“Watching you has me feeling nervous and excited in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time.”

“When I am with you I get butterflies in my stomach, and I never normally have these.”

“When you touched me I felt tingles run along my arms and legs.”

“Being with you, I feel like a teenager again.”

“Seeing you smile warms me up from the inside out.”

“The way you listen to me, I feel like you have lived exactly the same life as I have.”

The above sentences are ones that I have said or had said to me and they are so memorable because of the connection they created between me and the person I was with. For that moment, and the ones that followed, the outside world dropped away and there was just us: the last two humans in existence.

There is a simple practice that I have learnt as sharing impact. The concept is straightforward, yet there is a subtle component we must cultivate awareness of.

Generally women are a lot better at this than men because of how tuned in most women are to their internal world of feelings; from my experience, it is enough just to model this in my own behavior for a woman to begin communicating back to me in the same way.

We can also be taught. So don’t worry men, we may just need to understand the why  first in order to develop more felt-perception in our bodies, then have it broken down into logical steps.

Why?

Because it feels amazing for both people involved as it creates a connection between two (or more) people that is tangibly felt by all. It may lead to laughter, tears, turn-on—sometimes all three at once!

Regardless, more will be felt and I can guarantee that bringing this kind of attention to another will make us stand out from the crowd. Most beautifully, it tells the other person (or people) that their very being has an effect on us here and now—in this life. Because what an amazing gift it is to let another know that their existence, and the way they are with us, makes us feel a certain way.

They get to know real-time just how deeply they touch us, and we get to share real-time just how much we appreciate them for it.

How?

The name of the game here is awareness.

We need to cultivate an awareness of self at all times. Feel our own body, hear our own thoughts, monitor our own emotional state; become intimate with what it is like to be us, with who we are, moment-to-moment—when alone, with family, with friends, with a lover, on a first date.

The more aware we are of the flavors of our own experience, the more capable we are to notice when they change and when something new blossoms within us.

When we are with another and we notice there is some kind of change inside us—that being with them, and something they said, is having an impact on us—we can take a moment to feel it fully within our body, gathering it into words, and then we share it.

It doesn’t matter if it isn’t pure poetry, and we stammer or stumble a little in the telling. The words are less relevant than the simple act of sharing that this person’s essence has reached in and moved us. And if we notice ourselves feeling shy, awkward, or vulnerable in the telling—then even better! Speak that too.

 “The way you are looking at me is making my heart beat faster, and now that I am telling you I can feel my face getting really hot, and it’s like I want to cry, sing, shout and laugh all at the same time.”

Who doesn’t want to hear something like that?

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Assistant Editor: Kathryn Ashworth/Editor: Bryonie Wise