By Winnie Bolton
I’ve been aware for some time now that rifts in otherwise loving families can continue for awhile without a clue toward healing.
But consider the following keys in any relationship which could help mending those fences:
One: Don’t judge,
Two: Don’t rationalize and
Three: Don’t defend your point of view.
When you stop judging, interpreting, defending, analyzing, describing, labeling, evaluating and defining – in that silence of non-judgment there spontaneously is healing and effective relationships.
Silence comes because most of the background noise in our brains is nothing other than the noise of judgment.
Even though the connection may not seem obvious, we make things happen even though we may perceive them as happening to us and rationalization is just an excuse for the experience basically of things happening to us. It’s a change in perception that is necessary.
If we practice these simple principles our relationships become magical. Most people spend their entire life defending their position. But the moment we stop trying to do that we are approaching defensivelessness.
Defensivelessness is actually the key to invisibility. When you let down all your defenses there is nothing to attack.
We cannot change other people by telling them to change or trying to make them change. It never works.
But our own environment can change because our environment is our extended body – an expression ourselves.
Losing the need to defend our point of view doesn’t mean that we don’t have a point of view.
We just aren’t rigidly attached to defending it because all life is the coexistence of all kinds of points of view.
No two people are going to experience a reality in the exact same way.
So it’s not necessary to manipulate another’s experience of reality.
As long as you lose your rigid need to defend your point of view that in itself will improve any relationship.
There’s a magnet on my refrigerator door which helps me to remember this.
It’s a magnet of a heart having been just washed in a bucket of suds and hung on a clothes line in the back yard to dry.
The words read, “Sometimes we need a change of heart.”
Quoting psychiatrist Carl Jung – “We will always find differences of attitudes and inclinations in those we love.
“Happy relations can only be experienced if no one feels threatened by differences but respects and honors the others’ perception and opinions.”
