Aaron Doughty uses flowers in a vase as a metaphor for how labels we assign to people—race, age, sexual orientation—create mental barriers that block connection. By consciously dropping these labels, you can interact from openness and feel deeper, more authentic connection with anyone.
How do we feel more connected to not only ourselves but to other people? People who maybe we come into contact with, maybe people that we already have a relationship with, but ultimately, how do we feel more connected to other people? And what are some ideologies that we can have towards really making that something that's apparent? Well, to be honest, I kind of did a video about this recently, and by recent, maybe a couple months ago, and I kind of talked about this idea, but today I'm going to make it a little bit different. What I wanted to do was to give you guys an actual visual example, like an analogy analogy for being able to really understand this idea at a deeper level and then ultimately able to apply it in a practical way. Now, what this involves is understanding that we are all ultimately connected, that we all— our natural state is feeling connected to every single person that we could possibly come into contact with. Now, in order to visualize this idea, to give us some type of visual perspective, what I've decided to do was to have an assistant. Of flowers, and these flowers, while they might smell very good, also have the intention of helping me explain the idea of understanding who we are. Now, ultimately, the flowers represent us. We are all connected at a deeper level, and the vase symbolizes that connection. As you see, the flowers are inside the vase. Now, when we're born, we have no prejudices, we have no judgments, we don't label anything, not only because we can't speak, but it's just our natural state of being. Now, anything that comes to do with stereotypes, anything that has to do with the idea of labels comes from the idea of something that we've either had from personal experience or it comes from the idea of our conditioning, which is maybe the environment, the TV that we watched. It could be a lot of different things, but the idea is that those shape our perspective and that that's ultimately where the disconnection begins to happen. Now, to illustrate this, I want to give you guys the example of seeing these flowers, seeing this representation of who we are, and then as we grow up, we might be inclined towards having certain meanings as to what different type of people mean. So you see all these flowers. Now imagine if we took out just this kind of flower and we put it into a separate smaller vase because, I think there's one more. There's one more? Is this the same color? I don't know. So now we got this little vase. Now this little vase represents the idea of, of race, for example. So anytime we meet other people, maybe something that's conditioned in certain people is having and labeling people based upon the race that they are and then tagging on some type of meaning as to what that means. But automatically we begin to emphasize the differentness instead of the sameness of the connection that we are. And rather than it being like a collaboration of having fun, it becomes a collaboration of identity, of saying this is who you are. And people are deeper than just the race that they are. People are deeper than these categories I'm going to show you, and the way that we get into that is by feeling that. Now imagine we have another vase. Now imagine we begin to take the flowers out of the vase and we tag on the meaning of the idea of age, for example. So maybe these represent the idea of age. Maybe it means something when you meet older people or elderly people, or the idea when you meet younger people, there's a certain meaning that gets tagged onto that. Because of that, once again, we're emphasizing something that doesn't really even define who that person is. It's just a characteristic that some people use for convenience, but it doesn't really do it justice. And by emphasizing it when we meet people, what we begin to do is we begin to separate ourselves from who they are. And that's represented by the idea of this little separate vase. So the third one could be the idea of maybe sexual orientation. Tagging a certain meaning as to what that means. And then ultimately, once again, by just labeling it, what we're doing is we are separating different groups of people. We are creating barriers in our mind that make it harder for us to connect with people because there's all these connotations that are added to who somebody is when once again, that doesn't really justify who they are. It's just a little characteristic that someone might identify with, but it's nothing more than a label in itself. That I've showed you this analogy, you might say to yourself, how do I understand and how do I actually connect to other people? Well, it's actually quite simple. What you do is instead of having, when you meet people, certain ideologies, certain labels that we begin to mentally tag onto people, what we do is we then keep them inside the big bouquet by simply dropping the labels. Metaphorical. People can feel if you're an open person. People can feel the judgments that you have even if you don't really say anything. So the idea is to drop the judgments, and the simple way of doing that is to simply pick up those labels and to drop them. And as you begin to drop those labels, you'll notice that you then begin to connect to people at a deeper level because you're not defining who they are. You're not putting them into a little mental construct that's emphasizing the separateness of who they are. And then the effect of that will be you feeling more connected. Those barriers don't have to be there. They are self-imposed. So when you meet somebody else, understand that all you have to do is know that you are connected to everybody, that you are collaborating with them in a creative way, but there doesn't need to be any degree of separation based upon connotations, based upon mental constructs that we place upon other people. Begin to drop those, and as you begin to drop those, I guarantee you that you will begin to feel a deeper connection to everybody you come into into contact with because ultimately you'll begin to be acting from a point of connection rather than separate. There you go. That's the example I wanted to share with you guys today. So I hope you guys like this video. Uh, feel free to like this video if you liked it, share it if you found it of value, and ultimately I'll see you guys on the next video.
If you can see this, you're about to become so magnetic you are unrecognizable
