What Are the Ingredients of a Healthy Friendship? Chinese and Qi Gong Offer Some Insights

Good friends make life so much richer and more enjoyable!

Whether it’s providing emotional support or laughing over an inside joke, healthy friendships can open up so many opportunities for fulfillment and depth. However, it’s not always easy to spark up connections that lead to meaningful relationships. So, what are the elements that ultimately lead to healthy and rewarding connections with others?

In this blog, you’ll learn about four elements necessary for healthy friendships to flourish, according to Chinese Medicine and Qi Gong.

The Ingredients For Healthy Friendship Lie Within The Individual

Before getting into what specific elements are required for healthy friendships, it’s important to understand where those elements lie.

Conventional wisdom tells us that powerful connections happen when the right two people come together. We’re told that if only you meet the right partner or friend, you’ll immediately experience a deep and transformative connection that blossoms effortlessly at that very moment.

Unfortunately, this belief leads many people into discouraging relationships — both romantic and otherwise. If you put all of the focus on the people you engage with, you’ll most likely be disappointed.

According to Chinese Medicine and Qi Gong, all healthy relationships must start within yourself. Without being able to connect with yourself in the right ways, it will be difficult to truly connect with others from a place that is authentic, supportive, and loving.

Based on this, the most important relationship ingredients lie internally. If you can cultivate these within yourself, it will be significantly easier for you to attract healthy and mutually supportive connections with others.

Inner Strength

In order to enter into a healthy friendship, it’s important to be strong within yourself and secure with who you are. This doesn’t mean you have everything in life figured out, but it does mean that you’re not looking for another person to solve all of your problems.

When you have inner strength, you’re able to take responsibility for your own thoughts and emotions. When challenges arise, you’re able to turn inward and use healthy practices to work with painful thoughts or feelings in a skillful way.

If someone doesn’t have a strong inner foundation, they may look solely to others for answers and solutions. Not only does this create a burden for the other person, but it’s also a futile process because no one else can do the work that must take place within yourself.

On the other hand, if two or more people come together with a sense of personal empowerment, connections can flourish. You and your friends can still support one another, but the relationship is driven by true caring and connection, not by the need to fill a void within yourself.

Presentness

In the busyness of everyday life, it can be easy to forget to slow down and really hold space for yourself and others. However, without being present, it’s difficult for deep connections to grow.

When you’re fully present, you’re able to really listen to what others have to share. Full presentness doesn’t just include intellectual presentness; it also has an emotional and even spiritual component.

To become present in your friendships, it’s important to make a conscious decision to let go of other thoughts and distractions. Entering into that space with others allows you to develop a deep understanding and appreciation of your friends. In turn, gratitude, appreciation, and closeness grow in both directions.

Mutual Support

When individuals are able to cultivate a level of strength and presentness within themselves, it opens up an opportunity for healthy and compassionate support.

Healthy friendships are those in which both you and your friends are able to offer their unique gifts and insight to help others. This doesn’t mean waving a magic wand to remove all pain or answer every challenging question. It simply means that you’re able to meaningfully contribute to your friends’ well-being by providing authentic and loving support.

There are many ways to offer support, including doing favors, helping out with tasks, or holding space for thoughts and emotions. In all healthy forms of support, each person acknowledges and encourages the other’s personal autonomy and sense of empowerment. In other words, healthy support is about giving to others in a way that allows the other person to truly grow, as opposed to trying to “fix” problems that only the other person can address within themselves.

Supporting others in this way requires that you’re able to delineate between empowering others versus taking on others’ baggage in a codependent way.

Joy

Of course, healthy relationships help create joy!

Joy is the fruit that flourishes when both people are in alignment with both themselves and the other. It requires that both people have a level of internal abundance to share and blend. When that happens, it creates a strong sense of connection and excitement that brings you closer together.

Often, joy is sparked when you engage in a shared interest or activity. Whether that’s art, hiking, or playing a game, you experience joy when your Heart energy is activated.

Sometimes, joy happens effortlessly. At other times, it can take a bit of “practice.” By making it a priority to take care of your own internal needs, it can be much easier to experience joy, both by yourself as well as with your friends.

If you’re interested in growing and expanding the depth of your friendships, be sure to check out a practice that is aimed at enhancing all of these qualities — Qi Gong.

Use Qi Gong To Help Cultivate Healthy And Meaningful Friendships…

Qi Gong is a practice that helps you cultivate all of the core elements that are important for healthy friendships. It helps you develop internal strength, presentness, a sense of inner abundance, and joy.

At Holden Qi Gong, we have many Qi Gong programs to choose from, but our Qi Gong for Summer Workshop is especially powerful for helping you cultivate the energies of connection.

In Qi Gong for Summer, you’ll learn Qi Gong practices that are designed to strengthen your Fire Element and Heart Energy. When this energy is alive and healthy, you’re able to experience an abundance of joy and inner strength within yourself. In turn, this helps fuel healthy and rewarding relationships with others.

Learn more and sign up for our on-demand Qi Gong for Summer Workshop.