Class Act: Roughing Relationships Like a Dame

 

 
The following "guidelines" are random bits of inspiration that came to me on an overnight bus ride from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, Thailand (11.11.12). Borne out of the dissastisfaction that commonly plagues the complacent relationship (where women occasionally lose their wits and their fierce femme bravado) I took a hard look at some of the common pitfalls and self-saboteur mindsets causing roadblocks in my own relationship. This self-professed manifesto, if you will, is a compilation of Buddhist ideas and random bits of experience I've woven together- the product when you finally allow incubations of the mind to surface. I claim in no way to be an expert in relationships, but if you are anything like me (a girl, cough, a highly emotional android, a Gemini, cough) and you are sick of banging your head against a wall time and time again, still wondering for the umpteenth time why he or she hasn’t changed, then read on...You may see some of your own pitfalls here and ways to deliver yourself out of madness.

 Flip the script.

Do the unexpected; don’t give him a reason to see the worst in you or even better, have something negative to say about you when it comes to blabbing your ish to the gossip mongers (psh, and you thought girls were bad!). Instead, give him a batch of kindness served up on a platter, tongue-twisted cherry on top, and see if he still wants out. Watch him quiver in his boots, utterly confused at what the hell just happened. This doesn’t mean bend over backwards or act under false pretenses, but be true in your intentions and true in your actions. People can smell a load of ‘doo doo’ a mile away. Reach deep into your heart strings and muster some kind of genuine kindness and compassion, applying the law of equanimity in your relationship. Even if your true feelings are “Ugh, I can’t stand him, he doesn’t deserve any kindness or tolerance from me right now”, see if you can separate yourself from his mess and look at him as God (or Buddha) does, or his mother, sister, brother, friend. See him with fresh eyes, as if you are meeting him for the first time and have no history to go off of. We may think that by begrudging him we are “serving him right” but in fact, we are actually becoming enslaved by our own emotions, allowing him to “wrong us” or make us victim to his slander or criticisms. Remember the wise words of Ms. Eleanor R: “Nobody has the power to make you feel inferior unless you let them”. In the same way, YOU choose how you are going to react and whether you are validating his words with power. If he says something to rile you up, flip the script and release his hold on you by slapping a smile on erstwhile nodding your head, going “yeah, yeah baby”. You may appear the loser, but in fact, you’ve just WON, Madame.

 Be the best version of you.

 Make yourself as happy as possible. Find a reason to celebrate everything in life. Make as many friends as you can, discover and learn as much as you can, see the best in people, and don’t settle for any less. If you spend time loving you, living out your fullest potential, the universe will attract a higher energy for you. People are not drawn to “perfection” but to those get high off their own supply of bubbly. We shift our head sideways, wondering what they’re on or where they got that damn happy pill, but truth be told, we want to be around those people. Their verve is contagious. By working on ourselves, and not through the rear-view mirrors of somebody else’s gaze, we are living our best lives. And that doesn’t mean reaching for some unrealistic end goal, but loving ourselves exactly as we are, at this very moment- warts and all. At that juncture, the exact point where we let go of our preconceptions and give permission for the light and love to come in is when we become exactly what we want to be.

 In that sense, we have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain. And if he still kicks rocks, it’s not you, baby, it’s his own mercurial ego and compulsory need to divide and conquer that’s to blame. The “love” may have been superficial, motivated by selfish desires rather than true, altruistic love. Even if said boy drops out of the picture, we’ve gained a bundle of confidence, friends and allies to boot. Again, this one’s a no brainer: total win-win.

 

 

Learn to let go.

 Buddhism talks about attachment and how fixing ourselves to a certain object, person, desire, or outcome is sure to bring pain. We don’t even realize how tight we’re holding on to the helm, until we look up and see that person trying to shake us. Then our paranoia reels us into another obsessive round of cling- retreat/ cling- retreat. The more the other person tries to get away, the more we crank this weezing engine up, as if our ammo and desperate attempts at winning this person over is going to resuscitate the relationship. Nooooo, we cry!! Don’t leave us by ourselves! I am nothing without you! You are the oxygen I breathe. Any fool looking from the outside in knows how this story is going to end. Yet, when we are guilty of hovering and smothering our loved ones, we only bring about greater suffering.

In Buddhism, there is no concept of needing a partner. If someone comes along and they happen to be a value-add, and if you’re able to expand your heart in love and fulfill your purpose, then by all means, go forth and work on a communion between you and a partner. But in Buddhism, when we project our desires on another to feed something in us, to fill a void or heal some wound of the past, we are bound to experience suffering if anything derails our plan. Instead, when you literally release your attachment to that person (or whatever), you feel the weight of the world fall off your shoulders. Now, we only have to worry about ourselves! (oh, the relief) Buddhism is all about the individual- we can spend a lifetime trying to perfect self-love. Sure, we can lean on others at times, and developing relationships is crucial part of our human experience, but it isn’t everything. We are bound to run into disappointment when we place so much importance on others, who are on their own life track of trying to figure shit out. Instead, take the energy and hopes you place on external human relationships and apply it to your own inner growth and evolution. You can never go wrong this way.

 

Meditate first. Then Act.

 Any time a disturbing or negative emotion arises, avoid reacting immediately. Responding in silence is not only perfectly acceptable, it’s sometimes necessary. Sometimes we act from a visceral response rather than from a place of logic. Let’s say something goes down, igniting a fire-wall of bells and alarms, take a minute to let your body float outward, a la Whoopee Goldberg in Ghost and try to observe yourself from a third point reference, as if playing from a tape recorder. Study yourself, how your facial expression appears, the register of your tone, your body language and then the words themselves. How do you appear? Like a sane and sound individual or an “off-her-rocker” manic? Are you the one in control of your emotions or are they in fact controlling you? Would you be embarrassed if a panel was monitoring your every step or would you regret the way you handled yourself? Hold yourself to a higher standard, be reflexive and prudent, and THINK before you act! Walk away to somewhere quiet and private and meditate. See if you still feel anger or sadness or whatever negative emotion you have given rise to. Or see if the feeling has diminished at all, lost some of its grip or chokehold over you. Is it a product of delusion, perhaps, or a distortion of your interpretation of events? It’s possible that the other party involved reacted from their own previous predicament or mood from earlier in the day. See if meditating can offer another point of view and a means to provide your own solution to the problem.

 

 

GET. OUT. OF. YOUR. HEAD.

 On one hand, (for  people-pleasers like me) this is stifling your creativity. Nina Simone goes, “don’t put nothing in if you don’t feel it.” We tend to over-analyze and over-intellectualize things. By thinking too hard, or trying to write or act for an audience as opposed to expressing ourselves in the truest and most honest way, we will come off too rehearsed, as if we are living life in a series of “sound-bites”, delivering what we think people want to hear.

On the flip side of the same mantra, subtract the hype we add to situations and events. We are writing stories, half-truths distorted by the meaning we ascribe to these events. Paul Ekman writes “the mood causes you to distort reality to fit the mood.” If we are in an angry or self-righteous state of mind (as characterized by moods), we tend to bloat details and fix meaning to them in order to align with our schemas and previous predilections. It’s important to leave things purely as they are by practicing greater objectivity. Getting out of your head in a sense means USING YOUR HEAD- properly. It’s not just the heart that gets the confused, the mind becomes confused as well. We have to reach back further into the recesses of our mind, that divine place of reason (our conscience, subconscious, etc.) where truth resides and follow another stream of logic. Just like we edit others, we need to self-edit, self-question, self-probe to test this objective reality.