Tag Archives: Relationships

December 2011 Soul and Solace

Creativity/Spirituality, , , , , , , ,

Nurturing Relationships

A Spacious Place is founded on what we call our six “Playground Principles.” Read an overview of our fifth principle, “Nurturing Relationships,” below.

The “Nurturing Relationships” principle favors “Empathetic Listening.” Active, nonjudgmental, compassionate listening carries incredible power for healing. We seek to avoid the “My Assumption is Your Reality” approach, which assumes a person can determine from another’s body language or words the others’ feelings. While such observations may guide our perceptions, each person has a right to his/her own sense of personal truth.

A Spacious Place also avoids the “You Heel!” approach, which employs defensive language to manipulate another person’s behavior. Both the “My Assumption in Your Reality” and the “You Heel!” approaches employ violent communication.

Instead, A Spacious Place favors the use of “Non-Violent Communication,” often through the use of open-ended questions. Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger lists four steps in Non-Violent Communication: Step 1—Differentiate Observation from Evaluation; Step 2—Identify and Express Feelings; Step 3—Connect Feelings with Needs; and Step 4—Make a Request, understanding the difference between a request and a demand. “Non-Violent Communication” enables us to take care of ourselves while respecting the other. Non-violent communication helps clarify both individual’s needs and also deepens trust and relationship.

Our symbol for Nurturing Relationships is a pair of shoes, because we foster relationships with other persons by seeking to stand in their shoes: respecting their experience and their sense of truth. Standing in another’s shoes also involves valuing the other equally with ourselves.

How do you “Nurture Relationships?” Share your thoughts.

January 2010 Soul and Solace

Creativity/Spirituality, , ,

In Relation to…

At 6 a.m. on our twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, my husband awoke with severe abdominal pain. The pain didn’t let up all day, and at 11 p.m. I motored him to the emergency room where my daughter and I tried to get ourselves out of the way of the medical personnel as they strapped on blood pressure cuffs, slapped on EKG monitors, and slipped in IV needles. Then it was up to the ward for the night, into a room for a day, surgery the next, and a couple more days of hospital recouping. David occupied the unwieldy, technological marvel of a bed next to my neat little Murphy, but he wasn’t there. David was wandering somewhere in a land of pain and pain killers and he was out there alone. In that season, I needed my daughters and they me. We wondered together at the strangeness of it all; we held each other’s hands—literally and figuratively. We smarted at the bad news and hooted at the good. The experience altered our relations with one another and our relations with our singular souls. Relationships. Their tenuousness and unpredictability invite me into risk, into change, into growth.

I imagine holding my relationships in a cupped, open hand: cupped to feel their preciousness and their intimacy against my skin, open to allow them to breathe, to alter, and, if necessary, to drift away—then to return, if they wish, of their own volition. I find the practice more than a little scary . . . but it feels like love.

Share your thoughts.