You don't know how building a relationship will change things
You don’t know how something will change when you build a relationship with it.
When you play with a kid and really look at them, something happens.
Why is it not enough to be in the room?
Why do kids say, “Look! Look! Look!” until you actually look?
Why does a date suck if your date won’t look at you?
Why do you feel something when you’re being looked at?
All we know is something changes with attention. And it’s not just the eyes pointed in one direction, it’s an engagement with the thing they’re looking at. Something that electrifies the exchange through the mind and body of the looker and affects the object of their looking.
I think I’ve seen one thing dissenting from the quantum physics experiment with the electrons everybody talks about so I’m gonna resist pretending I know what happens.
When we think about someone we affect them. Our attention is currency. Our attention has a current.
I follow a lot of women who focus on bodies and female anatomy.
All of them discuss building a relationship with your parts. Many talk about how breasts change shape and texture when they’re lovingly massaged. Others discuss how your uterus can be repositioned through attention, visualization, and massage, and they have the testimonials. I’m very glad that pelvic floor PT is a more normal thing now, but you can go through the motions and the exercises without ever paying attention to your bits down there in a way that feels attentive.
One body/energy worker I read teaches people to simply non-judgmentally focus on the area they are stressed about and the miracles of healing that occur by doing so on a regular schedule.
And that’s just your relationship to yourself.
I gave this exercise to Meg Guthmiller’s mentorship program. I wanted to show the women exactly what their mental image was of themselves, using touch and diagramming.
Draw an outline of a human (you.)
Take several minutes and slowly touch yourself everywhere.
When you notice something is hypersensitive (above norm, think ticklish or sensitive), make an X on that spot on your drawing.
When you notice an area is numb or hyposensitive, make an O on the drawing. You may also notice that you cannot pay attention there and get immediate dissociation.
You’ll know more of yourself immediately lol.
Of course that’s one of many versions of this I’ve played with or assigned around gifting people a new vision of themselves over many years.
Vipassana meditation is an invention of the Buddha that serves the exact same thing.
You could start by looking in a mirror and identifying the things you hate vs the things you love and marking those down so you have to confront the realness of that hate you hold towards yourself.
But really this has to do with our relationships to anything. Maybe you could do a diagram for what you hate and like about another person, or your apartment. It’s the judgements and the holes in how we see things without really seeing them.
How do you build a relationship?
By intending to let something show you what it is without you trying to decide what it is ahead of time.
And then that person, or that thing, or maybe it’s just you changing, changes from that receptivity in ways you cannot fathom, predict, or begin to know.
It’s investing to build a relationship with a thing. To try to step away and back on occasion so the other can expand and be themselves without us trying to show off or place our judgements on them prematurely.
I’ll end with a brief summary of the two most recent conversations with my dad.
Mid-talk I realized that he didn’t care about my life except how it affected him and how he felt. And I didn’t judge that. So I stopped trying to make him care the ways I wanted him to and just listened because I cared what he thought and felt. It feels lighter and like the beginning of a new relationship. One that will change us both instead of being in a standoff the whole time, or me trying to stop myself from distracting myself throughout the conversation. I actually want to and look forward to talking to him for the first time in years.