How To Express Yourself In Relationships: Kathlyn Hendricks

Knowing how to express yourself in relationships is so important. The advent of technology has genuinely made us not move and not relate to each other. A lot of people, during their free time, prefer to sit down in front of their TVs or computers, which results in cutting themselves off from their body intelligence.

Kathlyn Hendricks, author of Conscious Loving, shares that body intelligence gets activated when we’re breathing, moving, and paying attention to what’s going on in our body. Thus, you are able to know how to express yourself.

Movement Is A Form Of Authentic Self Expression

She also teaches us how we can utilize movement as a way to bring and connect to ourselves and to the other person, which creates more beautiful, more connected, and more loving relationships.

Therefore it is essential to know how to express yourself.

The work of Dr. Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks has been some of the most influential work we’ve come across. Through their book, “Conscious Loving,” we discovered some very simple ways to open up.

We’re excited to share with you an amazing interview we did with Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks.

In it, you’ll learn ways to use your body to more deeply express yourself, be more authentic, and have a deeper connection with the people in your life.

Key Takeaways: How To Express Yourself In Relationships – Interview With Kathlyn Hendricks

• When you bring consciousness to your relating and to the moments of choice in your relationship, your relationship can be really one of the treasures that are available to human beings. It’s such a journey of discovery towards learning how to express yourself.
• Talking doesn’t really work because you’re not using very much of your brain. It doesn’t help you know how to express yourself.
• When you’re moving, you’re activating all of the different parts of your brain. Thus you will be able to learn how to express yourself very quickly.
• There’s research about how terrible sitting is for us. Sitting for long periods of time is worse for you than if you were a chronic smoker.
• Plonking yourself in front of the television cuts you off from your body intelligence, which gets activated when you’re breathing, moving, and giving attention to what’s going on in your body. You are less likely to learn how to express yourself.
• When you get stuck, one of the things you can do is drop the words out and let yourself continue relating with sound and movement. This helps you know how to express yourself.
• When you are moving, you are opening up your ability to experience each other as your limbic brain and reptilian brain get online. This is one of the best ways to know how to express yourself.
• Your limbic brain and your reptilian brain provide the juiciness for your cognitive brain to be able to analyze and figure things out.

Related Reading: Creating Conscious Relationships

People have both an urge to merge and an urge to individuate.

• People often ask how to express yourself. The more people move, the more that they’re opening up to their inner community of 50 trillion cells.
• From a cellular level on up, you basically have 2 choices at any moment. You can either protect or grow. Both of them contribute to knowing how to express yourself at various levels.
• In relationships, we’re either growing together and discovering, or we’re protecting, and if one person starts protecting, like defending and withdrawing or withholding something, then the other person still has a choice to continue opening and growing. Learning how to express yourself in relationships is so important.
• When people close down, they get into those very predictable routines of controlling each other, of criticizing and blaming, and those really create such stress for relationships.
• When people are dancing and sharing physical touch, growth hormones, oxytocin, and hormones that allow us to feel intimate open up, which helps in knowing how to express yourself.

When people are closed down, they’re operated on adrenaline.

• When anything is going on, move first because when you move, you get smarter, you get connected with yourself, you get open to being connected to another person, and you interrupt. You do what scientists call “pattern interrupt,” which helps in knowing how to express yourself.
• While you’re sitting, all of those stress hormones accumulate in your body, and they really destroy your health over time, but they also shut down the window of connection for you. Removing stress hormones is essential in order to know how to express yourself.
• It’s a shame that people keep themselves from feeling their aliveness because they’re afraid of how they’re going to look, which is not going to contribute to knowing how to express yourself.
• When you are doing creative expression, which is important to know how to express yourself, you are shining the light of your awareness on it rather than trying to compartmentalize it, overlook it, or distract yourself from it.
• When we have that freedom to be absolutely just ourselves and share anything, our inner energy or our flow of aliveness gets undammed and unkinked. That’s when you are truly able to know how to express yourself.

Just moving out of the head allows us to access all of the wisdom that the rest of our body has.

• People don’t realize that if your mind is close, your body is going to be close too, and the quickest way to change your mind is to change your body.
• When you open your body, you open your breathing, and you turn toward your partner. You’re getting connected and plugged into the other person’s body intelligence, and both of you have more energy to play with than either of you have on your own.
• Each of us has a unique dance that starts with just one step at a time. Just one choice of movement, like opening your shoulders and uncrossing your arms, is going to influence your ability to take a deeper breath, feel connected to you, and create a connection again with your partner.
• Changing your posture changes your whole mood and your whole state. Keep changing posture to be able to know how to express yourself.
• Having ways that you can learn to play with each other really makes just such a huge difference.
• At the bottom of all any of our relationship hassles is the experience of fear.

Transcript: How To Express Yourself In Relationships – Interview With Kathlyn Hendricks

Luis Congdon Today, we’re going to be talking about getting unstuck, how to move emotions out of your body, and how to express yourself with honesty, authenticity, and clarity.

I brought on Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks to help us with that.

Today, we’re here with Kathlyn Hendricks, and we are thrilled to know how to express yourself. We’re super excited to have one of our favorite authors and teachers on the show today.

She’s the author of one of my all-time favorite books Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment.

In my life, there have been a few books that dramatically changed my life, and that was one of those books. Welcome to the show.

Kathlyn Hendricks Thank you. I’m so glad to hear that.

Kamala Chambers We’re just super honored to have you here, and how to express yourself is super near and dear to our hearts, especially mine.

Just this idea of conscious loving, of being in full awareness in your partnership with your partners or as aware as we possibly can be.

Can you talk a little bit more to our audience about what conscious loving is and why it is important to know how to express yourself?

Conscious loving and authentic self expression

Kathlyn Hendricks Yes. When Conscious Loving first came out in the early ’90s, we made buttons that said, “Conscious Loving,” and then beneath it, it said, “Consider the alternative.”

You can learn how to express yourself through conscious loving.

I think most people don’t actually think that loving goes together with consciousness that most people have the falling in love and you lose your mind and then, when you come to your senses, you’re kind of stuck and either routines or compromises.

What we really found and have continued to find in the 25+ years since we wrote Conscious Loving is that.

It’s possible for a loving relationship to be an avenue of awakening, finding what your essence is, and being able to be who you are in the presence of another person.

That conscious journey is really so much the opposite of what we think of as romantic love, where you’re supposed to overlook things, put up with things, and especially, you’re supposed to sacrifice, and it’s going to be hard work.

The conscious journey is going to help you know how to express yourself.

Self awareness

What we discovered is that when you bring consciousness that helps in knowing how to express yourself, your full presence to your relating and to the moments of choice in your relationship, your relationship can be really one of the treasures that are available to human beings.

It’s such a journey of discovery to learn how to express yourself.

So we think of consciousness as really being the opposite of being asleep or sleepwalking through a relationship with roles that you might have learned from your parents or seen in the culture and trying to emulate or trying not to do what your parents did but really expressing who you are and being a witness to the other person really awakening and discovering more and more of who they are and who they can be.

Authentic inner self expression skills

Luis Congdon It’s so beautiful to hear you talk about how we can learn to be our genuine and authentic self while we’re with other people and have full access to expression.

I am sure this is one of the best ways to learn how to express yourself.

I know in our last conversation, when I spoke with you, one of the things you talked about was utilizing movement even during conversation.

How that helps in knowing how to express yourself?

I’d love to hear more about that because as somebody who likes dancing as a way to express or just kind of alleviate my feelings, and even as I’m talking to you, I noticed that I want to use more of my body and bring that into the conversation. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Knowing How To Express Yourself Through Conscious Loving

Kathlyn Hendricks Sure. When you’re working on your relationship, you got to talk about it, and for so many people, that is not only a turnoff, but it doesn’t really work because when you’re talking, you’re using not very much of your brain, but when you’re moving, you’re actually activating all of the different parts of your brain which is really important in knowing how to express yourself.

There’s a tremendous amount of research that has come out just recently about how terrible sitting is for us, which you should avoid if you are willing to know how to express yourself.

There was one headline that sitting is the new smoking.

Sitting for long periods of time is worse for you than if you were a chronic smoker.

To be able to know how to express yourself you should avoid sitting for longer periods of time.

That’s really big news because so many of us, I think, with our devices, our computers, our smartphones, and our iPads, we are genuinely not moving as much, and we’re actually also not relating to each other in the way that we did for thousands and thousands of years, which was relating while moving around.

Relating while moving around, you’re gathering food, going hunting, getting the food ready, taking care of the kids, making a home, and all the other forms of those sub-specialties that we have created now.

People often ask how to express yourself.

A lot of people consider their free time or their downtime as literally plonking themselves in front of the television, and what that has done to so many people is cut themselves off from their body intelligence that gets activated when you’re breathing, moving and giving attention to what’s going on in your body.

Gay and I have been dancing and moving together since we first met in 1980. By then, we both were looking for how to express ourselves.

I’ve been a dance movement therapist for 45 years, and so it’s my great passion to assist people in opening up to the body language part of their movement, the messages that come from their movement, and we play with that when we’re working with couples or when we’re exploring with partners.

Your own self expression skills with sound and movement

When they get stuck, one of the things that you can do, for example, is drop the words out and let yourself continue relating with sound and movement.

People can communicate so much more intimately when they do drop the words out because all couples know how to trigger each other.

They know how to say just that thing that’s going to get their partner.

However, when you are moving, which helps you know how to express yourself, you literally are opening up your ability to experience each other as with your limbic brain and with your reptile brain, get with your territorial brain and with the part of your brain that’s your emotional brain get online so that you get the fuel for your engine.

The urge to merge

Your cognition is like the driver, your forebrain, the part of your brain that hasn’t been around for as long, but your limbic brain and your reptilian brain provide the juiciness for your cognitive brain to be able to analyze and figure things out.

You really need both in order to learn how to express yourself.

We’re not saying that we want you to simply use sign language and gesture to each other, but when people move their bodies, they really can open up to the dance of a relationship.

What we found is people have both what we call an “urge to merge” to get close to each other and to really experience being in unity with something larger than yourself, and we also have an “urge to individuate”, to experience our own full individual creative expression.

Developing self discovery and authentic self expression skills

Kathlyn Hendricks So when you’re moving, even if it’s just walking or taking a walk together, you get to experience that dynamic of how much, how close you want to be, how much you want to be on your own individual path, and you learn how to express those desires to each other in a straight forward way so that you don’t create your need for your own personal space by getting into an argument.

This contributes a lot to teaching yourself how to express yourself.

Here is an example of knowing how to express yourself.

For example, you can just say, “Hey, I’ve just been feeling so close to you recently that I think I’m going to go take a walk by myself,” or “I’m going to go take a bath,” or “I’m going to go to a retreat for a few days.”

Being in touch with that rhythm, I think, is one of the most important things that people in close relationships need to learn because we have so many mythologies about how you’re supposed to be when you’re in a close relationship.

Communication with body language

Luis Congdon I got to tell you, as you’ve been talking about how to express yourself and we’ve been listening to you, Kamala and I immediately decided to enact on our dialog here that we’re having about movement and we stood up and most of our interviews we sit, but we decided to move, and we stood up while you were sharing and we started moving around a little bit, and I know that made me feel better. How did you feel, Kamala?

Kamala Chambers I love that piece of dropping deeper into your body, and communication. I think communicating through dance is something that’s really important for me and my relationship with Luis.

Just moving out of the head allows us to access all of the wisdom that the rest of our body has, which is absolutely important in knowing how to express yourself.

Protect or grow our true selves

Kathlyn Hendricks Truly. In fact, we just had our 2nd Body Intelligence Summit, which is a virtual summit where we had all kinds of researchers, ecstatic dancers, psychotherapists, Feldenkrais people, and all kinds of people who were really intently passionate about the value of body intelligence and knowing how to express yourself.

What we found was that the more people move, the more that they’re opening up to their inner community of 50 trillion cells, and one of the things that’s become very clear is that from a cellular level on up, you basically have 2 choices at any moment.

You can either protect or grow, both forms of which contribute to learning how to express yourself. So the cells are either in a state of protection or in a state of growth.

How To Express Yourself In Relationships

Kathlyn Hendricks It is so important to know how to express yourself in relationships.

My sense that is exactly the same in relationships that we’re either growing together and discovering or we’re protecting, and if one person starts protecting, like defending and withdrawing or withholding something, then the other person still has a choice to continue opening and growing, and that can actually influence the relationship because you don’t have to be in locked step with each other all the time.

However, that choice in any given moment is, are you going to open to discovering in yourself and in the relationship, or are you going to close down when people close down, they get into those very predictable routines of controlling each other, of criticizing and blaming, and those really create such stress for relationships that then, people have to dig themselves out of.

When people are dancing, they’re activating a different hormone that helps them learn how to express yourself.

They’re opening up the growth hormones, the oxytocin, and the hormones that allow us intimate thoughts and feelings, but when people are closed down, they’re really operating on adrenaline.

They’ve gone into fear, and that then releases cortisol and all of the stress hormones, and then your partner starts looking like your enemy.

That’s been one of the really big shifts that helped us know how to express yourself.

Not only for us personally, for Gay and me in our relationship, but what we see for other people when you get to that choice point is, “Am I willing to see you as my ally?”

Kamala Chambers Just the mindset that you’re proposing here of whether I’m protecting or whether I’m growing.

You say this is happening on a cellular level, but to apply that as a mindset is so powerful to just think, “Am I closing up to my partner right now, or am I opening and expanding?” I love this piece that you brought up that helps in learning how to express yourself.

It’s so simple and practical to help to move into our bodies more, which is just taking a walk with your partner. How powerful that is even for Luis and me when we have an issue come up, we take a walk, and we talk through it, and that’s just such a great tool.

Luis Congdon As Kamala was talking, I was thinking about the listeners, and most people are probably sitting down and listening to this.

Maybe you’ve been at work all day now and wondering how to express yourself.

Here’s one thing I’ve noticed about knowing how to express yourself.

I’m pretty sure everybody can agree with this a majority of people’s jobs nowadays are sitting that we get in our car and we sit.

Then, we drive home and have dinner, and we sit.

Then, most people have dinner. After dinner or during dinner, they sit and watch a movie, and then they lie down.

We need to avoid this if we are looking for how to express yourself.

I want to encourage anybody who’s listening to move around as you’re listening to this.

To bring your body into it If you resonate with something that’s being said, what is it like to move into an agreement or to, “Oh, I don’t agree with that,” and move around with that and play with the emotional expression or just move around but bring your body, engage it into the experience of what we’re saying.

That’s something that I really learned from you in our first interview about how to express yourself, which, unfortunately, I lost when my computer crashed, but I took so much away in regards to letting movement into our learning.

Kathlyn Hendricks Yes. I so appreciate you echoing that because I really think that is the most important thing humans can do today in order to know how to express yourself.

In fact, we formed an organization called “Move First.” I really love that.

When anything is going on, move first. That helps you know how to express yourself. You have a pain in your shoulder, move first.

Move in a way that’s listening to your shoulder and open up to what’s going on there, or if you feel stuck with your partner, with your colleague or friend, let yourself move first because when you move, you get smarter, you get connected with you, you get open to being connected to another person and you interrupt.

You do what scientists call “pattern interrupt,” which really contributes to teaching you how to express yourself.

For example, not saying what you’re feeling and then criticizing your partner, then your partner withdraws, and then you go into another room, and you either raid the refrigerator or go watch some sports on television.

While you’re sitting, all of those stress hormones accumulate in your body, and they really destroy your health over time, but they also shut down the window of connection for you.

However, fortunately, you actually can recover your ability to listen and speak to yourself and to listen to and move with your partner at any time in life.

We’ve had people up into their 80s come to our workshops, and actually, with had one who out danced everybody.

We had a woman who is 86 who out danced everybody at one of our conferences.

You can learn how to express yourself irrespective of your age.

That thing about this for most people is they say, “I can’t dance,” or “I can’t move,” or, “I don’t how to.”

They’re afraid they’re going to look silly or stupid, and I remember a poem I read that actually convinced me to go to the graduate school that I went to.

There is nothing that can stop you from learning how to express yourself.

As I walked in the door, I saw this poem right inside the front door on the bulletin board, and it says, “There are fools who dance and fools who watch the dance. If I must be a fool I’d rather be a dancing fool.”

Kamala Chambers I love that. Nothing can stop us from knowing how to express yourself.

Luis Congdon That really brings me to our last conversation about how to express yourself again because one of the things we talked about is moving while you’re listening and utilizing movement as a way to bring and connect to the other person and to yourself.

Then, I asked you what about looking silly. I feel like I’m going to look weird.

I’ve done this with people where I move, or I might close my eyes while they’re speaking, and for me, it’s a great way for me to feel into my body while the person sharing, and I’ve had some people go, “Hey dude, are you not listening to me?” or “I feel like when you close your eyes, you go somewhere else.”  Sometimes people feel kind of awkward when we do these things.

Creating A Holistic Relationship With Your Own Self Expression

Kathlyn Hendricks What I like to do is to invite people to go ahead and feel awkward and to just take a moment to honor feeling awkward because we spend so much time trying not to feel awkward.

It’s like, what it would look like if you just did this really awkwardly? What would it be like if both of you let yourself move in absolutely the silliest way you can think of?

Just go ahead and bring that forward rather than trying to be cool. This is important in knowing how to express yourself.

Almost all of us still have residue from junior high school when we were trying to look cool and felt really awkward.

I just think it’s such a shame that people keep themselves from feeling their aliveness because they’re afraid of how they’re going to look, which obviously doesn’t contribute to learning how to express yourself.

Often, I will be silly along with people, and I’ll make myself look really stupid and really awkward, and people see that nothing happened to me, nothing happened to them, and they, in fact, don’t feel silly.

They start having fun right away. Whatever comes up inside of you that can be included through movement and sound includes everything rather than trying to do something the right way.

Whatever thought, image, or feeling is something that can be included, and it can be included through the act of movement, breathing, sound, or imagery.

I call it “Turning what’s happening into creative expression,” and if you let yourself start experimenting with that, you really move out of trying to do things right or trying to be perfect or trying not to look silly, and you move into wondering and curiosity and that’s where all of the big fun is.

Kamala Chambers I love that because it’s really creating a holistic relationship and helps you know how to express yourself where you’re not leaving any part of yourself out, where you’re including all of your weirdness and all of your joy and whatever is coming up for you in each moment, allowing its space to be there and giving breath or sound or movement to that.

That’s such a powerful experience to know how to express yourself when you get a room of people doing that or even if you get a couple doing that with each other. It’s just transformative and moving out of those insecurities and into unlocking what’s living inside.

Kathlyn Hendricks What’s living inside is all of this creativity, these expressions that want to be included, all kinds of silliness and fun, and also deep feelings, old memories, and ways in which your partner reminds you of somebody else that you can then bring forward and bring it into consciousness.

In other words, you are shining the light of your awareness to focus on it rather than trying to compartmentalize it, overlook it, or distract yourself from it.

One of the great joys of a close relationship, I was just sharing this with Gay the other day, is that I feel like I can absolutely be myself, and I can share anything, and so can he. We’re not trying to manage or organize ourselves.

Kathlyn Hendricks You can just feel this level kind of champagne streaming, bubbling aliveness in yourself all the time, plus you have a lot of free time because you’re not trying to manage.

“What should I say?” “I don’t want to say this because I’m going to hurt your feelings.” “I don’t want you to see me this way because I think you won’t like me.”

All of those thousands of things that we grow up learning because the culture wants us to behave in a certain way, and almost nobody fits that template.

Luis Congdon I’m curious. One of the things we talked about is curiosity and movement.

I guess I have a curiosity. When our partner says something to us that just feels really uncomfortable to hear, how can we utilize movement and curiosity because, generally, our instinct is to get defensive or just shut down or to attack?

Kathlyn Hendricks Right. To attack back. In fact, one of the hand-outs that we use in our trainings, we called The Openness to Discovery Scale, and we have below-the-line numbers and above-the-line numbers.

The below-the-line numbers are all about defending and protecting.

They would be everything from listening politely while rehearsing your rebuttal to all the way to minus 1, all the way to minus 10, where you attack or you make an abrupt departure.

You say, “I’m out of here,” but then, above the line, in the middle is your choosing, committing overprotecting yourself. You are choosing to be in the relationship.

You’re choosing to face not only yourself but your partner, and then, you move into the plus numbers, and the first one is creating an open posture.

It’s amazing to me how often people don’t realize that if your mind is close, your body is going to be close too, and the quickest way to change your mind is to change your body.

So one of the ways I invite people to move is to notice where do you feel close right now and to take a moment and just close a little further so that you can feel it.

Usually, it’s been in the background because it’s so habitual.

For example, finding your arms crossing your chest, just go ahead and really cross them across your chest and feel that, and then let yourself deliberately choose to open your body and turn toward your partner.

Just that might be something that people would need to practice in order to feel some familiarity with it. It’s like learning a new language or learning a new dance step.

You might feel a little awkward at it at first, but it’s also big fun.

Once you start, you just start.

You put your foot into the unknown. You get to start having fun, and, one of the really big things people don’t realize is when you open your body, you open your breathing, and you turn toward your partner.

You’re actually getting more energy than you have on your own.

You’re getting connected and plugged into the other person’s body intelligence, and both of you have more energy to play with than either of you have on your own.

It’s like you’re getting more fuel than trying to move through your life in a choked-off and just working on very little juice.

Kathlyn Hendricks You don’t have to do a big choreography. You don’t have to be a skilled dancer.

I was looking at others at a wonderful compilation I saw on Facebook just the other day of a whole bunch of dance moves from movies.

They were so splendid. For a dancer, it was just like heaven, but all of them were people’s individual unique moves. There wasn’t anything that was the same.

All of these different actors and all of these different groups were all dancing, but all of their dances were unique.

Each of us had a unique dance that started with just one step at a time, and we found over and over again that just one choice, like, for example, to open your shoulders and uncross your arms, that’s moving, and that is going to influence your ability to take a deeper breath, to feel connected to you, to create a connection again with you partner and that’s something you can build on and even if you get closed up again because you’re not going to stay open.

You can make that choice over and over again, and the more you make that choice, the more your body learns how to do that, and your body’s wisdom then supports your brain, and your brain doesn’t have to work so hard to try and manage everything.

Kamala Chambers That really reminds me of a close couple that I’m friends with, and in their marriage, whenever they get into any kind of argument, they try this experiment where they change their posture and try to touch their elbows behind their back so chest is very open and their hearts are very open to each other.

They say, “We just can’t stay mad when we’re doing that or when our posture is set up like that,” because emotions shape the body, and also, the body follows the emotions too, just like the mind, like you were saying.

Kathlyn Hendricks Your body can shape your emotions. There is a tremendous amount of research, which is catching up to our work now.

We wrote a book called At The Speed Of Life about 20 years ago, all about body wisdom and body intelligence.

What we’re finding now is that changing your posture changes your whole mood and your whole state.

We know that when we change our beliefs it changes our experience in our bodies, but we don’t have so much experience of when you change your body or your posture, it is going to influence your mind and your emotions, and I would like to see the pendulum swinging way over in that direction to begin to get us a little more balanced by favoring our body intelligence and letting that inform our minds.

Luis Congdon When you talk about where your body goes, your mind goes. I immediately think about wrestling because, in wrestling, we used to say, “Wherever you point, your head is where the rest of your body goes.”

So we were incredibly focused on keeping your head up. If somebody is trying to push your head down, keep your head up, and it’s very hard to wrestle with a good wrestler. I know a good wrestler who knows how to keep their heads up.

Kathlyn Hendricks Yes, as the same in any sport that you learn certain postures that are kind of the set-up.

I learned how very late in life to play golf, which I’d never thought that I would play, which I now consider just a wonderful meditation, and the set-up is incredibly important.

If you get the frame for your shot and in your body, that’s why golfers are always practicing their set-up because then, your body is free to move in a way that really uses all of your body intelligence.

It’s the same in your relationship. There are certain physical frames that you can set up with each other.

In fact, one of them that we like to use that we’re writing about in our new, which is called Conscious Loving Ever After. It’s for 40+ years old people.

It’s what we call “The art of the toss” in our interactions that we can either keep the game going with each other or stop the game by the action that we take.

If you are turning toward me and you say something, if I turn toward you and I receive what you’re saying and reflect that back to you while I’m breathing and being present in my own body, then we keep the game going.

But if I turn away or slap the ball back at you, I’m stopping the game.

That involves so much more of our body awareness than it does really our verbal skills, and when people do that, we start them with balloons so they can really get into it.

Having ways that you can learn to play with each other really makes just such a huge difference.

Kamala Chambers This reminds me of workshops that we’ve done where when you go to talk to your partner, do it in a way that you are mindful of what’s happening in your body first and being able to express what’s happening in your body before you start any kind of dialog.

So there is that set-up awareness, and there’s that vulnerability, and it dissolves any tension that’s there instead of coming at from a place of blame.

I’m noticing that there is some tension in my belly right now and then, having the emotion come in and then adding in from there.

Kathlyn Hendricks Yeah, beautiful. I really appreciate you mentioning Kamala because that is something authentic and in the moment, and it’s also unarguable.

You’re tuning into what are you actually experiencing and doing your best to describe that. That is such a move toward intimacy and connection.

It can defuse any kind of a hassle or a stuck kind of place with a partner by your tuning into, and you’re going to that very deep level and describing it. It really is like opening your belly to the other person.

Kamala Chambers I loved that. Is there any last tip or advice or any last resources that you’d like to share with our audience?

Kathlyn Hendricks As in Gay’s book, The Big Leap, and in each one of those sections, we have free stuff.

For example, in body, in the free stuff section, we have something called “fear melters”, which are movements that people can make that will move them from fear to flow, and I really want to recommend this to people because I think at the bottom of all of any of our relationship hassles is the experience of fear.

We get caught up in fear, and then from fear, our partner doesn’t look like an ally anymore. He or she looks like an enemy.

Kamala Chambers What a wonderful invitation. We’ve been here with Kathlyn Hendricks, the author of Conscious Loving.

Thank you so much for being here and expressing such deep information about how we can apply movement to create more beautiful, more connected, and more loving relationships.

Kathlyn Hendricks Thank you. It’s my great pleasure, and thank you so much for the energy of your relationship. It really comes through even on audio.

Kamala Chambers Thank you so much. That means a lot. It really does.