❤️🔥 In Relationship With x 💙 Asian Mental Health Project | Relating from Joy instead of Struggle
Note on the session: This live session will be recorded and accessible to the facilitators, Kevin and Stephanie. They will use it to write a follow-up summary and post the recorded part of only their story on YouTube, to be accessible to folks who cannot attend the session live. Due to the privacy and protection of folks who attend the session, the rest of the recording will not be published or accessible at all.
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Are you the type of person who anticipates 💩 hitting the fan or waits for the other shoe to drop… so much so that it inhibits your ability to be fully present in your joy?
Maybe you wonder:
😟 Things are so good right now in this relationship… but I better be careful because nothing lasts forever.
😟 I should not get too excited over that compliment they gave me… it’s not that big a deal.
😟 I feel connected to this person, but they’ll get used to me eventually. I should prepare for that.
Our joy is sometimes a hard place to be in, especially if we’ve spent our lives struggling in the pursuit of it. In Asian culture, joy might only show up in conditional moments when we earn it because of the high standards we were held up to. Our parents or caregivers may not have had the space or been given the permission to be in unbridled joy, and much of our cultural conditioning can influence us to be on the defense and to protect ourselves from being hurt.
So how do we allow ourselves to do the radical thing, and move from a place of worry to a place of trust, from doing life alone to leaning on communal support, and to shift from continuous self-improvement to generous self-acceptance?
Relational dynamics facilitators, Kevin and Stephanie, will unpack these themes in this Brave Conversations session. We’ll specifically explore:
❤️🔥 The discomfort of embracing joy: Being curious about what’s underneath the discomfort and making space for celebration
❤️🔥 Receiving love: Allowing ourselves to be transformed through receiving love.
❤️🔥 Tools for relating: Affirmation
It’s safe to say that Kevin and Stephanie’s Asian experience has lots of complexity, and while their experience isn’t representative of all Asian cultures, their intention is to create a space to normalize having conversations about these themes.