Phil & Maude - Successful Relationships: Recent Episodes
Phil Mayes
Each week this podcast talks about some aspect of successful personal relationships. Phil and Maude believe that conflict-free relationships are possible for everyone, and talk about how they achieve that between them.
As with so many things, progress on your own path enriches your relationship. Ongoing practice that helps you gain insight into yourself, and furthers your awareness of your own issues, needs and desires, is a strong support for a healthy peaceful relationship.
Intimacy is a critical element for successful, peaceful relationships. To share intimacy in a relationship you must be present with each other. You cannot share love if you are not there.
“Be Here Now!” How elusive this often is. We can all benefit from finding ways to stay in the actual here and now. Most of the practices that we outline for a peaceful and successful relationship are predicated on being present, both with yourself and with your partner.
Your relationship can, over time, take a back seat to life’s busyness: shopping, cleaning, childcare, parent care, friend care, health care, finance care... Relationships need to be experienced in the present. To have a partnership filled with living peace, it is necessary to share peace together as a tangible reality.
Ensuring that core values match is an important part of establishing a new relationship. Whether you are aware of yours or not, they underlie all your behavior. They are the principles you live by. These are not intellectual constructs, but rather deeply felt truths that arise from your inner being.
Our togetherness isn’t fueled by needs – neither of us is looking for the other to fill holes in our lives or our being. This kind of connection enables each of us as individuals to develop and prosper, and at the same time, feeds that energy right back into our relationship.
Unconditional acceptance of your partner is a baseline for a peaceful relationship. Being treated with total acceptance calls forth a markedly different response in all of us. When you know that you won’t be attacked or criticized, an amazing feeling of true peace and calm settles within you.
Our experience is that by exploring how we feel about a problem we’re not only telling each other what is of meaning to us, but we understand our own voice better as well. This happens because of the safe arena of communication created by our joint understanding of the “we”.
Learn to recognize your partner as an entirely different and unique individual. They don’t think, say or do things exactly the way you do. These differences aren’t a threat because they arise from the same core values. You are being offered alternate ways of seeing, doing and feeling.
In a relationship, a mutual solution is a resolution that works for both people. It is something that is created together by the contributions of two different viewpoints. It is not something that either can come up with alone because each person brings different knowledge, views and insights.
Active listening is paying attention to what the other person is saying without preparing a response. In practice, responses and ideas come up as the other person is speaking and it can be a considerable effort to both hold on to those thoughts and keep following the speaker.
We used to talk about conflict-free relationships, but now, instead of thinking in terms of what it is not, we see it as a quality of peace. In the world, it arises directly from peace between people, and we promote it both through the idea and the direct experience.
Total honesty: why it’s good, difficult, and what’s needed for it to be possible. It arises from working on yourself. You have to know yourself in order to share that with your partner. Resolving conflicts isn’t about changing the other person, but rather looking at what your resistance is about.
The balance between planning and going with the flow can be a problem in a relationship. One person is free and easy, and wants to accept the last-minute offer of a weekend at a cabin; the other had a household project planned. There’s a solution that works for both people.
Neither of us enjoys arguments. It’s not avoidance, it’s that we choose not to act that way. Our desire to share what is happening with each other and to be sure there are no confusions, or any distancing caused by things unspoken, is paramount. It leads to an argument-free relationship.
Touch is an important part of all relationships but can get overlooked. Animals huddle together and groom each other. The messages are of caring and comfort. So it is for humans, too, and if we stop speaking that language, we lose an important way of expressing concern for each other.
It is critical to the success of a peaceful loving relationship to find mutuality, and to create from that place of connection. It can be quite simple to do, especially when it becomes a habit. Make agreements and verbalize them to each other; refer to them aloud periodically.
In any relationship, there can be a feeling of being on the same side that is quite delicious. Whatever it is, become attuned to that feeling, because if it vanishes, that’s a warning signal that you may be swerving into the path of a full-blown argument.
Today, we are sharing about a very basic component of a peaceful loving relationship, and one that can have surprising consequences and ramifications. Commitment. Here, we each describe our personal experience of commitment and the surprising benefits it creates.
It’s the early days of winter and yet it feels like a fresh start. Lots of changes have occurred, and there’s a sense of new opportunities. Come out of these events with renewed hope and a commitment to keep sharing burdens and rejoicing in victories together!
To be in a relationship is to exist in a state somewhere between individuality and union. We must all find our balance between staying in connection and awareness with ourselves, and relating to others and their inner selves. Ideally, we can move smoothly between these states without any struggle.
Last week we shared a holiday photo of us wishing everyone Peace and Love. Now the New Year is upon us, and what we wish for all of you is for peace to spread, one relationship at a time.
We feel an enormous sense of gratitude for life, for the opportunities to grow and share, and for our relationships.Click here to read more...
Stressful situations are opportunities for us to grow. 80 to 90% of our reality is self-generated, so instead of seeing them as external problems and trying to deal with them as such, we can learn much and feel good if we use them to look inside.
Individually and in our relationships we all need play time where we are not working on anything; not on progressing, not on taking care of business, and definitely not on achieving anything. Changing our patterns and altering the way we fill our time wakes us up and keeps us from sleepwalking through our lives and our loves.
Telling someone you are worrying about them doesn’t offer the kind of practical support they may need. Love, support and the belief that they will be able to deal with what is happening is much more constructive.
Being present is not a rarified experience. It is something you can experience both in your relationships and your everyday life by paying attention to your senses as well as your thoughts.
In these divisive times, it behooves us to take a look at all that is good, beautiful and loving in our lives, and to take comfort and joy from those things. The fabric of our intimate relationships can be a powerful force for peace and unity.
Thanksgiving is a wonderful American tradition when people from family to acquaintances come together in harmony. We want to let all of you know how glad we are to be connected to you and to share our work of spreading peace on this planet, one relationship at a time.
It is very important to find a balance between your own individuality and cooperation within your relationship. To achieve this kind of balance, it is vital to get to know yourself and to find practices to strengthen your sense of self, to come to be comfortable with your own individuality.
Often relationship success can come down to partners speaking with respect, love and kindness in their tone of voice. When they do, this kind of communication creates an environment for loving interactions.
In a relationship, always remember that you are on the same side. If you find yourselves estranged or at what feels like odds in your partnership, go back to this basic understanding. Speak it to each other. Find new ways to show it to each other.
Thumbtacks represent lack of total acceptance from your partner. Your partner doesn’t accept you as you are. But when there are no thumbtacks, when your partner offers what we call 100% acceptance, the effect is transforming. You can be yourself.
In the security of a committed relationship, people feel safe enough to express their deepest emotions but sometimes dump their anger, grief or depression on their partner. This causes estrangement which can only be fixed by honest sharing of both partners’ feelings.
When we’re snippy, we ask “What if we just decide not to do this, not to be short with each other, and then we just don’t?” So we do (just stop) and we do (not do it) and we have a magical time from that point on! Poof, true transformation.
Too many relationships (and this applies to all of our intimate relationships, family and friends) do get taken for granted. Spending time with each other gets put on the back burner till everything else of “importance” is taken care of, and often that time never comes.
September 21st is the International Day of Peace. We believe there is a direct line between personal peace and world peace. A peaceful relationship has results beyond two people. It ripples out into the world and, by showing what is possible, inspires people to be their best.
There’s been a lot of political discussion about diversity; its supposed good and bad points. In a relationship, sameness and difference coexist. Accept this paradox and look for mutuality, not a carbon copy. Lose yourself in the sameness, find yourself in the difference, and rejoice in the peace it will bring.
Peace in our relationship is a tangible reality of tranquility, love, unity, connection with each other and with the world. You can counter the current divisiveness by carrying that peaceful feeling out into the world and offering it in every relationship: friends, family, strangers.
After several weeks of coughing and night sweats in the spare bedroom, we’re finally sleeping together all night again. It feels like a major step back to normality. But in another way, nothing has changed. There is no reconnection because there was never any disconnection. As Maude put it, there was no disturbance in the field.