February 19, 2015

Amazing relationships are natural. A Happy Hour Conversations with Rudi and Jenny Kennard

55 minutes

Amazing relationships are natural

I was thrilled to speak to the wonderful Rudi and Jenny about how it's so natural for us to have amazing relationships very naturally as we see the role of Thought in our relationships. Rudi and Judy are Three Principles Facilitators and film-makers who have been travelling the world, interviewing other facilitators, teachers and people who have had their lives transformed through understanding the principles.

They were as fabulous as ever, these were my best bits:

It can seem that we're a type of person, e.g. a jealous person or a person with a temper
Jenny talks having a blind spot when it came to her jealousy - she could see that her feelings were coming from her thinking in every area except her jealousy. She described it as thinking she must just be a jealous person and that was fixed. Over time she began to see that her jealousy was just a thought too. That's the case with pretty much any trait you can think of.

The biggest relationship change is the one we have to our own thinking
Jenny described how the biggest change in their relationship, has actually been the relationship that each of them have with their own thinking. Sometimes we can be wrapped up in thought and thinking it looks and feels real, and other times we see that our feeling are coming from thought. The more we see through the illusion of thought, the less worried we get about the content of our thinking and the more we see it's just thought.

We can't have a relationship without thought being included
I loved Rudi's phone metaphor - just how we can't have a phone conversation without the intermediary of the phone, we can't have a relationship, conversation or any kind of interaction without the intermediary of our own thoughts. The more we recognise the intermediary of thought is always present, the less seriously we take the thoughts which are getting in the way with connecting with the other person.

What about when we have different goals or values to our partner?
Jenny spoke beautifully about the conversations they'd had over the years about big decisions such as whether to have children. They've been able to have some very honest, open conversations from a neutral place which has allowed them to move forward through life without needing the other person to have the same opinion.

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