Dr. Gail Brenner

Sacred Space for Awakened Living

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You Hold the Key to Thriving Relationships

good_friends“In spite of all similarities, every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction that cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you.”
~Martin Buber

What is the #1 problem in relationships, a major source of unhappiness, and a deterrent to our peace of mind? Expectations.

If you want to be disappointed or frustrated, just expect someone to do or say something, and wait for the fallout. It will come. Holding an expectation is like putting a vice grip around reality, and reality will eventually break free. People do what they do, circumstances happen as they happen, no matter what we think or want.

The Power of Expectations

An expectation is a big, fat should. It creates a scenario of what we want the future to be like – he should…she shouldn’t… And then he doesn’t or she does.

Expectations move us out of the realm of the real and into the mind-created realm of imagination, fantasy, and hope. And by buying into these beliefs, we bring struggle to our own lives and disharmony to our relationships.

A friend of mine recently called this the “tyranny of should.” When we take “should” thoughts as real, we act like a tyrant wielding oppressive power toward ourselves and those around us. We clamp down on people, trying to limit their freedom to meet our needs. I know I have wielded my should’s and expectations in relationships. I have hurt people, including myself. Have you?

Trying to eliminate expectations is unlikely to bring you the peace that you long for. Expectations are the product of the mind, and it seems like the mind has, well, a mind of its own.

Rather than fighting with these thoughts, consider taking the compassionate approach. Investigate them, see if they are true, determine what fuels them, take in the effect they have on you and the people around you. Bring so much awareness to them that they lose their power. Then go forth in freedom.

The Compassionate Approach

  • Investigating your expectations requires you to take responsibility. The focus of your attention moves from blaming and a “poor me” mentality to an honest appraisal of your thoughts and feelings. You choose the path of wisdom and intelligence by giving up your need to be right. You are willing to illuminate the truth.
  • The fuel that keeps expectations in place is an unexamined feeling. What are you afraid of – being alone, losing control, not getting what you want, not being right? Let these fears surface and receive them with so much love.
  • Notice how these fears give rise to the expectation. If you are afraid of being alone, you try to limit your partner’s need for space and independence. If you are afraid of losing control, you react when things don’t go according to plan. See the process clearly:  fear ? expectation ? inner reaction ? reaction toward another
  • Feel the effect of reacting to an expectation. Is this what you really want – for yourself, for others?
  • Align yourself with reality. You can’t control what other people say or do. You can’t foretell the future. Stay open and accepting to things as they are.
  • If you are really stuck, go straight to your heart and offer wishes of well-being, happiness, and peace to yourself and whoever is triggering you. Eventually, you will want to thank the other person for helping to bring this problem to your awareness.

If you have a habit of acting on expectations, do yourself a favor. Take the time to do the work. Be willing to be honest and see what keeps you trapped. Lovingly come to peace within yourself.  Every person you know will thank you for it.

Do you get trapped by your expectations?  What is that like?  Have you experienced freedom from expectations?  I’d love to hear…

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The Secret Is Out: How to Improve Any Relationship

muslimcouple“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
~Rumi

There is a simple way to improve any relationship. And it’s called listening. I don’t mean listening while you are formulating your response, or listening but assuming you already know what is going to be said, or listening while you are answering an email or watching TV.

I mean listening – with openness, with curiosity, with your heart wide open. When you show up as empty, aware presence, miracles happen.

I recently sat with a client who was sharing some difficult feelings. I automatically went into fix-it mode, offering suggestions to help her move through the pain, and she thankfully resisted every one. “Just relax,” I told myself.

I turned away from any need to save or help, and softened into the vast space of being that allows everything as is. As I followed her lead, supporting her exploration, her own connection with infinite wisdom guided her to exactly what she needed to know.

I got out of the way and listened.

How to Be Present

Living as aware presence in our relationships is so rare. It asks us to slow down, to put aside our opinions and dilemmas, to inhabit questions rather than answers. It is an offering we can make that is free, available, and holds the potential for so much healing.

We melt any personal barriers, which creates the space for true intimacy, where we meet in the one heart of love. Deep listening is one of the most loving things you can do for another.

As aware presence, we arrive to our interactions clear and clean. We are empty of our:

  • Needs
  • Stories
  • Beliefs
  • Desires
  • Expectations
  • Judgments
  • Hopes

We are filled only with loving space that receives, that wants to know.

Being There for Another

Imagine being this space with your partner or child or parent. You erase everything that has happened in the past, and you see the person before you as if for the first time. You might wonder:

  • What is important to you?
  • What are your fears?
  • What do you need?
  • What thrills and elates you?
  • What is your experience in this moment?
  • What else would you like to say?

And you listen to each response with rapt attention. “Oh, I see, it’s like that for you.” You are perfectly in rapport, accepting the other unconditionally. You are empty, aware presence.

Have a conversation like the one I am describing and let me know if your heart doesn’t break open.

Now take this way of being to your workplace, your gym, your neighborhood, the post office and grocery store. Can you open your heart to everyone you meet – no separation, no distance?

You Have the Power to Be the Healing Balm

In this day and age, many of us feel alienated from ourselves. We crave attention, control, and security to assuage our fears. We strategize to get what we want from others because we resist meeting our deepest feelings.

The result is a painful lack of intimacy that keeps us isolated. We long to be accepted for who we are, but fear being rejected if we were to reveal the whole truth about ourselves. This is the root of all our relationship struggles.

Loving presence is the healing balm. When you are empty and aware and offer others your unconditional interest, the walls begin to crumble. There is a return to wholeness, acceptance, and clarity and a welcome sense of relief from no longer having to maintain a protective vigil. You and the apparent other relax into the space where you meet as love.

My challenge to you is to take one interaction – with anyone – and show up as empty, aware presence. Ask questions from a place of curiosity, and let the answers drop all the way into your loving heart. It doesn’t have to be a heavy discussion.  An everyday, seemingly superficial interaction or one with a stranger is the perfect place to start.  You will make someone’s day, I promise you.

And you are likely to find what I have discovered – intimacy, connection, happiness, a heart overflowing.

I’d love to hear how it goes…

Note:  I am honored to have been asked to write a chapter in Leo Babauta’s new book, Focus: A Simplicity Manifesto in the Age of Distraction.  My chapter addresses how to overcome fears of focusing.  I don’t receive anything if you buy the book, but you will undoubtedly benefit from tons of  practical suggestions that support a sane and happy life in these crazy, overstimulating times we live in.  I highly recommend it.

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The Good News About Limiting Beliefs

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“When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.”
~African proverb

In the last post, we saw that when we tell the truth about our challenging relationships, the only solution is to look within. Where previously we might have blamed or criticized another, we discovered that the true source of the problem is our own unexamined thoughts and feelings. When we are willing to explore these unresolved places in ourselves, we stop projecting them onto others. We stop wanting others to change so we feel better. We accept the fundamental reality of people and situations and respond accordingly.

This approach potentially shifts the whole dynamic of a relationship. Friction fades to freedom; resistance to wise responding.

The Tragic Effect of Not Embracing Feelings

However, the desire to look within is extremely rare. Very few people are interested in inner reflection, in taking responsibility for their contribution to their own unhappiness. Projection runs rampant in everyday life, with the vast majority of beings on the planet wanting others to change so they can avoid feeling their own pain. It is at the root of wars between nations as well as conflicts in our communities and struggles in our homes.

Most people in the world do not want to be honest with themselves. And we have probably encountered some of them in our own lives.

What happens when we are the object of other people’s unexamined pain? Say you were raised by parents who could not meet their own sadness or fear. Maybe you had a teacher or sibling or neighbor who was ruled by a need to avoid their own distressing feelings.

Even though unintentional, you might have been the object of someone’s:

  • Blaming
  • Judging
  • Criticizing
  • Abandoning
  • Demanding
  • Ignoring
  • Manipulating
  • Intruding

How did that affect you? Because of how others treated you, you may have concluded that you are unworthy, lacking, needing to prove yourself or please others to deserve love. You may believe that success and fulfillment are for other people, not you. You may speak to yourself with a very harsh voice.

As Always, the Way Out

Well, here is the good news: it is so important to realize that how you were treated had very little to do with you. The person who could not give you what you needed was unable to tend to their own painful emotions. What happens when people hide from their inner strife? They engage in all manner of avoidance strategies, some of which have an impact on those closest to them.

Significant people in your life may not have really wanted you to suffer by this treatment, and you didn’t really want to let it define you. Both of you were unaware of what was happening and both ill-equipped to handle it wisely.

Divest Yourself of Limiting Beliefs

The beliefs you hold about yourself? They seem true, but they are erroneous conclusions based on others’ misguided behavior. When to unwind them? How about now.

  • Bring to mind a belief or mindset that holds you back in life.
  • Reflect on how that belief developed. How were you treated that led you to conclude that you are damaged, incapable, or less than whole?
  • Now, enter the world of the person you were in relationship with. What do you imagine he or she was actually feeling – scared, overwhelmed, incompetent, angry, filled with unexpressed sorrow? Can you see that this person was unable, or unwilling, to embrace these uncomfortable feelings?
  • Reflect on the fact that the pressure of these feelings fueled their less-than-supportive behavior toward you, leading you to make distorted – and untrue – assumptions about yourself.

As part of my training to be a therapist, I had a session in family sculpting. I chose fellow interns in our group to play the roles of people in my family, and I gave them a scene to enact. Now, my mother can be a formidable character. But through this play, I became privy to unexplored frustration, sadness, and fear I never imagined she could have been feeling. I felt so relieved not to have to carry the effects of it any longer.

The legacy of unconsciousness continues in families – until it stops. Like tumbling dominoes, one person denies their pain, which impacts those around them, and so on through the generations. You may have absorbed this tragic bequest, but you also hold the key to unlock yourself from the prison of these beliefs.

Living Consciously = Clarity, Light, Ease

As we saw last week, you can lovingly welcome all parts of yourself into awareness and thereby put an end to your role in emotional and relationship drama. And, with the light of clear seeing, you can shed unproductive and demeaning identities that have nothing to do with your brilliant essence. Regarding all of the insanity, the buck stops with you.

What happens next? Enjoy your life. If gratitude wells up, let it consume you. Live from your heart, and be the light of truth and clarity in this crazy world we live in.

What have been your insights about limiting beliefs you hold about yourself? What do you experience when you look objectively at what really happened in your past?  Any other thoughts?  I’d love to hear….

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Thank You, Annoying People

“All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.”
~Marshall Rosenberg

I met someone recently who pushes my buttons, and not the good ones. When I am around him, I feel irritated, there are judging thoughts running through my mind, I am trying to figure out how I can get away, I want him to be different than the way he is. I actually think I am justified in my feelings because I know other people feel the same way I do.

But where does this get me? I’m right…but so what?

Truth be told, feeling right doesn’t even feel that good. I feel the arrogance of being “holier than thou” in my body like a ten-pound weight in my chest. Being right certainly doesn’t put me any more at ease when I anticipate encountering this man again, and it doesn’t bring any more love into the world. In fact, I am trapped, a victim of my judgments and opinions. And I am contributing to disharmony and strife.

Please Change so I Feel Better

What I am experiencing is a ubiquitous phenomenon that is at the root of all interpersonal difficulties: we want other people to change so our uncomfortable feelings will diminish. I want my new acquaintance to not be overbearing so I won’t feel invaded. Mary wants her husband to not throw his clothes on the floor so she can find relief from her frustration. Joe wants his coworker to stop talking so much so he won’t feel bored and irritated.

We give up our inner comfort to something we cannot control – the behavior of other people. And, oh, the lengths to which we will go to try to control them anyway!

When we don’t own our emotional reactions, we run the risk of wreaking havoc on our lives. We leave relationships, gossip, criticize, fight, manipulate, and spend our precious time rationalizing our opinions to ourselves and everyone else around us.

Is this what we really want? Do we want to promote friction and divisiveness – or do we want to be free of undesirable habits and meet the world with an open heart?

True Healing by Turning Our Attention Inward

It is so easy to blame and accuse. But the beginning of a bold and courageous enterprise is to turn our attention away from the other and directly into all the distressing emotions we strive so hard to avoid. We stop seeing others through the veil of our own pain, and compassion naturally arises – for others as well as ourselves.

Rather than being an annoyance, our reactions to other people can be viewed as a golden invitation served to us on a silver platter. They are a mirror that reflects back to us areas of unexplored emotion and inner secret places where we wall ourselves off. Being triggered by others becomes a time of celebration: we get to see where we are stuck, we have the opportunity to free ourselves, and as one book title suggests, we can say, “Thank You for Being Such a Pain.”

The inner investigation of our triggered reactions toward others reveals so much tender information. If you lash out at your partner, you might realize you are actually afraid. If you judge and constrict your children, maybe you feel helpless as a parent. Take any relationship that causes you stress or displeasure, and like a trail of breadcrumbs, follow your reaction back into yourself to its source. I can guarantee you your discovery will be illuminating.

The Opportunity to Clean Up the Past

Often, the strong feelings that arise in our interactions echo an unresolved relationship from our past. If you were criticized by an overly demanding parent, it won’t take much for a boss correcting your work to seem like a tyrant in your eyes. If you were abandoned in your youth, a friend calling to cancel plans at the last minute may cause you to feel like you are five again. Any reaction that seems too intense for the situation at hand has undoubtedly triggered some old, undigested feelings.

What to do with these emotions that are revealed? Love them with all your heart. Surround them with affection. Let your heartfelt attention permeate them entirely. And once they have drunk their fill, notice that you now see others in a fresh light. Where before you saw an aggressor or a nuisance, the clouds part and you see a tender being who is scared, hurt, or needy. Now the relationship, you and the other, have the potential to be transformed.

Author and teacher Byron Katie says, “Things don’t happen to you, they happen for you.” The challenges in our relationships are an offering, a gentle tap on the shoulder asking us to deepen in our commitment to freedom. Can we take care of ourselves and free our interactions from being repositories of our pain and suffering? Can we look into another’s eyes and rest in the space of non-separation? Can we declare an unmitigated, “Yes!” to truth, to life, to this very moment?

This is a topic that hits home for all of us. I’d love to hear how you are meeting these relationship challenges in your own life.

For an exercise in unconditional acceptance, have a listen to: You Are Welcome as You Are.

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Relationships, Happiness, Freedom, and More

Wishing everyone a very Happy New Year!  May 2010 be a banner year for you in every way.

You may not realize it, but there is a very connected community developing here at A Flourishing Life.  Every reader of this blog has a compelling interest in knowing themselves so deeply that reality cannot be denied.  We are joined in discovering wonder in the ordinary moment and a heart overflowing with gratitude for no reason.

I read a post recently over at GoodlifeZen, the site of fellow blogger, Mary Jaksch, in which she listed all the guest posts she had written during the year. To acknowledge a great idea (Thanks, Mary!), I’ve decided to do the same.

My journey into the world of blogging has included the opportunity to post articles on some wonderful sites, and I offer these to you.