SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

By LaShelle Lowe-Chardé

Whether you are falling in love, offering counseling, or listening to a friend, you give the biggest gift by staying connected to yourself at the same time.

The pleasure and intensity of a strong connection or focus can be a wave that you seem to enjoy riding in the moment, but at the end you may find yourself a bit lost and depleted.

Martial arts and energy practices like tai chi, and chi gong all emphasize balancing your physical and energetic bodies in your center and maintaining a relaxed expansive focus.  In these arts you learn that movement requires less contraction and muscle than you habitually engage.  Learning to relax and move in a more subtle way, energy can flow freely and keep you healthy and nourished.

All this remains true in the social, mental, and emotional realms as well.  Even as you give your loving attention to another, you can do so while maintaining a sense of your own needs and energy in a relaxed state.  This might feel like a physical and energetic settling back and into your core.  You might do this by focusing on your breath; aligning your posture over your center;  bringing awareness to receiving through your crown and root charkas and feeling the hara line that runs through your center between them; pulling your shoulders back and relaxing your face;  repeating a mantra to yourself, feeling your feet, or anything else that gets you present in yourself.

You might be able to give yourself and the other attention at the same time or you might simply shuttle back and forth consciously.

Forward or slumped posture, lack of energy, disorientation, narrow and exclusive focus, muscle tension, and doing and saying things that aren’t authentic for you, can all be symptoms of giving yourself away.

Giving yourself away to your clients, your friends, or your beloved leaves you less resourced and more reactive.  In this way a cycle of depletion gets created and you might find yourself avoiding the people you love most.

Take a moment now and reflect on your recent interactions.  Notice if any of the symptoms of giving yourself away are present.  Choose a particular relationship or context in which for the next week you will practice staying with yourself while giving loving attention to another.

Here is the direct link to this gem where you can read and comment:
http://www.wiseheartpdx.org/blog/?p=652

Next Compassionate Communication course in Auckland, New Zealand: Foundation Workshop in Parnell, Auckland, with Susie Spiller.  Find out more.

Tags: communication