Communication can be bliss. We fulfill our needs through communicating with others, and it helps if our way of communicating with others is aligned with our needs, values and aspirations. However, too often we do not pay much attention to communication. We might see that something is not working on the job or in a relationship, which may also cause us anxiety, sadness or anger, but we fail to see that it is how we connect with ourselves and others, which causes much of the grief and pain. Just imagine how communication can also lead to the opposite, a sense of joy, satisfaction, and bliss.
The goal of psychotherapy is not to change who you are, but how you communicate with yourself and the world around you. How you exchange meaningful messages within and without yourself determines what you will find in either of those realms and how you will feel about yourself and the world. The easier it is for meaningful messages to flow, the more meaning and enjoyment you can experience. When people are immersed into a task and experience a sense of joy, this has been called a state of ‘flow’. One may take this flow quite literally. When you are feeling your inner self, you are essentially experiencing flows of information within you. After all, there have been estimated to be more than 30 trillion cells in the human body, which all communicate with each other and within themselves. Awareness for all this communication inside you can cause a feeling of bliss.
Communication can feel negative, but it is usually because there is a communication impairment. In the outside world, we may think of an unresolved conflict no ones is talking about. Even if it seems far off that communication could resolve the conflict, the breakdown of communication makes this even less likely. Even if it sometimes seems that some people like conflict, in the end, no one really does. We all want to feel better in our own ways. Such communication impairments can also be internal. If you are feeling anxious whenever you think of your job, you may not be open with yourself about something that is not working for you. We sometimes repress a thought or a feeling to stay in control, only to find that the situation becomes even less controllable by doing so. We lose even more control. Instead, we can gain control by adjusting how we communicate not only with ourselves but also with the world around us. That ultimately leads to greater happiness.
So to communicate to increase happiness we need more communication and more of the good communication that makes us all feel better. That is communication that takes place inside you and in the world around you, and which gets across as many meaningful messages as possible. We live in a world of information and we carry information in us. Communication is what helps us make the best use of it. Through awareness of it, reflection on it, listening to constructive feedback from others, and experimenting with it, we can improve our skills of communicating.
Whether you are connecting with yourself or with the world around you, you can experience real bliss just from connecting. Exchanging meaning lets you see more meaning in things. Connectedness with yourself on the inside and the world on the outside is often described as a very rewarding, uplifting and positive state. There may be obstacles in the way, which it is worth identifying and removing, either by yourself or with the help of a therapist. But this can open the doors wide to a state of bliss just by sitting on a park bench or when walking form one place to another. You do not have to accomplish anything or work hard to get there. It is already there, and you just have to connect with it.
What if we feel anger on the inside or we are dealing with someone in the outside world who is angry, for example? You can still experience bliss, because the anger pushes for change, as any emotion does, and that is a good thing. Once change happens, the emotion can subside away. Connectedness helps here as well. Identifying an emotion inside you and communicating with others to effect a needed change can move life forward, but it requires open communication within yourself and with others. If that feels scary, you may want to seek out the help of a psychotherapist. Important is to feel also the part that is not changing, that conveys an inherent sense of stability. We often tend to forget that even in a world of change, there are things that are constant, many of which are inside ourselves. Even change itself operates by rules and has certain stability over time.
Getting closer to yourself, another person or the universe itself can lead to bliss. When we are disconnected, it is difficult to experience anything, but when we are plugged in with ourselves and the universe, there can be enormous bliss.
© 2021 Christian Jonathan Haverkampf. All Rights Reserved. For more articles, see www.askdrjonathan.com. To contact me, please see www.jonathanhaverkampf.com or www.jonathanhaverkampf.ie. I am also a guest on www.wordnets.com. These are just my thoughts. I may be wrong.
