If you want to know how to improve your relationship with others, you first have to take some time to improve your relationship with yourself.
The book Eat.Pray.Love. talks about this phenomenon.
If you haven’t read it, the movie version is hitting the big screen in a few weeks. The story, which has resonated with millions of readers is a memoir sub-titled –
“one woman’s search for everything”
Really, it is the chronicle of one woman’s search for a better relationship with herself.
The author of the book, Elizabeth Gilbert, woke up one day after a series of bad romantic relationships and realized she had never taken time to discover who SHE was, what SHE liked and how to make her life whole – all by herself.
So, she made a dramatic move and created a grand around the world journey to improve her relationship with herself. The questions she asked were essentially:
How do I find me? Is it in physical pleasure? Is it a spiritual separation from the world? Is it in giving to others? Is it all three?
Kathy Jacobson – author of Do Tell: The Relationship Game – believes these questions resonate with so many people because they are questions of connectedness. “We have this physical part of ourselves, but we have a much bigger non-physical part,” says Jacobson.
In her practice of helping others, Jacobson finds when we are more connected to ourselves, we are then able to remain connected to this non-physical part of ourselves, and that helps us feel good.
“When we’re in it, we’re just happy,” explains Jacobson. “We have no resistance and we’re not looking at something we don’t want.”
In Eat.Pray.Love. a reader watches Gilbert (and soon the beautiful Julia Roberts in the big screen version) travel around the world to find a place where she isn’t looking at something she doesn’t want.
Most of us can’t do that – BUT that doesn’t mean we need to be denied the pleasures of improving our relationship with ourselves.
Jacobson wrote the Do Tell game because in her work helping others, she found that we can all create our own journey to ourselves and others. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic experience of traveling around the world. It can be a simple night of playing games with your family and friends.
Just asking simple-fun questions that make you laugh, and making new memories with the people you love can help you find that place of connectedness to the source of life within you – without leaving home.
Our most important relationship is our relationship with ourselves. So, stop. Make a place of ease in your life and learn to feel the joy we were meant to feel.
Sphere: Related ContentKarenRR
Wonderful article. I have a slightly different take, and that is “from a real-life point of view, from a Zen point of view, just Why? does one have to leave home to find yourself?” My thoughts are that the particular person who needs to travel to far-away-places as the tried-and-true-method of finding themselves is probably also one who’s present validations of life come from pleasing others or managing other people’s lives, and thus the trip is needed to remove that mental overhead/influence that mentally stops them from seeing their inner self and values. Of course there is the other reason of a “person with money spends it traveling for no reason at all, then has a revelation, and thus writes a book about herself which also makes an entertaining movie”.
But my real point is that “the self you are looking for, in true reality, is sitting with you right now as you read this”. To need an giant vacation/escape to find out “just where your lost self is” seems more self-indulgent/entertaining or fun, than a traditional soul-searching trip, with back-pack, to walk the roads of starving India in search of the guru’s latest epistle, which in a particular moment may be highly inspirational to you in particular.
Just some thoughts of one who has found himself while staying at home living the real life he’s stuck in every day. Although I did go out for coffee several times during the search.