Tag Archives: getting InTouch

The relationship between loving kindness and compassionate communication:

Posted on June 21, 2013 | 1 comment

A student attending Think, Speak, Act workshops, a series of getting InTouch Communication, is a Buddhist student and has practiced meditation for many years. After a short series of workshops and a few private empathy sessions to learn and practice self empathy and empathetic listening and speaking skills, a comparison was made with what I was sharing with their recent retreat teacher dialogues.

Hearing this I made a request to have some points written down so that I could have more clarity. With luck another retreat was scheduled. As promised here are some notes of how they integrated our Think, Speak, Act practices and how it aligns with their Buddhist retreat learning.

It is to communicate or to speak kindly, to pay attention to the inner voice.
Our ability to respond in a friendly way.
It is to be aware, knowing what is going on. Communication affects us and others.
It is a language of respect. It is sharing and opening to other.
It is getting to know our self better to see what is our state of mind moment by moment.
When you observe closely you gain insight and recognize the truth in the present moment.
It is training the mind.
It is to be able to stop our habitual response, calm down our nervous system, relax and be less reactive.
It is to get familiar on how do we experience our feeling and how it impacts on us and others.
Loving kindness or Meta fill our needs by opening the heart and wishing us and for other positive statements.
When we express our feeling or needs the receiver is more receptive.
Compassion is honesty, to say the real inner feeling. (There are no judging or blaming). There are not too many words to explain “compassion.”One of the statements of compassion is: “May I have ease (space) with this difficulty.” Stay in the feeling and say: “I care for that pain or difficult time.”
When we practice Metta or getting InTouch techniques the circuit in the brain runs differently in different parts of the brain.
The point of Metta and getting InTouch is to extend your kindness, your compassion to others around us and in the world.
Metta or getting InTouch is responding to the feeling and the needs in a gentle way.
It is helping the little self, “The ego” to not be involved. To see things as they are…….
Self Empathy is to observe to see what is happening and connecting with the stimulus without being caught in it.
It is helping us for a liberation and not being caught in the thinking mind.
This approach of Metta or getting InTouch cares about us, it is to see with the “big mind, the big picture.”
We react the way we react because we do not know other ways until we learn the new way of communication. We often say and do things we regret.
One of our deep needs is to understand to see the stimulus with “big eyes.” Take the problem or conflict and understand really what happened, observe, identity the feeling in us.
Be able to see more than to react to the stimulus, see the old story, the hold picture.

The compassionate communication of getting InTouch is a tool to respond properly to our self and to others. To be awake is to be able to respond appropriately with loving kindness.

A final comment was that they changed their personal Buddhist affirmations (mantras) based upon having more clarity on how to achieve success in connection to the statements. To understand them with concrete actions and making them doable!

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Tagged Buddhist Perception, buddhist retreat, different parts of the brain, gain insight, getting InTouch, Loving Kindness, Metta, Mind, opening the heart, parts of the brain, Perception, Self growth, thinking

Top 7 signs your love relationship is struggling

Posted on June 8, 2013 | 2 comments

So much of your time in being a twosome is spend taking care of things and being busy. You both have schedules of your own and one with your partner and children if you have any. You know when family chores have to be done, when bills need to be paid and when anyone is unwell or sick. You strive to have a healthy home and family. But in these efforts to live a family life, you often overlook the glue that holds your family together. The intimacy in your relationship that makes you a couple. Everything around you may be nice but your relationship is suffering and needs tending and care. What are the telltale signs that your relationship is struggling?

1. Fear & Resentment

You know there are things you should be doing to help your relationship thrive, but you avoid them because they make you uncomfortable. Maybe they don’t seem interesting or naturally compelling or you believe in “following your joy”. You feel less confident about speaking up about issues that are important to you and put them on the back burner. You may choose the path of least resistance, least risk and least learning or effort until it is a crisis. With the added pressure and stress of a crisis, it is hard to do anything effectively or authentically when driven by fear. It’s a vicious cycle and waste of time and peace of mind.

2. Avoiding Issues in Your Relationship

Your relationship with your partner is unpredictable and wearing thin. You don’t have a clear sense of what is expected of you or what you expect yourself in each moment. You love your home, your children, your community, but at times you put your head in the sand when it comes to really knowing “where things are at” between you and your partner. You don’t know how to develop intimacy in your relationship. You have had more than your share of lost opportunities to be valued by your partner or to value them. The ego loves ambiguity and uses it to create stress and worry, robbing you of joy in your relationship.

3. When Meaning is Missing from Your Relationship

When you have put aside your faith or life philosophy for the relationship and if it is not the inner source for your actions it creates a compartmentalized life. Cut off from intention and source of what motivates you, your relationship can start to feel devoid of inspiration and purpose, resulting in depressed daily functions. This is often when partners say they feel alone in their relationship, with heavy burdens on their shoulders, contributing to relationships burnout.

4. Walking in the Disconnected Relationship

This is when relationships feels like work and as though there is no purpose. Your marriage can feel like there is no mutuality and that there is no point of connection. It is not easy and you feel like it takes huge effort just to get the smallest thing done. You feel resentment when considering how much effort, time and energy your relationship requires. You may secretly wish you could cancel your marriage. You have lost the memory of the positive aspects of what you once loved in being a couple. This is relationship burnout.

5. You Feel Abandoned and Alone

You don’t know where to turn or how to start. You feel frustrated at putting effort into this, or the efforts you are making are not yielding results. You feel discomfort, concern or fear when you and your partner move farther apart or disagree. In the absence of a thriving relationship in your marriage you begin to feel like anyone else would be a better match for you. You have lost track of you and the integrity of your commitment. You secretly hope that a new partner will have the qualities that you feel are lacking in your current relationship. You believe you should be enough and that you deserve to be loved and feel the affection that has been lost and that you will find this in a new partner. Sadly, we know that is not the case.

6. Current Communication Sucks

You are angry and hurt that your partner is not fulfilling your needs and that your relationship does not show your true self. You don’t care if your partner is getting their needs met in your relationships or not, yet you do care about what they are doing. You may begin to control everything to try and find the support you need without considering what they need or even to consider if they want to take part. Physical intimacy is a source of guilt and anxiety. If you haven’t had successful moments of intimacy in your communication experiences you may have become restrictive with your affection towards one another. Things are beginning to fall apart and you can’t keep on top of it. You may come up with ideas to fix things, such as replacing furniture, changing your address, increasing your family in some way, seeking therapy all the while hoping it will work this time! You may feel like circumstances are working against you more than they are working for you. Good news is, this is a pretty easy fix if you are ready, willing and committed.

7. Bad Communication

You tend to seek help when you realize that you are about to separate, maybe become divorced and lose everything you have worked for. Your goals have only ever considered your financial future and where you want to be financially in the future, where you will live, where your children will go to college and your retirement. You have never had clear relationships goals and no planning has gone into what make your relationship harmonious and one that equally values each person. There are no clearly established agreements that support what is meaningful for each partner. Somewhere an unspoken assumption is that one partner has to do what the other wants and give up their dream as we have been taught there is a winner and a looser. We have never experienced two winners in a relationship before so how would we know how to create this in our own relationships? Without the skills to create a relationship that each partner equally matters, you feel frustrated at the reality that learning how to do this is actually an ongoing process of building trust so that you can experience intimacy and rapport. It will need constant nurturing and attention for most of the life of your relationship.

As a fellow human being who loves being in relationships, I have had times in my life when I have experienced relationships when they were not in balance, resulted in separation and divorce. On a daily basis, clients come for support to regain wellness and balance. Most times it is the end of their relationship and not at the beginning or middle when it would be time to seek support to create wellness in the relationships now for future sustainability. If your marriage is in the spirit of who you are, what you do is the relationship. You need wellness in both to create thriving intimate relationship.

At getting Intouch Coaching, I specialize in helping partners in relationships move into healthy balance to create thriving and intimate relationships mentally, emotionally and physically. Connect with me at Inside Awareness for Healthy Living to find out how to increase the vitality in your relationship. Isn’t now the time to begin to take the steps and make the effort where it really matters? In the center point from which all your experiences start from? Contact info is renee (at) insideawareness (dot) com or two,five,zero-three,six,one-seven,five,zero,eight.

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Posted in Relationships

Tagged Emotional Health, family chores, getting InTouch, Health, Healthy Living, Healthy Relationships, Love, mental-health, path of least resistance, Relationships, society, Well Being

Intimacy in relationships

Posted on June 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

Intimacy in relationships begins with an experience! Intimacy begins with tenderness in our skill of listening and ability for reflecting back. It is our willingness to hear and not to only be heard.

How many of us want to be held and touched tenderly by our lovers?
Why would our conversations be any different?
Can you remember a time when the tender kindness that went into your intimate touch was matched in your conversation with your lover? When that tenderness is not in the conversation do you imagine them as your lover in that moment?
When was a time that you both shared anything with each tenderly and felt accepted exactly as you are?

I believe it is more important to create an experience of intimate connection in conversation first before mastering the correctness of how to speak to each other. Ever coach a couple only to hear one partner tell the other how it’s done? Intimacy maker? No! If you forget how it should be done and have the experience of intimate connection you are more apt to take chances, be creative and develop your courage to tell each other what really matters. This is when I experience couples commit to keep trying to hear what is meaningful in what the other person is trying to share. If you have to learn how to do it and get it right first, before the connection, it tells me that you are feeling frightened and need the safety of being right and getting your way at the expense of your partner.

Therefore with couples the primary focus is to walk them through a dialogue dance that isn’t focused on how to do it. It is focused on doing it and accepting whatever arises so that it is easy for them to feel heard and understood. This is when they feel safe to share important issues.

Each partner is being coached to make the dialogue about themselves to translate each story they bring up into being about themselves and never staying in the habit of making it about the other person. Talk is slowed down so that each partner can reflect and that the dialogue is never one-sided. It means pausing to connect to what is being said before bringing up other issues so that both have a say.

It definitely isn’t for the faint hearted. It is for couples wanting to work on their intimacy, vulnerability and grow their relationships to bring warm loving kindness and spiciness back into the experience.

This week I had an opportunity to stand beside and guide couples into their vulnerability to the point the veil of self protection fell away. From this place of deep meaning it is one of the most tender sweet spots to find oneself in. By standers included! You are where it really matters. When couples commit to continue coming back to try and express in a way they both can be heard, isolated behavior and fear looses its power, humor develops and it becomes easier. This is when it becomes about the relationship and not about winning.

Integrating the emotional and physical behaviors into ones own image of self

Posted on June 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

In private sessions with clients there is less distraction and the benefit can be deepened awareness of their own behavior. This includes clarity of how reactions are dependent on both thinking and locked in movement patterns. The two are locked into behavior!

Clients searching for a change in their relationships will enjoy the simple movement techniques I introduce to increase their focus. Some will begin to alternate between talking and movement sessions. Both these types of sessions are designed to increase the success in their progress and are compatible.

Clients who come for improving their movement and reducing pain will find themselves integrating their emotional reactions that are keeping them in their pain and strain.

Both types of clients discover physical movement and emotional reactions are married together in their reactions. They come to know the value in learning their automatic habits. If someone is able to observe their habits then there will be change.

One example is a client who discovered one of the largest muscles in their body and that they had not been using them. They didn’t even know at first how to engage it! This client originally came to improve their relationship connections. To relieve their tension and increase their breathing patterns I introduced small movements for them to experience. Afterwards our sessions began to alternate between the two types of sessions, movement awareness and talking awareness.

They discovered a large muscle that was dormant and not being used. They realized the strain that this put on their whole body in the effort to move in any activity. They also realized they did not even know how to activate this muscle. There was no connection to the brain signals.

Then came the awareness of tension being held in another set of muscles. The control that went into holding these muscles stopped any ability to engage these new ones! The control of this other set of muscles was directly related to emotional behavior! The balance then came from intellectually knowing one is safe and supported to begin to release control.

I love my work! When clients can experience their journey through learning techniques their journey is more concise and clear. There is beauty in waking up the parts that have no brain awareness! When this client stopped using these big muscles the brain lost the memory of it. Therefore there is a disconnection until they relearn they have these muscles and how to use it. If they are not aware that they have stopped using it, how will they even know about it?

This is something that cannot be learned through outside sources and activities. It takes a control environment of focused somatic learning.

When the education stops change begin!

Behavior is the art “man” has forgotten!

Posted on May 28, 2013 | Leave a comment

Have I ever told you how much I enjoy myself! I have the best position in the world! I watch workshop members integrate information and see change in them in as little as two hours.

In two seemingly separate workshops yesterday the members heard me say, “If you don’t use it you lose it!” Both workshops are designed around personal exploration with the intention to increase the use of participants brains in a novel way. One through movement to increase balance and the other relationship behavior. We know our relationships are based upon behavior , yet when you consider movement, it too is a learned behavior!

The workshop members are looking for change and to improve their life abilities in some way. Those only looking for reassurance that they have the answers already move on quickly to the next novel workshop. Those who stay, do so as they are tired of seeking answers from external sources and are wanting sincere change. They are willing to go beyond thinking about it and finding easy answers. They are willing to explore and deepen their understand through practical experience. That’s when the magic happens and brains mapping increases. I see a shift in facial expressions, body posture and tone. This is when tiredness turns into engagement, fear turns into contentment, and lack of supporting oneself turns into personal power of supporting oneself.

I also enjoy the verbal feedback that comes from participants. One of our workshops from yesterday explored deepening patterns of listening. A practice of a simple pattern of steps was introduced with an explanation of how it was similar to a pattern used in other parts of our culture to increase safety. At the end of the night one participant shared they had just spent the past weekend in a loving kindness meditation. While listening to their teacher they had moments of joyful surprise when what they heard was similar to what they had been learning and practicing through our workshops together.

The difference for me is that our workshops are based upon the practical application: to act from conscious action in the moment you are living the experience. It is not a practice of faith, tradition or spirituality. It is not the dogma. It is a series of steps to recognize and change behavior. I believe it may support the art of living one’s faith! Perhaps it is the bridge to bring that loving kindness into a moment of action.

I know for myself that I can meditate until the cows come home and still my relationships interactions outside of the mediation space remain the same. The experience is not translating into real life action. Yet I notice that when I have the courage to listen first and then speak authentically and honestly, the same quality of experience rises up within as when I have been in long mediation!

Have I ever told you how much I enjoy this? When I imagine the Japanese Zen artist drawing from a state of mediation and holding the calligraphy pen to draw the circle of life or the dot of awakened state, I draw a comparison. I know the behavioral pattern awareness and integration process I share to be the pen. My opinion is that they are the tool to increase skill levels of behavioral action in the moment of living it.

Behavior is the art “man” has forgotten!

Intimacy ~ Art of Listening and the responsibility of the speaker

Posted on May 25, 2013 | 1 comment

Listening changes when the space is created to feel supported by everyone in the group while, at the same time, hearing “new information on how to listen” and having the courage to participate in the guided practice suggestions without worrying about right and wrong ways of speaking. Renee Lindstrom

There is joy in working with individuals committed to improving the intimacy in their relationships. It is not the traditional sharing circle of going on and on about our stories and talking about it! The learning comes through the experience of sharing in a precise pattern of speaking and listening to increase the potential of spontaneous vulnerability and freedom of speech. There are no rituals, feathers, labels, conditions or talk therapy!

Our learning time together become a unified experience of a series of planned practices designed to learn through the experience itself. In the closing feedback I hear unique and individual comments of learning that is coming from their own source of creative expression. The tools have laid out a pattern for exploring deeper within and the awareness that is expressed is simple, intimate and beautiful. It is easy for the ears of others to really take it in!

The members of the group now have a new memory experience to notice the differences of their interactions with their partner through the week until we met again. Mission accomplished and we didn’t have to go on 3, 7 or 9 day retreat, be healed or fixed, or hand ourselves over to any higher power or focus upon our conditions. A set of intimacy tools that can be taught easily and be yours by your willingness to experience it.

To find out more about how to experience personal clarity and power in your world – inquire by email – renee(at)insideawareness(dot)com.

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Posted in Relationships

Tagged Behavior, getting InTouch, Inside Awareness, Intimacy, Listening Skils, Relationship Training for Couples, Relationships, Self empowerment, Speaking Skills