Relationships and Personal Growth

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about the relationship between relationships and your inner growth. Now, there are a few things that are going to highlight your patterns, your fears, your traumas, and your survival strategies, more than relationships, especially your intimate partnerships. Chances are you've already experienced this. Then for this reason what you experienced in relationship, as well as the kinds of relationships you find yourself most drawn to repeatedly, this can really illuminate what's going on in your internal world.

So a simple thing that you can do when you find yourself triggered in relationship is to just try asking, what might this be showing me about myself. What might this be showing me about myself? We want to be careful with this because what can happen here is we get triggered, somebody does something that maybe crosses a boundary. And instead of putting up our own boundary and saying, you can't do this, we go, oh, maybe there's something about me that I'm doing wrong. And a lot of us can get caught in that pattern, which can be a very toxic pattern. We just let people walk all over us.

We make it all about, oh, these are my issues, I need to work on this, rather than recognizing that person has their own stuff and you have your own boundaries. And there is a dynamic that needs to be established of respect there. So we want to be careful not to go full on into, okay, everything is a reflection of me. I need to do only my personal work. There's a balance here between that and also having an honest conversation with this other person about what your needs are and what your boundaries are.

But it can be a useful practice that we can bring into our life. Especially if we are interested in our growth, where there is a trigger, something really gets activated in us in relationship to another person. And we ask ourself, all right, where's this coming from? What the, what might this be trying to show me about me? What can I learn about myself based on this particular trigger and the emotions that are arising? Just another useful way for you to grow as an individual, and then also start to grow more within a partnership or any sort of relationship. So try this out. It's a great way to merge mindfulness practice with relationship practice.

Thank you for your practice. And let's settle in for today's meditation.