Scroll down for a transcription of this episode.
Take a moment to appreciate the friends who know you, support you, and make your life richer with their presence, with author Alex Elle.
How To Do This Practice:
- Take a few deep breaths: Inhale through your nose and exhale slowly, relaxing your shoulders and jaw.
- Bring a friend to mind: Think of someone who has become an important part of your life.
- Remember how they’ve known you: Reflect on the stories, experiences, and versions of yourself that this person has witnessed.
- Notice the ordinary moments: Bring to mind a laugh, conversation, meal, road trip, or small gesture that captures your friendship.
- Feel your gratitude: Let yourself appreciate what it means to be seen, remembered, supported, and accepted by a friend.
- Consider how you can show you care: Think of one small way you can tend to the friendship, whether by reaching out, checking in, or simply telling them you appreciate them.
The Science of Happiness is a Top 5 finalist in the Signal Awards for our series on how cities can inspire awe, and we’d love your vote! Find the voting link here or on our Instagram page, @scienceofhappinesspod.
Then email happinesspod@berkeley.edu with a screenshot of your vote for a chance to win a signed copy of host Dacher Keltner’s book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.
Today’s Guide:
ALEX ELLE is a breathwork coach, author and restorative writing teacher.
www.alexelle.com/about
Related Happiness Break episodes:
A Meditation on Original Love and Interconnectedness: https://tinyurl.com/mu2uzs2c
Our Deep Interconnectedness: https://tinyurl.com/y2epxyxn
Making Space for You, with Alex Elle: https://tinyurl.com/45arsb76
Related Science of Happiness episodes:
Why Compassion Requires Vulnerability: https://tinyurl.com/mrxsad33
When It's Hard To Connect, Try Being Curious: https://tinyurl.com/mr32nwtv
The Contagious Power of Compassion: https://tinyurl.com/y6bpvbv5
We’d love to hear about your experience with this practice! Share your thoughts at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.
Find us on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap
Help us share Happiness Break! Leave a 5-star review and share this link: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap
Transcription:
DACHER KELTNER: Welcome to Happiness Break from The Science of Happiness, where we take a moment to slow down, take a breath, and settle into practices that can help bring more ease, calm, and connection to your day. I'm your host, Dacher Keltner. We often talk about romantic relationships and family when we think about the people who shape our lives.
Friendships get less attention, even though research suggests these connections really matter for our wellbeing. The science shows that having close, healthy friendships makes us feel more satisfied with our lives and less likely to experience depression. We also know that our friendships can grow stronger when we show each other we care, celebrate each other's good news, and make room for one another to be ourselves.
Those efforts can really make a difference in how we feel. So today, we're taking a moment to appreciate those relationships. Our guide is author Alex Elle, whose book 'The Company We Keep' explores friendship, connection, and how we can nurture meaningful relationships with others.
Here's Alex.
ALEX ELLE: Hello everyone. Today I will be guiding you through a meditation on being grateful for our friendships and treasuring them just as much as our romantic connections. Wherever this finds you, I hope it finds you well. Feel free to have your journal in hand or take this meditation on a walk. You don't have to be seated. You can be moving.
Take a deep breath in here through your nose, filling up your belly, sighing it out. And once more. Inhale and exhale. These breaths don't have to be dramatic, just enough to notice yourself, to be in your body. And maybe as you settle, think about the people you call your friends. Not everybody you know, not everybody who has access to you, but the people who have actually become a part of the texture of your life. The ones who know your stories because they were there when they happened. The ones who remember versions of you that you hardly recognize anymore. The ones who can tell by the way you say hello that something might be wrong.
Bring to the center of your heart the ones you've laughed with so hard that the story itself almost doesn't even matter anymore. You only remember that feeling of trying to catch your breath.
Friendship can become so woven into our lives that we forget how extraordinary it is to be known by someone we did not have to know. There are billions of people in the world, and somehow, we met a few of them, and decided to stay close. To say to them, "Tell me what happened. Come over. Call me when you get home. Let me know how it goes. I saved you some. I thought of you when I saw this." Those small sentences carry entire relationships inside of them.
Breathe in here, filling up your belly, and think about one particular friend. Maybe someone you've known for a long time, maybe someone relatively new. Maybe the friendship surprised you, or it came into your life during a season when you weren't looking for more people to love.
Notice what you remember first. Their face, their laugh, the sound of their voice, a kitchen table, a road trip, a restaurant you always end up at, a conversation that lasted much longer than either of you intended. Maybe what comes up is not a big moment at all. Perhaps, it's in the ordinary.
Sometimes we make the mistake of believing that knowing someone for a long time means we already know them. But time doesn't make curiosity unnecessary. If anything, long friendship requires more of it. It asks, "Who are you now? What have you changed your mind about? What are you carrying that I might not know about?" There is something deeply loving about refusing to assume we have finished learning one another.
Pause with that and breathe into that for a moment. Lean in. Inhaling through the nose, filling up your belly. Exhaling through pursed lips, dropping your shoulders, and unclenching your jaw. Soften as you think about the friendships in your own life, the ones that feel alive, the ones that feel neglected, the ones you are grateful for, the ones you may have been taking for granted.
We tell ourselves we'll call later. We say we should get together soon. We even think about someone five times a day and never send the text, and sometimes months pass instead of soon. Tending to friendship requires a kind of intention that adulthood does not naturally provide for us. What is beautiful about friendship is that it teaches us so much about love because there is often less performance around it.
No ceremony tells us we have to stay. No legal document binds us. No traditional milestones declares the relationship legitimate. We stay, we remain, because we want to, and there is something beautiful about that.
Think again about the people you are grateful to know. Feel this in your body. Bring forth in your heart the friend whose house you can walk into and immediately exhale. The friend who knows when to make you laugh and when not to. The friend who has watched you make mistakes without making your mistakes your identity.
The friend who has sat across from you at a long table after the food was gone because the conversation was still in the air. The friend who has seen you, truly seen you, become more of yourself and did not punish you for it. Let yourself feel the weight of that.
Not sentimentally. Gratitude. Thankfulness. A fullness in your heart, because there is a difference.
To be loved by a friend is to have someone witness a life they did not have to witness. To be remembered outside of your presence, to be considered and checked on, to be included, to have someone carry a piece of your history and still remain curious about your future.
That is no small thing, and maybe that is one of the simplest ways we can care for friendship. To stop assuming that people know we love them, but to tell them, to show them, to live like connection is something worth attending to, because it is.
Inhale through your nose, dropping your shoulders, unclenching your jaw, and softening into this moment. Sigh it out, emptying your belly and allowing yourself to be held in this moment.
Thank you for participating in this meditation with me. Wherever this finds you, I encourage you to lean in. Take good care.
Comments