communication

What does the idea of “family” mean to you?  Spiritual Cinema Circle’s May film selections explore family, identity and home.

In the short film OMG, a teenage girl and her grandmother learn to communicate in the modern age, with hilarious results. In Transit shows a touching encounter between strangers at a bus stop who find they have more in common than they think. And Fetch is the story of a young boy who is trying desperately to find his mother.

You know who you are based on all of your past experiences and choices. If you choose to remain who and what you are now, and not look ahead, then you will forever be at the mercy of your own future life experiences. Instead of taking this passive approach, allow yourself to understand that you have a choice in all of your future experiences and make those choices.

Here are three ways to to take an active role in shaping your life:

One of the keys to healthy relationships is spoken appreciation. Other kinds of appreciation (such as touch or giving a hand with a chore) are great, too, but spoken appreciation is highly valued and easy to do. We recommend a technique we call verbal valentines, which work wonders in any kind of relationship.

We give each other 10-second verbal valentines all year long. We believe it’s one of the main reasons we’re more in love now than when we met 32 years ago. Verbal valentines are not just for lovers, either.  You can give them at work, to children, to other family members and to cherished friends.

You can make the holidays a time of dramatic change and healing by using your innate intuitive abilities in a conscious and directed way.

Holidays are supposed to be a time when families unite, when you are reminded of your childhood or revisit the memories of yourself over the years. You may be spending this time alone or far from home. But no matter where you are or who you are with, the holidays provide you with a unique opportunity to heal the inner patterns and relationships that have been obstructing your life and hindering your dreams.

Every person I know and every company I have ever worked for has talked about communication. When you look at relationships, people say that many of the breakdowns have to do with misinterpretations or lack of clarity around communication. So, since we all know this, why aren’t we better at communicating? I believe it is because we love the concept of communication but not the challenge of it.

We all crave connection. We long to love and be loved. Even those of us who have been hurt or abandoned secretly hope that someone will come along to prove to us that love is real and intimacy is achievable. During the holidays we are catapulted into situations where we can see how far we have come or how far we have yet to go regarding relationships. Today I want to share a tool to help you or someone you love transform feelings of isolation by looking at connection as a choice.

“I feel out of sync with my family of origin around the holidays, when I spend more time with them than usual,” wrote one reader recently. “They aren’t interested in honest communication, working on relationships, or other things that are important to me … How can I deal with this in a positive way?

Much of the stress of daily life is caused by incompletion in relationships. There are many stressful aspects of leaving things incomplete, but the most stress occurs around significant emotional communications that are left unfinished. Many of us have people in our lives with whom we have big incompletions on the emotional level:  secrets, debts, unspoken regrets, unexpressed I-love-you’s. This stress often magnifies around the holidays and in-person visits to family members, because of the focus on and expectation of good times, joy and love during those visits. Why not take a few moments right now to make a list of incompletions in your relationship life? Then, give yourself the gift of completing as many as you can.  Most significant incompletions boil down to a minute or two of heartfelt communication. Many of us put off that minute or two for far too long.

When the holidays approach, we receive a lot of requests from people who are experiencing more conflict and stress in their relationships.

If you’re feeling increased pressures around this time of the year, you’re definitely not alone. Along with the possibilities of great joy in this season come other feelings as well. It’s important to remember that all feelings come through the same “faucet” of your awareness, and that the holidays are an ideal time to open yourself to learning from every relationship moment.