Your Garden of Connections

By Emily Celis, MS, LMFT @ S.A.G.E. Holistic Health & Wellness Center

Its been on our minds lately about how to deepen relationships and create more authenticity. Often, this is something that many people long for…but when faced with challenges in current relationships, we can tend to shy away from authenticity and connection in order to protect ourselves from pain or what might feel like rejection.

Creating lasting bonds of friendship, love and lasting relationships takes work, but often times we aren’t given a “rules book” on how to make this happen.

It takes a lot of COURAGE, we’ll tell you that…and today we want to share a few tips on how you can deepen your current relationships and step into more connection right now. Your life starts to shimmer a bit more when you have connections with others that are full of meaning and acceptance.

Tip #1: Reflect on your relationships. Who is in your inner circle? Who is in your outer circles? Do you have anyone in your inner circle who you would prefer to be a bit further away? Do you have someone in an outer circle that you would like to get to know better to see whether they can be a friend or relationship with deeper connection? The first step is reflecting on what your current state of relationships is before you make your next move…

Tip #2: Choose how much time you want to spend on relationships. We all have the same pie to utilize when it comes to pieces being used for different things (i.e. sleep, exercise, work, family obligations, grocery shopping, and other adulting tasks). Consistency is key to create trusting bonds. Now that you’ve reviewed your circles and identified which relationships you want to focus your attention on, think about how much time you would like to spend nurturing these relationships. It helps if you correlate this time commitment to how important relationships are to you. Go ahead write it down. 

Tip #3: Tend to your garden. Now that you have decided how much time you want to spend on nurturing your relationships, now is the fun and challenging part. Begin with a text or a call, maybe set up a virtual hangout if you’re not seeing people in person. Or you might go old fashioned and call someone. Whatever, you do notice how it feels when you are trying to connect with these people. Do you feel vulnerable? Do you notice feelings rising up inside of you when you are reaching out?

So much can come up when we get vulnerable and start reaching for what we want in life. We will write more about relationships and how to tend to them in the future?but this can be a great start to establishing or deepening long lasting bonds. Stay tuned for more relationship help.