One of the simplest gifts we can give ourselves and our partner in our relationship is loving-kindness. It’s not hard to do yet can have a profound effect on the quality of our relationship.
Over the years we can become familiar with our partner and with this familiarity can emerge a slightly ‘snappy’ tone. Instead of always treating one another with love and respect a level of irritability creeps in.
This doesn’t have to happen.
While there are 1000 reasons why we may become irritable with our partner, we can also simply choose not to be. This means that whatever we have to say to our partner, we can do it with loving-kindness instead of nastiness.
In order to raise our level of loving-kindness we must let go of our judgments of our partner (and ourselves) and choose only to see what is wonderful about them. It’s useful to use a pen and paper to write these judgments down e.g. Mary is lazy etc. You can then ask yourself whether it serves your relationship to hold on to these judgments or not.
After you have named and let go of your judgments of yourself and your partner you can then choose to replace them with the qualities that you love most dearly. Take a moment to open your heart and feel how wonderful these qualities are.
Finally practice feeling these qualities when you are around your partner and you’ll find yourself speaking with loving kindness more naturally. In summary you have to do the following activity to receive the benefits.
*Make a decision to only speak to your loved one with loving-kindness
*Write down a list of judgments about yourself and partner and choose to let them go.
*Now write down all of your and your partner’s wonderful qualities and choose to feel these whole-heartedly when in your partner’s company.
On our Dynamic Couple Website you can view a video of the author discussing issues from this article, taking the nastiness out of relationships [http://www.thedynamiccouple.com/page/23685/default.asp].
