Beyond relaxation or stress relief, why do so many people make meditation a part of their day? It’s not to become good at meditation, sitting on a cushion 20 minutes a day! Meditation is a way to become more self-aware, caring and wise, and to bring those strengths into your relationships, your work and your way of being in the world. In this six-part series, we Meditation Teacher Ann Vrlak looks at the core life skills you can develop or strengthen through a meditation practice.  

THE 6 LIFE SKILLS YOU’LL LEARN FROM MEDITATION: PART 6 – Connecting with Other People

I’m writing this last article in a series about six life skills of meditation, Connecting with Other People, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic. For better and for worse right now, we’re seeing how everyone on the planet is much more connected than we may have thought. All of a sudden, great distances don’t mean very much and, in our day-to-day lives, we’re seeing how deeply interconnected we are.

How we relate to other people has more vivid importance than just a few weeks ago. So, I’m glad to have this opportunity to share with you the ways that meditation can strengthen and enrich your connections with others during this very disconnecting time.

As someone who hasn’t always found it easy to connect with other people, I was so grateful to discover meditation. It has helped me in so many ways, from seeing other people more clearly, to spontaneously feeling love for people in everyday interactions, and feeling more able to just be myself. 

In writing this article, I’ve been thinking about four barriers that can get in the way of any kind of connection, from a casual conversation at the grocery, to work relationships, to intimate partnerships–and how meditation can help you. 

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1 | BEING STRESSED OR ANXIOUS

One of the first and most common barriers to connection is being stressed or anxious. It gets in the way of being yourself and being able to see the other person as they are.

Physiologically, your brain is under-functioning when you’re stressed, so your perception, thinking and expression are not allowing you to connect with the external world accurately or wholeheartedly.

Subjectively, stress fills your mind with thoughts about what could happen or what you should say or what the other person thinks of you, and on and on. Anxiety, which is essentially fear, is a high and wide barrier to opening up to whatever and whoever is right in front of you, to listening, to connecting.

Meditation comes to the rescue here! It brings a whole range of benefits that are stress-reducing. It’s physiologically relaxing and healing for your nervous system, and has a calming effect on your brain. Your mind relaxes, so your worries about other people tend to dissolve a bit or just not have their usual ring of truth for you. Your perception, thinking and expression will help you to be genuine and speak from the heart.

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2 | BEING DISTRUSTFUL OR JUDGEMENTAL

Your life experiences may have taught you that people are not trustworthy. Maybe you have a conscious or unconscious habit of judging other people, being suspicious or easily finding fault with them.  Needless to say, these thoughts get in the way of the openness and trust that we all need to allow meaningful connections to grow.

One of the core skills of meditation that I love and I have loved seeing grow in people I teach is acceptance. It’s one of the simplest to explain and one of the absolute hardest to do.

The guidance is something like: “Whatever is happening, just let it be as it is.” The inner dialogue of someone doing this practice might be, “Okay, I’m sitting to meditate, good for me! My back is a bit tight, though. Okay, I’m just going to accept that. I’ll focus on my breath now. Oh, yeah, have to pick up bread on my way home. I better write that down. Okay, I’m getting distracted, I’ll just let that be. I’m having a great feeling of expansion and love right now. I’ll just let that be too.”

The almost universal first objection people have to acceptance is that many things are not acceptable– they are not likable or they are not what you would choose. Who would like losing their job, or choose for their child to break a bone or enjoy living in a world where a virus is taking untold lives every day?

But the purpose behind practicing acceptance is simply that it doesn’t help to argue with reality. Acceptance doesn’t mean that you like something, only that you sit, as best you can, with the fact that it is happening.

With acceptance, you gradually become aligned with life, present to life, rather than being in an argument with it–an argument that can become almost continuous for some of us.

Meditation will help you notice the arguments in your mind in any given moment (you’re tired, but don’t want to be tired; you don’t want to be confined to your home because of COVID-19, but you are).

What good does the resistance do? Acceptance reduces your inner wars, so you’ll see and create fewer wars with other people. 

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3 | BEING SELF-CENTERED

All of us are self-centered once in a while, but sometimes we seem to only see our own interests or our own suffering. We think what we experience is somehow so much worse, so much more unique than what other people are experiencing. And that creates distance from other people and even a disinterest in them.

But something quite wonderful happens in meditation as you practice a different kind of very intimate interest in your own inner world, your joys, your confusion and your suffering. You begin to see it is not actually personal.

It’s one of the many lovely paradoxes in meditation. When you truly see your own anxiety, without running away from it, you can see it as human anxiety. Your loneliness becomes human loneliness. You see your fear about contracting COVID-19, as the same fear everyone around the planet is feeling and your heart opens to the suffering of our shared humanity.  

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4 | NOT BEING ABLE TO BE YOURSELF

Many people including me sometimes have the feeling that we just can’t be ourselves around other people. We have a painful, skewed kind of self-consciousness. So, it’s very hard to genuinely connect with other people or for them to connect with us because we’re not actually there. We’re hiding.

The kind of introspection and self-awareness that you develop in meditation cultivates real self-appreciation and self-compassion in all of who you are–your strengths and your challenges and your quirky quirks. So that ground of self-confidence allows you to risk a bit more, to open more to other people. How do you feel when someone surprises you with their openness or trust?

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

During this stressful and quite surreal time of the virus outbreak, I’m talking with students about the life skills in this series–and doing my best to use them every day myself: gaining perspective, self-compassion, becoming skillful with anxiety and depression, emotional balance, mental clarity and connecting with other people.

Each skill has helped me to be a bit more at peace and to reconnect with the compassionate wisdom we all have inside us. It changes everything. 

Whether you practice meditation already or you’re thinking of using this extraordinary time to try it, I hope that you find the practices and ideas in these articles give you some strength and peace. And please remember that five mindful minutes can be enough to find the quiet in the eye of the storm of these difficult times. 

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Missed part five of the SIX LESSONS MEDITATION TEACHES BEST? Read it here.

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