This month’s challenge is a way to work with any kind of relationship you might find important in your life: a committed partnership, a new romance, a deep friendship, or other loved ones or people in your life.
Each of us has our own relationship challenges. Some of you are in a committed relationship but perhaps have some problem areas, some are parents and need to work on patience, some have friendships that could use some nurturing, others have work relationships that need working on. Still others of you want to work on your relationship with yourself.
We’ll work with practices this month that address all of these relationships!
So here’s the plan:
- We’ll practice mindfulness as a way to work with relationships.
- We create a daily habit of spending at least 10 mindful minutes with someone and working on your relationship with that person.
- We have a number of focuses for that 10-minute session, to work on different areas of relationships.
That means we’ll be talking about listening, about being calm, about dealing with frustrations, about being compassionate, and much more. You can use your 10-minute mindful relationship session to focus on whatever areas you feel would be most helpful to you.
Sound good? This will be an important challenge, for a few reasons:
- Relationships are about the most important thing in most people’s lives — if you have good relationships, you’ll be happier, more secure, and have a better job or business, because relationships are the key to a good business or job. Improving relationships, then, is one of the best improvements you can make to your life, even if you don’t think you have major problem areas at the moment.
- Relationships are a great place to practice mindfulness, especially if you’ve already tried being mindful during meditation, exercise, eating, or procrastination, as we have in previous challenges here in Sea Change. Practicing mindfulness during relationships is taking mindfulness to the next level, because it’s more of a challenge.
- Mindfulness can help you improve anything. It’s a spotlight that helps you to be more aware of what’s going on, and then make a conscious choice about what you do about what’s going on, and appreciate what you have in front of you. That’s an amazing tool for improving relationships.
I have no doubt that if you focus on this habit for a month, it will change your life. So while some of you might be tempted to skip this challenge, please don’t. You won’t regret doing it.