I now want to offer some specific strategies and language for how to communicate and stay calm in those moments when you just want to scream “this is not my fault; this is about you—don’t you see that?!” That reaction is so natural and understandable, but it doesn’t usually go well when followed, and rarely leads to greater peace or closeness with your partner. The difficult truth is that if you want to break the cycle of projection and defensiveness, you’ll need to practice a more mindful and disciplined strategy.

Projection is difficult and painful for both you and your partner. Your partner’s core wound is re-activated and they’re deep down the rabbit hole in a negative narrative. And for you, the one being criticized and misjudged, it’s frustrating, hurtful, and infuriating. It’s also profoundly lonely because your partner is not with you in the present moment when they’re lost in projection; they’ve disappeared into a past reality that you’re not part of. So, what can you do and say to navigate this challenging situation in a thoughtful and productive manner?

The first thing to do when you smell the scent of projection is, counterintuitively, to shift your attention away from your partner and bring it towards yourself. That is, to ground yourself inside your own body. You can do this by simply placing a hand on your abdomen or heart (or anywhere that helps you feel present). From there, you can inconspicuously (or not) take a conscious deep breath, which will prepare you for the interaction and help you stay calm and connected to yourself, which can be difficult when the projection train is heading your way. Taking a conscious breath (or three) can also help create a separate, safe space where you won’t be swallowed up by your partner’s feelings and narratives, and overcome by the survival instinct to defend yourself.

When you feel grounded in your body, you can more thoughtfully respond (or not respond) to your partner’s grievances. When your partner accuses you of making them feel bad in a way they always feel bad, the best plan is to become Teflon, that is, to unstick (and make yourself unstick-able) from their projections, which involves resisting the urge to join them in their storyline. Instead, you want to empathically reflect your partner’s feelings, what they’re suffering, but (and this is important), without including yourself in the reflection. As in, “I get that, for you, the situation felt really invalidating.” It’s also helpful to use words that frame your partner’s experience as feelings not facts: “You felt invalidated” rather than “You were invalidated,” or worse, “You were invalidated by me.” In using feeling words, you highlight the fact that this is their experience (which means it’s important) but not necessarily what happened in some absolute reality.

It’s also helpful to use language like “for you” and “in your experience.” For example, “I hear that—for you—it felt like this…” or “I get that—in your experience—it felt like this…” By using these sorts of phrases, you also suggest that the experience they were living might not be the experience you (or anyone else) was living. Your mindful response is designed to unlink their experience from you and also from what is.

Your task in responding, always, is to draw the “conversation” away from the you-based storyline, and empathize with the feelings and suffering your partner is caught in, to make it clear that you see and get their experience, their pain. Your skillful language is designed to create a separation between how they feel and what you did. Ultimately, the skill in responding to projection is to be sensitive to the other person’s pain, but not bite the hook—not engage in the personal battle over who’s to blame for that pain.

So too, it helps (if you have the emotional bandwidth) to lead with an affectionate word, like “sweetheart” or “love.” As in, “Sweetheart, I hear that you felt invisible in that interaction.” Notice that you’re not saying “I hear that I made you feel invisible.” Or perhaps, “Love, I’m sorry you had to go through that pain.” If you choose to use the word “sorry,” do so carefully; be mindful that your sorry-ness is not about having caused your partner’s experience, but rather, for the fact that they are suffering at all. When projection is happening, skillful language can help you create space for yourself, between you and your partner’s narrative, which you can then maintain regardless of whether they want to collapse that space. Responding mindfully doesn’t just change the relational dynamic, it keeps you safe and saves you from having to get on the emotional roller coaster your partner is riding.

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The key “don’ts” in dealing with projection are:

1. Don’t bite the hook.
2. Don’t engage in the battle your partner is trying to wage
3. Don’t try to prove your innocence or set the record straight

All of these “don’ts” are saying essentially the same thing, and if you practice them in whatever ways you can, they will change how you experience your partner’s projection, and also change the part projection plays in your relationship.

There might also be an opportunity, not in the thick of conflict, but at a more peaceful and loving moment, to draw your partner’s attention to the fact that their feelings with you seem similar to feelings they’ve described from other times throughout their life. The key is to raise this issue with curiosity and not judgment. As in, “Do you think this feeling of (fill in the blank) might be one of those core experiences for you, one that reappears in lots of different forms for you?” You might also share a core experience or wound from your own life, one that reappears in different situations, to remove any shame, create connection, and show your partner that what they’re experiencing is something you share and part of the human experience.

I would be remiss, however, if I ended this post here, without saying this: telling your partner they’re projecting onto you is almost never a good idea. Regardless of how certain you are that projection is at play, to assume that you know more about what’s happening in their internal world than they do, that you know the real truth, is disrespectful, unkind, and not helpful. When we do that to anyone, assume superiority and make an interpretation that pathologizes, shames, or claims to know their truth, we emotionally violate that person and rob them of their dignity. Don’t assume the role of authority in your partner’s experience; it isn’t compassionate and it won’t encourage greater awareness in your partner or serve to deepen the connection. If you want to break the cycle of projection and create a more conscious and intimate bond with your partner, mindful communication—which starts with your response—is ultimately what works.

The post Responding Mindfully When Your Partner is Projecting On You appeared first on Nancy Colier.

But over time, I realized that despite all the thinking humanly possi­ble, there were important questions in my life that I couldn’t know and couldn’t solve, not yet anyway. This truth was unavoidable and irrefut­able. I had to admit and accept that, with all my pseudo-knowing, my proposed and attempted solutions, I was still not any better off. Any knowing I had thought myself into was illusory. The more I tried to know, the more I felt like I didn’t know. On the other side of that admission and acceptance however, I found something unexpected…utter relief.

We live in an age of reason and science. We worship information, research, and logic so much that we named our era for it: the age of information. To reason is to think, to use the rational mind, understand, and make sense of our world. Over time, we’ve put more and more eggs in the reasoning basket, betting on thinking to save the day. The thinking mind is the road to salvation. At this moment in history, we’ve lost interest and, to some degree, respect, for all the other ways of knowing: bodily, intuitively, experientially, and so forth—all the ways we can know other than through thinking and logic.

When I present material as a public speaker, despite three decades of professional experience with human beings and their thoughts and emotions, I am almost always asked what MRI studies or research I can offer to support my observations on human behavior. Reason and scientific proof have been anointed as our kings. Thinking, we believe, will solve whatever questions and challenges life presents. And, with technology exploding, our faith in and reverence for thinking are only intensifying.

Living in the Question

“The only true wisdom is in knowing we know nothing,” said Socrates. A lot has changed in the 2,500 years since Socrates uttered those words. Our society now seems to disagree with the great philoso­pher on the issue of knowing. Here, in the 21st century AD, we believe that we should and can know everything. Our unceasing need to know the answers along with our unwillingness to accept the unknown sit at the root of our excessive thinking, and our anxiety.

Mystery, in our society, is not a real thing…it’s a flaky or woowoo thing. Not knowing the answer is not an acceptable answer. We’re taught from the time we’re born that knowing is good—we are good, worthy, if we have the answers. “You should know better” is what we hear when we’re young and have done something wrong. We feel shame and inadequacy when we don’t have the answers: It makes us feel weak and defective, vulnerable and lost. Not knowing is a form of failure.

At the same time, knowing feels safe; it feels like we’re in control. With the answers in place, we don’t have to face the impermanence that underpins our life, the reality that everything is constantly changing, whether we like it or not. We don’t have to feel how out of control we really are as human beings on this mortal and mysterious journey. As a result, we do a lot of faking it, “impostering,” when it comes to knowing. Simultaneously, we rush to answers that aren’t true or sustainable. We’ll do anything, essentially, to not reside in the unknown.

But despite what we’re conditioned to believe, life is forever deposit­ing us in situations where we cannot know and don’t have access to the answers we want, don’t know the way forward, to say nothing of the larger not knowing—what we’re all doing here, existing, in the first place. Given the frequency with which the experience of not knowing or at least not yet knowing shows up in life, we would be wise to learn how to inhabit it and, even better, to do so with a sense of acceptance and relaxation rather than judgment and fear.

It may feel unfamiliar, unwise, and even dangerous to sit with a chal­lenging, unresolved situation, to not know what it means, what we need to do about it, or how to get out of it. Uncomfortable though it may be however, it behooves us to learn how to not know, to feel what it’s like in the not knowing, and to await more clarity and the arrival of a path through. Living in the question, if we can drop our judgments about it, can become its very own place to reside. With practice, we can learn to actually relax with not having the answer.

When we offer ourselves permission to not know, we allow life to reveal what it wants to reveal, in its own time—without forcing it. The questions then, remarkably, become their own destinations. What’s more, we find that not knowing is a place that, if we have the courage to trust it, can deliver deeper and wiser solutions, real solutions, paths forward that are more reliable than anything we can mentally muscle our way into knowing.

Surrendering to living in the questions feels like dropping through a trap door. Suddenly we are deposited into the present moment; we have permission to be here, to experience what life is like—now. We have permission to get interested in the experience of this reality and allow the answers to reveal themselves on their own timeline. Just for now, we don’t have to do it all ourselves, don’t have to push our way through with our mind, as we’ve been taught. Relaxing into the questions, unexpectedly, allows us to join a larger unfolding, a process bigger than ourselves, and thankfully, one in which we don’t have to be respon­sible for controlling our life at every turn. At last, it isn’t up to only us. Living in the questions, no matter how uncomfortable it might feel, is living in the truth, which, once we get the hang of it, contains its own safety and trustworthiness. The safety we experience in the truth, however, is not because we have all the answers or because the truth is comfortable (the usual markers of safety), but rather because the truth is inarguable…because the truth is what is. Surrendering to not knowing means planting our feet in moving ground and accepting that we’re in a process without a known outcome and that the process is the destination for now.

The post How to Relax When You Don’t Have the Answers appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Why we get stuck in negative thinking loops

Thinking gives us a sense of agency, makes us feel less vulnerable and afraid, less at the mercy of change and what we can’t control. We don’t know another way, don’t know how to let go of what we see as our lifeboat. We are so heavily invested and reliant upon thinking as the way to keep ourselves safe that we don’t stop for long enough to get a glimpse of a way of living that doesn’t necessitate constant thinking.

We hold the deep conviction that thinking will make whatever we’re thinking about better. It’s ingrained in us from the time we’re born: Thinking is the solution—to every problem and non-problem. But what if it’s not? What if the premise at the center of everything we believe and do is faulty? What if thinking, the way we do it, is actually the problem, not the solution?

People often ask me if it’s possible to recover from chronic overthinking. The answer is yes, it’s possible. But in order to recover, you have to be ready to fall out of love with your thoughts and with your thinking process. You have to stop believing that your thoughts are the most important thing on Earth and, of course, the absolute truth.

Furthermore, you have to hit rock bottom—your bottom. You have to be sick and tired of being sick and tired, anxious, frightened, stressed, distracted, unhappy, and all the rest of the states of mind that your thoughts inflict upon you. In short, you have to get fed up with your thinking process and what the voice in your head is shouting or whispering at you. You have to find a new way of responding to your thoughts when they arise and a new way of thinking about thinking.

How to stop overthinking

The first step in breaking free from overthinking is making a commitment to listen to your own mind. In other words, to make the leap from being the one doing the thinking, the thinker, to the one the thoughts are talking to, the listener (or, if you choose, non-listener). When you’re caught in a thought loop of any kind, what you’ve lost is space … the space between the one listening to the thoughts and the thoughts themselves. When you’re caught, your thoughts don’t appear separate from who you are. Thoughts are you, and you are thoughts.

But the moment you recognize what’s happening inside your mind is the moment you start to feel relief. Acknowledging the presence of thoughts, ironically, allows you to feel disentangled from the thoughts and the whole thought tsunami. With awareness and acknowledgment, suddenly, there’s a separate shore from which to observe the thoughts without being drowned by them.

It is helpful in this acknowledgment, too, to give a name to your negative thinker or thinkers. When you label this voice of negativity inside you, it lightens and further separates you from the negative messages. Naming creates space.

You can use different names, too: one for your catastrophizer, the one who reminds you of everything that could (and will) go wrong (I call her Aunt Mathilda); one for your self-critic, the one who reminds you of everything wrong with you; one for your grievance keeper, who reminds you of every injustice anyone has ever done to you, right down to how the bus purposefully splashed you this morning. If you like, you can match the kind of thoughts to the names of people you’ve known who remind you of such sentiments. What’s paramount is that when the thoughts arise, you take a moment to acknowledge the voice with its proper name: Oh look, it’s Aunt Mathilda, here to tell me that I’m going to fail and that it will all end in disaster. Thank you for sharing, Mathilda. Now you can go!

When you recognize that the negative thoughts have (or are trying to) seize your current reality and that your present moment is being injected with this toxic content, you can name this truth as well. You might take a moment to pause and consciously offer yourself a dose of compassion right there, at the center of the storm. You can acknowledge that you are really trapped in the thoughts, down the rabbit hole, and suffering, wishing you could get out but not knowing how to do it. This compassionate pause, stepping back and acknowledging your own experience at that moment, is, in fact, critical in the process of breaking free from your self-inflicted unkindness.

The most important discovery in freeing yourself from excessive thinking is recognizing that your thoughts are not you. You, and all of us, have what is essentially an out-of-order computer firing all day and all night inside your head. Sometimes, that out-of-order computer tells you interesting things or maybe helps you put together a grocery list, but for much of the time, it’s spewing out contents that are not particularly helpful and often harmful to you. That said, it behooves all of us to expand our awareness when it comes to our own thinking and start deciding for ourselves which thoughts we want to engage with and how we want to be treated inside our own minds.

The post Putting the Brakes on Overthinking appeared first on Nancy Colier.

For the first year of the pandemic, couples actually managed well. The physical and emotional consequences of the virus, being cooped up in the house together, the losses endured, fear, anxiety, financial instability, all of it was handled, by and large, with compassion and patience. Many couples, in fact, grew closer and more appreciative of each other over the first year of pandemic isolation. And yet, something has definitely shifted.

Perhaps it’s the fallout from all the time spent together, or all that required compassion, but what’s showing up in my office right now is a whole lot of impatience—and conflict. Particularly, that is, when it comes to what’s safe, how to re-enter life, and at what pace.

Two couples who disagree about COVID

Chloe and Zach are struggling. Both are vaccinated, but for Chloe, being vaccinated means she has the green light to get back to normal life; COVID is in her rearview mirror. It means she can go out to restaurants and events without fear. She still wears a mask when she goes to indoor events, but for the most part, she is living a post-COVID life. Her husband Zach, on the other hand, doesn’t trust the vaccine like his wife does. He is still anxious about breakthrough infections and avoids all indoor events, even masked. After Chloe attends in-person events, which she has started to do (alone), Zach spends a period of days quarantining in their small studio apartment, so as not to be potentially exposed to the virus. His anxiety about getting sick from COVID was only mildly eased by the vaccine, and he is definitely not ready to join his wife in regular life, and not ready to take advantage of all the possibilities that are opening up.

In another example, Steve received the vaccine as soon as it came out; he never gave it a second thought. He understood that it might not be foolproof, but felt the benefits far outweighed the risks. Steve trusted what the scientists and health organizations were saying and was ready to roll up his sleeve, and move on with life. He was particularly excited about being able to travel again with his wife, as this had been one their favorite activities as a couple.

Lynn, however, who had grown up in an authoritarian country, felt differently. The idea of having to take a vaccine and show papers in order to be able to participate in daily life made her distrustful and afraid. In addition, she followed a rigorously healthy diet and what she called “toxin-free-lifestyle” and simply didn’t want the vaccine in her body. All this to say, Steve was vaccinated and Lynn was not.

Learning to hold differing truths

I’m not here to discuss the rightness or wrongness of any of these choices regarding COVID. For each of these individuals, the virus and vaccine elicited very different experiences and feelings, all of which were real and true for the person experiencing them. Each of these well-educated and well-informed individuals had heard the science and arguments in every direction. They already knew everything I could tell them in terms of stats and studies.

The problem that needed immediate attention was the fact that their differing feelings and beliefs about the vaccine made it impossible for them to resume their pre-COVID life as a couple. They could no longer go out to restaurants, attend events, travel, or do any of the things they used to enjoy together…to live as a couple in the world, either because of not having been vaccinated or not feeling safe to do so.

As a result, the partner who is ready to re-enter life generally feels resentment, judgment, and anger toward their partner for depriving them of the chance to enjoy life again, and for feelings that they deem as crazy or overly-anxious. Their partner’s experience is something that needs to be fixed (hopefully by me). At the same time, they feel fear and sadness over potentially losing their partner, and the person they want accompanying them in normal life. Simultaneously, the partner who chooses not to be vaccinated, or is still anxious even with the vaccine, feels judged, pathologized, and blamed. They feel that their experience is not heard or allowed; they feel rejected.

My intention in this situation, which is appearing more and more frequently these days, is not to persuade anyone out of their truth or convince them of any other truth than the one they hold. Rather, it is to help the couple find a way to be together with their differing truths—to reinvent who and how they will be a couple in their new post-COVID incarnation. If that’s possible…

If you are in this situation, regarding COVID or any other highly impactful life choice, the first thing to remember is that you are not the keeper of The Truth. It’s not up to you to decide what your partner’s experience is or should be. What’s true for you is true and what’s true for your partner is also true—even when the two truths are radically different.

The beginning of a new relationship is joining these two differing truths with an and not a but. Until you can meet your partner’s truth with curiosity and some degree of friendliness, real progress will be stymied. So, step one is to meet your partner’s truth, to try and understand their experience, not judge, pathologize, or blame it. And not blame them for holding you (both) back from life, assuming that if they chose to, they could have a different truth than the one they have. This truth that you are rejecting, no matter what you think of it, belongs to someone you love, and therefore is a truth you must be able to allow.

The second step is to talk about how you want to be together or if there is a way to be together with your differing truths. Are there other ways to enjoy each other as a couple, to feel enjoyment and intimacy? These are hard conversations but conversations that need to happen. If your partner is not willing, for now, to join you back in the world, or welcome your experience as it is, what will this new reality mean for you as a couple? Furthermore, what are the losses that will come with this new reality. These losses need to be recognized and honored, without blame.

At the same time, remember that whatever situation is happening right now, it will pass. Your relationship existed before COVID, and it can and will exist after it’s through. If, that is, you have the courage to allow your reality, your partner’s reality, and your new reality as a couple, to allow all of them to exist right now, as they are.

The post When COVID Threatens to Break Up Your Relationship appeared first on Nancy Colier.

But over time, I realized that despite all the thinking humanly possi­ble, there were important questions in my life that I couldn’t know and couldn’t solve, not yet anyway. This truth was unavoidable and irrefut­able. I had to admit and accept that, with all my pseudo-knowing, my proposed and attempted solutions, I was still not any better off. Any knowing I had thought myself into was illusory. The more I tried to know, the more I felt like I didn’t know. On the other side of that admission and acceptance however, I found something unexpected…utter relief.

We live in an age of reason and science. We worship information, research, and logic so much that we named our era for it: the age of information. To reason is to think, to use the rational mind, understand, and make sense of our world. Over time, we’ve put more and more eggs in the reasoning basket, betting on thinking to save the day. The thinking mind is the road to salvation. At this moment in history, we’ve lost interest and, to some degree, respect, for all the other ways of knowing: bodily, intuitively, experientially, and so forth—all the ways we can know other than through thinking and logic.

When I present material as a public speaker, despite three decades of professional experience with human beings and their thoughts and emotions, I am almost always asked what MRI studies or research I can offer to support my observations on human behavior. Reason and scientific proof have been anointed as our kings. Thinking, we believe, will solve whatever questions and challenges life presents. And, with technology exploding, our faith in and reverence for thinking are only intensifying.

Living in the Question

“The only true wisdom is in knowing we know nothing,” said Socrates. A lot has changed in the 2,500 years since Socrates uttered those words. Our society now seems to disagree with the great philoso­pher on the issue of knowing. Here, in the 21st century AD, we believe that we should and can know everything. Our unceasing need to know the answers along with our unwillingness to accept the unknown sit at the root of our excessive thinking, and our anxiety.

Mystery, in our society, is not a real thing…it’s a flaky or woowoo thing. Not knowing the answer is not an acceptable answer. We’re taught from the time we’re born that knowing is good—we are good, worthy, if we have the answers. “You should know better” is what we hear when we’re young and have done something wrong. We feel shame and inadequacy when we don’t have the answers: It makes us feel weak and defective, vulnerable and lost. Not knowing is a form of failure.

At the same time, knowing feels safe; it feels like we’re in control. With the answers in place, we don’t have to face the impermanence that underpins our life, the reality that everything is constantly changing, whether we like it or not. We don’t have to feel how out of control we really are as human beings on this mortal and mysterious journey. As a result, we do a lot of faking it, “impostering,” when it comes to knowing. Simultaneously, we rush to answers that aren’t true or sustainable. We’ll do anything, essentially, to not reside in the unknown.

But despite what we’re conditioned to believe, life is forever deposit­ing us in situations where we cannot know and don’t have access to the answers we want, don’t know the way forward, to say nothing of the larger not knowing—what we’re all doing here, existing, in the first place. Given the frequency with which the experience of not knowing or at least not yet knowing shows up in life, we would be wise to learn how to inhabit it and, even better, to do so with a sense of acceptance and relaxation rather than judgment and fear.

It may feel unfamiliar, unwise, and even dangerous to sit with a chal­lenging, unresolved situation, to not know what it means, what we need to do about it, or how to get out of it. Uncomfortable though it may be however, it behooves us to learn how to not know, to feel what it’s like in the not knowing, and to await more clarity and the arrival of a path through. Living in the question, if we can drop our judgments about it, can become its very own place to reside. With practice, we can learn to actually relax with not having the answer.

When we offer ourselves permission to not know, we allow life to reveal what it wants to reveal, in its own time—without forcing it. The questions then, remarkably, become their own destinations. What’s more, we find that not knowing is a place that, if we have the courage to trust it, can deliver deeper and wiser solutions, real solutions, paths forward that are more reliable than anything we can mentally muscle our way into knowing.

Surrendering to living in the questions feels like dropping through a trap door. Suddenly we are deposited into the present moment; we have permission to be here, to experience what life is like—now. We have permission to get interested in the experience of this reality and allow the answers to reveal themselves on their own timeline. Just for now, we don’t have to do it all ourselves, don’t have to push our way through with our mind, as we’ve been taught. Relaxing into the questions, unexpectedly, allows us to join a larger unfolding, a process bigger than ourselves, and thankfully, one in which we don’t have to be respon­sible for controlling our life at every turn. At last, it isn’t up to only us. Living in the questions, no matter how uncomfortable it might feel, is living in the truth, which, once we get the hang of it, contains its own safety and trustworthiness. The safety we experience in the truth, however, is not because we have all the answers or because the truth is comfortable (the usual markers of safety), but rather because the truth is inarguable…because the truth is what is. Surrendering to not knowing means planting our feet in moving ground and accepting that we’re in a process without a known outcome and that the process is the destination for now.

The post How to Relax When You Don’t Have the Answers appeared first on Nancy Colier.

My work with Anna and James was not just to mediate their current and ongoing struggle, but to create relational harmony between them, to help them be together in a way that was indeed harmonious. So then, what is harmony in a relationship? We usually use the word to describe a relationship in which the people seem happy, and the interactions are easy and relatively conflict-free. We consider two people in harmony when they fit together like concordant notes in a pleasing musical chord. And yes, all this is true; such relationships are harmonious. But, there is one element of relational harmony, which may be the most important and defining one, that we deeply misunderstand and that causes much of our unhappiness in relationships.

Because we think of harmony as an agreement between two people, we spend our energy trying to agree on some version of what’s true. We fight until we determine a shared reality. Undoubtedly, agreeing with another person’s version of the truth, their ideas, values, and belief systems, certainly makes things easier in a relationship.  But in fact, deep and lasting emotional, mental, and spiritual harmony requires something other than just agreeing on a shared experience.

Harmony in a relationship means understanding; we don’t need to agree to be in harmony, but we do need to be willing to understand another person’s experience and actually hear their truth.

From the time we’re born, we’re conditioned to believe that our thoughts, opinions, and beliefs define us, that they are who we are. At the same time, we believe that our thoughts are true, but not just true, fundamentally true as in, the Truth. If someone disagrees with us or experiences something differently, it can feel like our identity or very existence is being threatened. How can we exist harmoniously with this other person if they disagree with us, and don’t see it the way we do? This implies that they disagree with who we are, which means there can be no harmony between us, and maybe more importantly, within ourselves.  We must get this other person to agree with us and our experience; we must win the battle of whose version of reality is true so that we can feel better and find harmony again, at least temporarily.

Returning to our couple, Anna and James were in a state of disharmony when they first came to see me, not because they disagreed on the role that money should play in their relationship, but rather because they were unwilling to listen to or even try to understand each other’s experience around money. They were locked in a brutal fight to determine whose version of reality was right, whose experience was going to be allowed to exists as valid and real. And, they were in my office for me to serve as the umpire in their battle, and award one of them with the badge of truth.  As in, you win… this is what money should mean!  This couple needed not to agree on who was right, since they both were right, and both of their experiences mattered, but rather to learn how to hear each other and understand each other’s truth—to coexist in disagreement and simultaneously, in harmony.

Harmony in a relationship, whether romantic, platonic, professional, familial, or any other kind, stems from our willingness to understand another person’s truth, without judging them or defending ourselves, to let their truth be true for them, and therefore, true. Harmony is born from our desire to genuinely know what another person’s reality looks and feels like, through their eyes and heart—not ours. To understand their truth beyond what we think of it.

Harmony blooms when we have the courage to stop hearing another person’s experience solely through the lens of what it means to and about us. Like grace, it appears when we listen to know another human being—not as they exist in relation to us, but as they are.

At the most profound level, harmony in a relationship does not mean that we agree with each other on the contents of life, on what should or shouldn’t be, what happened or didn’t happen.  In other words, what’s true. However, it does mean that we share an intention to understand and know each other, in agreement, disagreement, and everything in between.

In service to our desire for harmony, we can start by learning to ask harmonious questions: What is this like for you? How do you experience this? What does this mean for you? And not just to ask the questions, but to set your self and your opinions aside long enough to really listen to and hear the answers. And…to let them be.

The post Harmony in Relationship Does Not Require Agreement appeared first on Nancy Colier.

that just might be the one that would launch her. When Gwen wasn’t auditioning, networking, or exercising (to keep herself camera-ready), she was writing material, making videos, and submitting them.  And when she wasn’t doing that, she was waitressing and bartending to pay rent on her tiny studio apartment in a bad neighborhood.

Gwen was tough on herself, too.  If she ever wanted to take a day off or just skip an exercise class, she would attack herself: How do you expect to get there if you’re not willing to do everything it takes? You’ll get a day off when you make it.  In her mind, unless she chased every carrot, no matter what it did to her in the process, she would never make it to the top, and worse, she would blame herself for not being willing to do what it took to get there.  But living this way was difficult and painful; Gwen was not only utterly exhausted and overwhelmed with shoulds, but also suffering at the hands of her own internal critic.

After a decade of pushing, her career had stayed at basically the same level.  And yet, her level of exhaustion and suffering had gotten far worse.  Ten years of never saying no had left her weary and bordering on bitter.  And deeply disappointed.  The story she had always told herself, that her time would come, was wearing thin and feeling less believable.  Most importantly, she was growing tired of the life she was actually living — her real one, not the imaginary one that would happen when she was famous.

With a lot of hard work and tears, Gwen was finally able to admit to herself that she didn’t want to keep living such a grueling life, under the whip of an internal slave-driver, or to keep living it on the fumes of a dream.  She wanted a life that she wanted to be living—now.  Her present experience had finally become something that mattered; she had become someone who mattered.  At last, Gwen chose to hang up her comedian’s hat and enter graduate school.

For the first time in Gwen’s life, she wasn’t striving every minute to try to get somewhere else, to become someone else who was more important.  She liked herself and felt at peace for the first time.  She even discovered that she positively loved puttering around doing very little, which, in her previous incarnation, was something she had never known or allowed herself.  Mostly, she was deeply proud of herself for having had the courage to step off the treadmill of striving for success.

And then she met Brendon.  Her new boyfriend was a jet-setter, a successful entrepreneur on the fast track to big things.  Filled with ambition and talent, he also never missed an opportunity to attend an event, network, or just go the extra mile, whatever was needed to score the deal.  He was always chasing after something and usually getting it.  As Gwen described it, Brendon was the male version of her old self, but a winning one.

Shortly into their relationship, Gwen started talking about needing to get back into comedy.  She began making casual references to herself as boring.  Her coursework, which had been fascinating just weeks before, was now dull and mediocre.  For the first time since she had left comedy, she was feeling disappointed in herself.  She felt inadequate, a failure.  The life that had been enjoyable, hard-earned, and courageous, and most importantly, one that finally belonged to her, was now empty and unexciting—far too average for Brendon.  And indeed, she imagined that she herself was far too average for Brendon.

Just two months into her new relationship, the self-worth and pride she had earned in the very difficult process of changing careers, letting go of a dream, and building a new identity, had, for the most part, slipped away.  Gwen had lost connection with what her life meant through her eyes and was now seeing it through the lens of what it would look like to her boyfriend.  How she felt about herself was now defined by how she imagined Brendon would perceive her.  The respect Gwen had built for her own journey was gone, reduced to a few judgments by which her new boyfriend would label it.

As women, this is sometimes what we do—to ourselves.  We ignore, dismiss, and throw away our own experience, what our journey means to us, what we know to be true about ourselves, and replace it with other people’s definitions and perceptions of our life.  We do this habitually, without even knowing we’re doing it.

If we want to break this self-abandoning habit, we have to first become aware of it.  We have to become conscious of our willingness and compulsion to sacrifice our own experience in favor of others people’s versions of it.  Once we can see ourselves giving away our truth, see the suffering it causes us, and see the absurdity of it, then we can stop doing it.  But first, we have to get good and fed up with giving ourselves away.  With awareness and a lot of practice, we can learn to stay connected to our own experience, to stand in our own truth, to define our own journey, even in the face of other people’s opinions, and those who see us differently than who we know ourselves to be.  For now, start paying attention to how and when you give away your own story, and let others write it for you.  Practice taking back your own authority, whatever that means to you.

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After four years of going to bed with our stomachs in knots, hearts heavy and brains on fire, trying to make peace with yet another horrible thing, it will be a while before our shoulders fully drop and the knots in our stomachs unravel. It will take time to trust that the world might, at some point, be fundamentally OK.

At the same time, more than 73 million people chose to support our outgoing leader. This fact gives pause to the many others who cannot fathom that choice. And yet it happened, which leaves us with a difficult conundrum.

This conundrum is not a place to stop and get comfortable with a new kind of outrage, a new version of “what the hell is wrong with them?” If we use this conundrum as a doorway, not a destination, perhaps we can move the dialogue forward and create something that brings out our humanity once again.

In a country where the average American has to work more than a month to earn what the average CEO makes in an hour, there’s no doubt that our rage wasn’t born in 2016. But, even if this leader didn’t officially create the hatred and contempt that now pervades our society, he did create a system in which everyone feels the right to shout their opinions and disgust through a megaphone, to publicly point fingers at whomever they think is to blame for their discontent. This leader has empowered the mental garbage that floats through almost every human being’s mind and entitled it to an audience.

Over these last four years, there’s been no attempt whatsoever to rein in our grievances, to be kind or behave in any sort of civilized manner. The current leadership has modeled an attitude of bullying, blaming, and shaming, an attitude utterly devoid of empathy. A leader who feels perpetually persecuted and is always looking for someone to blame creates a sentiment that mirrors his own.

Many moons ago, there was a saying … if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Today, this saying might sound absurd, ignorant, and even dangerous to free speech. Most Americans believe that not nice words are important for creating change and making the world a better place. I agree; the idea that we would only speak if we had good things to say sounds like a recipe for becoming sheep.

But over these last four years, with a leader who spews venom and toxicity, we have twisted that original expression into its modern form, namely, if you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.

I frequently find myself wondering, what happened to our basic sense of decency and decorum, to integrity and basic kindness? While it may seem old-fashioned to follow some sort of public etiquette, at this moment in history we could use an infusion of old-fashioned values. We could use what Senator Cory Booker called a “resurrection of grace.”

It’s hard for us to agree on anything these days, but I hope we can agree that a regular diet of anger and intolerance does something dreadful to us, to who we are as a species. It poisons our consciousness and brings out the worst in us.

What if each one of us made a commitment to stop contributing to this cesspool of hatred? What if we each made the choice to stop using the public square to announce and celebrate every angry thought or grievance that floats through our minds? Just because we think something doesn’t mean it’s true, and it doesn’t mean that we have to say it. In fact, when we stop awarding our angry thoughts with so much attention, stop providing these floating mental flotsam with a megaphone, they tend to get a lot quieter inside our own heads.

We cannot control anyone else’s behavior, but we can control our own. What if, crazy though it may sound, we just acted a little kinder than we felt, or thought?

We don’t have to wait for our leaders to change our country. We can start a revolution right now by making the choice to use our words and our own behavior as a means to resurrect decency and decorum, to bring back goodness and integrity as fundamental societal values. And maybe even, to invite grace back into the conversation.

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Based on the fact that he was a public figure and had planned a jam-packed few days of in-person social and professional meetings, she had assumed (without realizing it) that her friend had recently tested for the virus, although she hadn’t confirmed that assumption.

They met on a chilly evening in New York City.  Without thinking, Petra grabbed a table inside the restaurant.  Her friend showed up wearing a mask and they elbow bumped a warm hello.  But then, her friend took off his mask, claiming that it wasn’t required because they would be eating.  For a moment, Petra also took off her mask, and the two dove into conversation.

After a few minutes, however, Petra was overcome with fear.  It suddenly dawned on her that her friend had been on an airplane the previous day.  Her friend had also (nonchalantly) mentioned that the last time he’d been tested was more than two weeks before the trip to New York.  As he went on talking, Petra found herself feeling increasingly afraid, and simultaneously, utterly trapped.

Petra made the decision to put her mask back on.  But what she didn’t do, and was so angry at herself about, was ask her friend to put his own mask back on.  She felt paralyzed, as if she had to stay in the seat and also had to stay silent.  Why hadn’t she asked her friend to be safe?  This was the question we explored the morning after.

What became clear was that Petra felt guilty about asking him to put his mask back on.  To ask felt unkind, particularly given how much pain he was in, and how happy he seemed to take it off.  Asking would have been a “bother,” and she certainly didn’t want to be that.  So too, it would suggest that he might be infected, which would be insulting, and a way of saying she didn’t trust him.  As if that weren’t enough, being honest about her concern would have made her a “buzz-kill,” difficult,” and “neurotic.”  Clearly, in Petra’s mind, there were huge risks associated with taking care of herself.

Petra was aware of her fear, and even the legitimacy of her fear, but nonetheless, could not bring herself to voice it.  No matter how she tried to rationalize what was happening, she knew she was putting herself at risk.  Still, she sat there like a “good girl,” quietly and empathically listening to her friend, watching the saliva droplets fly from his mouth.  Despite her discomfort and dread, she was not willing to stop what was happening.  She was not willing to risk being unpleasing.  In the end, Petra chose to protect her friend’s experience over protecting her own.

It can feel so hard, particularly for women, to not be what we imagine other people want us to be, to let other people down.  To please or not to please can feel like a life or death choice, like emotional survival.

Most of us have lived something similar to Petra’s experience, and also the regret, confusion, and anger that result from it.  What’s important is that we remember (and continue reminding ourselves of) these experiences, and how we felt in their wake.  These experiences are fundamental to our growth; we cannot change if we don’t recognize and deeply respect the power of our conditioned need to be what we imagine others want us to be.  Petra may or may not end up with COVID, but either way, she put herself at increased risk for it because she couldn’t risk not being what her friend wanted her to be. The threat of not being pleasing proved stronger than that of getting a potentially deadly virus.  If we resist the impulse to criticize ourselves for our choice, and instead use such experiences as teachers, they can lead us to change—and serve as fundamental turning points in life.

The need to people-please is a complicated topic about which I will write more in future posts.  But for now, here’s what I suggest.  First, start by paying close attention to your own experience.  Awareness is key; without awareness, we will continue acting out our habitual people-pleasing patterns.  Notice where you’re straying from your truth, where you’re “behaving” and becoming who you think is wanted.  If we don’t become conscious of our unconscious efforts to be pleasing, we cannot change them.

Furthermore, when you notice that you’ve slipped into pleasing mode, consider the possibility of pleasing yourself too.  If it helps, you can close your eyes, so as not to see the person you think you’re disappointing.  Now, say the words that are true.  Imagine saying them to yourself, but say them out loud.  And remember, everything can be said nicely.  In our re-written script for Petra, she said, “Hey, you just got off an airplane, I’d be more comfortable if you wore a mask.”  The ask is simple, direct, and honest.  It doesn’t seek to explain her feelings. What’s most important in these moments is that we own our own experience, without blaming or defending, and without indulging the story we have going in our own mind.

While some of you may see Petra’s choice as incomprehensible, something you would never do, in reality, most of us fall prey to the habit of people-pleasing, at our own expense, in one way or another.  Let me be clear: Taking care of others is not a bad thing and we’re not bad for doing it.  But we run into trouble when taking care of others comes at the expense of taking care of ourselves.

Remember too, each time we people-please, we strengthen the belief that it’s not safe to be who we really are, and that the only way to be accepted is to become who someone else wants.  This keeps us stuck in the same habitual patterns.  And worse, it can keep us feeling fundamentally unloved, and un-lovable, believing that our lovable-ness depends upon our willingness and ability to please.

We don’t become people-pleasers overnight and we don’t recover overnight.  It’s a process.  We start with small steps, practicing in what feel like low-risk situations.  Maybe we tell the waitress, nicely, that this isn’t what we ordered, or let a friend know that we don’t really want to take a walk in the cold, even though she needs some exercise.  Through practice, we build the muscle for taking care of ourselves. And, each time we practice, it gets a little easier and the muscle gets a little stronger.

The more we learn to express our needs, the more we feel we deserve to express our needs.  Each time we choose to be real, rather than to be pleasing, we experience a feeling of strength, self-respect, and groundedness.  Furthermore, we end up building relationships that are correspondingly grounded and real, based in the truth, and therefore, trustworthy.  Precisely what we’re trying to create by pleasing.  Most importantly, we build a relationship with ourselves that is self-loving and unshakably on our own side.

The post Are You A People-Pleaser at Your Own Expense? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

So, what are we to do with all this anxiety? When the new normal is anxious, when living with a constant sense of fear is just how it is, can we, also, feel peaceful and even well (without being delusional or in denial)?

While it may not be what we want to hear, the only way through our anxiety is through it. In order to ease our anxiety, we have to stop running from it and actually experience it.

Amped up on caffeine, I had spent the morning busying myself with one task after another. With a hyper-zealous, Virgo-style efficiency, I was getting an inordinate amount done, which was good, but I could also sense a kind of franticness in myself. As productive as I felt, I also knew that it wouldn’t have been possible to stop moving, stop getting stuff done, stop accomplishing, stop checking the boxes, just plain stop. I could tell that I was running, internally and externally. And so, after 400 years of spiritual practice, lo and behold, it occurred to me to stop and ask myself what I was running from.

When I asked myself this question, however, I was careful not to frame it as an intellectual quandary. Such an inquiry can easily become an invitation to describe (to ourselves) all the things we’re anxious about, to mentally regurgitate the list of scary things and remind ourselves why we have a right to be afraid. But ultimately, this is not helpful, not in any deep sense. We already know what we’re afraid of and why. Naming it may be helpful for our mind, but it doesn’t usually make us feel any better at a gut level.

When we become aware of the fact that we’re running from something inside ourselves, when we feel like we can’t stop or desperately don’t want to stop doing or “tasking,” that’s our cue that we really do need to stop. We have to (compassionately) override the instinctive part of our brain that’s desperately trying to keep us away from what scares us.

My advice is the last thing on earth you want to hear. I get it. I spent years, even decades, running, literally and figuratively, moving and doing, accomplishing anything and everything. I got all sorts of accolades for my running, but my real work was in learning to stop. That is, to get inside here and feel its edges, no matter what here contains.

When we feel the anxiety of what’s happening in our world these days, we can invite ourselves, albeit counterintuitively, directly into the experience of what we’re calling anxiety. Not our story or narrative on it, but the experience itself, what it feels like in our senses. We can literally say to ourselves, feel this, feel its edges, feel its uncomfortableness. Simultaneously, we can give ourselves permission to not have to understand it, figure it out, solve it, make it feel better, or make it go away. But simply to get inside it, step into it like a wet suit you wear scuba diving.

Maybe it’s all my years of being a serious athlete, of pushing my body and mind past what felt possible, but there’s something challenging (in a good way) and even exciting about experiencing something hard, about getting inside the experience of uncomfortableness. There’s a real payoff when we do hard things and stretch outside our comfort zone. Dropping into our actual experience, whether it’s anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, whatever it is, can in fact be a fascinating and beneficial exercise.

And here’s the thing: When we stop running and drop into whatever is here under all the running; when we let ourselves travel into the eye of the storm and the center of our experience, remarkably, we feel better. It’s the paradox of all paradoxes: When we allow ourselves to experience our anxiety, we feel less anxious (and that’s true for most everything). It’s as if the anxiety benefits or is soothed by our own presence.

But, I repeat, experiencing it is not telling ourselves about it, listing its causes, or trying to solve it. Experiencing it is not blaming ourselves or anyone else for it. Experiencing it is not collapsing into our emotional storylines about it. It is just (and yes, I’m laughing as I write “just”) a matter of inhabiting the experience itself, getting inside it, and if it works for you to imagine, feeling its edges.

So, give it a whirl. The next time you feel anxious or any other unwanted emotion, try thinking of it as a challenge. If you’re like me, you can make it a kind of athletic or spiritual challenge, like climbing Mount Everest. Instead of distracting yourself from the emotion, do the least intuitive thing possible: Stop and drop into the experience itself, lean into the feeling you’re running from. Feel what it’s like, get inside its edges. Wear it. Hey, if the experiment is a disaster and experiencing it proves worse than running from it, you can always peel off the wetsuit and put your sneakers back on (and unsubscribe from my blog). Let me know how it goes.

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