When people ask me what is it that I teach, my response is that I teach about relationships. When I say that some say “Oh, something like marriage counselling”.

My answer is “Mmm, well, yes, relationships between people are the context of most of our lives but what’s really interesting is that relationships actually exist on a much broader scale than that so I take an inside out approach so that you can see how outside in works as well”. That usually confuses everybody and I love it when they say “how do you do that?”

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines relationship as “a kind of connection or feeling that prevails between persons and things”. So, what I am talking about when I refer to relationships is a connection or feeling that exists between people, between things and between people and things. I like the word “connection” because, despite the fact that our senses tell us that we are separate and we view ‘things’ as separate such as our mind and our body or our work and our home or the plant in my room and me, its not true – connection is fundamental to our existence, both as a reality and as a personal experience.

This means that nothing happens in isolation. Relationships exist on all levels and that is important to our lives, it is just that sometimes we don’t realise it until we make the connection! Scientific research helped me see this.

I will give you some examples for those of you who are interested in the science but for those who aren’t – skip to the next paragraph! At the level of quantum physics there is a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, which refers to the phenomenon where particles that appear to be separate in one sense really are not separate at all because when one particle is stimulated the other one has an identical reaction to the stimulation, even when they are long distances apart. Then there is the research into networks, which identified that the relationship between people’s happiness extended up to three degrees of separation. It concluded that people’s happiness is influenced by the happiness of others with whom they are connected. Astronomers discovered that we are made up of the same elements as everything else in the universe. We are made of stardust; we are connected to the universe. Psychoneuroimmunology is a multidisciplinary study of all aspects of the body and mind. It is the study of how the mind and the body communicate. Through a complex network, our thoughts and our emotions have a relationship to everything that happens in our body, as seen by the relationship between our emotions and our immune system.

So there is a relationship between our thoughts and feelings and our health and healing. The relationship between mental attitude and rate of recovery is well established in medicine.

When we talk about our thoughts, we are really referring to what we are telling ourselves. We tell ourselves lots of things but we mostly don’t even notice we are doing it and seldom pull ourselves up on it. What we tell ourselves and how we feel about ourselves determines what we do, how we act or react, what we say. It is the basis of habits.

In the absence of awareness, we use established thinking and emotional patterns and so most of our actions and behaviour are habits. That’s important for us and it is important for the relationships we have with other people. Years ago, I had a client in my dietetic practice who was trying to lose weight. If she had worked really hard during the day or if she had a bad day she felt like she wanted to nurture herself so she would give herself something “nice” and sweet to eat. It had been a totally unconscious pattern but as she started to realise how her relationship with herself, her body and her food created her behaviour, that new awareness was a real turning point.

Our relationship with ourselves is determined by our thinking and emotional patterns. There are other aspects to our inner experience that are also important including our spiritual intelligence and our access to joy and inner wisdom.

What does this mean for you? It means that your relationship with yourself determines your actions and behaviour and has an enormous impact on all the relationships you have with other people.

There is a wonderful story that Dan Millman tells when he teaches about how little things make a big difference. A woman came up to him and told him how she had always been very shy and had been suicidal, having had a couple of half hearted attempts. She had decided that she was going to do it, in her words “once and for all”. She said, “I didn’t believe anyone cared whether I lived or died, so I didn’t care, either. I was on the way home where I was going to do it, when I saw a man – a nice looking man, walking in the opposite direction. I don’t usually look at people, but in the state I was in, it didn’t matter, so I looked at him and he looked back and smiled at me. He had a wonderful smile – and then he was gone. I know it sounds crazy but his smiling at me – it was something I wanted to hold on to for a while, so I – I didn’t kill myself that day or the next. Then I decided to stick around and get some help. Things are better now. I have a boyfriend I love…….”

Little things, small actions, do make a difference but what struck me is that there is more than just a moral to that story. She had told herself that no one cared whether she lived or died – and she believed it! Byron Katie speaks about a realisation that came to her at a time of complete despair, “I realised that when I believed my stressful thoughts, I suffered, but that when I questioned them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being.” We are capable of stressing ourselves. We are capable of telling ourselves things that are simply not true. We are also capable of turning that around and caring for ourselves.

And then there is that man who made a connection with her or put another way, he acknowledged his connection to her. It was brief and passing but the thing is how he acted was a reflection of how he felt about himself, what he was telling himself and his relationship with himself. In that moment, it turned out to be incredibly important.

But really, isn’t it always?