Relationship Quotes & Advice
How Meditation Will Improve Your Relationships
If you’re striving for a better relationship with your partner, family, work colleagues and – most importantly – yourself, meditation can be the perfect place to start. Through its extremely calming, focusing techniques, meditation can help you become a better parent, friend, sister and a better all-around person by getting in touch with your true nature and your center. Meditation is able to help you focus on challenging relationships along with other ongoing issues while also providing you with the tools needed to handle future relationship problems. This is all possible because meditation helps you work on yourself. The more you respect yourself, the better your relationships will be with others.
It won’t take long for you to begin seeing the benefits of regular meditation in your personal life. You will begin to develop the strength to handle stressful situations without fear or panic and you’ll also see the benefits in your physical body. Meditation lowers blood pressure and strengthens the immune system, making you feel better, think better and react better. Listed below are four specific ways meditation will instantly begin to improve the relationships in your life.
How Meditation Will Improve Your Relationships
1. It Strengthens Your Feelings Of Connection – Sometimes partners can start to feel more distant from one another. One study done on compassion and loving-kindness based meditations found that these types of meditations can really help people feel more connected and empathetic. You can literally train yourself to feel more compassionate and loving. Research also shows that empathy and compassion have tremendous benefits for your health and happiness. Improved happiness, lower inflammation, decreased anxiety and depression, plus even a longer life. That is all an added bonus on top of enjoying better and stronger relationships with other people. When asked which traits they value most in a prospective partner, both men and women mentioned kindness.
2. It Keeps You Grateful – Another great reason to meditate regularly for a healthy relationship is because of its impact on your perspective. By helping you regulate your emotions, meditation can help you keep a positive perspective. You stay grateful and gratitude, in turn, is a powerful predictor of long-term love. Research has shown that, over time, we get used to the things we have and people we’re around which can start to make us take those things for granted. That’s the point where people may begin to focus on what’s wrong with their partner instead of thinking about what made them fall in love in the first place. Grateful people are more satisfied in their relationships and feel closer to one another. When you are grateful, you stay focused and appreciative of your partner’s good qualities. Your partner, in turn, feels appreciated, and your bond strengthens.
3. It Curbs Your Stress – It’s not uncommon for people to feel stress throughout the day. Worse yet, people often bring that stress home with them. As a consequence, their spouse gets the brunt of it: a short fuse, bad moods and lack of affection. Over time, this kind of pattern can lead to a negative atmosphere in the home and that will create distance between couples. Research has shown that people with a tremendous amount of stress can see a tremendous reduction with simple breathing-based meditation. If you can take responsibility for curbing your stress by using this kind of practice, you will not only begin to improve your mood instantly, but also help preserve your relationships with loved ones.
4. It Keeps You Positive – If you study the feeling of happiness you will be amazed by all of the benefits it offers: it makes you more present, more charismatic, focused, productive, and creative. Even you capacity to learn and think outside the box improves. But most importantly, we know that positive emotions will help you connect more easily with others. It makes us more open, approachable and strengthens our feelings of connection with others – even strangers. Just think about it – on a day when you are feeling stressed and blue, how likely are you to strike up a conversation with the person behind you at Starbucks? Stress makes us self-focused. However, when you’re feeling “on top of the world,” that’s the day you are more likely to share a joke with a stranger or notice if someone needs help. Research has shown that laughter (an outcome of positive emotion) makes you more open to new people and helps you build and strengthen relationships. Along with that, it helps make you more resilient in the face of difficulty, like challenging relationships. Hundreds of studies now show that meditation is a powerful way to boost happiness and well-being. By helping with anxiety and even depression, it can help keep you in a positive frame of mind that has enormous benefits!
