22 Aug, 2022
How important are friends in our lives? According to an article in the New York Times friends are a huge influential force. A Harvard study found that more than quality schooling, job availability, cohesion in the community or even family structure, friendships with well-off people help to rise out of poverty.
Distance
Friends have a great impact on our lives as they shape our opinions and how we perceive the world around us: burdened with scarcity and threats, or teeming with opportunity. For many years I worked with an organisation that offered young male delinquents a new start. The first thing the coaches did was take the teenage offender to their institution in a remote location (where the means to communicate with the outside world had to be earned by showing good behaviour) thus putting a huge physical distance between him and his criminal mates.
Burden
Friends influence how we see ourselves. If your friends respect and love you, you’ll develop self-confidence and you’ll feel supported to pursue your ambitions and dreams. Now imagine what would happen to your self-esteem if your friends take you for granted, or use you to just suit their agendas. Friends also alter our desires. We want others to tell us what is worth wanting. If all your friends want to be doctors and engineers, you naturally want such a career too. If your friends want to do clever drug deals… you will quickly convince yourself that that’s what you want as well. Often we hang on to friendships with mates we met at a young age at school. These are habitual friendships: we don’t really question whether as adults we still have a match. But we always have a choice. Especially in the past few years many of us have realised that some friendships became more of a burden than an asset as close friends broke up over Covid, politics and conspiracy theories.
Fitting in
When practising mindfulness, notice you’ll develop a more conscious attitude towards friendship. With mindfulness we become more aware of the causes of our frustrations, grief and stress. Often our upbringing is the root, but friends too can play a large part in suffering from emotional pain. The people we see on a regular basis influence our thoughts and behaviour, and as social animals we are conditioned to adapt to keep fitting in our social circle. With mindfulness, however, you learn to reconnect to your true self. You get to understand and process the events that have caused trauma, then acknowledge your desires and ambitions.
Polished
Mindfulness is a cleansing process which helps you to break free from old and suffocating thought habits while looking for positive and inspiring ways to experience life. This new cleansed, polished and shiny ‘You’ will have a new look at existing friendships too. As you will better understand your purpose in life, you will look for different qualities in the people you hang out with. Also, your values will change. You will now notice that some of your old friends are actually not very kind to people or animals, and you will no longer be able to excuse their low standards and mindless behaviour. With your new attitude you can trust that users, pleasers and complainers won’t feel attracted to you anymore, and that people who share your values and ideas will naturally cross your path.
n Marisa Garau is a mindfulness expert who has lived in Mangawhai since 2007. Find more practical tips on how to de-stress your life at her website or flick her an email if you’d like to have a personal chat: marisa@growingmindfulness.com
