Learning to be a captain can be tiring.
On this Monday’s post; Allow yourself to be lovable and shine I argued the case for us to become strong basecamps and how important it is that we captain our own Life first and then we can become a leader for our family. Being captain is no longer the prerogative of men, times are changing and with that the need for everyone, women and men alike to accept the responsibility of being our own captains on our own life voyage. We need to start learning to think and act from our own inner indigenous power.
This is easy to say, but as Dorothy shared very challenging to embrace in daily life. Dorothy’s experience was one of;
Tess what do you think of my hair? Honestly?
My heart sang with the honest sharing in this Monday’s post; ‘How I got to Honesty‘. YOU shine!
It sang to me because you too felt the need to be honest with yourself first and in particular with your feelings.
Chris Edgar gave a fine example of honesty by paying attention to what he is actually feeling;
the first and biggest step toward honesty for me has been actually paying attention to what I’m feeling, rather than what I’m “supposed” to feel in a given situation
He went on to say that feeling angry when being cut off while driving is a learned, ’supposed to have’ feeling, especially for males. Chris’ honesty had him realize that he did not feel anger and I’ll agree; not feeling angry does not take away maleness and it sure is time we all get that! Go Chris go.
Aligned relationships keep the Ego in check!
This week’s post explained the difference between aligned and parallel relationships.
From Wilma’s sharing we could see how being aligned with our loved one achieves wonderful results, almost effortlessly.
There is flow; problems still arise however they are dealt with in a constructive, productive way that supports each person.
We may indeed be causing results in our relationships but the point to note here is; how are we going about creating these results?
Are we aware that there is a third person, the Ego, lurking around in the foreground of our relationship and are we aware of how much turmoil and upset the Ego wreaks.
Oh man, to deal with this malfunctioning compost toilet, lovingly and manually is a miracle.
Learning to see a wholesome ‘what is so’ has been extremely valuable for Ann-Marie and me and from the comments, I can see that has been the case for some of you as well.
It sure showed up the flaws in my previous relationship and how unaligned we were.
We were just two egos marching alongside each other, seemingly together on the same path and going for the same outcome.
NOT.
‘What was so’ was that we had a parallel relationship.
While, we loved each other, it was conditional on behaving a certain way, on fitting into our respective perspective of what constitutes a ‘good’ partner and when that was not the case, we lost interest and started to complain about each other. In hindsight our conversations were repetitive, covering the same safe things over and over again and we preferred to talk about other people rather than exploring intimate topics such as ourselves, our dreams, sex, finance and child rearing.
What is so? Who is trusting whom?
In last week’s posts I wrote how once Ann-Marie accepted ‘what was so’ with her two year old daughter Molly not sleeping on Monday afternoon, she had access to thinking and doing things differently.
There is more to this ‘accepting’ business than just accepting how things appear in the first instance.
There is a vast difference between first ‘appearances’ coming from a very limited perspective and ‘what is so’ coming from a more whole and connected place, especially when it comes to relationships.
When we think or talk about our relationships, we describe them in a certain way, we describe them as they appear to us through our so called colored glasses. How our relationships ‘appear’ to us is of course often not the ‘what is so’ for the other party when you come from a wholeness point of view.
Accepting how things appear is not going to give us access to thinking and doing things differently; all THAT is doing is giving us more of the same or resignation.
The greater level of ‘acceptance’ is not a case of accepting appearances, but going to a place of wholeness about ‘what is so’.
Ann-Marie and I learned from this experience that wholesome acceptance needs to be preceded by finding out what is the ‘what is so’ to accept in the first place.
And finding ‘what is so’ is a skill that we rarely think to develop, especially when it comes to seeing what is going on in our relationships.
Our lack of skill has us easily miss ‘what is so’ and have us miss the starting point which will allow us to think and do things differently, that will allow us to develop heart centered team play that has us fly in relationships.
RSS
