to find the matching values. It requires the desire to understand and honor the needs of the other. This can be applied in all intimate relationships, and the same principles carry over into larger and larger groups of relationships, your family, friends, community, country, the planet.”
Mutuality is the Core of a Peaceful Relationship “At the heart of our relationship is a process we use to ascertain and co-create mutuality when finding solutions and making decisions together. It is a method that employs many different components of communication. These include a shared respect and honoring for our separate individualities, combined with a commitment to each other, to knowing we are on the same side, and most importantly a commitment to be relational, to find the answer that comes from the ‘we’. We have never approached each other with hostility or a need to be defended. We are not trying to be right or to win. When you are committed to a place of reciprocity, to solutions which are mutual, then winning is not defined as standing alone, of getting your own way, as though your way were juxtaposed to your partner’s.”
Why Mutuality is Important in a Successful Relationship “The direct experience of mutuality is a critical aspect of a peaceful and conflict-free relationship. It is the sense of being in the relationship, rather than just being our individual selves. In fact, “rather than” is the wrong connector here; it’s really “at the same time as.” Yet, many people do not recognize or acknowledge this aspect of their relationship. This is not surprising, as the mutuality we speak of is a transcendent experience; one of those areas which require a suspension of normal boundaries, and a stepping into, an allowing of another dimension. This doesn’t make any sense if you think of identity as residing in your body, bounded by your skin and probably created by brain activity. Concussion or anesthesia will switch it off for a while. Any number of documentaries and neurologists espouse this model. But that is a very isolated view of identity. We are not an isolated universe, disconnected from everything else; we are part of the entire world. A little reflection will show that we identify with our gender, our culture, our family … the list is long.”