The skill of mindful relating is essential for building genuine and authentic relationships and is a key aspect of self-development. In our relationships with others—whether they are romantic partners, family, friends, professional colleagues, community members, or strangers—there is always an opportunity to be mindful and meet them as they truly are. Can we honour their being from the centre of our own being? In authentic, mindful relationships, the primary connection is always one of being, and requires that we be clear and present. The problem that sabotages relationships or makes the resolution of conflict difficult—whether it is between people or between nations—is always one of being trapped in the mind’s reactivity and overlays of judgement, which prevents us from being mindful of and present to others from the centre of our being—the true self. This blog post will provide guidance for overcoming this problem using the skills of mindfulness. Mindful relating is a call to greater presence and consciousness, and by responding to that call, we will enrich our relationships, reduce the potential for misunderstanding, stress, and interpersonal conflict, and grow in emotional intelligence and heart-centred presence.
Mindfulness in Relationships
Mindfulness is the practice of consciously directing our attention, from our observer self, to our inner and outer experience in the present moment, without reactivity or judgement. Applied to relationships, this means staying present to the humanity of the people before us, without being distracted by the reactivity of our thoughts and feelings. This is the basis of compassion, the language of mindful, heart-based relating, and an important key to satisfying relationships. When we judge people or relate to our idea of them rather than who they really are, we effectively put up a screen between us and them. They will also react further to the screen we put up, creating a vicious cycle of inauthentic relating.
When we are not mindful and fully present in our relationships, we may act automatically and reactively. We may say and do things that we don’t really mean, react angrily or hurtfully to something others say or do, and generally base our relationship on our reactive thoughts and feelings. It is important in these instances to clear the mind of prejudice, judgement, and distortion and to try to see beneath the struggles, suffering, and conditioning of the other person, as well as our own, so that we do not react to their behaviour or our perception of it. This key skill of mindful relating demands emotional intelligence and the ability to stay present.
To break out of this negative habit and release our fixation on the other person’s behaviour, it can be helpful to think of how the person before us was once a baby, free from their present conditioning, and that if we had lived in their shoes, with their circumstances, we might have picked up the same conditioning. Yet, beneath their conditioning, they are still a human being, and still an expression of the universal spirit that connects us all. By practising mindful relating, we see through their conditioning to their humanity and spirit, and no longer react to the conditioning.
Mindful relating involves not identifying our thoughts, opinions, beliefs, judgements, and reactive feelings with the person before us. Instead, we see them as they truly are: a centre of pure being. This does not mean that we become blind to how they treat us with their conditioned and reactive behaviour. It simply means that, with healthy boundaries in place, we meet them from our centre in the present moment as they truly are, free from the reactive overlay of our conditioning.
Mindful Communication in Relationships
A key interpersonal skill for mindful relating that helps us to stay present to the other person is mindful communication. Mindful communication includes active listening, empathy, emotional awareness, and genuineness. Active listening involves listening mindfully with our full attention and presence in order to fully hear and understand the other person in the present moment. We let go of the impulse to interrupt. It contrasts with passive listening which occurs when we just soak up the words or let them pass through one ear and out the other without understanding what is really being said. Empathy and emotional awareness enhance mindful relating by helping us to understand what we and the other person are feeling, and why. Genuineness is about saying what really matters to us, and expressing how we really think and feel. Notice that mindful relating, mindful communication, and emotional intelligence are all interlinked and served by each other.
Studies by Barnes et al. (2007) involving 82 individual partners and 57 couples examined the role of mindfulness in romantic relationship satisfaction and responses to relationship stress. They show that higher mindfulness is associated with greater relationship satisfaction and the ability to respond constructively to relationship stress. This is because mindfulness helps us to let go of our reactivity and distorted perceptions so that we can stay present to the other person and communicate better with them from our hearts.
Mindful Relating and Gratitude
Mindful relating provides an opportunity for us to develop gratitude for the other person. When we do not stay present to the other person, start to relate to them by habit, or relate to our distorted perception of them, we can take them for granted, devalue them, or not appreciate the beauty of life in them and the unique gift of their being. Always look for the opportunity to be grateful for the other person by being present to them first.
A study by Eyring et al. (2021) involving 1360 couples examined the relationships between mindfulness, forgiveness, gratitude, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction in couples’ relationships. The study found that when couples were more mindful, they reported more forgiveness and gratitude, resulting in greater relationship and sexual satisfaction.
But what if the person we are trying to relate mindfully to is behaving in a challenging way—perhaps even disrespecting us? How can we develop gratitude for them? By being grateful to them for teaching us to respect our own authentic needs, values, and boundaries. Feeling gratitude for someone does not mean you support their behaviour. On some level you have attracted this person into your life, so it is more productive to look at how you co-created the challenging relationship with them. Of course, it is important to still look after yourself by setting healthy boundaries without shutting yourself down.
Mindful Relating from the Heart
Mindfulness helps us to disengage from the reactive contents of our mind and the perceptual overlays we project onto others. We can then bring our attention back to centre and truly be present to the other person from a place of pure being, where we open our hearts to them with love, gratitude, compassion, and healing. The heart has a very different way of relating compared to the mind: it feels from a place of pure being; it doesn’t create stories.
While the heart holds the secret to experiencing the most fulfilling mindful relationships, it ironically can be the most closed down part of us when we are relating, which can put our relationships at an immediate disadvantage. This can happen if we are continually cycling in the contents of our mind, which makes us head-centred. It can also happen if we still have past hurts from relationships, which make us close down reactively out of fear of being hurt again. The combination of these two tendencies can fuel automatic projection and reactivity—unless we are mindful and work on ourselves to stay present.
We owe it to ourselves and the other person to be mindful, to heal our past wounds, and to shift our relationship with them to the heart. Both people can do this by practising being present to each other from their hearts, with love. With healthy boundaries, we create the safety for the relationship to unfold in trust, letting in the good and keeping out the bad. And sometimes opening up our heart to the other person is a risk, but so is being alive on this planet. Why not clear the negative bias and change our language and perception to see it as an opportunity? When both people are relating to each other from their hearts and are working to be more mindful and present, the relationship will have the best opportunity to flourish from a place of shared being, with love, gratitude, and compassion.
A powerful exercise for building mindful, heart-centred presence with another involves looking into their eyes with full attention as you both hold each other’s hands and breathe mindfully together as one, in a heart-centred state. Interestingly, research at the Institute of HeartMath has shown how the electromagnetic fields of people holding hands in this way move into synchrony.
Mindful Relating while Being Your True Self
Mindful relating requires staying present to our true selves in relationships, with the help of healthy boundaries. Abandoning ourselves in a relationship by not being true to who we are is self-destructive. An example of this is a person who conforms to their own belief of what the other person expects of them, and stops being their true self in the process—because they desperately want the other person to affirm their worth in the absence of their own self-worth.
Using mindfulness to stay present to our true selves in our relationships, and relating from our true selves with healthy boundaries, is the best way to develop and maintain healthy relationships that meet our authentic needs. Unhealthy relationships that don’t meet our authentic needs will inevitably dissolve and fall away as we honour our true selves. Allowing ourselves to let go of these unhealthy relationships can be hard, but is ultimately necessary and demonstrates our emotional intelligence.
Mindful Relating Promotes Personal Growth
The way people treat us or push our buttons teaches us a lot about how we need to grow and be more mindful of our authentic needs and values. For example, if we are always treated as if we are a doormat to others, then it may be the case that we have not given our needs importance or based our relationship on their fulfilment. A relationship is always two-way.
Mindful relating requires taking responsibility for our personal growth and self-development, addressing unprocessed issues that can affect the quality of our relationships. A pattern of blaming or criticising others, or trying to make them responsible for our experience, is typical of unprocessed issues which can exist as unconscious shadow aspects within us. These unprocessed issues can be the root cause of many negative emotions.
Unprocessed shadow aspects can cause us to project onto others what we don’t want to deal with in ourselves—whether these things are positive or negative. For example, if we have undesirable qualities that we have not owned and processed, we may unconsciously project them onto another person, and then criticise that person for having those qualities. In a like manner, if we have desirable qualities that we have not owned and expressed, we may also unconsciously project them onto another person, and then defer to them for having these qualities when we don’t want to honour and develop them within ourselves because of the responsibility of doing so.
Mindful relating helps us to grow in emotional intelligence because mindfulness fosters emotional awareness and regulation. Emotionally intelligent behaviours expressed in mindful relationships include sharing our feelings openly with others; understanding how we and others are feeling and what is needed; embodying compassion; and taking responsibility for our negative feelings and emotional states, including our shadow aspects, rather than blaming others. Relationships are a wonderful teaching for our emotional growth and maturity, and the more mindful we can be in them, the better.
Mindful Relating in Summary
Our relationships provide an opportunity to grow in mindfulness through them, both in being present to the other person and in being present to our own true selves, in which we honour our authentic needs with healthy boundaries and high self-worth. Mindful relating produces the best relationships due to the mutual presence, personal growth, mindful communication, and emotional intelligence, including the capacity for compassion and gratitude. These relationships enrich us with their depth, light, and love.
An important part of mindful relating is taking down the screens of our mind that act as relationship barriers or distorted perceptual overlays, and being present to the other person from the centre of our true self without reactivity or projection. By not reacting to our judgements of others, we can meet them as they truly are, from our hearts, with compassion and clarity. Mindful relating teaches us to develop gratitude for others, reminding us of the blessings they bring us that we can overlook due to familiarity and reactivity. Even a person we find challenging can bring us a blessing if we are relating mindfully to them and are open to learning from the teaching of the challenge.
Mindful relating provides an opportunity to face our shadow aspects and mature emotionally as we learn not to automatically react and project upon the other person, and learn to process and heal our old hurts and behaviour patterns. For more on this, see my post Mastering Emotional Intelligence with Mindfulness and Shadow Work.
Next step: book a personalised Guidance Call with me to get clarity about your relationships and how to improve mindful relating while maintaining your freedom for self-development and alignment to your true self.
References
- Barnes, S., Brown, K. W., Krusemark, E., Campbell, W. K., & Rogge, R. D. (2007). The role of mindfulness in romantic relationship satisfaction and responses to relationship stress. Journal of marital and family therapy, 33(4), 482-500. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0606.2007.00033.x
- Eyring, J. B., Leavitt, C. E., Allsop, D. B., & Clancy, T. J. (2021). Forgiveness and Gratitude: Links Between Couples’ Mindfulness and Sexual and Relational Satisfaction in New Cisgender Heterosexual Marriages. Journal of sex & marital therapy, 47(2), 1470-161. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2020.1842571
