The three different aspects of relating

I was blessed to be able to attend a recent teaching by Nick Totton (author of ‘Embodied Relating’ among many others), which was profound on many levels. There were a number of threads that were sparked within me that I’d like to bring here.

I’ve always felt that we are inherently elemental beings looking to be in relationship with the world around us.  We search for resonance and for connection as we also search for reflection to enable us to establish who we are in the world.

Nick talked about the three different aspects of relating – relationship with our own process and self, relationship with other people, and relationship with the non-human aspects of the world.  This made me think of how we oscillate between balance and non-balance.  We can have times in life where we are obsessed about our own process to the exclusion of everything else.  What brings harmony here is to be in service of others, or to spend time resourcing in nature and allowing the bigger picture of the macro ecosystem to find a resting place within us.  We can also have times where we are obsessed with a relationship with a partner, to the exclusion of everything else.  And we can also disassociate from the human world so much that we are just residing in the non-human world.  What I was sensing is that this is a continual dance throughout the whole of life and how important it is to our wellbeing to have relationships with all aspects.

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​I was touched by the invitation to offer our clients what the trees offer us unconditionally when we sit with them: egolessness and presence.  

I was struck by Nick’s description of ‘soft fascination’ – where you sit with the ripples on the water or a leaf blowing on the wind, absorbed by the movement of it and how relaxing this is to us.  There is no ego in nature, so our own ego is not called forth, and this kind of relating enables us to let go and to just be.

One of my first questions when I was training to be a craniosacral therapist was about sitting with the tides of trees or the land... so it was beautifully freeing to sit in a room full of therapists talking about the importance of our relationship with the non-human aspects of the world (plant kingdom, animal kingdom).  I was touched by the invitation to offer our clients what the trees offer us unconditionally when we sit with them: egolessness and presence.  

I know from experience that the healing happens in the space in between two people (and in some respects the modality becomes irrelevant), so the more we as practioners can bring into the resonant field, the greater the potential for quantum shifts in health and wellbeing.
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Nick talked about cognition being a relational process; our senses create the world as the world creates our senses.  This feels to be a beautiful living metaphor for who we are in the world.