We assume that relationship begins when we meet. But, in fact, we are always already in relationship.
You see, before I see you, hear you, or touch you, I am already in relationship with you. Just as I am already in relationship with the whole world – with the air, the ground, the trees and the animals – which I am unaware of most of the time.
There is nothing in this world that is not already in relationship with everything else
There is nothing in this world that is not already in relationship with everything else.
Now that might seem so obvious – once you think about it – that you might conclude it adds no value to who and how you are. Or who and how I am. Or who and how everything else in the world is.
After all, one of our most deep-seated assumptions is that connection begins only when sensory data reaches the brain – when sight, sound, and touch deliver information to the brain, and the mind starts to interpret it.
And yet, when you take the time to notice, you will see that relationship already is!
Now, you might find this both unsettling and astounding. And it is!
Unsettling – because you realize, if only for a split second, that your wellbeing is not separate from the wellbeing of another -that to diminish them is, in some way, to diminish yourself
In other words, you can’t help but see that you cannot thrive at the expense (or neglect) of another.
Astounding – because you have only ever thought of yourself as a separate entity and yet, now, in this irrefutable realization, you know that you are never alone. And never have been. Not because there are other bodies and objects but because you are already and always with them relationally!
The Body as a Field of Relationship
The philosopher-phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, observed something that we too will recognize almost immediately when we take time to notice.
And what is that?
That we are not detached observers receiving data from the world. We are bodily beings, already immersed in a world of intertwining relationships.
It was a radical observation given the prevailing philosophical paradigm of his time – that we are subject and everything else is object.
But Merleau-Ponty was quite clear – my body is not a container. It is a relational field of experience.
And so is your body.
Before any deliberate perception, before any thought, any judgement, any kind of cognitive processing, our fields are already intertwined, already responding, already adjusting, already sharing meaningfully.
That is why, ordinarily, I do not walk into you.
Not because I’ve already figured out how I must avoid you, calculated the angle and movement and speed which I need to avoid bumping into you, not even that I ought not to bump into you, but because, at a bodily level, our relationship is already meaningfully coordinated.
Meaning Before Thought
We often assume that meaning comes after interpretation.
First we perceive, then we think, then meaning appears.
But our experience points in the opposite direction:
Meaning is already there—before we think about it.
Our bodies are already in meaningful relationship:
in posture
in gesture
in breath
in subtle shifts of tension and openness
This is pre-reflective or pre-cognitive meaning – not yet shaped into concepts, but already fully alive.
Thinking doesn’t create this meaning.
It arrives afterward.
And while sometimes thinking can reflect and provide doorways into the deeper layers of such meaning, it often simplifies, reshapes, or even obscures what was already expressing itself.
Buber: Meeting What Is Already There
The philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber, challenged this subject-object view that cast humans as subjects observing and making sense of a world of objects.
He observed that this view caused humans to see other humans as objects that are used for our personal benefit. And he called for the recognition that every human is intersubjectively rather than functionally related.
He called this intersubjectivity a meeting, or as is often quoted, the I–Thou relation. He called the functional relationship the I-It relation.
In genuine meeting, I don’t reduce you to an object to be understood. I don’t stand outside you, analyzing you, processing you, managing you.
In genuine meeting, I don’t reduce you to an object to be understood. I don’t stand outside you, analyzing you, processing you, managing you.
Instead, I awaken to a living relation that is already unfolding.
This perspective is where Buber and Merleau-Ponty converge:
Merleau-Ponty shows that we are already intertwined at the level of lived experience while Buber shows what it means to be faithful to that intertwining
You see, by the time I form a judgment about you, something far more immediate has already occurred.
If it is noticed, it might appear as a felt sense, a tightening or softening in the chest, a warmth or coolness in the cheeks, an openness or contraction in the stomach, a subtle pulling toward or away of the torso, an avoidance of eye contact, a lowering or lifting of the face…
This is not noise. This is meaning in its first expression.
But thinking often assumes authority, overriding that first expression, insisting “No—this is what this means.”
And in doing so, it can override or dull the more original, embodied knowing.
At best, thinking is almost always playing catch-up.
A Different Way of Meeting
So what would it mean to really meet someone?
Not by trying harder to understand them, but by becoming sensitive to what is already happening.
When you meet someone – whether for the first time or the hundredth – you might experiment with this:
Give attention not only to their words, but to the intertwining of your shared field of experience.
You do this best by noticing what is happening within you, in your body – the subtle movements in it, the shifts in breath, the textures of sensation – tightening, loosening, pulsing, softening.
You take time to notice them because they are how bodies express the impact of intertwining, the relationship that already was before thought gave it recognition and additional meaning.
You take time to notice them, not to analyze them or interpret them immediately.
But simply to let them speak.
Already Together
Perhaps the deepest shift here is this:
We are not separate beings who occasionally come into relation.
We are beings who are already in relation, and only later come to think about it.
We are beings who are already in relation, and only later come to think about it.
Meeting, then, is not the creation of connection.
It is the recognition—and sometimes the protection – of a connection that was always present.
When we fail to recognize the already present relationship, we risk objectifying another. And ourselves!
We attempt to take others and ourselves out of the I-Thou intertwining fields of experience. That’s brutal even though it is unintentional.
It is forcing us to be something we are not. Like taking fish out of water, we take ourselves out of the very nature of who we are – interwoven beings.
And the impact?
The unbearable existential sense of separation and isolation and all our well-rehearsed defensive compensations, the belief that my preservation must happen at your expense and vice versa, the inability to trust a world in which I feel separated, threatened and weakened.
But what happens when we do let the intertwining express itself in the body? When we attune to it?
When we, say, turn our attention inward and notice what is happening in our body. When we let the thinking settle like mud in a glass of water.
When we stop trying to control, manage, project, define, understand…all that mud settles and we see the clear water above it.
And in that clearing – what was already pulsating in troughs and peaks, in textures and movement, in openings and closures.
Felt in the shifts in breath, the timing between words, the sense of openness or contraction…
It draws us out of our preoccupation with managing, controlling, assessing, labeling, psychologizing and pathologizing the other. And even ourselves.
The perceived threat by the other and by what is experienced falls away.
Instead, we become attuned to, and aligned with, the aliveness that shows itself in the intertwining of beings, gifting us with its unlearned wisdom and meaningful response.
We witness the spontaneous movement of relationally intertwined selves.
The result?
Actions and decisions that are grounded in the relational I-Thou rather than the Separated I upon the Objectified You.
We might recognize it by a name we often use: love.
Interested in Mentoring?
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