Meditation Helps to Improve Your Relationships With Others
Some of the benefits of meditation are well-known. For instance, it’s a practice that benefits your mind and reduces stress and anxiety. Also, by meditating daily, positive changes can be observed in your way of dealing with unexpected situations or circumstances. However, whenever you think of meditation you tend to do so with regard to obtaining benefits for yourself, such as reducing stress or better managing your emotions. Nevertheless, it’s easy to forget that meditation also helps improve your relationships with others. How does it do it? How is it achieved? Let’s take a look.
Meditation and its relationship with empathy
The article, Empathy and Mindfulness. Theoretical Convergence, states that “empathy is an essential element in interpersonal relationships”. Although the human being is born with a biological predisposition to develop this capacity, the experiences and the environment in which they grow up determine their degree of development. Furthermore, we now know that empathy can be enhanced through meditation.
How does this happen? As a matter of fact, meditation helps improve interpersonal relationships because it encourages the development of compassion. In addition, it encourages you to listen carefully without making judgments and with a predisposition to acceptance. By doing this with yourself, you also do it with others, because you open yourself to listening attentively without criticizing the actions of others.
An important element of meditation is that it allows you to have an open attitude toward the experiences, behaviors, and attitudes of other people. This is essential in order to have healthier relationships, based on the understanding and acceptance of the other. The article, Empathy and Mindfulness. Theoretical Convergence talks about different investigations that are based on empirical evidence. These studies have determined that it’s true that meditation contributes to increasing empathy.
“Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them.”
-Dale Carnegie-
The impact of insecurities on your relationships
What if they don’t like me? Will they want to leave me? These kinds of questions reveal intense insecurity in relationships. It’s the kind of feeling that, every time, gets more embedded, as indicated by Gilles Lipovetsky in the newspaper, El País. Meditation emerges as a way to resolve these insecurities or to manage them better.
Meditating is a practice that helps you to know yourself better. It’s that inward look when you observe your thoughts and your actions without judging them, accept your mistakes and learn from them, and listen to your wishes to increase your security. Knowing yourself better, you stop depending on others. You don’t need external approval, but you can allow yourself to be as you are.
This is important so as not to maintain dependency relationships. These aren’t only present in the couple. In fact, depending too much on family or friends demonstrates great insecurity. These types of relationships aren’t healthy and usually end up doing you a great deal of damage. Therefore, meditation helps improve your relationships in this regard as well.
Experience sexuality without stress
As well as friendship and family relationships, meditating as a couple can also allow you to experience sexuality in another way. For instance, how many times have you felt insecure about your body and this has generated stress when having sexual relations? This is a part of life and relationships that you have to learn to take care of.
Experiencing sex with stress, fear, insecurities, or haste is harmful to your relationship with your partner and, also, for your relationship with yourself. For this reason, in recent years, interesting concepts such as orgasmic meditation have emerged. Meditating helps you focus on the present, lowering your gaze from the future and from the concerns that appear in it.
In fact, many of the most frequent problems in your personal relationships have their origin in your difficulty in disconnecting. Meditation helps you to reconnect with your body, to be in the here and now, to open up your senses, to be more aware of each kiss, each caress, each breath… Thus, meditating can make your sexual relations become more enjoyable.
Make it a daily practice
Now you’re more aware of how meditation helps improve your relationships. However, in order to enjoy the benefits derived from meditation, you should make the practice a habit. You won’t need a lot of time. Five minutes a day will be enough.
As the days go by, you might feel that you need to extend the time you dedicate to your daily meditation. However, you shouldn’t force yourself. If you find it difficult at first, guided meditation can be an excellent option. Having someone to mark your steps and teach you to meditate is extremely helpful.
What are you waiting for? Start meditating today and improve your relationships. On the other hand, if you’ve been meditating for some time, think about the changes you’ve noticed in the way you relate to others.
“Your relationship with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship in their life.”
-Robert Holden-
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Campos, D., Cebolla, A., Quero, S., Bretón-López, J., Botella, C., Soler, J., … & Baños, R. M. (2016). Meditation and happiness: Mindfulness and self-compassion may mediate the meditation–happiness relationship. Personality and individual differences, 93, 80-85.
- Goleman, D., & Davison, R. J. (2017). Los beneficios de la meditación. Barcelona: Kairós.
- Matsers W, Johnson V, Kolodny R. Perspectivas de la sexualidad. En: La sexualidad humana. La Habana: Editorial Científico Técnica; 1988. p. 9-32.
