Relationship problems? Take a Swami’s Advice.
Stop saying how the relationship should be — try responding as if it were already there.
First, a story.
A swami friend of mine likes to tell a story about an encounter that happened in his youth on a crowded bus in India — a story about something that could have gone horribly wrong, but didn’t.
The facts of the story: two men are sitting on a bus. One is smoking. The other is not. The non-smoking man does not want to inhale the smoke.
The swami does not want to cause trouble, so he takes his orange scarf and places it in front of his nostrils.
The man beside the swami — the smoking man — immediately sees this action as an affront, and gets angry.
He turns his attention on the swami and starts to challenge him.
The swami smiles and says, “No, sir, you have it wrong. I am not against you. It is only this…you have bought this cigarette, and you have paid for the entire thing. I have not paid for it, sir, and it is not right for me to take the benefit of something I have not paid for.”
The smoking man, who seconds earlier was ready for a fight, stopped. Looked at the swami as if he had just fallen from space. And then he started to laugh, and a friendship blossomed that would span decades.
The Swami’s Relationship Advice
Had I heard this story earlier in life it would have saved me a lot of years of unnecessary angst. I’ve chased a lot of windmills in my time, and I am sad to say that most of the conflict in my life was not as much over the situation, however horrible, as over my reaction to the situation, and the story I told myself about the meaning it carried.
Apply this to modern relationships, and it’s pure gold.
How to change your outcome by reframing the story you tell
The Swami took a potentially volatile situation and did two things with it. First, he protected himself. He did this by physically mitigating the damage done by putting a barrier between his body and the dangerous element (the smoke).
Second, he reframed what the situation meant. Instead of making the smoker into someone who disrespected him, and framing the encounter in terms of how he felt about the situation, the swami created a situation where the offending party (the smoker) was able to step back and see from a different perspective. If the encounter were about power, the swami would have lost, but he changed the terms of the discussion, and took both of their egos out of the equation.
To see how this works in a relationship, let’s look at a similar situation.
My partner likes to sit outside and smoke in the mornings. I don’t smoke, and don’t enjoy the smoke in my face. For the most part, we’ve worked out a system where he can enjoy polluting his lungs in peace, and where I don’t have to share the joy. On most days, if he’s smoking, and I’m around, he will either put it out early, or I will walk away until he’s finished. No ego involved.
But what happens if I walk out there, he sees me walking out there, and he lights up a smoke anyway?
What does that mean?
Here’s what the brain wants to do. It wants to find a reason, a plausible explanation for the behaviour, and the reason will be directly related to whatever we currently think and feel.
Feeling good, it was an accident. He wasn’t thinking, or at least wasn’t thinking about me when he did it.
Not feeling well, or already deep in other patterns of thinking, it could mean any number of things: he isn’t considerate, doesn’t respect me, is being selfish again, he’s picking a fight…he’s telling me I don’t matter. These are old, reactive thought patterns.
This way of thinking leads to more, and suddenly, I’m compiling a record of wrongs in line with those old thought patterns, and it’s yet another example of something he always does. This pattern is bad for both of us.
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. Albert Einstein
Try the Swami’s Way
If we go back to the bus with the Swami we can see:
- Undesired behaviour (the smoking)
- Past patterns like old attributions of meaning (he doesn’t care about me/ my needs) can be examined and dropped to form a new story with a different meaning (shared enjoyment)
3. New story.
Here’s the difference. The experience doesn’t change, but because the story around the experience is different, the emotional effect of the experience is completely different. Because the internal story changes, the impact also changes, and from there, everything is possible.
All of us are living with dogmas that we accept as truths. When one of these is overturned, there’s an initial gasp, soon followed by a rush of exhilaration. Deepak Chopra
Know The Outcome You Want
My friend the Swami, instinctively knew his true power lay within. He created a narrative to support the outcome he wanted.
He wanted to use conflict to make a friend. He did this with the story he created about their shared experience.
It doesn’t take much to see how this works in modern relationships.
Want to fight with your partner? Create a story that shows you are at war.
Want respect? Create a story that springs from mutual positive regard.
The swami knows something I wish I had known earlier:
If you want love, create and act from love.
If you want trouble, create and act from fear.
The Swami’s secret? He doesn’t think about how people should be.
My friend the swami would say that it’s a waste of time talking about how things should be. Why?
He says when you talk about how something should be, you’re cloaking yourself in illusion. You think only about what you want, and then you see the other person in terms of what they do or don’t do for you. How they fall short of meeting the ideal image you have for them and your relationship.
The problem? The ideal is not real. It’s wishful thinking.
If you try to make people into what you want them to be, you will spend a lot of time worrying about why they aren’t being how you want them. The swami says you then may interpret their actions as being “about you” somehow. Then it becomes something bigger in the mind — evidence the person doesn’t love you, doesn’t respect you, doesn’t need you…the list goes on.
A second problem is how responding to “shoulds” makes you feel and think. Nobody feels happy when they are looking at what is wrong with other people. It gets our mind stuck on loss and longing, messes with our emotions, and magnifies the problem.
Trying to resolve the issue from this place tends to make things worse. And it stops you from seeing potential for new growth. The next thing you know, you’re fighting.
Getting stuck in should is like looking at an airbrushed model who has starved himself to get defined abs and thinking that’s how you are supposed to look instead of looking in the mirror and seeing someone you love.
You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices. Deepak Chopra
We Can Choose Where to Focus Our Attention
Getting stuck in should focusses on what is wrong instead of what’s right. Maybe we can’t control how life happens to us, but we can certainly control what we interpret those events to mean. That story is ours alone to tell. The mind doesn’t have to react like a programmable robot. It’s rich with potential, and our human capacity for choice. We don’t have to view each experience from a mindset that served an older, less aware version of ourselves (although the choice is there, if that’s what we want).
The point I took away from my friend’s story is simple. Every exchange is an opportunity to choose to either react or respond. In my relationships, I can choose to be controlled by my insecurities and old thought patterns, and simply react in predictable ways. Or, I can try something new. I can choose to read a situation any way that works for me. Better still, I can choose to use the situation as a potential to change the way I relate to people in my world.
Hidden in every situation is an opportunity to rewrite the story of our lives as it unfolds.
I tried this on my partner the other day when I walked out onto the front deck. The sun was shining, I walked toward him. He looked at me and caught my eye just as he was about to light his cigarette. He lit the cigarette.
I stopped. It wasn’t a great day, so my first thought was reactive.
I stopped again. Smiled because I was thinking of the swami’s approach. He looked at me smiling, put out his cigarette and made space for me to sit down. It wasn’t until I’d walked away that I realized what had just happened.
By thinking about the Swami, I had diverted my attention from thinking about what was wrong to what was right. It only took a second, but that was enough to change something real in a pattern of thinking I had, and that change was all that was necessary to produce an actual change.
As the swami says, where the mind goes, the energy flows.
