I didn’t know how I would finally heal, but I instinctively knew that my path forward had to be based on radical honesty, having the strong determination to stop ravaging my health with dangerous intoxicants and focusing on building new healthier habits for my body and mind.

Whenever the urge to escape with intoxicants tried to take hold, I would bring my awareness inward to take a good look at the tension. I remember finding immense amounts of sadness and fear, and an emptiness that ached for love. Later I would discover that this was a space that only my own love and unconditional compassion could fill.

being with the down moments is better than carrying unprocessed pain everywhere you go

the appreciation you seek from others will not hold the same rejuvenating power as the appreciation, attention, and kindness you can give yourself.

Treating yourself to small gifts or going on rejuvenating trips can all fall under the umbrella of self-love, but self-love should not be confused with materialism. Material things cannot give you complete balance of mind and they cannot fundamentally heal your past.

Putting ourselves first in all situations can quickly become another type of extreme that disregards the welfare of others and pushes us to become more and more self-centered.

The understanding of self-love that makes the most sense to me is much more internal. It is the way you relate to yourself with compassion, honesty, and openness. It is meeting every part of yourself with unconditional acceptance, from the parts that you find easy to love, to the rough and imperfect parts that you try to hide from. Self-love begins with acceptance, but it does not stop there. Real self-love is a total embrace of all that you are while simultaneously acknowledging that you have room to grow and much to let go of.

True self-love is multifaceted and includes radical honesty, positive habit building, and unconditional self-acceptance.

Radical honesty, a form of authenticity that begins inside you, is a warm recognition that you gently apply to your conscious life. This view of radical honesty is not about telling everyone what you think. Instead, it is the root from which self-awareness grows. Thoughts and emotions that were once discarded or ignored are now embraced. Where you once felt the urge to run away, you now challenge yourself to face whatever is there.

If you want to see great results, you need to wholeheartedly commit to the process, especially when it gets difficult, so you can reject the temptation to fall back into unconsciously motivated behavior.

First, you fear truth and then you lie to be rid of your fear, unwittingly falling into a loop where you actually continue empowering your fear because every lie breeds further anxiety.

Dishonesty is the fear of truth.

Dishonesty with yourself creates distance.

A deep connection with another being is not possible if you are deeply disconnected from yourself.

Eventually, your radical honesty matures to the point where it becomes non-negotiable—you carry it wherever you go and in every situation it becomes an asset that informs your decisions.

Where you once denied old pain, you admit that there is a wound within you that needs tending.

What are my real aspirations? What has society encoded inside my mind that is not really mine to carry? Who do I really want to spend time with? How can I better align my actions to support my new evolution?

As we practice self-love, there will certainly be things we need to openly deal with and rectify, but feeling hate toward what we want to change will only cloud our minds and make our actions less effective. Self-acceptance is a deep embrace of reality, letting go of punishing ourselves for the past, and the foundation that balances all the other tools we use for personal transformation.

When taken to its highest level, self-love becomes the foundation that allows us to feel and express unconditional love.

Self-love and healing are deeply intertwined, and if you take one of them seriously, the other will be immediately activated.

What does self-love look like for you right now? How do you want your self-love to evolve, and what do you want it to feel like a year from now? What part of yourself do you have trouble accepting? Is this a critical part of your story? What positive habits are you working on developing? Is there a way to use boundaries to support yourself in the cultivation of the new you? Has building your self-love helped you have more compassion for others? Has understanding yourself helped you see them more clearly? What is your relationship to honesty these days? Can you be honest with yourself when your mind is full of tension? How has a lack of self-love affected your relationships in the past?

What was happening was a structural problem: Having very little money filled their minds with tension and they often projected that tension onto each other.

All human beings carry tension in the mind that inhibits them from living their best life. But, fortunately, the tension that accumulates within us can also be released. Healing is when you intentionally decrease the tension you carry in your mind.

Since our perception is being driven by our past and our emotions, it will inhibit our ability to recognize reality as it is. The mind will not do what is good for it unless we intentionally train it to do so.

Changing your location as a way to start a new life can be helpful, but if you never address your mindset, old patterns ingrained in your mind can re-create the situations you were trying to remove yourself from.

The things that are for you will come to you much more easily when you are deeply aligned with your truth and pursuing your growth.

Your inner blocks, meaning the parts of your conditioning that you do not realize are resisting your freedom, have a way of pushing things away from you until they are unbound.

Similar vibrations tend to attract each other, and if we don’t align ourselves with peace, then harmony will have a hard time coming into our lives. Healing will not only improve your life, but it will open the door for good things to come to you because the quality of your mind determines the quality of your life.

One of our strongest tendencies is to point to the source of our problem as if it were outside of us. Our ego likes to place blame outside ourselves, and often that blame falls on those closest to us.

Whenever anger or another heavy emotion appears in the theater of your mind, it will start looking for more fuel, even if it has to bend logic to do so. This is something that will come up again and again, even as you make progress in your healing. A commitment to patiently reminding yourself that you are the maker of your destiny will help you reassert yourself as the one who is in charge of your mental state.

maturity is when you can finally ride the ups and downs of life without getting tossed around by them you don’t expect everything to be perfect you know change is a constant you don’t judge yourself when times get hard you live in gratitude you enjoy the good when it is here

We can spend years constantly giving our power away by never taking responsibility for what is happening in our own minds. Healing is about illuminating your mind with your own awareness, turning on the light within so brightly that your old patterns no longer have anywhere to hide.

After hitting my rock bottom and spending a whole year practicing the three aspects of self-love—radical honesty, positive habit building, and self-acceptance—I had seen significant results, but my intuition was calling me to go deeper.

your immediate reaction does not tell you who you are it is how you decide to respond after the reaction that gives you real insight into how much you have grown your first reaction is your past your intentional response is your present

the thoughts that arise in the mind simultaneously arise with sensations in the body. Our reaction is not to what we think, but to what we feel.

In the teaching of Vipassana, the pervasiveness of dissatisfaction that humans feel is due to craving, but it’s possible for all of us to fully eradicate craving and thus be fully liberated.

Real healing is a deconditioning process that helps you unravel the blocks, narratives, and inflexibility that create space between you and your happiness. Healing starts with knowing yourself and loving yourself. When you see and feel how much you carry, it becomes clear that it is time to start letting go.

Reflections Are you in touch with your emotional history? What parts of you need healing? What are some of the major patterns that appear repeatedly in your life? What about the patterns that appear when things get tough? How has your childhood affected your conditioning and your personality? What hurt stands out that occurred after childhood, and in what ways has this reverberated through your life? Do you see the connection between your past and the ways you impulsively react?

Sticking to meditating through that time helped me more efficiently process all that stagnant sadness that had been sitting in my subconscious since I was a child.

Fear is the craving for safety. A mind that is dominated by fear is a mind that is still in survival mode.

If you are open to experiencing a profound transformation, you need to come to terms with the fact that much of your struggle is self-imposed. How many times has your imagination disturbed a perfectly peaceful moment? How many times have your cravings blocked you from fully enjoying the abundance in front of you? How many times have you impatiently waited for a particular moment—and then, once you were there, your mind started fixating on what it was missing?

All therapists, meditation teachers, counselors, and coaches can do is guide you to reclaim your own power. A guide is not a savior. A guide is simply the person who can show you how to walk the right path so that you can finally live without having to carry so many mental burdens.

If our past has been full of stress, that can cause our stress reaction to become much more easily triggered. When that happens, seemingly small things can cause wildly disproportionate stress reactions.

The most common response to change is resistance. We wish to maintain our youth and crave flawless health. We want the people we love to never leave us. We wish pleasant moments and easy times would always remain.

As we walked together one day, we spoke about the future, a future that would occur long after he was gone. In his words, there was no sadness, or words of caution, or attachments to how things should be done when that time came. He did not seek any type of glory, nor did he crave to be remembered. What stood out most was the unspoken happiness that shone from his long life of service and how the idea of his own death did not cause him any fear.

Difficult emotions feel like they are permanent when we are experiencing them, and we react to them as if they would last forever, forgetting that they will subside and others will take their place.

When the awareness of change matures, it washes away attachment and makes room for a loving presence that peacefully accepts that all things arise and ultimately pass away.

While it is true that change is easy to recognize when it takes things away (endings are louder than beginnings), if we are to strike a healthy mental balance, we need to honor the fact that love, joy, and compassion—the sweetest parts of life—actually become stronger and clearer the more we embrace the reality of change.

One of our greatest mental enemies is the fight against change. So much of our inner tension stems from our attachment to keeping the pleasant parts of life the same, which eventually crashes upon the shores of change.

I remember that as soon as a pleasurable moment would pass or the party was over, my mind would not feel settled or satisfied. To quiet the withdrawal, I would go back to my room and numb myself with marijuana until I’d finally pass out. I didn’t understand back then that the obstacle I kept crashing against was this intense determination to avoid mental discomfort, which was based on my rejection of change as a natural part of life.

The real you is not your initial reaction. The real you is your response that comes after your reaction. The real you is the one who can weave out of the grasp of the past and produce an authentic response that is based in the present.

Without intention, you would be aimless. Through intention, you reveal who you really are.

Cravings are a rejection of reality as it is, and bring our focus into imagining what is missing or how we wish things would be. When our desire for things to be a certain way combines with tension, craving emerges.

The understanding of attachment here is derived from the original Eastern sense that comes to us from the Buddha’s teaching.

The more deeply we identify with something, the more our ego grabs hold of it.

The love we have for dear ones is often tarnished by an inner push to control them, even when we know that real love is supporting their freedom.

Even though it fills our minds with tension, we keep digging deeper into attachment to see if next time things will be different. If we just get this nicer material object or reach this next career milestone, or if others would just see us the way we want to be seen—with love and admiration—we think we will finally be happy.

Attachments thwart our path to happiness and fill our life with mental pain. Both our attachments and the truth of suffering point to the fact that letting go is our only path forward.

When you are attached to nothing, happiness appears in abundance.

You crave for those close to you to be just like you, to see the world just like you, to think just like you. Your craving reinforces the ego’s impulse to control and limits the flow of unconditional love that makes connections deep and fruitful. Love exudes the security and confidence to embrace differences. Love also helps you admit when you are wrong. It understands that our loved ones are complex and that control will never bring them closer to us.

Healing is not possible without patience. And we must accept that letting go is a gradual process.

if the pain was deep you will have to let it go many times

If you are seeking to reclaim your power, one of the essential steps is realizing how much of your power you have given up to the hurt of the past and your fears of the future.

The heavy mental weight that you carry consumes a lot of your energy.

Living in a constant inner battle and treating yourself like an enemy pushes you far away from living at your most optimal level.

Letting go actually sharpens the mind by cleansing your perception.

A lighter mind and clearer eyes make space for wiser decision making.

Your best strategy to attain your goals will be more accessible when the weight of the past is no longer limiting your creativity.

Letting go of craving quick results helps you get comfortable with the process of accomplishing new and difficult things.

Reflection In what ways do you make things harder for yourself? What do you need to let go of? Does holding on make you feel safe, even though it hurts? Do you fear what life will be like after you let go? What more do you need to accept to fully let go? What is your relationship with change? When you resist it, do you see how your mind bursts into tension? Are you giving yourself the time you need to let go? Since letting go also takes intentional effort, are you making space to actively let go? Does your ego want control? How has your past influenced the way you react? Are you giving yourself the time you need to respond intentionally to life, instead of letting your past speak through your reactions?

the inner liberation ideas of Vipassana focus on undoing the craving that causes suffering within the individual.

There is nothing wrong with letting our enthusiasm lead and letting our friends and family know that we have found a practice that actually works. It is commendable to share good things with others, but we need to make sure that we do not develop a superiority complex. The ego can quickly grab a good thing and use it to create an imaginary hierarchy, where you view your practice as much better than all others and believe that your way is the only way for all people to heal. The reality is that it is not—your practice may work well for you, but it may be the wrong fit for someone else, and you may even outgrow it at some point.

Reflections What practices have you tried so far? What healing techniques have you heard of that you’ve always wanted to try and intuitively feel might be right for you? Are there any that feel right and that you should commit time and energy to? What kind of results do you want to see from a healing practice? Are you doubting your strength to do this serious inner work? Do you realize how powerful you truly are to have gotten this far? Are you setting aside time for daily intentional healing?

Ultimately, human habit is survival mode. Human habit is not permanent, and it is not who we are at our core. Our real human nature is what shines brightly underneath all the patterns, old pain, and confusion that stops us from being the best version of ourselves. Our real human nature is love, mental clarity, creativity, and a zest for life that is informed by the past but no longer weighed down or controlled by it.

If we scale up the healing of the individual and multiply it by millions, it will cause a cultural shift in our understanding of what defines human nature.

the roughest aspects of your character do not fully define who you are. The outer shell may be thick and prone to harmful or defensive behavior, but underneath there is a vast pool of loving clarity waiting for you to access it. If you do the work, the brightness of your true human nature will reveal itself.

letting go can feel like a tremendous struggle even when you know that it is absolutely necessary for you to live a better life breaking with the past is literally a break an end a refusal to return old patterns keep repeating until you intentionally move in a new direction

The default mode of the mind is survival, meaning it is mainly motivated by fear, craving, aversion, and self-centeredness—this is the initial layer of human habit. Many of these habits stem from encoded evolutionary direction to help keep us safe and survive long enough to pass along our genes. Being cautious and greedy can have its survival advantages. But living simply for survival in the modern world is incredibly limiting. When you train the mind to observe things as they really are, to take in reality without projecting your emotions onto it and without trying to control it, happiness will become more available to you—this is how you open yourself up to your loving human nature. Happiness requires intentional action, healing, letting go, and teaching the mind to settle into the present moment. Only the effort that comes from you can activate your happiness.

Many people find that once they start healing and accessing their human nature, they drop their old goals because they were never really theirs to begin with.

Often an individual’s real aspirations that are hidden under their old human habit are more creative, more in service to others, more focused on improving society.

you don’t need to quit your job to take your healing seriously.

your strategy is to avoid, it will make the distance between you and yourself wider and wider. At first, this strategy will feel like relief, but later it will feel like you are no longer at home within your mind and body.

Allowing yourself to feel your emotions without running away is the gateway to entering into healing and the path to accessing your human nature. When you break down the layers of old conditioning, your inner revolution begins.

Jesus spent forty days in the desert in deep reflection and overcame doubt. The Buddha spent six years practicing different techniques until he was able to fully liberate himself from all conditioning. The methods were different but there is a similarity in the results.

keep unbinding the past that weighs down the mind let go of the tension that limits your ability to wholeheartedly enter into the present heal the fear that stops you from aligning with your highest goals—this is how you stay committed to your growth

Practice love for yourself and others, and it will become stronger; pull yourself out of your perspective to take a look at how others see things, and you will empower your mental agility; intentionally feel happiness for the success of others, and jealousy will lose its power; take time to feel gratitude and eventually your mindset will flow in that direction more easily.

Reflections In what ways has your conditioned human habit made life harder? What does your mind feel like when you are connected to your human nature? Are you able to persevere even when it is difficult to connect with your human nature and cultivate those good qualities that can help improve your life? How has your ability to problem-solve changed since you started your healing journey? Are you seeing more creativity flow into your life? Do you have faith that you can become the person you know you can be? Who is an example in your life who does a good job living from a space of loving human nature?

Signs that your self-awareness is growing: Being able to feel your emotions as they come and go Coming to terms with your past and noticing the way it shows up in your present Watching your mind as it processes difficult situations Taking note of behavior patterns that show up repeatedly in your life Observing how your own thinking affects your emotions Examining your inner narrative

Non-reaction is essentially a practice in patience. The patience you are building will permeate your mind and open up your perception.

As you see others struggle with their patterns, learn more about themselves, and move through their own ups and downs, it will become easier to feel compassion for them because you, too, have gone through these steps and know how challenging the process can be.

One of the hardest battles to overcome is simply having enough courage and inner security to adopt a lifestyle that supports your evolution and mental health.

When you can’t handle your own pain or the turbulence of your emotions, it is easy to fall into a cycle where you use others as a means of escape.

There is also nothing wrong with having a friend help you take your mind off something that is too heavy to process at the moment, but a clear sign of being disconnected from yourself is when too many of your relationships are driven by your need to dodge your tension.

For some, their escape mechanism may be always surrounding themselves with people or work. For others it may be overeating, watching too much TV, drug abuse,

The act of running away from yourself has clear consequences in your relationships. If you do not know yourself well, it will be hard to deeply love and understand those around you. If you cannot meet yourself in total honesty, it will be difficult to hold space and go deep with others. If you do not have compassion for yourself, it will be hard to treat others well. Full honesty, while difficult at first, can stabilize the groundwork of relationships by building trust and understanding.

More than anything, you give yourself what you need, instead of what you crave. Treating your energy like a precious resource has a deep effect on your life. Saying no becomes more common so you can focus your time and give it to your highest goals. You miss out on some events because you don’t need as much external stimulation to make you feel fulfilled. And your fulfillment is now derived from your self-care and the wholeness that is uncovered from your healing work.

Emotionally mature people are kind and gentle toward others, but they give the highest priority to what helps them thrive. Here are a few other ways you will know you are on the right track. You don’t need to jump into every argument or give your opinion on every matter.

You have a strong sense of determination.

You notice that similar emotions attract.

When you use your self-awareness to override your survival instinct, you are saying no to human habit and yes to your human nature. From the space of human nature, it is easier to be gentle, to see other perspectives, to express love, to be more creative, and to have compassion and understanding, while still being able to defend yourself if necessary. Acting from a place of human nature does not make you passive; it makes you skillful in your approach to dealing with difficult situations.

You act with an increasing sense of responsibility.

If you believe that every moment of tension in your mind is always someone else’s fault, then it will be difficult to feel substantial happiness or real peace.

You learn to say no. When you make your goals a top priority, it will mean saying no to things that don’t align with your vision.

Knowing what your real aspirations are will make your journey forward clear, so that you don’t get pulled into distractions.

Since every human being only has a finite amount of energy and time, it becomes incredibly important to have a serious conversation with yourself and ask: What do I want to do with my life? What do I want my mind to feel like a decade from now? What do I need to do now so that I can thrive later?

Part of self-improvement is saying no to good things to make more space for the type of work or opportunities that really get you fired up. Not settling for less is one of the most direct ways for you to embody the principle of self-love. Living up to your dreams or sticking to a greater mission is much more mentally difficult because it is easier to pick low-hanging fruit. Saying no will organize your boundaries in a way that points you to what will actually give you the deepest sense of fulfillment.

You maintain humility.

There is a fine line between confidence and overconfidence. The ego always tries to stretch itself beyond what it understands, giving everything it encounters an evaluation, even when we have very little information on the person, subject, or situation to make a proper assessment. Instead, evaluate what you truly understand and have the internal fortitude to inquire about the rest.

The goal is to be able to skillfully maneuver around people who are in a turbulent mood without losing your cool.

Remember: Do not get stuck in a savior pattern. Help people when you can without becoming attached to being a helper; it is not your job to save everyone.

Intuition is not grounded in fear and it does not feel like the endless cravings that swirl in the mind. It feels like the body has a calm compass and it knows where to go next,

The beauty of intuition is that, if you listen, it will push you to grow. In my experience, following what was clear in my gut made me address deeper and deeper levels of fear.

Reflections In what ways has your emotional maturity flourished over the last few months? What are you able to do now that you weren’t able to do before? Are there instances you remember when you would try to run away from hard feelings or situations? What were they? How has your self-awareness affected your emotional maturity? What does it feel like to be able to see more of yourself? What is your relationship with your emotions these days? Are you able to honor and be with them when they arise? In what ways would you like to develop your emotional maturity next? Do you expect perfection from yourself? Are you able to let it go when you realize that you’re demanding way too much from yourself? Are you dealing with tough things from a place of peace or from a place of past hurt? Have you found your middle path?

Love is freedom, while attachment is control—and all human beings enter relationships as a mix of both.

Attachments, our cravings to have things exist in a very particular way, are the rocks that clog up the mighty flow of love. Our attachments are often molded by the hurt we have felt in the past. In this sense, attachments represent our inflexibility.

Love is a powerful light. If you are immersed in it and ready to grow, it will show you more of yourself. Love is not just for soothing you; it is an engine of evolution. Putting in effort to remove the reins of the past from your mind so that you can arrive at the present as an unburdened human being is a powerful act of love.

many who have never ventured into healing will struggle to love well. Those who do take their healing seriously have a greater chance at figuring out healthy ways of supporting each other’s happiness.

we allow ourselves to love because it’s worth the risk even though there is the chance of loss or hurt we take the leap again and again because love is one of the best parts of being alive we don’t do it because it’s easy we do it because connection makes everything brighter

The heartache period is a reflective one, and one of its gifts is that it can show us what we are missing. And if we are honest with ourselves, not only can it activate self-love, but it can propel our growth by highlighting parts of our character that would benefit from positive cultivation. Examine how you can be a little more selfless, more understanding, a better listener, and not so attached or controlling.

Your emotional energy is sacred, and there is nothing wrong with treating it as such. If connection is what you are looking for, give your emotional energy to a person who is ready to cherish it and give their own.

there is no shortage of people who you will find physically beautiful but finding someone who matches the maturity you are looking for the dedication to grow the humor that brings you comfort and someone who just feels right in your arms and life is incredibly unique

If you allow the blocks within you to remain as they are and the wounds you carry to fester, then it will become easy to fall into a cycle where you are always looking for external validation. And that same lack of self-awareness will make it easy to constantly project the roughness that you feel onto others, especially those closest to you.

Slowly, the constant finger pointing turned into “I want you to know that I don’t feel good right now,” which is a cue for the other that we could use support and compassion at the moment.

When one of you feels down, it is essential to communicate this clearly to your partner. Letting them know where you are on your emotional spectrum will give both of you the knowledge you need to handle this moment peacefully and successfully. For the person who feels down, naming the feeling helps bring it out into the open so that there is no confusion and so they don’t need to act like they are happier than they actually are.

We let each other know when our emotions feel turbulent by saying, “Anger has come up” or “I have a lot of anxiety moving through me,” instead of saying, “I am angry” or “I am anxious.” Saying it in this way reaffirms that our identity is separate from this temporary emotion.

When you both let go of winning, what is left is doing your best to understand each other. To see each other clearly, you need to take turns sharing your perspective. When one is sharing their perspective, the other needs to do their best to listen selflessly.

When it is time for you to share your perspective, it is most helpful to describe things from your point of view, without being accusatory or defensive.

If you realize that you did do something wrong, own it openly and take responsibility for it. This does not give up your power; it is a powerful tool to defuse an argument.

What Does Supporting Each Other’s Happiness Really Mean?

Understand that another person cannot make you happy. This is often one of the hardest pills to swallow.

Understand that another person cannot fix your emotional problems. On a similar note, we often expect our partners to be the answer for our own internal turbulence. We think the love they give us will be enough to bring lasting peace to our minds and erase the hard past that affects us on a daily basis. Avoiding responsibility, doing nothing to understand your own story, and not trying to manage your reactions will create conflict in your relationship. If you do not understand that your emotional stability rests on your own shoulders, it becomes easy to fall into a loop where you blame your partner for inner tension that arises within you, even when that tension is not necessarily related to them.

Recognize that healthy support has to be mutual.

Demanding a very specific form of support can backfire if it does not feel healthy for the other person to show up in the way you are asking. Ultimately, we can ask for support, but we cannot corner or coerce one another to get what we want. That isn’t real love and it is potentially harmful. What is possible is patiently sharing how you would each like to be supported and checking within yourselves to see if these are ways that you can show up for each other. The key is to find a match between ways your partner is looking for support and what feels possible within the realm of your emotional range. If they are asking for something that is not doable for you, honor yourself by saying so. Flexibility. The last critical piece is flexibility. Whether or not we are open to growth, all of us are constantly changing beings. What works one day may not help us in a new situation. When you both lean on active communication and check in on what helpful support looks like for each of you, you are setting yourselves up for success. Guessing games are a recipe for disaster, so never expect your partner to be able to read your mind. You are better off being vocal about where you are and what you need so that the one you love can come forward to support you.

Relationships work when you intentionally try to share control. In situations where one person is adamant about always getting what they want, this is automatically unhealthy. At best you can each control half the relationship, but not all of it.

Communication without patience is likely to turn into conflict. Communication with patience is likely to lead to deeper connection.

the real game changer is when you stop making assumptions about what your partner is saying and simply ask them for clarification this can prevent false narratives that cause arguments from sneaking into your mind and save your feelings from getting hurt

All humans want to be seen. If you can give that gift to your partner, it will build an incredible amount of trust and unity.

The type of communication that brings two people close together cannot occur without honesty. It is easy to fall into cycles of white lies as a means of people-pleasing or to avoid conflict, but even small lies create distance. To reach deeper levels of love and unity, you have to take the path of honesty with yourself and those around you. If you really want to be with someone, it means there is no more space for running or lying. A synonym for love is truth.

maturity is being able to maintain your energy the way you want it to be when someone close to you is trying to drag you into their storm you hear them you offer support but at the same time you let their tension be theirs and you let your peace be yours

The Value of Friendship Signs of a deep friend connection: Laughter is abundant. Honesty is encouraged. Support is real and active. Vulnerability is welcomed. You can put your guard down. You inspire each other to grow. You give each other good advice. Both of you feel stronger together. You help each other weather storms.

What worked especially well for the two of us is that we set the expectations really low for each other.