“Interpersonal relationship” refers to all forms of relationships. If you can establish a positive connection and have good communication with others, you can find happiness from these relationships. However, some people suffer from issues such as low self-esteem, cowardness, greed, selfishness, and anger, which causes disharmony in relationships. To overcome this problem, meditation may be useful.
Calm Down and Face Yourself
In fact, many problems are related to our inner consciousness. Many people don’t know the cause of their problems because they have never looked within themselves for answers. Therefore, understanding yourself should be done before pursuing harmonious relationships.
Meditation is regarded as an effective way to communicate with yourself. With the guidance of meditation music or experienced practitioners, the body and mind settle into a pure state, and consciousness becomes transparent, as if looking for something under crystal clear water, making it easier to find problems that are usually overlooked, such as arrogance, low self-esteem, or lack of compassion. Then you can address these problems and improve yourself step by step. When your attitude improves, others will want to be close to you, and your relationships will naturally improve.
The feasibility of improving one’s spirituality through meditation has received the attention of the academic community since Jon Kabat-Zinn, an honorary doctor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, opened a meditation-based stress reduction clinic in 1979. The clinic predominately used meditation practices to help patients become more acutely aware of their own characteristics and concentrate on their inner self. Many people who have gone through such meditation courses noticed that issues such as stress, restlessness, irritability, and impatience significantly improved, and their mood was calmer when interacting with others.
Awaken the Love Between Each Other
After self-improvement, those close to you will be the first to notice the distinct change . Laura Cunningham, an American mental health counselor with long-term meditation experience, published a report in 2012 on how meditation can help repair marriages and included an example. [1]
In this observational study, Cunningham first understood the conflict within the marriage through conversations with the couple. She learned that the couple had different opinions about future plans. Cunningham asked them to practice visualization during meditation, guiding them to imagine light and compassion flooding their body, then transmitting that light and compassion to the important people in their lives, and finally spreading the light to all life on Earth.
During the weeks of meditation experience, the couple slowly realized their mistakes, confessed, and forgave each other. Thereafter, they no longer felt the pressure of their future, became more patient when communicating, and said that their relationship was closer than it was before marriage. At the end of the report, Cunningham stated that the results shown in this research presented the impact of meditation on individuals which could be extended to both parties in intimate relationships. Compassionate visualization can awaken the love between each other, and thus consolidate the relationship between husbands and wives.
Building Positive Energy
“Positive psychology” is a perspective in psychology focused on minimizing negative thoughts that may arise in a state of hopelessness and, more importantly, developing a sense of optimism towards life. Based on this concept, scholars of this perspective often focus on meditation as beneficial for self-improvement. Among them is Barbara L. Fredrickson. In 2013, Fredrickson and psychologist Mary Brantley jointly published a report based on their experimental findings on how meditation generates positive emotions. [2] For two weeks prior to the experiment, they asked 102 participants to record their daily emotions, time spent socializing, and their sense of isolation from others. They also used devices to continuously record the participants’ heart rate in order to obtain a baseline. Half of the participants received six weeks of meditation training while the other half did not receive any training.
After the meditation training, the psychologists continued to collect information on emotions, social situations, and heart rate. By comparison, it was found that those who received meditation training had an improved stability of their heart rate. The social self-evaluation reported that they felt less isolated from others and were more willing to actively participate in social activities. On the other hand, those in the other group had no significant changes. As a result, this report showed that meditation helps to promote the desire to socialize and reduce the sense of isolation from others.
Making Friends Around the World
Meditation can also inspire the goodness in people and allow them to naturally show positive emotions such as affinity and empathy when facing strangers.
Cendri Hutcherson, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, focused on the use of visualization. She recruited 93 participants with little knowledge of meditation, divided them randomly into two groups, and guided one group to make compassionate visualizations and the other ordinary visualizations. This experiment required people in the compassionate visualization group to close their eyes, visualize two people they particularly liked standing next to them, and send them blessings and love. After four minutes, they opened their eyes and sent blessings and love to a photo of a stranger. Those in the normal visualization group closed their eyes, visualized two people they were acquainted with, but were not close friends with, and tried to recall their appearance and style of dressing. After four minutes, they opened their eyes as well.
After the visualization, both groups were asked to rate a photo of themselves, a photo of someone they knew, three photos of strangers, and a photo of a table lamp. It turns out that those in the compassionate visualization group rated all photos higher than those in the normal visualization group. This shows that even 10 minutes of meditation can have an effect and allow one to have affinity for a stranger in a photo. [3]
Conclusions
Positive emotions help promote social relationships, and meditation can play a very important role in promoting positivity. Therefore, when we encounter setbacks in interpersonal relationships, we might as well try to calm down, close our eyes, and enter the world of meditation to retrieve the compassion that was lost. Perhaps through this, the troubles we face in getting along with others can be resolved.
References:
- Cunningham, L., & Cardoso, Y. (2012). Loving kindness meditation and couples therapy: Healing after an infidelity.
- How positive emotions build physical health https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23649562
- Hutcherson, C. A., Seppala, E. M., & Gross, J. J. (2008). Loving-kindness meditation increases social connectedness.
