Chapter 1

1. What Do I Mean by Relationships?

“For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

You’re sitting in your favorite chair with your beverage of choice, reading this book. What is your sense of time right now? Do you feel like you have plenty of time to read today, or do you feel rushed and short on time?

It’s Saturday afternoon and you’re walking the dog. What is the weather like today? Is it too hot or too cold?

You walk into the office on Monday morning and survey the week’s workload. Do you have too much work on your plate right now or too little?

In all three of these scenarios, your response to the questions indicates your relationship to the thing. The items themselves—time, weather, and work—are neutral. They aren’t good or bad, and they aren’t doing anything to you. They are simply showing up as what they are: the time of day, the temperature, and the work sitting on your desk.

Time, for instance, is just the hour on the clock. Three o’clock is no better or worse than four o’clock, and two o’clock doesn’t act any differently than one o’clock. Time only takes on a different meaning in our minds based on how we relate to it. Consider two people sitting side by side for ten minutes. One person is casually reading her book, while the other person is holding a ten-pound weight overhead. They experience the same ten minutes in two very different ways.

The same variety of experience applies to work or the weather. If it’s ninety degrees outside, one person might be happy because the heat eases his arthritis, whereas the other person might be miserable. If it’s raining, some people will love the cozy feeling of being inside and listening to the storm, and other people will hate it because they don’t like the dismal, gray sky and getting wet. Same weather, very different experiences.

We tend to think that objects, people, and events outside ourselves cause us to feel a certain way. This simply isn’t true. Our internal reaction determines our initial experience, whether positive or negative, and we can learn to respond versus simply react.1 We can choose how we relate to our world. Learning this transformational skill will enable you to transact with others more skillfully. It will also change your life in whimsical and magical ways.

When we become aware of our naturally occurring reactivity, we can choose to respond differently. This is important since our relationships and the skillfulness of our actions are first and foremost born from how we relate.

Relationships and Relating

In essence, a relationship is made up of an action that occurs between us and something in our world. It describes how we are relating to the other person or phenomenon, consciously or unconsciously. We are always relating to people, places, events, objects, ourselves—anything encountered through our five senses and also our thoughts.

Try the following activity:

1. Look at an object in the room where you’re sitting. It could be anything—a lamp, your cat, the rug.
2. As soon as your eyes make contact with the object, take note of your reaction. It will fall in one of three categories: positive (“I like that thing. That’s pleasant.”), negative (“I don’t like that thing. That’s unpleasant.”), or neutral (no reaction, indifference, as if you’re not even noticing the thing).
3. Repeat the exercise with a few different objects in the room, and notice how your internal reaction varies.

This exercise illustrates a transformational truth that will come up throughout our discussion. We react to everything, and we always react in one of three ways—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.2 The preceding exercise used the sense of sight, but the same applies to all of our senses. Whenever we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, or even think something, we react. The nature of our reaction depends on several causes and conditions, including context, which we will discuss next.

Context

If you give five dollars to a ten-year-old, the child is probably going to think he’s rich. If you give five dollars to an adult making $100,000 a year, she will not be so impressed. In either case, five dollars is just five dollars. It’s neutral and has no inherent influence on the person’s reaction. The relationship between the person and external phenomena, such as money, flows out of the individual’s context, or the mindset from which he or she is relating to the thing encountered.

At the very root, we relate from one of two contexts: fear or trust. Fear is based on the desire to make things permanent. On the one hand, fear involves avoiding. We want to avoid losing what we have. Fear also involves holding on to or not losing the things we have. When we respond from fear, it’s as if one closed fist holds on while the other open hand pushes away. In this fear-based context, we experience stress and tension, and neither hand is very useful.

Trust, on the other hand, is characterized by openness, balance, and a willingness to engage fully with the stuff of life. We have two open hands, ready to receive whatever shows up. The trust-based context involves greater peace and calm, too, regardless of what we encounter. Who doesn’t want to experience more of that? Our operating context often creates our reality without us even realizing what’s happening. We react to everything in our world. To become skillful in working with these reactions, we need to see where they’re coming from. If we don’t pay attention, we can start believing that our reactions are actually caused by things. Then we start believing that the only way to have a different relationship with something is for the thing to change. We might think, “If only my team member would change. Then I would finally be happy.” In truth, what needs to change is our context—our unconscious mindset and way of relating.

At the root of fear is the sense that our identity, and therefore our well-being, is somehow being threatened. Father Thomas Keating was a Catholic monk who revised the idea of Christian contemplative practices. He wrote a welcoming prayer in which he identified a way to make this perceived threat seem far less significant: let go of security, control, and approval.3 In other words, when we let go of believing that those three things come from outside of us, we experience greater levels of trust. We begin to see that our sense of approval, for example, needn’t come from other people or external situations.

When we believe that the external world is solely in charge of our well-being, we suffer. We immediately feel that things should be different than they are: “I should have more time than I do,” or “I should have less time so I’m not bored.” We think that if things were different (having more or less time), we would be happy, secure, affirmed, and in control. Not so. We are actually the ones creating our own suffering and discomfort by resisting reality. We need to see how we are relating first. Then we can choose from wisdom and compassion—the two wings of mindfulness—what our next action (if any) needs to be.

Half Full or Half Empty?

You’re probably familiar with the idea of seeing a glass as half full or half empty. Seeing the glass as half full is generally associated with having a positive outlook on life, while seeing the glass as half empty is linked with negativity. However, the realists among us may stomp their feet in protest. The other half of the glass is, in fact, empty.

What about the less-than-savory things that occur in our business and life? Do we simply ignore them? Not at all. Relating from trust doesn’t mean we ignore the unsavory or leave problems unaddressed. This is likely one of the biggest misunderstandings about mindfulness. Living mindfully involves action. It doesn’t mean ignoring life’s trials and tribulations or giving too much attention to things beyond our control (as most things are).

The first step in relating to the glass is to see that it’s a glass. Like the weather, time, and work, the glass isn’t good or bad; it’s neutral.

Next, we need to appreciate the context and understand that we are relating to this innocuous glass as either half empty or half full. Both ways of seeing have their benefits as well as their perils. If I only see the glass as half full, then I may not be addressing issues that need to be addressed. Conversely, if I only see the glass as half empty, then I may not be aware of the good things that are occurring. I may not see that I can cultivate positive things in life that can be helpful and joyful to myself and others.

Here’s a story to illustrate this point. A mother sent her son to the market with money to buy a bottle of oil. On his way back home, the boy fell and spilled half the bottle of oil. He was very upset and cried to his mother that he only had half a bottle left. What a terrible day!

The next week, the mother sent her second son to buy oil, likely hoping for better results. As luck would have it, this son also fell and spilled half of the bottle...