When you improve your relationships it doesn’t just benefit you – it affects everyone around you – like your partner, family, friends and workmates. Having healthy relationships is a key to a happy life.
This benefit of mindful drawing doesn’t arrive all on its own. It’s a result of activating other benefits like deeper self-awareness, learning to open up and be vulnerable about why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling (the relationship equivalent of scaling Mount Everest) and the old stinger: learning not to take things personally.
Not taking things personally becomes far easier when you clear out your shadows because you just don’t get triggered anymore. We get triggered when we have unhealed wounds relating to lack of self-worth, rejection issues or not feeling good enough.
Now you’ll find you can actually communicate effectively – instead of reacting, holding back the sting of tears and gulping red wine really fast to cope. Yessss that was me.
The main benefit that helps to improve your relationships is growing self-love.
Growing self-love is the cornerstone of all benefits. It’s the holy grail.
It’s hard to have a healthy relationship without a solid foundation of self-love, because when you don’t love yourself, it’s close to impossible to believe that someone else can love you. And this is often toxic.
But the good thing is you can have ALL of these benefits (plus loads more) if you put in the work. You can create this reality for yourself. (And have I mentioned that it’s the best work in the existence of ALL work in the entire universe?)
Here's an example of what it looks like when you improve your relationships.
Let’s say your partner does something which makes you feel like utter crap. Instead of being unaware of why this is triggering you and reacting like a fireball (you know the game: TRIGGER > snappy wounded reaction from you > defensive response from them > rapid-fire escalation).
This new version of you, will take a step back into your powerful new pause between stimulus and response. You created this pause out nothing by the way. Nothing but awareness and intention, and practice – because you’re leveling up.
Think of yourself
as a magician
who is learning how to
shape your reality.
Now you’ll lay your shit out on the table – embarrassing, raw stuff sometimes – because new, improved you is cool with being vulnerable. It’s not easy by any stretch – but FUCK EASY when it’s right. And you’ll calmly explain what is hurting or bothering you – without attacking.
If you’re highly emotional and you’re gonna explode (old me EVERY TIME), instead, you’ll create another powerful pause between stimulus and response (wield that magic), and you’ll glide away or rip yourself away – whatever works – and you’ll go sit outside and breathe, centre, ground, scream, cry and you’ll come back when you’re calm.
It doesn’t always work like that of course, but that’s what the word “sorry” is for. Someone use it. Open up a SAFE SPACE for the other person to use it too, and learn from it.
You'll explain how this *shit thing* makes you feel.
If you’ve got a goodie who loves you, then you’ll both already know – or grow to know – that this is an opportunity to dive a little deeper into your relationship with one another. And this is what love is all about. Ever-deepening beautiful layers. Not shallow, honeymoon period ONLY, airbrushed FAKE shit.
Together, we’re like magical alchemists – we’ve got the goods to transmute the tough times into gold. This of course, takes the two of you – if it’s one-sided it just ain’t going to work. You’re better off being single (and this is a spectacular journey all on its own).
Having good relationships is also tied to having healthy boundaries.
Often we need BIG boundaries when it comes to certain people in our lives – for me, it’s my family. When I finally learned what a boundary actually was (late bloomer here), I whacked a boundary into conversations with my Mum and step dad, and voila, life instantly became far less yukky.
These days, we don’t talk about our upbringing, mental health, religion or anything to do with each other’s beliefs. We stick to what I call, “Level 1” convos (THE most basic) and funny animal memes. It’s a bit sad that it’s the only way we can communicate, but it is what it is.
If we don’t use boundaries and go beyond Level 1 convos, we’ll fight. And it brings up old wounds, it hurts bad and it takes days to resolve. It’s vibration-lowering and energetically gross – and I’m mega protective of my energy. I’ve done it enough times to know not to go there.
You also improve your relationships when you become less judgemental of people.
The thing with people is, let ’em do whatever they want – it’s their game. This is easier said than done because us humans have a weird habit of judging people. We just love pointing the finger.
When you’re doing the inner work, you’ll gradually judge people less. You accept that people have every right to make their choices. It’s their path. We all have our lessons to learn and their choices are not our business.
Stay in your lane
and focus on creating
your best life.
When you’re working to improve your relationships, you also get really good saying, I’m wrong. I’m a dick, Or I’m sorry.
Having better relationships in your life is not all about avoiding clashes either.
Every disagreement or difference in opinion is an opportunity to get to know someone on a deeper level. This is what teaches us more about ourselves and each other. With the right course of action, clashes can be diffused before they ignite and blow up to become this big thing. It’s all practice.
Improving relationships is about deepening connections to people you choose to have in your life. Listening better. Being understanding. Loving more unconditionally. Supporting one another. Laughing together. Showing vulnerability, being an example and learning from one another.
What it’s not about, is being right, or being perfect. It’s about knowing you are a growing, evolving human, consciously creating your pathway as you go.
