"Be comfortable with yourself first - then be comfortable with the world." Susan Abenilla-Brown
One of my favorite ways to make myself feel strong, lean, and healthy is to get outside and hike. I love the hills. I love the fresh air or prana and I love the company I keep. I have a couple of girlfriends who are available to walk with me during the weekday. Their work schedule is flexible and we are well aware of how fortunate we are to be outside in nature while most people are at a desk. We are lucky to steal a little girl time to talk. What do we usually talk about? Relationships. While we are out in nature, stepping forward, away from the everyday sights and sounds of modernity, there is nothing more natural than for us to take the time to talk about our relationships. I thought I would start my newsletter focusing on something so essential to our well-being: relationships.
Whether it is your boyfriend, girlfriend, child, husband, wife, sister, brother or best friend- most people, as social creatures, tend to spend some time turning over these relationships in their minds. Sometimes we turn them over in our minds with relish, sometimes with fury. Either way, there they are. Our significant relationships are oftentimes at the forefront of who we are. Hidden inside of all our relationships is the one we have with ourselves, the ground zero, the ultimate starting place. Who we are is in every relationship we have.
Consider the words of Bill McDonnough, a leading expert on environmental architecture (he's working with Brad Pitt right now on rebuilding New Orleans). He proposed that in this life we need more than just sustainability for the environment; we need kinship. Not only do we need more kinship with our environment, we need more kinship with all of our relationships. How we treat each other will reflect in how we treat our world.
He said, "If I asked you how your relationship with your husband or wife is and you said 'sustainable', is that really good enough? No way. It's not good enough for you or for your spouse. It's time for kinship."
What is kinship and how can I experience the greatest kinship with the people in my life?
Kinship is what happens to relationships when they are functioning with the greatest possible ease at the highest possible return. This means that each party gets back a thousand times what they give in terms of love, happiness, and fulfillment.
Kinship is like planting a small apple seed and getting back a whole tree full of apples. One seed just keeps yielding more and more, year after year. Many of my relationships are yielding apples but if I am to be totally honest, I will admit that I have a few relationships that aren't yielding much fruit. Instead they are yielding struggle and misunderstanding. What do I do with these relationships? Do I just keep enduring these muddy relationships and hope for someday?
For an answer to this, I turn to what I know through my yoga. In yoga, I know with my body. I know if I am bossing it around, telling it what to do, believing that it will never be good enough, then that's a type of dictatorship. If I am ignoring my body and its needs then that is a type of neglect. Kinship is a not a dictatorship nor neglect but a friendship. In order for kinship to manifest itself with others, being friends with our bodies and our selves is a natural place to begin. Begin by loving what is. Kinship with our bodies is a little less self-improvement and a little more self-acceptance. So, in our relationships, once we come to practice self-acceptance and kinship with our own selves and our own bodies, we can extend it to kinship with others. We can extend it out to kinship with our loved ones, strangers, enemies, and this earth. This is the lesson of yoga.
For one day (or for five breaths in a challenging yoga pose such as Warrior 3) can you extend kinship to yourself? I mean that. Starting with accepting your self is the path to accepting your spouse or your father or mother. Once you practice acceptance with your self then you can expand.
Extending kinship to myself is a practice just like the discipline of yoga is a practice. Befriending my self, especially at the beginning of a New Year is not something that comes naturally to me. I am more inclined to be the dictator with myself as I set out to achieve my New Year's Resolutions. (Especially when it comes to eating right and weight loss.) But once I do get into the practice of self-acceptance and self-kindness and do extend kinship to myself, I find that the need to put myself down inwardly and to judge others outwardly starts to evaporate. It disappears. I actually find spoken criticisms of others harsh and uninviting. Through the practice of self-acceptance, I get into alignment with what is. The concept of yoga is simple- as yogis we get into alignment with what is and practice accepting it.
Once you are in alignment with what is- acceptance has the chance to become real love. No one has to change for you to love them. Not even you. Incredible isn't it? That doesn't mean that we don't ever change, that we don't honor our own changes that we want to make in our lives. It just means we don't have to change in order to be loved. That is kinship.
This week I encourage all of us to look at our relationships. Look at the relationship you have with yourself and then notice if this is the relationship you have with others. I challenge all of us to honor the beautiful authentic qualities that exist within ourselves and those that we love and accept the parts that aren't perfect. As yogis, once we begin to walk down the path of self-acceptance, we can start to take some proactive steps toward the love we want and the love we all deserve. Sounds like a great way to begin the New Year to me.
Peace and Love,
Anne Falkowski
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