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Tag: love

Desiring Genuine Friendship? Look for People Who Support & Challenge You

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Healthy Relationships.

Do you think genuine friendships are becoming rare, because of the way we’ve learned to treat social media friends, and if so, here’s what we can do…Social media has dramatically changed the idea of friends. You friend someone by simply clicking a button. Every day, your number of friends grows. You never meet face to face and you may not say a word directly to them. They know far more about you than you know of them…but they’re your friends. And if you feel like it, a push of a button unfriends them. Is that what you would call genuine friendship? 

I’m sure you recognize the difference between social media ‘friends’ and genuine friends. But could the way we treat social media friends be creeping into how we treat our true friends, perhaps even damaging those relationships?

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Embody Love — Where the Body Is the Mind and Heart Will Follow

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Somatic Embodiment.

To embody love means to be mindfully loving being no matter what happens, letting the unique sensations of your body inform you of your true emotions.“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”  ~ C.G. Jung

He couldn’t keep his eyes off of her. · She loved everything about her…the softness of her skin…and when she smiled…she was over the moon! · He could get lost in his eyes for hours, as they talked about nothing and everything into the wee hours of the morning. · He couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was his life. She was The One.

Love is an all-encompassing emotion. It’s not just a matter of the heart. Science shows that the biology of love is largely directed by chemicals released in the brain that trigger responses throughout the body. Sweaty palms, the wildly beating heart, the breathlessness of attraction are responses to the innate need to connect and keep the genetic line flowing. You can’t separate any part of your body from the sensation of love — your entire body is involved. The deepest connections occur when you embody love.

Forgetting this fundamental human state is the reason relationships come apart. When our mind begins to disconnect, so our body follows, sending signals of rejection or lack of interest. We may even be doing this unconsciously, but a partner can read it in our bodies, long before our brains catch up.

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Emotional Healing — We Can’t Do It Alone, We Need to Heal in Relationship

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Emotional Intelligence.

Emotional healing is a combination of doing personal, internal work and putting your new skill into practice within your relationships — it takes both.Emotional healing is part of our life journey to recognize how others have impacted our lives in the past and how we can process any hurt so that we may keep moving forward. Hiding from or trying to deny the pain causes the wound to go deeper and become more long-lasting. Emotional healing embraces the pain in the sense of using it to learn about ourselves and how we fit into the world around us. It’s a mindful process of observing, without judgment, identifying the thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions that we feel, then learning to channel them in productive ways. 

There’s no denying that emotional pain hurts! And we don’t like to hurt. Yet trying to avoid emotional pain makes us live in fear. We’ll end up making decisions that avoid commitment, risk or failure. As Eleanor Roosevelt wisely said, “We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.” 

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How to Relate WITH Others — Healthy Love Relationships Master This Skill

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Healthy Relationships.

Learning how to relate with others becomes easier when you follow these steps to forming,maintaining and enjoying a long-lasting love relationship.Like peanut butter and jelly or boots and sweaters, some things naturally go together. When you met the love of your life, you just knew the two of you belonged together. You wanted it to last forever. Yet in the day-to-day realities of life, the spark and sparkle may have grown a little dim, maybe you don’t think you’ll ever get the luster back again. This is when fortifying your skills on how to relate with others can help.

Did you notice I put the emphasis on relating with not relating to? Relating to others puts the emphasis on you in relation to them. Relating with others puts the emphasis on them.

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What Is Your Legacy?

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Embodied Leadership.

To live a meaningful life is to consider what is your legacy that you’ll pass onto others now and in the future, in a way that makes a difference. “All good men and women must take responsibility to create legacies that will take the next generation to a level we could only imagine.”  ~ Jim Rohn

When most people are asked, “what is your legacy?”, they immediately think of something they leave behind once they die — money, a business, a strong stock portfolio, or even a benefactor’s name on a hospital’s wing. Their focus is on leaving something as a legacy, but very few people think deeply about building a legacy. 

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