Existence is relationship
I recently heard this sentence during a community call with Charles Eisenstein. It deeply resonated with me because so many times and in so many ways we’re avoiding being in relationship, not only with other human beings.
Our existence primarily means being in relationship with ourselves. With the feelings we hold in our body, with the needs expressed through them, and of course with the body itself. The relationship we have to our own life experiences, however painful they were.
How many times do we distract ourselves when feelings come up that are difficult to hold? Even the positive ones, such as gratitude and joy, we turn into fleeting moments instead of them washing through our entire body.
Feelings are supposed to be felt, not analyzed. This is something I only recently learned, having been trained in so many ways to find an explanation for my anxieties, worries, grief or anger. It makes a world of a difference when I allow the feelings within to simply be felt until they change their form or entirely disappear.
This is type of relationship, I resonated with in Charles’ comment. The relationship that allows everything to exist as is, while I am focusing on staying clear-headed and -minded throughout the process.
Existing in this world, being alive in this world, means I am in relationship with everything that surrounds me, first and foremost nature, air, water and soil. Understanding how all of these elements and sheer beauty of the natural world uncompromisingly sustains us, means to get a deeper appreciation for one aspect of relationship, which is to receive.
Many of us do struggle with receiving because it means to stay open, especially openhearted. The pain and resistance that is attached to it might be a result of the openhearted child we once were not being received or punished for who she was. It’s real pain but it doesn’t have to define anymore the way you enter the relationships of existence today.
Becoming openhearted again is a process that is worth undergoing because it is the premise of living life at its fullest.
The easiest way to gradually allow for it is by being around children and remembering the child you once were and everyone one of us once was, especially those that aggravate you. Each and everyone of us was born with the desire to live a loving, caring, and meaningful life and the reason why many of us aren’t wasn’t their fault in the first place.
However, changing those circumstances nowadays is, and profound changes come when we start opening ourselves up again for the relationships that make up our web of existence.
Staying open to what is happening, taking in the information and responding from a place of genuineness is key to staying in relationship with those we love and care for, and hence with the world at large.
As I mentioned earlier it is of course no easy feat and requires our willingness to (jointly) work through what separates us within and without.
Every time you do that though, the result is a deepening and grounding within this world whereas the distraction from relationship carries us into a world of our own (unchecked) assumptions and (unproven) beliefs.
It makes the difference between merely existing and fully living.