Connecting with your inner self can help strengthen your external relationships.
A small survey recently found that singles who meditate are more proactively engaged in dating than those who don’t. To me, this is no surprise, because love and meditation, as well as a connection with our inner selves, are all linked.
We have several basic natures, or qualities, that we are all born with, and one of the most important is love. Everyone wants to receive love. Everyone wants to give love. Somewhere deep down that’s who we all are. Each person alive is also a product of love. This is why love is so crucial in everyone’s life, and why many people search for mates to share their love with.
The problem is, the stresses and events of life take us away from our basic nature. The pure love, peace, happiness, and bliss we are born with gets slowly diminished as we go through our daily lives. Many people react to this by looking for love outside themselves in another person.
But think about it this way: If you have lost something inside your house, and you are looking for it outside your house, you’ll never find it. Love works the same way—and you’ve probably heard this idea before. You must discover love of yourself before someone else can truly love you.
So how does meditation factor in? Well, when you start to meditate and reconnect with your own flow of love within yourself, it begins to flow from you to other people. Everyone wants have a piece of it, and you become a very loving and lovable person. In that state of being, it is easy to love and be loved in any relationship—romantic or otherwise.
Bridging the Disconnect
Take any romantic relationship. It starts with love and great memories. After a period of time, things start to feel less fun, less exciting, and maybe even less loving. What has gone wrong? Love has died down.
When love starts to diminish, people’s preferences outside of love start to take over. When love is lost, the relationship itself becomes lost, with both partners searching for the love they want to regain in each other, which often causes more harm than good.
When it comes to romantic relationships, there are four types of people:
1. Mind-based: These people connect at the mind-level with their partner, and are attracted to intelligence and the intellectual aspects of their partner and their thought-process.
2. Body-based: For these people, sexuality and physical attributes are key, and they primarily connect with their partners in a physical way.
3. Heart-based: Emotions are very important, and these people come from a place of heart intelligence.
4. Energy-based: These people connect with the energy of their partner and feed off of it. If they don’t like the energy they’re getting, they start to feel unsatisfied.
All relationships contain a bit of each of these four elements, but most people strongly identify with one type over the others. Problems occur when love has taken a back seat, and you are body-based and your partner is mind-based, for example. Without the strong presence of love, this mismatch suddenly becomes more obvious, and creates a disconnect.
There are always going to be mismatches and disconnects, but the key thing is that there is a connection in the relationship, and that connection is normally at the level of love. When these other aspects become more dominant than love, then your relationship is going to face some challenges sooner or later.
That doesn’t mean the relationship is doomed, but it does mean that you need to find a way to come back together. If you can take care of the love part, those mismatches won’t matter much. You need to nourish that love, and the way to do that is meditation.
Using Meditation to Get Back to Love
Meditation is essentially going inward and not getting caught up in the tendencies of the mind so that you can connect with the very core of who you are. As I mentioned earlier, love is a big part of that. There are three levels of meditation:
Dharna: When you are focusing your mind, you’re concentrating outwardly. Perhaps you’re performing an action in your daily life mindfully by giving it your full attention.
Dhayana: This is what people normally consider meditation and is focused on awareness. It can be inward or outward, like being aware of your breath or noticing things in your environment.
Samadhi: This is the deepest level of meditation, which has a very spiritual significance. There are different levels, but for the common person, it means letting your mind go into a “zero zone,” or reducing your thoughts as much as possible, and yet being aware of it. Gradually, you get to the point where there are no thoughts coming. It could be for only 10 seconds, but in that short time, you are connecting with your very basic nature.
All three forms of meditation will help you connect with the love that is already inside you, but getting into the “zero zone,” even if only for a few seconds, is essential.
If you’re interested in trying this out and rediscovering love in your own relationship, know that both partners must participate. It doesn’t matter where, when, or how you meditate, or whether you even meditate together, but you both need to find that love you lost somewhere along the way. As that begins to happen, you’ll notice that your differences suddenly don’t matter so much, because while you might mismatch in some areas, you’re matched in your love.
When you’re connecting at the love level, the “honeymoon phase” is never over. In love, there is total acceptance—no matter what your natural love preferences are. But it has to come from within.
