3 Pillar Relationships: The Solution to Your Existential Bottlenecks and the Key to a Better Life - MR #6

Focusing your efforts on these 3 pillar relationships will provide a firmer foundation for your Health & Wellness than any life hack or productivity app.

Last edition I talked about the need to focus on the Vital 20%.

I base this on the idea that 20% of what we engage with in human life gives us 80% of our well-being.

The Vital 20% may be different for everyone but most people would include things like family, achievement, health, etc. Some people might include traveling the world or writing the great American novel.

Whatever it is for you, the vital 20% are the most important things in your life that you want to be focusing on.

But in our modern world, this can be easier said than done.

So often we want to work on the most important things, but for some reason we can't seem to focus on them the way we want to.

Our attention wanders, our time is taken up by busywork that doesn't really matter, and we begin to sabotage ourselves without really knowing why.

One demand after another seems to eat up our time, energy, and attention.

What is going on?

Once we know what is important to us, why is it so hard to make these vital areas the center of our lives?

Understanding Existential Bottlenecks and Overcoming Self-Sabotage

The answer lies in what I call our Existential Bottlenecks.

Existential bottlenecks are the areas of our lives that consistently seem to cause us issues.

It is in these areas where we tend to sabotage our progress and keep ourselves from moving forward.

Self-sabotage can come in many forms. Some of the most common ones are:

🛑 Avoidance

🛑 Procrastination

🛑 Anger

🛑 Addictions/Compulsions

🛑 Perfectionism

Becoming aware of how we tend to sabotage ourselves and excavating to the core of what leads to this sabotage is the greatest productivity hack there is.

But, this requires that we take the time to map out our internal landscape.

So, maybe it’s not the fancy new productivity suite that will help you get the job done.

Rather than seeking a solution externally, it might be more helpful to look inward for awhile and see what is really going on inside.

3 Key Relationships That Define Your Existential Bottlenecks

There are 3 areas in life that really seem to trip us up.

And all 3 areas have to do with relationship.

Specifically our relationship with:

♾ A Higher Power/Principle

♾ Ourselves

♾ Others

Each of these types of relationship requires us to have a strong sense of ourselves and a good handle on what is going on within.

It is a strange attribute of our culture that many of us believe that focusing on ourselves is selfish.

But when you think of all the heartache and damage that is caused by people ignoring the state of their internal landscape, it's easy to see how this belief becomes a trap.

Ultimately, if we are dysregulated, we can't help but cause ourselves and each other pain.

So let's flesh out exactly what I mean by these 3 relationships.

Relationship to a Higher Power/Principle

Our lives ultimately hinge on what we choose to value and what our higher principles are. If we do not consciously choose these, we run the risk of being assigned them by default.

If this happens, we could end up being led by the nose into an existential blind alley without realizing it.

For example, we live in a culture that firmly situates itself within the scientific-materialist worldview. It is the water in which we swim. Under this paradigm, we unconsciously start treating ourselves and each other like objects or cogs in a machine.

Without taking the time to think deeply about what we value and what we believe, we will automatically value materialism over higher principles like love, community, and peace.

My feeling is that, in today's world, we are all suffering from a type of existential injury.

The old ways of understanding ourselves and our universe are no longer tenable and new ways of knowing are only just starting to emerge.

We are caught in a liminal space.

This means that, for many of us, we are burdened with the responsibly of piecing together a coherent worldview and value system that can stabilize us and our communities.

This is an enormous but necessary life task in our 21st century.

Relationship To Our Self

“I don’t understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I can’t. I do what I don’t want to—what I hate...[w]hen I want to do good, I don’t, and when I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway.” - St. Paul of Tarsus

The nature of our internal landscape has a profound impact on our lives, relationships, and behaviour. If we stop and listen, we might find that most of our days are burdened by the backdrop of an internal dialogue that is working against us rather than for us. We might find we are full of anxiety, shame, guilt, and anger.

The barrage of internal criticism is often directed towards ourselves and the people we most care about.

This leads to nothing but pain and conflict.

To make matters worse we soothe away these internal attacks with too much food, alcohol, gaming, streaming, etc. This all amounts to wasted time and keeps us from focusing on our Vital 20%. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix for this, but there is a solution.

It requires that you go inside and do a thorough surveying of your internal landscape and the broken narratives that have such a hold over you.

It is the only way to get any real traction.

If you truly value yourself and others, you will want to overcome your self-hate, shame, anger, and guilt and take a look at what is really bothering you.

Having the courage to face what is inside becomes a radical act of self-love and an affirmation of life.

Relationship to Others

If we value others, we will want to experience relationships built on trust, care, and concern.

A true relationship is a partnership that requires many hours of negotiation and sharing.

Conflict is inevitable when we try to impose ourselves on others.

Often, the will toward domination has more to do with our own existential anxiety around who we are (our relationship with ourselves) and where we fit into the grand scheme of things (our relationship with a higher power or principle).

To regulate this anxiety, we try to force other people to see things the same way we do.

This is a recipe for disaster. It may be expedient to try to dominate others, but to what end? It only pushes people away, the exact opposite of our intentions.

If we have taken the time to get to know ourselves well, we can simply ask others to share in our reality rather than try to impose it on them.

This requires that we learn to communicate our needs well and that we learn to be vulnerable and honest about who we are and what we are feeling. In modern life, we often erect many barriers to this kind of intimacy. But in the end, the peak experience of sharing ourselves with others who are prepared to receive what we have to offer is truly worth the work.

Identifying and Addressing Your Existential Bottlenecks

There are many ways to improve and heal your 3 pillar relationships. Here are a few exercises that will help you on your path to greater stability and well being. You can drastically increase the health benefits of these exercises by writing your answers down.

🌌Discovering your Higher Power/Principle

This is a large task but if not undertaken the lack of a coherent sense of meaning will color all areas of your life. Doing the work of finding your higher power is the ultimate hedge against nihilism and despair.

It's not necessary to go live in an ashram somewhere.

✍You can begin by mulling over some key questions about what meaning and purpose means for you.

✍You can also do some values clarification exercises that will help you sort out what principles are most important to you.

Even if you're struggling to find a large, overarching purpose in life, you can always begin small. Focus on finding small, everyday activities that bring you joy, fulfillment, or a sense of achievement. This could be as simple as reading a book, helping a friend, or learning a new skill.

🧘‍♀️Healing your Relationship with Your Self

Learning to love ourselves means facing all the ways in which we currently participate in a cycle of internal abuse.

Listen closely to your internal chatter for a few days.

✍What is that inner voice saying to you?

✍How much of your internal dialogue is filled with criticism, self-attacks, and ruminations about unresolved issues?

✍What about how you take care of yourself physically?

✍Do you value yourself and your body enough to feed it healthy food and give it healthy exercise?

✍Are you taking time to practice wise stress management so you can engage more lovingly with the world?

A side note:

The biggest existential bottleneck of all is unresolved trauma.

What might look like a problem with procrastination (avoidance), perfectionism (abusive inner critic) or memory issues (disassociation) may be a coping mechanism aimed at managing unresolved feelings around a trauma that you don't want to look at.

I can assure you from personal experience, if you struggle with a traumatic past, it is possible to achieve integration and healing.

The journey begins by caring for yourself enough to reach out for guidance and support.

🤝Strengthening your Relationship with Others

Review the state of your current relationships.

✍How functional would you say they are?

✍Are you able to openly communicate your needs to others and have your communication be respectfully received?

✍If you feel your needs are not being met, why do you think that is? Are you expecting too much from others? Or do you need to seek out people who are healthy enough to give you the nurturing and support that you need?

✍Have you communicated your needs in such a way that the other person can hear and understand them?

✍If you feel you are being disrespected by someone, are you avoiding the tough conversation outlining how you would like to be treated?

Relationships can be a source of delight and satisfying growth. But, they can also end up turning toxic and dysfunctional if we're not taking the time to clear out the cobwebs and renew them as often as we can.

Exploring Our Existential Givens as a Gateway to Deeper Health & Wellness

In a previous edition, I talked about the 5 Existential Givens.

These are:

♾Death

♾Freedom

♾Identity

♾Isolation

♾Meaning

These are the Givens that, as humans, we all must contend with in our own way.

Looking at the root of these Givens and finding ways to resolve the anxiety that surround them lies at the very heart of what it means to be human.

Examining our unique relationships with the Greater Reality, with ourselves, and with each other offers us the structured pathway we need to face these Givens with courage, together.

It is the path to Existential Health & Wellness and to a life well-lived.

This deeper form of wellness seeks to build our health on a solid foundation and allows us to feel firmly situated in ourselves so we can face the challenges of our lives with fortitude.

Feeling connected to a higher ideal, knowing ourselves well, and being able to partner smoothly with others allows us to:

🍏Gain a sense of Autonomy over our lives and work on our Personal Growth

🍏Achieve what is in accordance with our authentic selves and to humbly learn from others as we journey toward Competence

🍏Improve our Relationships and Social Wellbeing as we work with others to build a peaceful and functional home, community, and society.

3 Pillar Relationships for a Better Life

Relationships truly are the foundation of a quality life.

These 3 pillar relationships lead to success in all other branches of the Existential Wellness Tree.

Productivity culture tends to focus on superficial behavioural inputs and outputs like time management and organization.

These can be helpful in managing the day to day tasks of our lives, but we all know we are more than just a simple piece of machinery in need of programming.

We are complex biological, psychological, social, and spiritual beings who require a more relational approach to fulfilling our existential needs.

If you really want to work toward living a life of quality, forget about the newest productivity app or organizational tool.

Factoring in time to survey your internal landscape will get you farther faster in whatever life goal you have set for yourself than any life hack.

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Thank you so much for reading!

How about you? Do you have a plan in place for prioritizing your 3 pillar relationships?

Please let me know your thoughts. Leave a comment below or email me here.

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*All images in this edition have been created by the Author.