Authentic Relating

By Ryel Kestano

Authentic relating is a groundbreaking practice that offers people a way to create profoundly enriching, enlivening, and nourishing relationships in all social domains of life — from the bedroom to the boardroom, with intimate partners, friends, colleagues, perfect strangers, and everyone in between.

 

Authentic Relating covers every aspect of the practice, introducing readers to skills and tools that have been tested and proven by thousands of people around the world to develop and ultimately master relational intelligence.

 

After reading this book, you'll be able to:
•    Create nourishing relationships that are built on trust, honesty, integrity, and wholeness
•    Spark deep, meaningful, soulful conversations with anyone, anytime, anywhere
•    Transform conflict into deeper connection, understanding, and empathy
•    Identify and honor your core needs, desires, and boundaries, and those of others

"This is such a useful, comprehensive, insightful, and well-written book, revealing the author's deep understanding of the human condition." 

— Susan Campbell, author of Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil

"Ryel's guidance, gleaned from years of deep immersion in relational work, is infused with down-to-earth passion and nuance, presenting healthy relational interaction as more of an art than a science." 

— Robert Augustus Masters, PhD, author of Emotional Intimacy and Bringing your Shadow Out of the Dark

"Grounded, practical, and wise, Authentic Relating is a true gift for anyone interested in the felt experience of aliveness, beauty, and meaning. Take this book into your heart and the gold will be yours." 

— Matt Licata, PhD, author of A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ryel Kestano
• Release date: Oct 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986412719

Book preview

Introduction

On a cold February morning in the winter of 2018, high in the mountains of the Colorado Rockies, my assistant course leaders and I walked up to the towering, razor-wire-infested gates of the Buena Vista Correctional Facility. We passed through the metal detector and were escorted down twisting concrete hallways to the facility's classroom. Inside, a window revealed snow-capped mountain peaks in the distance, bordered by prison fences topped with concertina wire in the foreground. Snack machines hummed along white concrete walls, and security cameras peered down on us from ceiling corners.

A few minutes later, eighteen men filed into the classroom in their dark green prison scrubs and took their seats in hard plastic chairs, arranged in a circle. I could sense their emotions—eagerness, skepticism, resistance—as I began the course with a simple practice called Connect to Self, guiding us all into slowing down, noticing our own experience, and becoming intimately aware of what was happening in our bodies, minds, and emotions.

My team and I were there to deliver a two-day training course in the practice of authentic relating on behalf of the nonprofit organization I had co-founded to bring this extraordinary and life-changing practice to men and women behind bars. None of us knew it at the time, but sitting in the circle were several rival gang leaders with feared reputations for violence and retribution, sadly stuck in an endless cycle of retaliation for perceived insults and real acts of aggression that defines prison life. We learned later that a feud had been brewing between them in the weeks prior to the course, and an all-out war was widely expected to break out at any moment.

The sun arced toward the high peaks in the distance as I taught the men about setting context, relational dignity and humility, listening for the Why, and other foundational elements of authentic relating. They softened and started to reveal more of themselves, gradually shedding layers of masks and protective mechanisms built over years of living in constantly challenging and unpredictable conditions. By the time the course was nearing its end, the cold, sterile classroom had been transformed into a vibrant space of joy, connection, and freedom. We cried and laughed together, shared our hopes and dreams, fears and wounds, and found sweetness in each other’s stories of past pains and future plans.

We completed the course and sent the eighteen men off beaming and cracked open, armed with a whole new array of possibilities to be explored in life and relationship. My team and I drove home together remembering all the touching moments from the prior two days. Our eyes were still moist from the tears we had shed, knowing we had experienced something rare, special, and beautiful together with the men we left behind on the other side of those layers of concrete walls and guard towers.

About a month later, we received a handwritten letter from one of the inmates who had been in the course with us. He wrote to let us know that right after the course, the gang leaders had agreed to meet peacefully. Using the tools and skills we had taught them in how to listen to each other, understand each other, and create a shared context for negotiation and resolution, they worked out their differences and were able to avert the bloody war that had been otherwise sure to come.

You literally saved people's lives, he wrote.

It took me a long time to let those words fully sink in. Authentic relating saves lives? I had certainly seen the impact the practice had been having on people’s quality of life and relationships for years by then, but it never occurred to me that its impact could even literally save people’s lives. Yet as I thought about it, it made more and more sense, and on a wider and wider scale. As I began researching the health implications of social isolation, I came to see human connection as a vital ingredient for basic health; without it, we languish, suffer, and deteriorate—not just emotionally, but physically as well.

I found research conducted at the National Institute of Health that showed a clear link between social isolation and loneliness with higher risks for a variety of physical and mental conditions: high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, a weakened immune system, anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s disease, and even death. (Citation: https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/socialisolation-loneliness-older-people-pose-health-risks)

Dr. John Cacioppo, PhD, a former director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, oversaw groundbreaking research to produce his Evolutionary Theory of Loneliness, which concluded that loneliness automatically triggers a set of related behavioral and biological processes that contribute to the association between loneliness and premature death in people of all ages. (Citation: same)

Another pioneering researcher in the field of loneliness, Dr Steve Cole, PhD, director of the Social Genomics Core Laboratory at UCLA, even found that loneliness can induce inflammation in the cells of our immune systems, making us more vulnerable to infectious diseases, a particularly relevant finding as we learn how to navigate the effects of global pandemics. (Citation: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/loneliness-triggers-unhealthy-immune-response-study-finds)

My deepening research led me to believe that we have a real crisis of loneliness and disconnection in the world. It left me wondering why we have schools that teach people the skills they need to build rockets, heal broken bones, drive cars, cook meals, or even venture into outer space, but have hardly any schools that teach people how to create and cultivate high-quality, meaningful relationships with others. We leave it to parents, peers, and trial and error to be the often poorly equipped teachers of an aspect of our lives that affects all of us, every day, from work to home and everywhere in between. We stumble in the unknown darkness, hurting ourselves and others through no fault of our own, destined to perpetuate the cycle begun by our own mistakes by teaching them to others.

Authentic relating was the single most important and transformational part of my journey of self-discovery that began in 2012 as my marriage was breaking down. At that time, it had only been available to people in the personal development communities centered around places like Boulder and San Francisco, yet there was something so simple, so real, so universal about authentic relating that I could easily see it spreading far beyond these privileged enclaves and reaching a mainstream audience.

I wanted to test my theory that absolutely anyone could learn the tools and skills of authentic relating and experience a life-changing shift in the quality of all their relationships, so soon after my initial training, I joined a volunteer program that matched mentors with inmates at the Boulder County Jail, near where I lived. I spent two years visiting the jail every week, connecting with my inmate mentees and sharing with them a steady stream of authentic relating teachings and practices.

Week after week, the transformation happening in the men unfolded right before my eyes, both in the jail and after their release. Their relationships with fellow inmates and family members alike deepened and became more enriching, intimate, and trustable. Their sense of peace, self-acceptance, and dignity grew. Their ability to reveal their authentic experience to me and others allowed them to be ever more deeply seen and known, and to experience real intimacy for perhaps the first time in their lives. As I came to see and know these men over time, I came to love them and be loved by them, and began to feel a deep calling to share this work on a scale far beyond the cloistered Boulder bubble.

Over time, the culture at the jail noticeably shifted, and the administrators allowed us to deliver a full two-day authentic relating course to a group of inmates. All of us in that small, poorly-lit room at the Boulder County Jail created some magic together over those two days—the raw honesty, vulnerability, and intimacy that held us in that room couldn’t be contained by even the thickest walls of concrete. After that course, we got approved to deliver our training program throughout the Colorado correctional facility network, which led to the course in Buena Vista.

Through our own efforts and those of other organizations, authentic relating is now reaching people from all walks of life, introducing them to the most potent, innovative, easy-to-learn and easy-to-apply skills and tools for conscious relationship ever developed. It’s spreading like wildfire, and I have every expectation that authentic relating will soon become as ubiquitous as yoga and meditation are now.

I have been at the leading edge of the rapidly expanding movement of authentic relating around the world, and the company I co-founded and now lead—ART International—has grown to become the world’s predominant provider of authentic relating training. We have trained thousands of people and dozens of companies in over fifty locations on five continents, and offer a robust online suite of courses and programs to complement in-person workshops.

Our team at ART has collectively leveraged decades of training and experience in relational intelligence to produce skills, tools, and exercises that work for people no matter their background or previous experience, and that work in the varied social domains of people’s everyday lives—essentially, wherever humans interact and share space.

I’d like to give you one example of the impact authentic relating has had on my life. At the time when I began to fully immerse myself in the practice, I was running a real estate marketing company that required me to travel extensively all over the country, spending many hours on flights crisscrossing the US. I decided to see what would happen if I applied the tools and skills on my airplane trips with whoever happened to be sitting next to me, to see if it was possible to consistently experience a sense of connection and intimacy with total strangers.

The results were nothing short of mind-blowing. I met the most fascinating people—an elderly grandmother who showed me black and white photos of her youth in the Dust Bowl, a tearful husband who had just lost his wife to cancer, a teenager who shared a secret with me that she hadn’t ever told anyone, a devout Christian who gave me new understanding of sacredness in daily life, a woman I later flew halfway around the world to meet again. These were just a few of the countless beautiful humans whom I never would have had the chance to see, know, feel, cry with, and fall in love with had I not known how to reach out and connect with their essential human spirit.

I have now spent years working toward innovating elements of authentic relating so it can be shared with a mainstream audience, and this book is a comprehensive result of that effort. Having taught authentic relating to people as varied as prison inmates and executives, New Yorkers and Indonesians, teens and retirees, students and professionals, and so many others from all walks of life, I have witnessed first-hand the immediate and lasting impact authentic relating has had on their lives and relationships. I’m proud and excited to offer the entire practice in book form to reach an even wider audience, and to share with readers everything that I have learned of this beautiful, very human practice.

My intention is that after reading this book, you will have everything you need to create and participate in authentic relationships with the people in your everyday life, to know yourself as deeply as you ever have, to be profoundly nourished by your connections with others, and to create spaces, environments, cultures, and communities that thrive on healthy, honest, trustable, and collaborative relationships.

How to Use this Book

The layout of this book is informed by the way we sequence our teachings and practices at our courses. We have spent a great deal of time working out the most effective order of teachings so that they build a solid foundation to support a flexible and powerful structure on top. After many hundreds of iterations, we have figured out how to teach authentic relating in a way that anyone can understand and apply to their lives right away. Each skill and tool builds upon those that came before, with the most advanced skills toward the end of the book.

Many of the teachings and practices offered in the book come with associated exercises. The exercises are designed to support you in applying the tools to your life and relationships right away, and in a way that gives you immediate feedback on how you are applying each tool so you can evolve in becoming ever more skillful and natural in your application of the practice.

I primarily use the pronouns they and them to describe people in the third person to make the language of the book inclusive, except in specific examples when I’ve given people proper names. I try to use language that is universal and non-ideological, simply because for me, authentic relating itself is universal and non-ideological.

At the end of the book, I’ve included a section that compiles all the practices and exercises I write about in one place for your easy reference. If you need a refresher on any of the tools and skills of authentic relating or just want to review them in sequence, look here.

Chapter 1

What is Authentic Relating?

The sense of identity requires the existence of another by which one is known.

— R.D. LAING

At its simplest, authentic relating is a groundbreaking relational practice that offers skills and tools to create enriching, enlivening, and nourishing relationships in all social domains of life, from the bedroom to the boardroom, with intimate partners and perfect strangers and everyone in between. Authentic relating is both a key and a map that allows people to unlock and explore the vast and extraordinary landscape of human connection that lies beyond the scope of most typical relationships. It is a practice that heals old wounds, softens and settles reactive nervous systems, and allows people to be deeply seen, heard, and accepted for who they are— even in their darkest and scariest innermost selves.

When I discovered authentic relating and began immersing myself in it, I realized how much I had been guarded and protected for most of my life, and how little I had allowed other people to really see parts of me I was too scared or ashamed to reveal, and often didn’t even know how to reveal. I had spent most of my life living at the relational surface, dabbling in shallow waters. Authentic relating showed me how much more depth and territory there was to explore in the relational space, and how incredibly beautiful and meaningful that journey of discovery could be.

Authentic relating is also the most effective prescription I have ever discovered for social isolation and loneliness and all its attendant ramifications—depression, anxiety, hopelessness, addiction, self-harm, and even physical degeneration. Humans need to be in connection with other humans—when we are in connection with others, we are able to thrive and be productive and creative, and when we are not, we can wither and suffer, and become despondent, lethargic, and lifeless.

Authentic relating offers an integrated set of skills and tools that are potent, versatile, and easy to learn and apply in everyday life, with everyone we encounter. It combines modern research into the science and psychology of relationships with the timeless tenets of ancient wisdom to produce a relational practice that is non-dogmatic, eminently practical, and immediately accessible by anyone.

The skills of authentic relating shine in how they provide a map to navigate conflict; there is no other practice or modality I know of that offers tools as effective and easy to apply in transforming conflict into connection and creating more trust and positive regard between individuals and groups. Authentic relating shifts the paradigm of conflict from something to be avoided and experienced through gritted teeth to an opportunity for stronger connections and relationships, more empathy between both individuals and groups, and a path towards co-creating vehicles of relationship that honors each person’s unique values and perspectives.

Another way I often describe authentic relating is that it is a practice that reveals the hidden, brings consciousness to the unconscious parts of ourselves and others, and gives us a language to speak the unspoken. It acts as a beacon of illumination, reaching into the darkest corners of our hidden selves to reveal the gems of essential humanness. As the artist and philosopher Tony Berlandt says, The more introspective a work of art is, the more universal it becomes. So it is with authentic relating—as we use the tools of the practice to locate and reveal the parts of ourselves that we’ve learned and been conditioned to lock away and keep hidden, we find a universality, a human-wide commonality that has us feeling less alone and more connected to others.

Authentic is being real, honest, revealed, and transparent, allowing others to see, hear, and know our inner world. Relating is recognizing that there is someone else on the other side of the relational field, having a unique experience as rich and complex as our own. Space and invitation must be given to weave their experience with our own to create a dynamic dance of both authentic human expression and reception. Most people have been conditioned to prioritize their own experience over others, or others’ experience over their own—authentic relating harmonizes this imbalance to create a center of gravity that lives in between each person, where the most aliveness and intimacy can be felt and shared.

Authentic relating is a practice that steers people toward a sense of wholeness, a defragmentation of the different parts of the self into a cohesive whole, where all physical sensations, emotions, and mental thoughts are integrated into a unified expression of consciousness. Great suffering and energetic drain arise from the constant efforts we often make to put forward some aspects of ourselves and keep hidden other aspects of ourselves; authentic relating provides the skills and tools to bring all aspects of multifaceted humanity together. The result has often been reported to be as healing and transformational as even the best therapy can provide.

Authentic relating lives in the body. It is not a cognitive exercise. It is more like playing an instrument than doing a math problem. It is not a thing that we do or think about, rather it is a way that we naturally are. It is remembering a time before we were laden with absorbed culture, a time of innocence and unbridled expression. As we find ourselves hurtling toward a technologically driven society that ever further distances our sense of self from our bodies, authentic relating has become ever more relevant and important as a practice of re-embodiment and re-integration with the wisdom and insight that lives in our bodies,.

The renowned Hungarian-Canadian physician and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté speaks about how children have two fundamental needs in order for them to grow up in healthy mind and body. One is for secure attachment, and the other is for authentic expression. An ideal upbringing is one in which a child’s caregivers provide both ongoing reassurance that the connection between child and caregiver is strong and impermeable, as well as generous space for the child to be fully expressed throughout the emotional spectrum. However, if a child experiences a negative correlation between the two—when I express myself in this way, the connection is withdrawn—the child will always sacrifice authentic expression in order to ensure the security of the attachment, and never the other way around.

This is precisely why so many of us have grown up suppressing our authentic expression, because the risk of losing connection and secure attachment is too great. If we want to ensure the continuity of our relationships, we have learned (often, the hard way) to manage our emotional expression and to employ strategies to keep the relational cord intact. The paradigm shift that authentic relating offers is a complete flip of the script—the more secure our attachments are, the more we can be authentically expressed, and the more authentically expressed we are, the more secure are our attachments. This is a groundbreaking contribution to the quality of relationships available in this practice, and it is available to everyone, no matter the path a person has traversed to arrive at its doorstep.

Authentic relating brings the focus to the here and now. It invites us to shed the social scripts we often lean on to navigate through social interactions. The deepest sense of intimacy and the greatest sense of aliveness are concentrated in the mystery of the here and now, where we never know where we are headed and what we will discover along the way. In an authentic conversation that lives in the here and now, we are riding the very edge of the unknown, letting go of planning for the next response or question and allowing the aliveness of the unknown to be the only source of inspiration. One of my favorite maxims of the practice is to follow the aliveness, wherever it may lead. Time and again, this simple guiding principle has steered my conversations and interactions with people to the most fascinating and unpredictable places.

Let me share with you an example of how this principle of following the aliveness created a magical experience for me. One night, while hanging out with some friends in New York City, the group decided to go to a dance club. I always felt very uncomfortable in loud, crowded places, and would try to avoid them as much as possible. I noticed my resistance arise immediately but wanted to stay with my friends and turn toward my discomfort to see what might be possible if I didn’t indulge in my resistance. I also decided to create a context for myself (a skill we will explore later in the book)—instead of melting into the shadows and hugging the perimeter walls as was my usual practice in such circumstances, I resolved to playing a game of intimacy. Wherever possible, I would apply the tools and skills of authentic relating to create vulnerable, intimate connections with people in a place that I would otherwise have believed to be the last place any such connection could be mustered.

We got to the club and walked into loud, reverberating dance music and hundreds of people packed in together. I scanned the large room for a space that might be remotely conducive to my mission for the evening. Off to the side, I noticed an outdoor area where people spilled out to relieve their ears of the aural assault, smoke cigarettes, and get some fresh air. I pressed past the throngs of people and made my way outside and found a seat on a bench. At first, I felt a bit awkward and anxious, but the experiment was just beginning. A few minutes later, a young woman sitting next to me turned toward me and we made eye contact. I asked her how her night was going, bringing my genuine curiosity to the question.

Pretty terribly, actually, she responded.

I gave her my full attention and spoke and listened from the practice as it lived in me, reflecting, sharing impact, revealing—all simple tools that I had learned early on to create a space of trust and vulnerability. She said that her father had committed suicide just three months earlier, and she had moved to New York seeking a new life and a new beginning. She had met