Reconnect with your authentic Self.
Cultivate empowerment consciousness.
Though we’ve covered all these concepts in previous chapters, here’s how to actually put them all into practice.
Embody your Self. Our first step is to realize that our relationships with others are impacted by more than what we think, say, and do or by what others think, say, and do. Because we interact with others as our embodied Self, or our body, mind, and soul, we have to meet our physical, mental, and spiritual needs before we can show up as our whole Self.
Create and share your nervous system safety. The state of our nervous system affects our thoughts, words, and actions. If our nervous system is stuck in a stress response, as most of ours are, we’ll think, do, and say things that create or escalate conflict with others. Our nervous system will communicate our threat state to those around us, amping up the collective stress level. When we become aware of our nervous system stress, we can choose to bring our body back to safety or wait to interact until we’re calm and grounded again or we can safely co-regulate with others.
Compassionately witness your conditioned Self. We all have a conditioned Self, created by the roles we learned to play in our earliest relationships or, simply, how we learned to feel safe, valued, and loved as children. When we play these roles as adults, we subconsciously expect others to meet our needs and play their part in our childhood re-enactments. It’s only when we witness our conditioning, that we can begin to make new choices that better align with what we truly want and need.
Reconnect with your authentic Self. When we consistently commit to these first three practices, we naturally begin to live in integrity and make choices that are aligned with our authentic Self. We’re able to express our genuine thoughts and emotions, share our deeper passions and purpose, trust the decisions we make, and feel more whole and complete in ourselves and around others. This, in turn, enables us to connect more authentically with those in our lives.
Cultivate empowerment consciousness. When we’re empowered to take responsibility for creating the safety we need to authentically express ourselves or be who we are; we gift others with the opportunity to do the same. When we’re authentically connected to our heart, we can tap into our deep wisdom and intuition, learning to regain and rebuild trust in our instincts. Reconnected with our own source energy, we can truly become the love we seek.
Empowerment Consciousness Self-Exploration: Journal Prompts
The following questions can help you identify areas in which you already feel empowered and interdependent in your relationships and areas in which you may want to work to develop more relational empowerment and interdependence. Spend time thinking about each of your relationships, writing down your thoughts and feelings in a separate notebook or journal if helpful.
How do I feel when I’m in this individual’s presence? How do I feel before and after I spend time with them?
What do I like about this individual? What do I dislike about them or perceive as possible red flags?
Are they honest and consistent in their communication (i.e. they do what they say)? Are they dishonest and inconsistent in their communication (i.e., they say one thing and do another)?
Is there space in our relationship for emotional expression and attunement? That is, are my feelings heard and understood?
Do they listen to requests and respect boundaries?
Do they clearly ask for what they need?
Do they understand and take responsibility for their roles and emotions within the relationship?
Do we want the same things, and do our values align?
Am I open to this kind of relationship at this time?
Does our dynamic feel healthy, and is this something I want to continue to pursue as it is? What do I need to change about our dynamic in order for it to feel healthy and be something I want to continue to pursue?
It’s completely normal if you feel uncomfortable or disheartened about some of your responses to these questions. It’s helpful to view your answers as an opportunity or a starting point to identify and clarify areas that you’d like to address. Understanding what isn’t working can often help you to begin to find your way toward what will work, even if that means changing the dynamics of your current relationship or venturing into the unknown, alone. Remember, leaving a relationship when it’s no longer aligned or you feel complete and have grown all you can is different from leaving to try to find something better, which many of us, including myself, have done in the past. Be patient and give yourself time and space to grieve any changes or losses in any of your relationships, even those you’ve chosen to initiate for yourself.
As you explore your current circumstances or begin to create new ones, continuing to extend yourself grace and compassion and reminding yourself that each of us is a work in progress, doing the best we can. The fact that you are this far along in the work is an incredible sign of your desire and commitment to create change for yourself and your relationships.
HOW TO HAVE A DIFFICULT CONVERSATION
As you’ve already learned, taking a moment to pause and connect with your heart can help you move toward a more connected and collaborative space of heart coherence. Before you enter what could be an upsetting interaction or conversation, place your hands on your heart and take a few slow, deep breaths as you remind yourself what is truly important to you about this person or relationship. It could be as simple as calling to mind something you like or appreciate about who they are and how they show up in your relationship. Spend as long a time here as you’d like before beginning the interaction or conversation, noticing if your experience or outlook changes in any way. Pay particular attention to both the differences in how you approach the interaction and how the other person responds to any shifts in your energy.
Those of you who want to begin to address more difficult topics or realities may find the following guidance helpful.
Ask to have explicit and open conversations with others that directly address the source of conflict or issue. Attempt to break habits that may cause you to avoid or deflect difficult topics.
Practice validating others’ thoughts, feelings, and perspectives, even if you disagree. You don’t have to agree with someone or feel the same way they do to attempt to understand or validate and accept how they feel. To demonstrate that you’re trying to understand them, you can say, “I understand this really hurt you” or “I can see how you could feel that way.”
Break the natural habit of trying to make sense of another’s thoughts, feelings, or intentions or assume what they may be. Instead, practice asking questions and listening from a place of curiosity and connection to your heart space, allowing them to speak without speaking over or interrupting them.
Own your role in your shared experiences, be open and humble, and apologize or take responsibility when you hurt someone.
Practice trying to compromise and navigate conflicts as a team to come up with mutually workable solutions. Break any habits you may have of focusing only on yourself and your own best interests (when it’s safe and appropriate to do so).
Try to stick to the current issue or topic, and break any habit you may have of bringing up the past or using absolutist statements like “You always do X” or “You never do Y.”
Affirm your love and connection to your loved one during conflict, reminding yourself that it can be stressful and overwhelming for both of you, even if your loved one appears distracted or detached. If you can’t do so during a conflict, affirm your connection when you’re both calm, letting them know that you love them, appreciate them, and remain committed to the relationship. (This is particularly important for those who grew up in a home where conflict meant big blowups or the loss of love, like the silent treatment.)
HOW TO REPAIR A CONNECTION AFTER A CONFLICT
Conflicts are a natural part of navigating life with someone else who inevitably has different ideas, feelings, perspectives, and past experiences. Learning how to acknowledge our individual roles in conflict, including the impact of our emotional reactivity, helps increase our security and trust in a relationship. Emotionally healthy couples repair their relationship after disagreements or disconnection instead of ignoring their issues or pretending the conflict didn’t happen. Practice using the tips in the list below to help you repair your relationship or reconnect after heated or disconnected moments in your relationship.
Check in with your nervous system to make sure you’re regulated. You want your body to be in a calm and grounded state when you apologize or attempt to repair the disconnection. If you’re stressed or upset, you won’t be able to think or speak clearly or hold space for the other person’s feelings.
Be specific. Name the behavior, its impact (be curious and ask if unsure), and your role in it. For example: “The other night when I made that joke in front of our friends, I was trying to be funny and am really sorry I hurt you.” Or, “I’m wondering how you felt when I made that joke in front of our friends the other night?”
Listen without being defensive. This will be difficult if you came from a home where people deflected or invalidated one another’s feelings. Remember, you may not agree with what the other person is saying, but practice allowing them to share their experiences anyway.
Focus on the other person’s feelings, not yours. If you, like me, were raised by emotionally underdeveloped parents, you’ll notice the urge to center the conversation around how you feel. Try to shift out of this habit, since true and meaningful apologies are centered around others’ feelings, not our own.
State what you’ll do differently in the future. Identify your role or responsibility in creating change or decreasing the likelihood that it happens again. For example: “When I’m tired or irritable, I’m going to work on taking space and being aware of what activates me because it’s not okay to snap at you.” I’ve had to say this often myself!
Practice forgiving yourself. Remember, we all hurt people throughout our life; it’s part of being a human being. After you apologize, remember to practice self-care, extending yourself grace and compassion and reminding yourself that you are doing the best you can and take a moment to celebrate yourself for taking accountability. Practice redirecting your attention away from any self-shaming or critical thoughts.
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Naturally, most of us want to feel loved in the same ways we learned to feel loved as children. For most of us, these ways are anchored in trauma and what we needed to do to feel safe, valued, and loved in our childhood environment. As we become more aware of the expectations we place on others and take responsibility for our unmet childhood needs, we become intentional creators of our experiences with others instead of allowing our past trauma to drive and dictate how we interact with them. When we’re empowered in our interactions and relationships, we’re able to connect more authentically with the people with whom we share space and time. We’re also better able to connect with the energetic power of the natural world in which we live, a life-changing power you’ll learn more about in the next chapter.
10
Reconnecting with the Collective
The summer of 1993 was both sweltering and deadly in Washington, DC. At the time, the city had one of the highest crime rates in the country and was experiencing the kind of temperatures that send even the most ardent of heat seekers into air-conditioned cool. Despite the heat and the violence, four thousand people chose to descend on the city to sit in silence and meditate with one intent in mind: to lower the crime rate by focusing their mental energy on spreading peace and safety to others.
It worked. At the height of the two-month experiment, violent crimes in DC dropped by 23 percent.54 Prior to the study, led by the quantum physicist John Hagelin, Washington, DC’s, police chief had told reporters that only twenty inches of snow during the summer would cause as noticeable a fall in crime.55
What happened that summer wasn’t a one-off incident. Decades of research provide evidence that when groups of people focus their attention on promoting peace, harmony, health, or well-being, they achieve their intended outcome in quantifiable ways. Another notable study found that during the Israel-Lebanon war in 1983, deaths dropped by 76 percent as a result of a heart-centered daily group meditation.56 Everyday stress like crime, traffic accidents, and fires also decreased in the surrounding area.
The “field effects of consciousness,” as Hagelin termed it, go beyond meditation: Any practice that creates physiological safety in our nervous system and coherence between our heart and brain can impact the overall well-being of others. More surprisingly, when we band together to focus our mental energy on specific feelings, intentions, or outcomes, it can spread those feelings, intentions, or outcomes to people around the world, not just to those in our town, city, or even country. This is known as nonlocal consciousness.
Some of the strongest research into nonlocal consciousness has been conducted with prayer or other intention-setting practices. Cardiologists at Duke University found that when people of various faiths from around the world prayed for 150 cardiac patients by name, those patients fared 50 to 100 percent better than those who didn’t receive any prayer, even though the patients and those who were praying for them were separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles.57 Another study of nearly a thousand cardiac patients reached similar results, showing that those who were prayed for nonlocally had healthier outcomes than those who weren’t.58 As researchers point out, their results don’t prove that God exists or that He/She/They answer prayers but that collective consciousness is extremely powerful.59
Though the term has various meanings, I define collective consciousness as the combined state of energy in a group of people, whether that group is our family, circle of friends, work office, sports team, university, company, corporation, town, city, or country. There is also global consciousness, or the mass energetic state of everyone on Earth who is alive at any given time.
