(lively music)
All right, welcome.
I'm Katie Hendricks.
And I'm Gay Hendricks.
And we're here to really support all of us
in creating thriving relationships
and relationships that can survive
all of the different unknowns
that we're all encountering right now
with the virus and all of the changes to our schedules
and our work schedules and school.
It's a lot to deal with.
It's a lot to deal with,
and it's also an opportunity
because when things are shaky or falling apart,
in some ways, it's an opportune time
to look at yourself and open up to whatever you need to do
to survive and thrive through a stressful time.
So it's an opportunity for learning
that's unlike just about anything
that we've ever run across.
We work a lot, of course, with relationships.
And so what we've seen is tremendous amount of stresses
in couple relationships,
but also a lot of stress in the lives of people
who are single, because just for one example,
single people have told me that meeting people
is such a different challenge now.
And so we have a lot of things we wanna say about that,
that we think will be helpful to you.
But first of all, we just need to acknowledge
that this is a very unusual, special time,
and it calls forth an extraordinary type of love
and attention from ourselves at this time.
So the first thing we wanna invite you to do right now
is to turn your attention toward you
and appreciate yourself,
that is give some sensitive awareness and presence
to just what you're experiencing right now,
what's going on inside you, what you're feeling,
what you're dealing with and appreciating yourself
for your willingness to give attention to you
because loving yourself for whatever you're experiencing,
rather than distracting yourself
or turning away from that,
is really the beginning of being able to move
toward what you want, being able to nourish yourself.
So whether you're single or in a couple,
or have lots of friends around,
or are isolated by yourself in a mountain cabin,
this is a time where expanding your ability
to give and receive love, I think is really central.
One of the things I've been appreciating about this time
that some people are calling the great pause,
and I sometimes call the great time-out,
where the planet is saying, "Okay, guys,
time to take a time out and don't go back to normal."
And we really wanna encourage you not to go back
to what you might have considered normal in your life,
but use this as an opportunity to both dive more deeply,
but also expand your willingness
to give and receive more love.
And so right now, just try on a commitment or willingness.
I'm willing to grow my ability even now
to give and receive more love.
(breath whooshing)
And take a couple of breaths with that and notice,
how does that feel to you to actually declare
that I am willing to choose,
to open my ability to give and receive more love?
One of the things that our trainings,
at some of our trainings, when people graduate,
they get a little wrist band and on the wristband,
it has our name, of course, hendricks.com and all that,
but it says, "Breathe, move, love."
And what we're meaning by that
is we really think that we have, you have,
all the resources you need
in your own natural body and mind,
resources to go through any kind
of difficult situation there is.
And what we specifically mean with the breathe part
is that there's a tendency when times
are stressful and fear is in the air,
there's a tendency to clutch up and our breath goes up
into our chest and muscles clench,
and it's all part of the fight or flight response.
Actually the fight or flight response
is a fight, flight, freeze, or faint response
because fear actually has four different expressions.
Some people get mad when they get scared.
Some people pull back and flee when they get scared.
Some people kind of get spacey when they get scared,
when I watch an old "Star Trek" episode.
And sometimes people just wanna conk out and go to sleep.
And sometimes people freeze.
Freeze too, yes.
And so you can see that all throughout nature.
For example, rabbits, if they get under stress,
they freeze.
And so we have the same mechanisms built into us,
but here's where we have an advantage
because of our consciousness and awareness
that we've developed as human beings,
we can use moments of stress to actually grow from.
And as Katie just said,
having a willingness to use this moment
to grow from in your relationships
and in your relationship with your body
is incredibly important.
So we want you, as you watch this,
and as you go through the times ahead
to really use your body, breathe, open up,
learn from this moment.
I was inspired one time,
many years ago when I read a biography
of our great naturalist out here in California, John Muir,
who was up in Yosemite, camping in a cave
when the great earthquake of 1906 hit,
and in his notebook, he said he felt a great rumbling
in the earth and he ran outside to see what he could learn.
And so we wanna have that kind of attitude
with the shaking that's going on now.
So that's the breath part.
What we mean by move is to actually remember
that human beings are born to move.
We're not born to stay subtle in ourselves.
So keep your body moving while you're going through this.
Get plenty of exercise.
Remember to breathe.
Remember to stretch.
You are your most important instrument.
And we need to realize that no matter
what kind of work you do,
whether you're in the coaching field or whatever you do,
you're your own best instrument.
And we all need,
those of us that are in the helping professions,
need to learn to keep polishing our instrument
and tuning up our instrument all the time,
so anything you can do like that,
that involves breath and movement.
Ultimately the real healing power
is in love because with love, you have the only thing
that humans have access to that can contain its opposite.
So here in this room and in other rooms
we've worked in over the years,
we've seen literally thousands of people
make the shift from not loving themselves
to suddenly loving themselves
and realizing that they can even love
the unlovable part of themselves.
And so ultimately everything
that needs to get healed in ourselves
and our relationship must be done in a loving way.
You can't criticize change into a relationship.
You can't shame yourself into learning.
And so what we need to learn really
is how to love ourselves more deeply,
which at the same time allows us
to love the other person more deeply.
And love is really being able
to be in the same space with something.
And the big skill that we wanna promote
is turning toward what is happening.
So turning toward what is happening inside you,
turning toward what your partner or your friend
or a relative is expressing to you,
that you're letting your whole self,
including your body, your breathing, opening your posture,
turning toward what is actually happening.
And the willingness to be with,
I think, is our first expression of love.
And the willingness to appreciate
that we've been talking about
is really giving your sensitive awareness
to what you're turning towards.
So if you notice for example,
that your friend seems to be,
you're on a Zoom call,
and you notice that your friend looks kind of down,
you can turn toward that.
You can let yourself open to your own breathing,
your own moving,
but open to being sensitively aware
of what they're experiencing,
and those are really the building blocks of love.
I also wanted to share with you
that we have a huge number of free resources for you.
We have two big websites and hendricks.com,
H-E-N-D-R-I-C-K-S dot com has several videos
on practicing the skills of loving and-
Breathing.
Breathing and listening and moving
and listening to each other.
And the foundationforconsciousliving.org
has a bunch of videos,
particularly on the subject of fear
and how to move from fear to here.
We've developed something we call Fear Melters,
which uses very simple movements
to allow you to get more present
so that you can be here,
so that you can turn toward and be with what is happening.
And the whole idea of loving,
I think is also supported,
and breathing, moving, and loving are supported
by you taking a look at one of the pulsations
that we've really noticed in relationship
that's really, really important,
and that is that we each have what we call an urge to merge,
an urge toward unity and an urge to individuate,
an urge to fulfill our own creative destiny.
And how that shows up during quarantine
is you're together with people
that you haven't spent all day with.
Or you're alone.
Or you're alone,
and you don't have the opportunity to be with people.
So the both ends of that continuum
are really being emphasized right now.
And we think that it's really important
that you create a willingness
to see or to feel sense into.
Do I need some time for myself right now?
Is it time for me to take a walk around the block
or take a book and go out
and go into another part of the house
and just have some time for me,
or am I really wanting connection right now?
And how will I know that because generally people
wait until they get into some kind of a hassle
with each other to create space,
or they won't share what they really need
with their partner and expect the other to mind-read.
So that's one of the things that I've really noticed
has been important is, okay, am I getting enough solo time?
And am I getting enough connection?
And that's a dynamic balance that really changes, I think,
both day-to-day, but over time,
depending on what you're dealing with.
A friend of ours, who's a yoga teacher,
that has three children,
she was saying that if she gives herself an hour a day
to herself to do her yoga and all of that,
then she can give back 23 to the family.
But if she doesn't get that hour,
she can't give back anything.
And so it's something we all really need to keep in mind,
especially in times where there's often
a forced intimacy of having kids stay at home
and being in the same space as each other.
I wanna say another word too, about the fear issue,
because fear is really underneath most issues
that occur in ourselves and between other people.
There's something we get scared about
dealing within ourselves,
and so we avoid it with addictions or whatever,
or there's something we're not dealing with
in the relationship.
So we pull back and go into some kind of fear-based thing.
But the reason fear is such an important thing
to focus on is because throughout human evolution,
there's been a tendency, not just with humans,
but all other species too, to contract when we get scared.
If you notice that if you get scared,
you tighten up in your belly, you don't breathe as much,
your muscles tighten up,
and there've been jillions of different studies on that.
But the important thing to know
is that we've got wired into us a tendency
to contract when we get scared.
However, sometimes what we really need to be doing
is expanding when we get scared
and coming out of our crouch and opening up to learning,
just like John Muir did,
you know the great rumbling on the earth,
and I ran out to see what I could learn.
Many of us would be running for the back of the cave.
(both laughing)
Whoa.
So what we need to do is get a habit built in
of opening to things, opening to our fear,
opening to our feelings,
opening to our anger instead of shying away from that,
because it's in the act of defending ourself
against things in here that causes a lot of our symptoms.
And same thing, if we're defending
against something that's going on here,
then we get into the usual relationship dramas
of criticism-
Control.
Control, contempt, sulking.
Defensive.
All of the popular kinds of things
that human beings tend to do
when we get scared in a relationship.
So anyway, I'm just wanting to point
a big finger at fear in ourselves,
because there's a lot to be learned there,
and especially once you really become open
to learning about those inner feelings,
you realize how much control and power you have
over them with your breathing,
because breathing is really a key to all of your emotions.
If you notice in yourself,
fear will cause you to breathe differently than anger will.
Same thing with sadness.
Oftentimes when you're sad,
you breathe slower and more labored,
whereas when you're angry,
your breath goes up in your chest
and you get more huffy and puffy with it,
but really fear is at the center of it.
And if you learn how to be open to and learn from your fear,
you can really save yourself a lot of wear and tear
on your body because you're not fighting
with what's going on inside.
And what I was just hearing in what you were saying
is that you're being authentic, you're being real.
And I think that we're really being called on right now
to draw on our deepest core resilience,
our possibilities to meet this time.
And even just saying something as simple as,
"Oh, I just realized that I'm scared,"
and when I say that,
I'm actually aligning with what is happening
and that unkinks the energy hose inside,
so that I feel more alive-ness, I feel more capability.
And if I'm doing that in relationship
with anybody in my life,
I become a space where other people can be real.
I then invite other people to share and to connect.
And one of the big issues
for so many people right now is connecting.
How can I connect with others?
And so being able to both give my attention
and to give my full attention
is what we call really turning towards.
So I'm not turning toward,
but then I'm also sort of looking at,
or doing something else,
or going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."
If I really turn toward,
and I'm also willing to be real,
that opens up this ability to connect
that allows us to fill our reservoirs, our inner reservoirs,
and to be able to be more abundant with what we can offer
and also what we can create, solutions that we can create,
for all of the daily things that come up.
Things break, schedules change,
kids can go back to school,
no, they can't go back to school.
So all of this unexpected, I think really,
is what scientists would call a pattern interrupt.
It's kind of a global pattern interrupt.
So the usual things that we do every day,
those have all been disrupted.
And when we can meet them by being real
and by actually calling up our ability
to co-create together,
we can invent all kinds of new things.
One other thing I was wanting to mention too,
that I find really important during this time
is focus on, in your relationship
with friends, yourself, and others,
get your business handled
in what we call a 10-minute business conversation,
the stuffed talk conversation.
So one of the dangers is that the things
that need to be happen,
the decisions that need to be made,
can spread out and kind of contaminate the connection
and the possibility of playing with each other,
of enjoying beauty,
of doing things together that you both enjoy
or that the family enjoys.
So we have, in fact, in our book,
"Conscious Loving Ever After,"
we have practices in there
that we think would be very valuable for you,
especially at this time on customizing appreciation.
But the ones that I'm talking about now
are what we call the 10-minute conversations,
and they allow you to handle the business of life
without having it spread out into all of the times
that you're together.
So you can find directions in that,
but the basic gist of it is
that you schedule a meeting
and you take 10 minutes to look at what needs to happen,
who's gonna do it and by when are they going to do it?
What household thing is broken,
all of those kinds of- Yep, all of those things.
We put all of that into the stuff talk.
And we started doing those on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
We had the stuff talk on Tuesday
and the heart talk on Thursday.
So you wanna kind of separate that out,
so you're not talking about stuff all the time.
I can't tell you how many people have said to us
in counseling over the years that it just,
like one particular time a fellow told me
that he came home from a long three-day business trip,
and he opened the door,
and the first thing he got was,
"The upstairs toilet is busted."
So you want a certain quality of experience
and then suddenly something breaks.
And so most of the time though, those things aren't urgent.
You don't need to handle them at the time.
So that's why we suggest pushing them
into a compressed little period of time.
And most people can handle this stuff in 10 minutes.
It doesn't take an hour to do it.
But then on Thursday, we don't talk about stuff.
We have our 10-minute heart talk
where we talk about anything that's going on with us.
And it can go 20 minutes or 30 minutes,
but most of the times,
it's just kinda talking about some stuff that's up,
that we haven't had a really chance to communicate about.
So whether you do it on Monday and Wednesday or whatever,
what we suggest you do is you make a couple of times a week,
especially one that is designated for stuff, business stuff,
because that can get out of hand
and just crawl all over your life.
So we can say, put it in a box
and deal with it on Tuesday night.
And get it handled.
And then one of the disciplines for me was writing it down.
So rather that say, "Oh, Gay,"
I would write it down,
and then when I had a sufficient number of things
on the list, I'd say,
"I'd like to schedule a business,
a stuff talk conversation with you,"
and we would just handle it then.
And what that opens up is that any time
your partner or your friend says,
"Hey, I'm noticing," or, "Hey,"
it's a "Oh, what are you learning?
What have you just discovered?"
Like Gay will say,
"Hey, I wanna show you this cartoon that I just saw,"
or "I was just thinking about something
I experienced last week,
and I just figured out what that was about."
So it's about the richness of giving and receiving love,
of giving and receiving attention.
And I find that so incredibly nourishing,
and we need a lot more of it right now
because there's so much that is chaotic and unknown.
So having something that you've agreed on
that is something that you can count on,
I know that I'll have this time to talk to you about this,
I think really kind of sounds a tone.
It gives a kind of a drum beat that your body can go,
"Oh, okay," something has some kind of regularity in it.
The other thing I wanted to share
is how important that I think it is
for us to focus on things
that we love rather than everything that is hard.
So one of the things that I do every day
is to focus on something that I love to do.
So one of the things I love to do is to cook.
And so every day I tune into what would be fun
for us to eat today, or I'll ask Gay,
"When you thinking about it,
what would you most like to eat today?"
And then giving my attention to creating that
is not only nourishing,
but it's a loving practice for me that helps me to open up
to doing something that is creative.
So feeding your creativity during this time
with beauty, things that you love to do
that may not necessarily seem productive,
but they're really essential
to your inner emotional reservoir.
And I think it's really important to give yourself
at least 10 minutes a day where you're doing something
that is just for you.
And it's something that you love to do,
whether it's doodling or cooking or singing,
or making something new with scraps
that you're finding around the house.
So that was another one of the recommendations
that we wanted to make to you.
Also too, one of the most important things
I think that we ever learn about ourselves
and especially in relationships
is how to use our creativity productively.
One of the big things that we looked at
in "Conscious Loving Ever After,"
it's a book about, primarily about how this,
how to create magic at midlife and beyond in relationships.
So it's based on work we've done with couples
ranging in ages from 38, 40 years of age,
up to 75, 80 years of age.
And creativity becomes really important
in the second half of life,
because the way we say it is every breath you take
after 40 or so is a breath of creativity
or a breath of stagnation.
So every choice you make,
especially at midlife and beyond is about,
am I opening up to something new?
Am I generating something new?
Am I learning something new?
Or am I just going through the motions
and riding on what has happened before?
One of the things I've learned about human beings
is the personality that gets us up to about age 40,
we need to then grow a different personality
that's the one that's going to go from 40 to 90,
because a lot of times the (mouth whirring)
push of life in your 20s and 30s,
if you keep doing that in your 40s and 50s,
really begins to eat up your body.
And so at 40 or so,
you need to learn how to open up and move through life
in a more loving, mindful way.
Otherwise you eat up your instrument.
Mm, yeah.
We have suggestions for you
both in "Conscious Loving Ever After."
We also have creative instructions and suggestions for you
in "Conscious Loving Ever After"
and on the foundation website,
foundationforconsciousloving.org.
So, one other thing I wanna mention
that I think is a nutrient for everybody
is appreciation.
And it is probably the easiest,
the most underutilized skill that humans have access to,
and appreciating is not only just focusing
on giving your sensitive awareness to being with someone.
It's also focusing on what's emerging.
What is a gift in this person using my senses
to tune into what about this person
can I really appreciate?
So I do my best every day to be finding new things
to appreciate about you.
And I experienced that from you as well.
So whether it's touch, or really using
all of your different senses to appreciate your partner,
'cause we know that successful
thriving relationships have at least a five to one ratio
of appreciations to criticisms or withdrawal.
So your ability to grow your appreciation
happens one appreciation at a time.
And so if you were gonna do just one thing,
that's what I would really suggest.
And in "Conscious Loving Ever After,"
we have a little exercise for you.
We call it customizing appreciation
because not everybody likes to be appreciated
in the same way.
So we have a guideline for you,
so you can deepen your appreciation for yourself
and for others in a way that I guarantee you
makes a huge difference,
'cause people light up when they're seen,
when you can presence them and notice something.
I can see people expanding and kind of fluffing themselves.
You can tell that that is just as important
as food and water, giving that kind of appreciation.
And also don't forget to appreciate
yourself too. Exactly.
Because ultimately the more loving you are to yourself
in every possible way,
the more you're going to be able to love other people
in the way that they thrive on too.
(lively music)