This is a post I wrote to Sivana East the other day. You can find the original post here.
“The miracle of love comes to you in the presence of the uninterpreted moment. If you are mentally somewhere else, you miss real life.”
— Byron Katie
There was a time when I used to analyze my relationships. I thought all the thinking and talking about the other sex helped me to get more clear what was going on and ultimately see, if the relationship was for something real. I could spend hours of doing this and not realizing that it was the very thing stopping me from experiencing love.
Later on, I’ve come to see how I was painting my own experiences with my own thinking and how all that analyzing stopped me from being present in the moment and seeing the love that already existed in my life.
Why analyzing doesn’t make sense
Everything changed when I realized there was a connection between what I thought and how I experienced my relationships. I realized that my experiences didn’t necessary tell me anything about the reality, but rather where my thinking in the moment was. Suddenly analyzing stopped making sense to me. Whenever we are analyzing, we are experiencing our thoughts about our relationships, instead of experiencing the real relationship.
We can never know what the other person feels or why they behave in a way they do. We might have an idea about it, but the idea may not have anything to do with the reality. Most of the time it doesn’t and still we spend hours, if not a lifetime, worrying about something that exists only in our minds.
I was watching an old episode of Sex and the City and in that episode Carrie (main character) asked Miranda to analyze Mr. Big’s message in her answering machine. She wanted to know whether Mr. Big was not able to meet her as a date, or a friend. Like in the TV show, no matter how much we analyze, we can never know the answer.
Analyzing ruins our experience of relationships
Not only does analyzing leave us without answers, it also ruins our experience of the moment. It is impossible for us to enjoy at the same time that we are analyzing. When we become busy in our heads, we experience our stressful thoughts, instead of experiencing the moment. The feelings we have tell us more about how we think than how things really are.
Spending time in comparing and overthinking stops us from enjoying, simply because it’s not fun to be constantly questioning and criticizing; neither is it fun to be with someone who is doing that. Having our head full of thoughts ruins our experience of our relationships because it stops us from enjoying the moment and feeling the connection with another person.
Letting go and finding love
When I let go of analyzing I became more present. I started to spend more time in my relationships, than in my head thinking about my relationships. That is the time when the love I had been looking for also showed up in my life. Being present lets us to experience more love. It lets us to experience more the good feelings we all have inside us.
It lets us to have good relationships effortlessly. When we are not actively thinking about something, but being present we start to feel more connected to others and they can feel this too. When we find the feeling of love inside, it becomes easy for us to experience love in our relationships too.
Giving less attention to our stressful thoughts and spending less time on analyzing helps us come back to the present moment and connect with that love and others. We become better able to find love in the moment, with a new person and in an already existing relationship.
With Love,
Heidi
