Nourishing Friendships

Recently, I enjoyed an unhurried lunch with a fabulous group of female friends. My initial connection with this particular group of women was a shared love of yoga. Over the years, we have become good friends.

We have witnessed and held each others high and lows, triumphs and the tears on the mat and over steaming post-yoga-class cuppas in cafes around Melbourne.

Kathy Lette recently wrote “If I didn’t have the cathartic camaraderie afforded by female friendship, I’d be sobbing in a psychiatric unit, braiding my hair.”

I am with you Kathy.

There are certain types of conversations that I can only have with my close female friends. These conversations are face-to-face, they are honest, they are raw, they are real and they are free from judgement.

These types of conversations are a unique and essential source of nourishment for me.

Many years ago, I came across a fabulous piece of writing in The Marginalian about reclaiming true friendships and a time when the word 'friend' has become somewhat devaluated in many contexts.

 
“Some kindred spirits become friends in the fullest sense — people with whom we are willing to share, not without embarrassment but without fear of judgment, our gravest imperfections and the most anguishing instances of falling short of our own ideals and values. The concentrating and consecrating force that transmutes a kinship of spirit into a friendship is emotional and psychological intimacy. A friend is a person before whom we can strip our ideal self in order to reveal the real self, vulnerable and imperfect, and yet trust that it wouldn’t diminish the friend’s admiration and sincere affection for the whole self, comprising both the ideal and the real.”

Could you be doing more to nourish the friendships that nourish you?

Read the full article on reclaiming friendships in The Marginalian here.

Image credit: Wendy MacNaughton