disconnection Archives - Melissa Perrin

acceptance, disconnection, disunion, intimacy, love, lovers

www.theonethatgotaway.show

We met and made music and told stories about “The One That Got Away.” We did this at the Laugh Factory in Chicago last Sunday. An amazing night. Something I did not know I wanted to do until Billy Pacholski and Scott Whitehair offered the opportunity.

www.theonethatgotaway.show

We told stories about lost loves, missed opportunities, misunderstandings and bridges burned. We told stories about found loves, epiphanies, unconditional love and falteringly brave connections.

We told stories about risking and gaining and losing and gratitude for risking, gaining and losing. We had much in common and nothing in common.

An epiphany: I was so young, I thought relationships would always be like this so I let him go.
An epiphany: I deserve Better.
An epiphany: She crushed me. This was so hot. I lost myself…until it was no longer hot. Then I had to save myself. And I did.
An epiphany: We loose pieces of ourselves to those who love us; we gain pieces of those we love and hold them forever.

An epiphany: My authentic self must be enough. It simply must.

Intimacy Happens. It just does. It happens when we risk asking, telling, hearing. It happens when we allow ourselves to bump into each other for a moment, an evening or a lifetime. If I let myself, if I choose to release my self-focus, I am changed by one story. I am changed by you. If I let myself. Whether we are together for five hours or five years.

November 23, 2015/by Melissa Perrin

acceptance, children, disconnection, friendship, love, Modeling, patterns, safe driving, Teaching, Uncategorized

Give a Nod.

I live in an area that is filled with Achievers and the families they are raising. This area buzzes with activity. The atmosphere is saturated with this message: “We are busy people. We all need to get somewhere and we need it to happen with as little mess as possible.” Stress levels are high. Our children watch how we handle it. They learn.

Of late, I’ve noticed an up-tick in head shaking. You know the kind I mean: when you take too long at the stop sign, letting pedestrians pass in the cross walk, and the driver behind you honks with frustration and shakes their head in disgust.

Yesterday, a teen driver miscalculated his position on a small road in our area. I was in his way. As he drove over a stretch of lawn to force his way past me, he glared and shook his head at me [barely missing a mail box]. Monkey see, monkey do. This young driver has witnessed, as I have, the difficulty of managing delayed satisfaction, the head shake, the quick judgement of idiocy from others while making one’s way down the road.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve given my fair share of exasperated head shakes meant to wake the other person up to their failure, as viewed by me, from my perspective. Lately, I’ve done it more often that I care to admit.

Today, I am visiting another area. This is dance competition season and I occasionally land in a coffee shop waiting to pick my daughter up from a performance. New to the area, I drove slower than usual while trying to find my way. I may even have accidentally cut someone off when the road narrowed to one lane before I was aware it was happening. Not one head shake. Not one. When I waved to let the other driver know I knew of my mistake and was taking responsibility, she smiled, nodded her head and drove on.

A head nod. All was well. This gentle, accepting behavior has continued through my morning at the coffee shop. It’s possible I’ve landed in a happy respectful hamlet of achievers who do not need to judge, demean or alert me to my failures. I may have landed in a hamlet of folk who have good impulse control and an ability to tolerate delayed gratification.

Either way, that head nod felt so gentle, so accepting, I found myself reviewing the power of this small action. Allowing for the other person’s humanity, assuming good intention, is loving on life’s terms. Sometimes the best way to show up for another is to simply choosing a nod over a shake.

August 17, 2015/by Melissa Perrin

connection, dating, disconnection, friendship, history, intimacy, love, lovers, patterns, protecting love, sex

Falling in Love: Easy. Staying in Love?

In the most recent post “To Fall in Love,” I wrote about a pathway to falling in love. It includes asking and answering 36 questions with a partner, sitting face to face, then finding a quiet spot and looking into each others eyes for 4 minutes.

Key ingredients: A willing partner, willingness to Listen, willingness to Share, a quiet environment, sitting face to face, authenticity.

When you try this, are you going to fall in love? It is easy to fall in love. Harder to Stay in love. Falling in love, within this context, is actually the decision to open oneself to receive another person. Opening oneself to show one’s authentic self to another person. The questions are designed to offer deepening authenticity; designed to offer opportunities to receive a level of truthful communication from another. These things create the platform on which love and connection can thrive.

We humans crave attainment of a state and hope to live there as if we have scaled a vertical cliff and reached the mesa at the top. Stasis, however, is not a viable option. To stay in love requires effort. It requires us to continue to risk with our partner. To continue to be willing to be seen clearly, to risk being disappointed, to risk living in intimacy. This can be a terrifying state of affairs…at the very least, exhausting.

My willingness to continue to ask questions, your willingness to live with my answers when I give them has everything to do with connection and attunement, those experiences that deepen love. We humans often move in and out of states of awareness with each other and in our day to day worlds.

Loving on Life’s Terms is avoiding tuning out, finding that balance between connection with an Other while living life as it needs to be lived today.

January 30, 2015/1 Comment/by Melissa Perrin

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