Every true love story is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough. —Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
Connection is our superpower. Through connection we have the power to transform ourselves. Connection is our essence. It requires us to share our kindness, compassion, generosity of spirit, unconditional patience, respect, and honor, which enable us to gradually live into who we truly are in our full essential humanity. We are conceived in connection and then spend nine months ensconced in the safety of our mother’s womb. We are born into the welcoming embrace of loving parents, who, if they know how important it is for us to feel connected, smile at us, soothe us, and sing to us.
Their delighted facial expression says: “I am so glad that you came to this world to be with us.” Through this loving connection with our family, we learn how to stay connected naturally to others. Friendships allow us to continue to live in our connected wholeness. There is a core guiding principle with three invisible connectors that foster and support healthy friendships and develop our intentional friendship muscle. Let’s take a closer look at these three invisible connectors, which give us the keys to enter and understand each other’s inner world. When you use these invisible connectors, you will understand how to restore, repair, and reclaim your full potential as a loving human being and a good friend.
From Unconscious to Conscious Friendship
“What am I to you?” asked Yumi. “You are my best friend,” I answered. And so, he said: “As your best friend I recommend you marry me!”
The time is 1964. I had just returned to my hometown of Antwerp, Belgium, after a tragic boating accident on the River Parana in the Brazilian jungle, during which I lost my friend Luzzi. Yumi, who was in Europe on assignment from his American company, had lost both his sisters when the refugee boat they were on, on its way to Palestine, was torpedoed and the survivors machine-gunned. He could deeply understand the profound grief I felt. His sisters were killed on August 9, 1944. I was born on August 19, 1944, ten days later. When we met, we felt not only friendship, but a strange kinship, like a brother and sister.
We married on April 13, 1965, in Tel Aviv, Israel. Unbeknownst to us, we started a journey to build a “living laboratory” for a passionately full marriage, in which we would foster and maintain a flourishing friendship. We did not know how to combine all the complex elements—friendship, romance, desire, lust, and soulmate-ness—that comprise an intimate relationship. I must honestly say that Yumi and I were at that time the Olympic champions of unconsciousness. We had no idea that there was such a thing as a conscious relationship. In a conscious relationship, we make the shift willingly from automatic reactivity to thoughtful intentionality. We go from coping in isolation to living in connection.
Our saving grace was to welcome the Shabbat in our own special way that allowed us to deeply connect with each other. We made a commitment to never enter the sanctity of Shabbat with angry feelings. Our interpretation of the Mikvah, the ritual bath, became soaking in the tub together and talking things out. When the water drained out of the tub, our promise to each other was to surrender to peace. One day we overheard our son Yigal, 4 years old at the time, say on the phone: “No. My mother and father cannot come to the phone right now. They are in the bathtub, and they will be there for a long time.”
Over the years, Yumi and I became avid students of the power of connection. Our friendship deepened. William Blake wrote: “The bird a nest. The spider a web. Man friendship.” Yes indeed! Yumi and I learned to land increasingly into the safety and sanctity of true friendship.
The Three Invisible Connectors in Friendship
Yumi and I developed a core guiding principle. To foster and maintain flourishing friendships, three invisible connectors must be embraced in your relationship:
• The relational space between us
• The bridge that connects our worlds
• The encounter of our souls
The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber inspired our core guiding principle. Martin Buber says: “Your relationship lives in the space between you. It doesn’t live in one or the other of you, nor even in your dialogue. Your relationship lives in the space between you, which is sacred.” Martin Buber reminds us of God’s invitation: “Make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among you.” God lets us know that the space between us is “Hamakom,” which is one of the names of God in Hebrew, and it means “The Place.” It is the dwelling place of the “Shechina,” the feminine incarnation of God. Martin Buber says: “When two people meet authentically, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
Yumi and I were influenced by Martin Buber because he based his relational philosophy on his deep and long friendship with his wife Paula. With Paula he viscerally and palpably experienced the encounter of the souls, which he describes in his book I and Thou.
I experienced this powerful connection with my mother. In her nineties she lived in an Old Age Home outside of Tel Aviv, Israel, where I visited her. Looking at her frail and fragile body in her wheelchair, I was flooded with emotions: guilt, anger, resentment, and shame. She is my friend and my hero. She is the fierce woman who walked the Alps, pregnant with me, after a brilliant escape out of Rivesaltes, a Nazi transit camp in Vichy France. When she encountered the Swiss border closed to refugees, she hurled herself over the border, survived and recovered in a Swiss hospital, before entering a refugee camp where I was born.
I could not bear to see my mother this way. Suddenly I had a realization: I wasn’t visiting my mother; I was polluting the space between us with my own emotions. I made the decision to leave my own world, and the neighborhood of mixed emotions, and cross the bridge to truly “be” with her. When I landed, our eyes met. She looked at me intently. And then in Yiddish she said: “Di bisst mein tochter. You are my daughter.” She hadn’t recognized me in months. But of course, I hadn’t been with her in months. We both cried together.
“Once you are my friend, I am responsible for you,” says the Little Prince of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Yes! I was responsible to truly meet my mother, to give her my undivided loving presence. Henry David Thoreau wrote: “The language of friendship is not words but meanings.” When I landed in my mother’s world, our language was the multi-layered meanings of our rich relationship as a mother and a daughter. That experience is the encounter of the souls.
Gently close your eyes. Visualize yourself sitting across from a beloved, a partner, a friend, a parent, or a child. With your imagination see, feel, and sense the quality of the relational space between you both. Imagine a bridge that connects your world and the world of the other person. Let yourself feel invited to cross this bridge to visit the other where they live right now. See how the space between the two of you fills with thankfulness and delight.
Friendship and the Brain
What Martin Buber could not know as a 20th-century philosopher, when he taught about the sacred space between us and the encounter of the souls, is what new brain science of the 21st century is telling us. This relatively new science, Relational Neuro-Biology, has discovered brain plasticity (or neuroplasticity), which means our brains have the ability to change, adapt, and grow in response to our experiences. It turns out that our friendships and love connections change our brains and make them more relational. Relationships change our brains, and good and deep relationships change our brains even more.
Amazingly, what the Relational Neuro-Biologists found is that when we are in close physical proximity with someone we love, and we look into each other’s eyes with “soft eyes,” and we speak to each other in such a way that we feel “felt,” our limbic systems, the seat of our emotions, resonate together. Scientists have called this limbic resonance the “brain-bridge.” A further discovery is that once the brain-bridge is established between two people, their central nervous systems relax together. It turns out that the brain is the only human organ that does not regulate from within, the way, for example, our heart, lungs, and kidneys do. The brain needs another brain for full relaxation. We cannot regulate as deeply and fully when we are alone. It is now easy to understand that it is counterproductive to say to a child who is acting out, “Go to your room until you have calmed down.”
Friends Hold Each Other’s Hands
“He held my hand in the way I didn’t even know that a hand could be held.” This is the way I tell the story of how my husband Yumi gave me support twenty-two years ago, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. We sat together terrified. Then he said to me: “Hedy, how long shall we be terrified? Two hours… three? After that this is not a problem to be solved. It is an adventure to be lived.” Yumi gave the adventure a name: “Rallying around the Boob.” Everyone who rallied became the “Boob Brigade.”
Researcher Dr. James A. Coan, who studies the neuroscience of emotion and social relationships, wondered how the presence of a loved one might alter the brain’s response to a threatening situation. He designed a unique test in which there was a twenty percent chance of experiencing a slight electric shock to the participant’s ankle. Critically, in some of these trials, the participant’s hands were held by either their spouse, a boyfriend or girlfriend, or by a stranger. Dr. Coan found that the neural regions of the brain associated with processing threat were significantly less active with someone holding the participant’s hand. It was particularly less so for the participants whose loved one held their hand rather than a stranger.
Even more remarkable were his findings when Dr. Coan decided to also make the threat of a shock available to the person holding the participant’s hand. The participant’s brain responded as if they themselves were in danger of receiving the shock. It was impossible to tell which person was actually the recipient of the shock. Dr. Coan realized that we adapt to each other by sending brain signals that essentially say, “I am with you.” Over time this message transforms into “I am you and you are me and we are here.” The Hebrew verse from The Song of Songs tells us, “Ani le dodi ve dodi li.” (I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.) Connection to others is not only a survival skill but gives us our humanity and the ability to flourish.
Love is a Story of Unexpected Transformation
Over the years Yumi and I filled our relational space with treasures, and now, at this new phase of life called Elderhood, we draw from it like a well-stocked bank account. Today, Yumi lives with a changed memory.
It is now my turn to hold his hand “the way he didn’t know a hand could be held.” As a wife, I find myself dipping into the rich fertile relational soil that Yumi and I cultivated for over fifty-four years. In it I find the generosity of spirit, the calm patience, the open-heartedness in which I live every moment with my “new” husband. I call this new Yumi the twenty-ninth version of my husband in our long journey. He has had the courage to transform many times. Over the years, I decided to choose him as my beloved and best friend again and again. I do miss my previous Yumi, but I welcome my new transformed man yet again.
I realize that this twenty-ninth husband requires of me a new way to love my man. It is kinder, sweeter, more affectionate, more present love, and an additional lesson in the deep meaning of giving unconditionally. That is why I am calling our new adventure “Rallying around the Essence.” Our essence is our core potential for full humanity that stays intact no matter what occurs. I do not accept the label of “caregiver.” Yumi and I are each other’s “care-partners.” I care for him as deeply as I can and he cares for me as deeply as he can. This way, our friendship continues to grow and thrive after all these years.
I have just lost my precious best friend and soul sister, Louise. She died on the third Shabbat of the month of April 2020, after suffering Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, an illness that systematically took away her agency. A group of us women, good friends of Louise, created a Zoom funeral and a Zoom Shiva for her. Friends and family gathered to honor our beloved Louise. I was in awe of the power of the stories that were told about her, which we all have kept as treasures in our souls. I learned from this experience that our friendships continue to blossom even after our death, when our friends share their treasured stories.
Martin Buber wrote: “All of life is in the encounter.” He pointed us towards the relational paradigm. Our Western culture looks at life through the prism of the individual paradigm. In it our highest aspiration is to become independent, autonomous, and self-governed. The relational paradigm, on the other hand, posits that we are born in connection, and that our highest purpose is to live in that connection and interdependence. Albert Einstein said: “Our separation is an optical illusion of consciousness.”
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov wrote: “A human being becomes whole not in virtue of a relation to himself, but rather in virtue of an authentic relation to another human being.” We are one web of humanity. Our friendships gift us with the opportunity to experience our true essence in connection and thus our wholeness.