How Can We Be Together

Transcript

As my friend Kenny once said answers might be temporary but a good question can last us the rest of our life. We can continue to develop our answers in a more precise way, or a more powerful way.

So sometimes we all want attention, we all want significance. When you look at a child or infant they don’t always know how to get attention, how to ask for attention in healthy ways so what we see is an infant throwing a tantrum, throwing physical objects and crying or screaming.

In an extreme case the child might deliberately trip and hurt herself in order to gain attention and sympathy. And it might well work.

We all want attention, we all want significance.

Of course adults want sexual attention, sexual significance. Now perhaps the attention in general or significance in general is more important than the sexual element but the sexual element is very real. Now what do we see happening sometimes?

People don’t know how to find significance or attention in a respectful or powerful so you find things like a young man taking a photo of his member and sending it to a woman. Now he’s probably not going to reach the highest goal that he has in mind but as long as the woman has some reaction than it affirms to the man through her actions that he is somehow relevant, significant and worthy of attention even if its negative attention.

Women do similar things, not as offensive and a lot more subtle. Women do these things. Men have a range of behaviors that aren’t necessarily great. Women do these things like put on makeup which is quite subtle. Imitates sexual signals, putting blush on your cheeks is meant to imitate the face of someone who is having an orgasm. Women show off their cleavage.

If they see a man they are particularly attracted to they will draw their attention to their cleavage or they will bend over in front of them to show their posterior. They almost always have some clever reason for doing this, “I was just bending over to pick something up”.

This is one way to get attention. Men and women alike will do this thing we call jealously plot line. They go to somebody else in front of the person they actually desire and give more attention and shower this other person with attention to get attention from their prospective partner.

Of course this isn’t very nice for several reasons, one thing is you are using someone else who is not even involved as a kind of pawn. And to me this looks like a losing game because what happens even if it works and even if you do attract the person you desire the likelihood is you are going to attract someone who is insecure.

Even if you win you lose, you probably lose. There are ways that we can seek attention and significance that are respectful, that are valid, that are full of loving power.

Of course we can simply say to a friend “can I have a hug?”

We can ask them to sit with us for awhile and have a conversation even if we don’t know why we can ask for just some of your time, just to spend some time with me. I feel lonely and would like some company.

When we look for potential partners we can engage them in conversation, we can listen to them. We can speak in moderation and find some common ground and speak about things interesting to both of us.

Many times its difficult but we can be vulnerable and show a person how we really feel. When we do this we run the risk of being rejected but if we do it right we can express ourselves in a way that affirms our own truth, that affirms that we are real to ourselves whether or not others acknowledge it.

The question is how can we express ourselves? How can we find our needs met in a way that also meets the needs of others and is respectful of others and inspires others and sets a good examples. That is full of that loving power.

As I said this question asked well might last us a lifetime, how can we be together?