Authentic Relating

At its simplest, authentic relating is a ground breaking relational practice that creates profoundly enriching, enlivening, and nourishing relationships in all social domains of life, from the bedroom to the boardroom, with intimate partners and perfect strangers and everyone in between. Authentic relating is both a key and a map that allows people to unlock and explore the vast and extraordinary landscape of human connection that lies beyond the scope of most typical relationships. It is a practice that heals old wounds, softens and settles reactive nervous systems, and allows people to be deeply seen, heard, and accepted for who they are – even in their most recessed, darkest, scariest innermost selves.

Authentic relating is a strongly effective prescription for social isolation and loneliness and all of its attendant manifestations – depression, anxiety, hopelessness, addiction, self-harm, and even physical degeneration. Humans need to be in connection with other humans – when we are in connection with others, we thrive and are productive and creative, and when we aren’t, we wither and suffer, and become despondent, lethargic, and lifeless.

Authentic relating offers an integrated set of skills and tools that are potent, versatile, and easy to learn and apply in everyday life, with everyone we encounter. It combines cutting edge research into the science of relationships with the timeless tenets of ancient wisdom to produce a relational practice that is non-dogmatic, eminently practical, and immediately accessible by anyone.

Authentic is being real, honest, revealed, and transparent, allowing others to see, hear, and know our inner world. Relating is recognizing that there is someone else on the other side of the relational field, having a unique experience as rich and complex as our own, and that space and invitation must be given to weave their experience with our own to create a dynamic dance of both authentic human expression and reception. Most people have been conditioned to prioritize their own experience over others, or others’ experience over their own – authentic relating harmonizes this imbalance to create a center of gravity that lives in between each person, where the most aliveness and intimacy can be felt and shared.

Authentic relating is a practice that steers people toward a sense of wholeness, a defragmentation of the different parts of the self into a cohesive whole, where all physical sensations, emotions, and mental thoughts are integrated into a unified expression of consciousness. Great suffering and energetic drain arise from the constant efforts we often make to put forward some aspects of ourselves and keep hidden other aspects of ourselves; authentic relating provides the skills and tools to bring all aspects of multifaceted humanity together, and the result has often been reported to be as healing and transformational as even the best therapy can provide.

Authentic relating brings the focus to the here and now, and invites us to shed the social scripts we often lean on to navigate through social interactions. The deepest sense of intimacy and the greatest sense of aliveness are concentrated in the mystery of the here and now, where we never know where we are headed and what we will discover along the way. In an authentic conversation that lives in the here and now, we are riding the very edge of the unknown, letting go of planning for the next response or question and allowing the aliveness of the unknown to be the only source of inspiration. One of my favourite maxims of the practice is to follow the aliveness, wherever it may lead. Time and again, this simple guiding principle has steered my conversations and interactions with people to the most fascinating, enriching, and unpredictable places.

Text from www.authenticrelating.co

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