The Open-Hearted Relationships Challenge

By Leo Babauta

This month, I invite you to go beyond the (relatively) simple, fundamental habits we’ve been working on all year, into one of the deepest practices we can explore: being open-hearted in relationships (no matter what kind of relationships).

For many of us, relationships can sometimes be the area of most difficult struggle. It’s also the area with the most potential for joy, intimacy, and rich learning.

Relationships can trigger our oldest patterns, insecurities, old narratives. Practicing in this area can be challenging and yet a huge area of growth.

Imagine being able to turn conflicts and struggle in a relationship into depth, growth, intimacy, love. This kind of transformation can have wave effects in all areas of our lives.

And so this month, we’ll explore this deep practice, no matter what kind of relationships you have in your life.

Here’s how the challenge will work:

  1. Week 1: Explore what comes up. We’ll bring mindfulness and awareness to noticing the stress, frustration, pain and other emotions that might come up in our most important relationships, along with our age-old narratives.
  2. Week 2: Open your heart & stay open in stress. When things get difficult and you feel like shutting down, lashing out, complaining or running to an old pattern — can you stay open-hearted? This will be a powerful practice.
  3. Week 3: Praise & gratitude practice. Most of us can get caught in the things we don’t like in our relationships — what would it be like to praise the other person each day? To find gratitude for who they are, exactly as they are?
  4. Week 4: Give what you want to receive. This is transformative — to see what you’re craving from the other person, and then give it to them. I believe this practice will change your life.

We’ll have an article with instructions for each week (Week 1’s article coming soon).

Are you up for it? Join me, I’ll be practicing too — I’m looking forward to this!

If you’re up for this challenge (we start on Monday, July 1), commit to it in the #love-challenge channel on our Slack community ( join the Sea Change Slack community here )!

Webinar Date & Time

I’ve set the webinar for this month for Thursday July 11, at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern (20:00 GMT).

In fact, you can add all the Sea Change webinars for the rest of 2019 using this link:

Add Sea Change Webinars to Your Calendar

Important note: the webinar will be held this month using the Zoom software — please download & install it for your computer or phone here.

Read more here.

Articles for the Challenge