Relationships: Keeping Love Fresh

Description

Our love-based relationships can empower or drain us, depending on how we nurture them. In this video, Rebecca and Kenton discuss how to cultivate a mind-state where you can still have a "crush" on someone after decades of togetherness.

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods,love,romantic relationships

Video Transcription

[Music]

greetings friends today's video is about romantic relationships note that this video is this is not about deciding whether you should stay with somebody or not this is about if you're in a relationship that you want to keep and it's how to keep it alive how to keep it fresh how to keep it loving this played a huge part in our in our life we've been together for 27 years now and often you know I'll say to people I still have a crush on her and in all areas of life I feel in a way almost that you know your romantic partner partners whatever your preference is the person or people that you are sharing your life with most intimately but that is maybe one of the most important decisions you'll ever make if I have a relationship that is like a foundation underneath me and it's strong it's loving it's connected it feeds energy into us and in our everyday life we find ourselves with more energy than we would otherwise have the reality for a lot of people today is that the relationship that they're in drains them and it it sucks energy out of us sometimes to such an extent that most of our daily energy is going into the drama and the pain and the stress that is our romantic relationship

we are assaulted by chickens again [Laughter]

before it was deer in the background and now it's the chickens they've become further roaming as they get braver and braver it's obviously something that we probably want in our lives is to have a deep connection with our partner so that we can be supported we can be encouraged to grow we can be nourished and comforted our mental state has so much to do with how we go through the world and that mental state has definitely affected by the people that we surround ourselves most closely with something I've I've heard especially in the rewilding circles is kind of a fad that the the monogamous relationship is just doomed to failure and you know it's not just the monogamous relationship but often you know even if you're someone that has you know multiple people in your life that that doesn't last very long it's not meant to I've heard people say like five eight years and then and to me I don't want to be mean about it but it seems like a little bit of a cop-out

our mind does get it love's novelty no argument there and when something comes into our life a person there's a lot behind a person but after five or eight years if we're in our typical civilized mindset then we're not seeing novelty anymore our civilized mindset just gets bored with things because it doesn't see things it sees its own patterns right it sees its own ideas so by year five or eight I've formed an idea of who Rebecca is

and then I'm just I'm in love with that idea and I'm getting bored of that idea because the idea is of real like kind of flat nondescript thing in comparison to the reality of who this person is and if I can see with clear vision with what I like to call our rewilding vision I think it happens to people naturally when they start being out in the woods and living closer to nature we start to see novelty all the time she is never the same I mean ever she's a different person every moment essentially the way she looks the way she talks her ideas everything's changing and evolving over time and I'm part of that dance with her and you can never get bored of that you can never get tired of that if you were seeing that that person is always fresh is always new always novel so how do we cultivate scene with those eyes but you know it's not real easy we've got these traditions like Zen and such that are helping us to recapture some of that natural vision we had but I think the first step comes with understanding a that my mind does seek novelty and be that it will form a what I usually call a crystallization it will form an idea over everything in my life the people the trees I see you know the scenes if you look out a certain window every day you see the same thing every day even though it's never been the same two days in a row and so realizing that the truth of the world is ever shifting ever changing ever novel the illusion that we put over the world is that the world's the same old thing every day yeah but that is not a reality that's those are sunglasses I'm wearing that tint the world in a very certain way worse than sunglasses they're like glasses with just snapshots photographs on there they try to freeze the world into something that it's not so some of the initial ways that that I sparked this in myself was differences watch your features and realize that you know when you're talking when you're smiling when you're sad when you're crying it whatever you're feeling whenever you're being in that moment your features are always changing and as you get all there they've changed and shifted and you know your hair is a little bit different it it's a different tapestry it's that moves and shifts all the time a person's face is unbelievable it's remarkable because it's this ever-shifting tapestry staying away from too much media yeah okay so I'm gonna share something with you guys it was remarkable to me because I've been completely away from media now I want to say basically for six months except for a documentary on when Native people were first here in the United States but define media yakking okay talking about movies I'm talking about yet actually you know world news junk YouTube internet surfing this kind of stuff where we just go on and get entertained yeah and and so you know that documentary

but otherwise I've been basically free of media and I've been really doing a morning practice of meditation and such my mind has been getting so loving and clear and beyond where it's ever been before and then the other day with my girls they've been wanting to watch Moana again with me and I sat down with them and we watched this movie we haven't seen for a while but we sat down to it watch it again it's an uplifting movie great messages great it's really positive and everything afterwards I could feel it in my mind it was it was like I just had a whole bunch of junk food for my body and I literally had not felt any irritation with my children for as long as I can remember and within a I don't want to say within 10 15 minutes after turning that movie off one of them did something normal and I felt a flash of irritation on modern entertainment media I just don't think it's good for us I think it's affecting us more than we know and having come off a fast essentially taking a bite and seeing that effect

it was very eye-opening to me how that media gets my mind into those patterns of not seeing the person around me it it if you think about it it's so you look at our movies over the last I don't know even say 15 years and it's got to be bigger and flashier and more exciting and more twists and turns and look more and more and more always and then regular life is just like dull in comparison because are you having like aliens coming it was talking through well you know cars come to life and how could it ever compare right and then how can your partner ever compare to all of that it's just winding down I was gonna say time in nature you know a little bit of time by yourself or with your partner and then you can begin to be slowed down to have some reflection time to settle that bar that's always moving higher and higher back down to a level where there's room for taking in the slower stuff right the things that are everyday and a lot of times for me I notice I come back if I've taken some time in nature by myself and I feel a sense of gratitude for what I'm stepping into the low life I'm stepping into this is an important one everybody if you think about okay your mind wanting novelty when you think about what the movies the social media video games all this stuff is doing to our novelty sensors that we are not we're no longer gonna be able to love and appreciate this life that we're in and there's a rock in front of us here and this is it's incredible the shadows moving over it there's little spider webs that are glinting in the sunlight for mine is slowed down we find beauty and amazement everywhere we look if we keep in taking these these substances right I'm just gonna call them substances the social media and the movies inside its it's just keeps raising that rpm of our mind higher and higher and higher we can't see what's in front of us anymore this big second part to me is being conscious about about the person in your life and being conscious about the emotions that you feel towards that person I was just listening to dr. Amit Sood he's a great neuroscientist and he is talking about basically said if we use a neural network network in our brains we strengthen it so if I'm five eight years in and I'm taking Rebecca for granted and I just passed my eyes over her and don't really give attention or consciousness to her then again I'm not seeing her and I'm basically building up an idea that she's not worth noticing but she's boring and then no wonder after eight years I'm gonna be like oh I gotta look for somebody else

and I'll look for that somebody else and go through that same process because the problem isn't the other person the problem is me so if we're conscious about how we're feeling about somebody it's you know it's the same thing that I talked about in a video once we're with with junk food or cigarette or whatever it is if you think about something really horrible and you associate that with it then there's going to be that association but if you consciously create an association with the person in your life of positivity then you're gonna be using that neural network creating that association and you're always going to be feeling in a pretty positive state about that person so with you what I do is like starting when I wake up you know looking over at her and saying you know to me you're the most beautiful person in the world because every morning I look at you I'm like I just taken the sight of you and and it doesn't matter what a person looks like you can look at them you can see this beauty in them and just enchant yourself with it when you watch the person during the day you know again I'll like look you over maybe in proper ways and and but also just think about you know consciously about how grateful I am for you how much I love you how much I appreciate the things about you I can think about these positive things I can equally think about negative things I could start to nitpick yeah pull you apart in terrible ways and I'm gonna strengthen that neural network what am I gonna choose that's up to me and it's not so much her again as it's me and what I'm forging in my mind so obviously the topic of connection in relationships and cultivating love in your partnership is very deep and very broad but this is a beginning of noticing your part in it noticing the ways in which I am needing to slow down needing to be aware of what media I'm taking it and be aware of how I'm framing you and we can train our brains right right when we're supposed to be an intelligent species so certainly we can do it I think it would be a fun experiment to try make pick a week one week in every every morning when you

wake up look at a picture or look at your partner and practice some of that cultivation of noticing them of noticing the changing this of them of cultivating that love an enchantment I like that word enchantment of the qualities that you really appreciate in them and funny thing is when you start to cultivate like oh I just love that look at how they're so giving or they're so sharing or this or that strangely enough though as qualities come out the other person they truly do write as the recipient of someone who is giving love in that way and using those lenses in an aware way I often feel my good side is just brought forward and it's so nice it's wonderful so pick a week get up in the morning notice that and then through the day notice stop take some time could be 10 seconds yeah it's a big part of it what you said about that those qualities come out no and so we start looking at the person and it's almost a little mystical if you appreciate you know somebody's if you appreciate the smile lines around their eyes I bet you're gonna find that they're more smiley that day but even more so if you you know tell that person how much you appreciate these positive qualities you're gonna see those positive qualities emerge more and more and that's again where it's self-defeating in relationships and I feel like I see this in people where ice I've developed a nitpick thing right like oh your braid you always wearing these very suits or whatever it's gonna be and then I started nitpicking that and then I complain about it to you and then you're feeling like well I have a right to wear whatever gray since I want maybe you're gonna wear more braces and and that just truly Cascades people down where that hot reinforcing the positive things boom you see the negative things in way almost melted just by what you focus on so it's watching that media right what feel what that does to your mind you know just start engaging and some porn for a while and you will see your your ability to be sexually attracted to your partner plummet so you know that awareness of your media intake and then being conscious about your your emotions that you're projecting out onto a person in your view of them realizing you have that choice to look at negative quality or to look at a positive quality the shape of your partner may have changed over the last 10 years you can look at that and say oh look at how beautiful they used to be and now they're just getting fat or you could look and say look at that beautiful shape that that they have and then giving them love for the shape that I have they may start exercising more and becoming more conscious because they enjoy that that connection that feedback that you're giving them and they want their body to look different for you whatever the quality is physical emotional mental that positivity will do wonders will share with us how do you stay connected in your relationships with your partners if you don't have a partner can relate to friends family what are some ways that you notice that you can cultivate that deeper connection I mean tell us and try an experiment try some of the things we've suggested next time you pick up your cell phone cuz you're bored and you don't know what you're gonna do you're gonna surf through the internet put it down and go hey baby doll let's go for a walk we don't call baby doll you come honey or whatever and try go out for a walk for the amount of time that you're gonna spend looking up random things on the internet go outside look at the clouds and just say hey tell me how you're doing today so tell us Sheriff us alright thank you can't wait to hear from you in the comments love to y'all [Music]