Pick Up The Phone And Keep Your Connections Alive!

I’ve just been in Sri Lanka with the great honour and privilege of officiating at my youngest son Roam’s wedding to his beautiful bride Shenny. 

It was absolutely a glorious event – the days leading up to, the wedding itself and the days following. 

I really couldn’t get over that people had come from all over the world to be at this global uniting of international families. 

Shenny is half Filipino and half Sri Lankan and Roam, of course is English and American. 

We had people from all over the world coming to celebrate my kids love and everybody was there for the right reason. 

To celebrate love. 

They were present as their best selves, allowing everyone else to be their best selves. Celebrating the joy and love of two beautiful people. 

It couldn’t have been better orchestrated. Shenny is one of the most organised people I know in the world, so if you need a website designer, she’s your girl. We tease her and call her ‘Monica’ from the tv show Friends because she’s colour coded down to the tiniest degree, so everything was attention to detail.

Her mother’s Filipino side of her family, were reconnecting. The Sri Lankan contingent came of course but many of them hadn’t seen each other in a long time.

Roam & Shenny’s friends came from England, Shenny’s international bridesmaids from Dubai and Pakistan, my soul sister from Australia, and even some American family and friends came all the way from California and New York. 

There were connections being made with people, not just myself with my own family and friends I haven’t seen, but with everybody there who hadn’t seen each other in years and years. 

Besides the beautiful emotion of the wedding, and celebrating Roam and Shenny’s love, everybody was celebrating their own love, connection and togetherness. 

At one point in the evening, I was standing back just taking everything in, and it was like I always talk about, a magical fairy dust suspended moment in time. 

I thought about how blessed we all were to be gathering in this totally beautiful place because of a celebration and for everybody to be there in a place of love. 

I wondered what had happened with all of these connections? 

How did life take over so much so that we should become disconnected? 

Why are we not consistently actively involved in the lives of other people that we love? Why don’t we make more of an effort? 

We have our active friends and the people that we hang out with, our family, people that we see regularly, but connection and community is the most important thing there is in the world. 

These days with Zoom, WhatsApp, Viber and all of the free calls available, there’s no excuse why we shouldn’t all still be connected together on a regular basis.

So pick up that phone! 

I’m just as guilty as anybody. I love texting, but even last night, I thought why am I texting when I really want to speak to this person? 

So I rang a soul sister friend of mine in the States and we had a wonderful face to face conversation. It was so much more empowering and love filled than just a few texts to let her know I’m  thinking about her. 

Yes, a text is better than nothing, but cherish your connections, take the time, pick up the phone. 

Today my eldest son called me. He was in Tesco’s shopping and he called me just to have a voice to voice conversation instead of just texting me. 

It was so much better! It was so much more connective. 

Something I feel very blessed about was being asked to officiate at Roam and Shenny’s wedding and somehow I did manage to hold it together. It’s very emotional to marry your own children and I also learned how to say “this union is blessed under the eyes of God” in Sinhalese for the Sri Lankan contingent, which was very well appreciated. 

I felt very honoured because when my kids asked me to marry them, they gave credit and said, ‘you’ve been an integral part of our relationship.’ 

In the early days I helped mediate between them. I got involved in the relationship to help them stay on course with each other. I helped them learn to communicate with each other and heal what they needed to. They were so young.

But age really doesn’t come into it. 

Because when we’re in relationships, when we’re in our own stuff, sometimes we say things that we don’t mean, or sometimes we don’t even know why we’re being triggered. 

Usually, our partners are mirroring some unhealed part of ourselves. But it causes discomfort and our natural human tendency is to get defensive or project or make meaning out of something that isn’t true.

Roam and Shenny have been together for eight and a half years. To me, they’re one of the most together couples I’ve ever seen in the world because they balance their time together, and they make time for each other. They’ve worked through all of the hard stuff, and they’ve called for counsel when they were at an impasse. 

I’ve felt so blessed and honoured that they both trusted me enough to confide in me, and work with me.

There’s no pointing the finger or blame and they also keep a sense of humour together. This is a connection that they’ve really worked for, because relationships don’t just happen. 

Something I realised that I’m very proud of myself for, is that I’ve healed absolutely every single relationship I’ve ever had, if it needed healing. 

Or I just have great relationships with people. But even the people who I have felt wounded by or I felt challenged by or people that I’ve fallen out with, not too much in my life luckily, I’ve worked hard to heal with those people and most importantly, heal in myself.

Because when you’re being triggered by someone, you’ve got to look at that as a gift. 

When you’re triggered it’s usually nothing to do with the situation at hand. It’s something much deeper going on for you personally, that’s being unearthed. 

It is a gift to be able to stop and look into yourself to see what that unhealed part is. 

Realising this with so many of my loved ones there and looking back on all of the work that I’ve done with people, all of the therapy, healing, coaching, mentoring, mediating, my favourite thing as you all know, is about communication and helping people communicate more effectively. 

Not just having understanding with yourself, but having understanding with others too. Being fully seen and heard and received.

So first and foremost, stay connected, keep your connections alive with other people, because all of our loved ones that are in our lives, that’s the most important thing we have at the end of the day.

Regardless of where they are in the world. Pick up the phone and talk to them. Schedule a Zoom Call, ring your friends, connect with people. 

Walk back into the living room if that’s where you need to connect and have the heartfelt conversation you really want to have with your partner.  

We’ve gotten very good at isolating ourselves. 

The next transformational program that I’m going to launch is a Relationship Reset for couples who need to have better communication with each other and a deeper understanding of the patterns that are keeping them stuck, in repeating cycles.

You love the person that you’re with, but you’re still stuck in the same dramas all the time. You’re having the same arguments, repeating the same patterns or you’re just frustrated or fed up or you don’t understand why s/he is behaving that way or you’re not happy or there’s too much stress. 

You love the person and you want it to work. 

So why don’t you give me a call so that we can have a talk, the two of you together and create a Relationship Reset. 

This is my new coaching/mentoring programme that I’m going to offer and officially launch next month, but if this interests you in any way, definitely book a call with me now so that we can have a conversation and you can begin to meet your partner from a place of love wherever you are, and avoid all of the trauma and be held in that beautiful feeling of clarity and connection.