INSPIRED WALK
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By Chris Walker - Advanced Awareness Course #29 Finding a New Relationship and Making it Last “Never again clutter your days or nights with so much “business” and unimportant things that you have no time to “be in love” and “live with love”. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived, with money as the only reward, is no cause for celebration. In its purified state, the human heart is the hologram of the seen and unseen worlds; it is the part that reflects the whole. The heart is the point at which the individual human being is closest to the Divine. The heart is the centre of our motivation and our knowing, possessing a depth and strength of will that the personality lacks. When we say that the heart has an integrative power, we are not talking in abstract, metaphorical, or merely intellectual terms.
Chris Walker - Innerwealth - Coaching, Adventures, Retreats, Education, Consulting
Finding a New Relationship and Making It Last
! ! ! ! ! ANOTHER INSPIRED INNERWEALTH BOOK
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How to Find A New Relationship and Make It Last ! A magnificent insight into relationships, love, happiness and the laws of nature.
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! ! ! ! Chris Walker Copyright 2014
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!! Love is easy Relationships are where the work is
! ! ! “Never again clutter your days or nights with so much “busi-ness” and unimportant things that you have no time to “be in love” and “live with love”. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived, with money as the only reward, is no cause for celebration. In its purified state, the human heart is the hologram of the seen and unseen worlds; it is the part that reflects the whole. The heart is the point at which the individual human being is closest to the Divine. The heart is the centre of our motivation and our knowing, possessing a depth and strength of will that the personality lacks. When we say that the heart has an integrative power, we are not talking in abstract, metaphorical, or merely intellectual terms. The realisation and purification of the heart both opens a doorway to the infinite, and also results in a restructuring of neural pathways, a refinement and reorganisation of our entire nervous system, which allows the fullest expression of our human possibilities. We can so easily fall into the world of live to work rather than work to live. Time can rush by, we are so busy getting ready to enjoy life, that we are too tired to take advantage of it. To manage our life, for the benefit of love, we must master the power of will. This, in another Page
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language, means discipline. No more busy work. No more hiding from love.
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Leave time, leave space to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!�
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! The First Step… A Choice!
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Grass Roots!
8!
Turning Up - Getting Your Act Together!
12!
The Audition!
17!
Falling in Love Again!
26!
Making A Commitment!
33!
A Conscious way to live!
41!
Dealing With Fear!!
46!
Know Yourself Well!
49!
Helicopter Views!
52!
Surrendering!
53!
Don’t Blame The Dingo!
57!
When is it Time to Move on!
59!
A Home filled with Love!
61!
Begin each day with Love!
69!
Romantic Lifestyles!
74!
Keeping Your Heart Open and Your Mind Free!
80!
BEING THE BEST YOU!
90!
TURNING UP!
94!
Surrender!
101!
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The First Step… A Choice In this book, I am assuming that you want your relationship to last longer than a few years of child raring, or a few years of house buying, so in this book I am suggesting that your priorities will be to “NOT” compromise your relationship, not justify coming home or being at home in a toxic, spent and stressed state. I’m assuming you’ve chosen a partner with enough self-worth and who is not obsessed with sacrificing everything, including their wellness and romance, in the interest of children, a job or money. If that’s not you, please dilute what you read accordingly. Not everyone is in that inspired space.
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A commitment to a new and better relationship is not just about coming home to a loving home. It’s about your overall behaviour in life. You need to know what you are committing to if you are committing to a long term relationship that’s healthy and thriving for a long time. Just witness this in the fact that not one single person on earth, of the millions and billions of heartbreaks, broken homes, marriage failures, domestic drama, ever once thought, at the beginning, that they would be one of those statistics. Everyone thinks they are safe at the start and most think they are safe. They just didn’t know what they were really saying when they said “I do commit - “I do choose to a life of love with you.”
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It’s easy to misunderstand that a commitment to love a partner is an exclusive commitment. People fail to understand that love is not exclusive.
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You can’t love one person and hate another. And you can’t dislike yourself and love somebody else. Sure, you can compromise those things if the objective is to create a family, or build a house, but eventually, those truths will challenge the motive of working together through the challenges life brings. It will, eventually look easier to do it alone.
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Love is not exclusive, you can’t love one person and hate someone else, hate your job, hate your life, hate your cat or even hate those who hurt you. You want love, then you need the realistic expectation of what it’s going to take to sustain it. It’s going to take a commitment, a choice, not to compromise the essential essence of a love filled relationship.
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That essential essence of a love filled relationship might or might not include great sex, great trips and a great car. It might and it might not include wealth, babies and healthy lifestyles. It might and might not include a lot of things. But there are a few things that it absolutely will include.
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It will include: dealing with your fears, your emotions, your feelings, your anxieties and your paranoia. It will include learning to focus on the object of the moment, to do one thing fully at a time, to be engaged in whatever you do, at home AND at work. It will include learning how to be totally present and undistracted, with everything in life, not just your lover. It will include knowing yourself well, knowing and liking yourself. It will include your capacity to engage in your WILLPOWER. And finally, it will include your overt and expressed conscious awareness of where you are going, what you want, why you are here and what you want to give. It’s these last four (your vision and purpose in life) that your partner ultimately, when they really, really know you, will fall madly, deeply and uncontrollably in love with.
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Grass Roots If you are serious about creating a healthy, loving dynamic with another human being - a relationship - you are going to have to make sure you are not carrying any unwanted old dirty laundry, unfinished business, anger, hurt, frustration, hate, fear, guilt or any such unfinished stuff from the past into your new relationship.
! I’m going to take you through the steps to clear out your drawers, clean the windows, polished floorboards and make sure that you turn up ready and available and inspired so that a person of a similar nature will walk into your heart and celebrate love with you as you deserve.
! It’s easy to carry stuff forward and that’s got to be your greatest concern. If you or someone you meet is still lingering in the past, even hanging out with the ex, it’s going to make “a great relationship” pretty much impossible.
! Unfinished business really does corrupt the future. Even deeply subconsciously. If we go through a painful separation or a hurtful time we automatically develop an expectation of what we do and don’t want in a future relationship. Those expectations are so flawed, so taught by misguided and angry therapists, writers and friends that is sets us off on a trajectory that’s going to create either heartbreak or melancholy for life. Let me summarise five simple realities that you can check your part healing against and make sure you are not setting yourself up for troubles.
! 1. Accept the diversity of love.
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Love really is the opposite to all emotion. So, hopes, dreams, positives, goods, bad’s and high’s and lows are all not love, they are emotions and therefore fragments of love. Love is the synthesis of all emotion. So, happiness on it’s own cannot be the outcome of any relationship without it’s correlate opposite. Be aware of any idealisation that the purpose of a relationship is an emotional one sided half life. If that becomes the objective, honesty, truth, joy, inspiration and intimacy will evaporate in favour of frustration.
! 2. Don’t run away, have the courage to change your consciousness around love. One lady from the USA booked me to help her deal with her relationship problems. Her intuition had already told her she’d spent enough time trying to talk her husband and father of her children into behaving as she felt appropriate. She wanted me to help her leave with a good energy. So, I said, “Don’t leave him till you love him.” She couldn’t understand and was very defensive about having done everything she could to change him and had stuck it out for, in her words “way too long.” I was not saying to her stay, I was saying, “leave when you love him.” The reason is this, if you leave people because you don’t like them, then you will be running for the rest of your life. If you leave people when you love them, then the relationship has served it’s purpose, bringing you to love what you didn’t love before. She was ticked off, “I do love him but he’s stupid” … Rather than leave or withdraw, whenever your partner does something you don’t agree with, doesn’t work for you, or doesn’t please you, simply ask “why am I attracting this” and then use it to grow. Like and dislike are no reason to become uncertain in love.
! ! 3. Hold your love for life as really important, even devote your lifestyle to it.
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Relationships don’t solve problems. We wish they did, but they don’t. If you were lonely when you met them, you’ll eventually be lonely during and probably after the relationship. Instead of hoping the relationship will fix things, fix thing and the hope the relationship brings up anything else you haven’t dealt with. A love for life is a requisite for a loving relationship. Make sure you recognise when your love for life is faded by recognising the fading love in your relationship that will reflect it back to you. Deal with that and keep your heart open and there is magnetism. Your love for life is too precious to be sacrificed defending menial emotions like anger, jealously, and envy. Your love for life is fragile, stay open, guard it carefully because this impacts your relationship.
! 4. Don’t allow anything external to have any power over you (unless you decide to permit it.) Don’t allow small stuff to distract you from doing what you love, working with love, being with who you love, and giving what you love. Give respect to people at work by honouring their choices even if you don’t agree with them. Love is not attachment. Practice love in your work life. Don’t react to negativity, ignore it, let it pass you; don’t even hit the ball back. Never accept criticism you didn’t ask for. Opinions are the cheapest commodity on earth. Their stress is not your stress, their fears and doubts are not your doubts. Only the universe of Nature can create the magnificence of a flower, but any foolish mind can pull it to pieces. So by practicing being open hearted at work you bring that home and then your living is inspired living. In simple language, Don’t give your power away.
! 5. Avoid the use of the word “MY” when describing your partner.
! My husband, my wife, my lover, my boyfriend, my girlfriend, my ex … can easily start taking on the form of conjoined twins, joined at the hip, living out of the same feed bag, thinking the same and feeling the same. It’s just not true. When two people are the same, Page
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one isn’t necessary. Every word of unsolicited advice you give your partner, or they give you and you accept, is a nail in the coffin of love. When a partner gives us unsolicited advice they are unconsciously saying “become like me” or “do it the way I think” which, if you follow it, will narrow the gap between you both and make you boring. Nobody marries themselves. Other people can’t belong to us, no matter how much we love them; our only right is to appreciate them.
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Turning Up - Getting Your Act Together Okay, you are not a newborn child. You’ve got a history. You’ve had a journey. There’s been some ups and downs. Welcome to the club. Some of that is journey was fantastic and some of it hurt. The only difference between us all, is whether we’ve actually done our homework and cleared, learned from and are complete in getting over it. So, if there is one single morsel of the past that you are saying to yourself “I hope that never happens to me again” you are wise to put the brakes on now, and deal with it. Unfinished business is going to lead you into very unwise places.
! Yup, it’s not easy to hear. You can scream at the top of your lungs “I don’t want to be hurt like that again” and what are you actually saying? You are saying that you are on the defensive, you are saying that you want to select a person who will not hurt you, you’re saying that you don’t ever want to be as vulnerable to another human being again. You are also suggesting that there’s a half person on earth somewhere.
! It takes guts and courage to step forward again into the world of relationship and fully throw yourself back as deeply as you were when you first fell in love. You have to trust yourself. You don’t have to trust your partner or anybody else in the world you have to trust yourself.
! That’s the acid test. If by going through a divorce, pain, heartache and suffering you learnt that you can survive pain, heartache, divorce and suffering then why would you be afraid of it. You know you can handle it if it happens so why not put that as plan C. if all goes pear shaped you will survive, you’ve done it before. Sure it was unpleasant. Sure it hurt. Sure it cost you a lot of money but you survived and you had love in your heart and
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the benefit of the time with that individual. If any of this does not land squarely comfortably and without reaction on your table then you are not ready to fall in love again.
! So I want you to begin by taking a piece of paper and writing down on it anything that you’re afraid of happening in a new relationship. Don’t pull any punches save yourself the agony of those things being revealed to you once you start getting entangled with a new partner. Go around the seven areas of life and ask yourself what you are afraid of entering a new relationship.
! Now you've written that list make another column, write on that top of that column “so what” (SW). Yup, you need to get yourself really clear that the worst-case scenario isn’t the end of the earth. So write down in that column the consequences of the thing you fear happening and what you do about it.
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Now, make another column, this time write down the benefit of that happening. So, that say for example; he wrote in the first column you fear losing your money. In the second column you wrote “borrow money and start again.” Now in the third column you could write the benefits of losing your money: “reinvent myself again, a new chapter in my life, re-inspire myself in my work, fresh start, spiritual awakening, new love, adventure and becoming good at dealing with lawyers.” You know what I’m saying here, that if you walk into a relationship fearing anything you are going to, because of that fear, increase the likelihood of that thing happening. Worry manifests itself.
! If you’re really brave you can start the fourth column. That fourth column could be what do I know that I can do to prevent this happening? For example: losing my money “do a pre- relationship audit” and there are many more things you can do to alleviate worry about this problem and others.
! All your fears that you carry into this relationship come from unfinished business, baggage, that is incomplete from your past. This is also poignant because it gives you the opportunity to question any potential partner about their history and see whether they are carrying unfinished business, anger, fear, frustration, attachment, need for approval, guilt, sadness, pain into a relationship with you.
! But we’ll talk about that later in this book. The warning sign however is when somebody says they’ve done therapy. That is usually a brown paper bag for trouble and unfinished business. And if a person says “they’re still in therapy” run. They are not ready.
! I don’t think I’m alone when I say that the odds of dealing with the past through therapy are quite low. My experience was that after being to Zen monasteries and meditated till I was green, doing yoga till my body was twisted as much as my mind, spent hundreds of hours in therapy, gone scuba diving, bathed in resorts with sexy girlfriends, traveled the world as a teacher, danced with shaman, I was, in retrospect, still carrying all the
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unfinished business from my divorce. Sure my back was straighter, my eyes were clearer, my head was smarter, but my heart was still chock full of hurt.
! Then when I was ready and under a no cost, free sunlit moon, I fell in love with life again.
! Of course, everything I’ve done helped. That’s why in this book I’m not pretending that you can just go out and sit under a tree like the Buddha and suddenly become enlightened in your relationship. no, there is processing to do. But instead of running around like I did all over the world try to sort things out I've simplified the whole process and taken the best of all that I learnt so that you can save a lot of time messing about and spending a lot of money getting over the past.
! I've called that process the discard process. It’s a hybrid version of Dr John Demartini process. If you’re really stuck I recommend you go attend one of John’s workshops or see one of his qualified consultants. I also include his process in my 30 day challenge as step one in the seven steps to back on track. It’s your choice a do it.
! Getting over the past and dealing with anything that is blocking your pipes from opening to a new relationship is a journey. A journey of peeling away the layers; of cutting through the myths, the ideas, the intellect and all the mind stuff that has accumulated in your heart. It’s a challenging journey, because it confronts you and most of us dislike to have our ego challenged. It’s our identity and that’s what makes us feel important. For me, I find it easier to have somebody challenge me through the process rather than sit down and spend hours and hours writing notes. That’s what I had in mind when I created the 30 day challenge with coaching every day.
! This process is really important because as time goes on when you are in a relationship stuff is going to happen that is going to get under your skin and potentially put you into a
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blocked state of mind. It doesn't take too many days of doing this to convince your partner that they’ve made the wrong choice. You know as well as I do that doubt kills everything it puts it’s blanket over. You do not want to create doubt in your partner’s mind.
! There’s a silk thread that goes between two people when they get into a relationship. There’s lots of scaffolding and heavy metal and steel ropes and all sorts of other things that connect us but there is a silk thread between us, it’s called trust. Doubt plucks at that silk thread. You don’t want to have that happen too often!
! This process is the difference between a growing relationship and a shrinking one. Information arrives every single day that can accumulate, reinforce old fears or create new ones. Just like a tsunami can come and wipe out a huge part of the world, if we don't engage in small adjustments on a day-to-day basis in our relationship, we get a big tsunami. Tsunami in a relationship is very unpleasant. You already know that.
! So, in summary, clear the past, learn the process and use that process to maintain clarity for the future. That’s the first step in creating and being prepared for a new relationship that works long-term.
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The Audition A relationship is a journey. If you choose well at the beginning of the journey it will be beneficial for both of you. If you choose poorly at the beginning of the relationship it will still be beneficial but “ouch.” Either way, you learn something from a journey in a relationship no matter how long it lasts but it’s better to learn something new, rather than to repeat old patterns. So, let’s see if we can write a few notes in this chapter about helping you get back on the bike, and choose, at least new mistakes, preferably none.
! When you meet somebody they will put their best foot forward. Take everything you see, reverse it 100%, and you will know the person you will meet after six months. If, with that realisation your heart still flatters and you feel a sense of destiny with this individual then, a relationship that stands the test of time is possible and probable.
! The whole conversation about meeting the right person and entering the right relationship is a time based issue. When you are 20 years old the right person will have very different characteristics to the person you would be interested in meeting when you are 50 years old. This reveals something really profound about relationships. The odds of two people meeting each other when they’re 20 and growing together at the same rate and being happy with each other when they’re 50 is small. It’s possible. But the odds are small especially when in the current climate, people search for pleasure instantaneously and are not so willing to work through the years of hard work that our grandparents seemed to enjoy or survive through.
! A global survey has recently revealed that more than 50% of people in relationship have had affairs and of the remaining 50%, 20% would be willing to have one. This shows one thing and one thing clearly, and that is: people do not know how to maintain the romance within the relationship. It seems we can all get started, but growing together over a period
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extending much more than 5 to 7 years seems to be a science few people understand. From statistics on relationships, the first two years are easy, the next three just seem to happen, and then people get itchy feet. Is this because people start taking each other for granted after a few years? Is it because they chose each other based on an infatuation? Is it because people don’t know how to deal with conflict? Or, because we start taking ourselves for granted, relaxing and becoming complacent in our relationship?
! Most people do act differently at the start of a relationship. They’re more diligent about everything. They turn up, they leave work on time, they’re polite enough to be horny, they don’t talk about their ex, or their unfinished business with their Dad or Mum. But, bit by bit, the sox get left on the floor, the skid marks appear on the undies, farts seem to become a family fashion and respect, both for self and other, seems to be replaced by a familiarity that assumes that partner, because they love you, will be happy living below the relationship poverty line.
! I believe it’s important to set the benchmark for how we act in a relationship pretty much by what it takes to get into one. How we act during the honeymoon period really does provide some great insight as to how we can act, after it.
Hold Your Horses Delaying getting into a relationship is wisdom. Spontaneity and that urgent, oh my god I’ve met the one, rarely aligns with the objective of a long-term journey together. However, it can be enormous fun. If you choose fun please don’t cry when it doesn’t end the way you expected.
! The purpose of delaying getting into a relationship is not to make it more likely to succeed. The probability of failure and success in a relationship does not change with time, self-help, wealth, or any other proposed suggestion about getting your shit together. The probability of success in a relationship is determined purely by the willingness of Page
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two people to enter into a growth contract together and to maintain a learning environment.
! I've written long and hard about the purpose of life. The one thing I’ve emphasised is that the purpose of life is not a relationship, nor a family, nor work nor anything else you can put your finger on. However, each of us has a purpose and when you can link your relationship to that purpose the odds of sustainability become massive. Of course, it takes 2 to tango. So if your partner’s highest value is sex then once you are conquered, you don’t have to be Houdini to work out what’s going to happen next.
! This is one of the most difficult topics to write about. We all love great sex and it's important but when it becomes the single most important thing, or even the dominant thing that attracts you to another person or attracts them to you, you have just gone down a path that millions of people have gone down before you, and that you’ve probably already gone down yourself, that ends in heart-ache.
Opening Up Again After A Long Shut Down If you’re anything like me when I’m single, every single person I meet of the opposite sex becomes a potential partner. I like it that way. I like treating people with incredible respect. I like to feel thankful for meeting people and I like to feel that everybody I meet is inspired at some level and I want to find out where. However, if I can fall in love 100 times a day, with 100 different people, how do I choose who I'm going to approach to take a conversation one step further?
! I don't want to have a cardboard cutout describing my perfect partner because then I would filter out 99% of people I meet and I'll eventually box myself in and create only trouble for myself. I’d only meet the external half of a potential partner, get infatuated, lose my balance and make a mistake.
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It's better to arrive with no expectation and meet people with an open heart and an open mind. Obviously, there is an incredible need for respect. There are two sides to everyone. Best find those two sides before I marry them! So, there’s a difference between falling in love and getting engaged. One is harmless… you just feel it and shut up about it. The second is determining whether this person is the person you’d be willing to compromise your freedom and gifts of being single to share your life with.
! When we develop this capacity to fall in love one hundred times a day it can become confusing. If we have a person that we have committed to and are in love with at home in a committed relationship, and we still fall in love 100 times a day, what are we to do? If we take everybody home that we fall in love with, we'll end up with a collection, and nobody will be happy. So the whole idea is to learn how to fall in love 100 times a day without making a move or taking action. Whether you are in a relationship or out of one it's important to recognise that love is not exclusive. If you love one person you will love many.
! So this all adds up to the question of selecting the right person. If you can fall in love with 100 people 100 times a day then how do you choose the "right" one? When I was younger the answer was to go to bed with them and if I felt like I fell in love that was enough. After 20 relationships that didn't go longer than a year I realise that the selection process that I'd chosen had its merits but wasn't reliable if I was looking for anything more than a short-term situation. (Which I wasn't)
! Let's first look at the basis on which most people think that they've fallen in love:
! There are seven areas of life. We prioritise them and those priorities are based on our values. Sometimes we feel fulfilled in one or two areas and sometimes we feel unfulfilled in others. We fall in love when we feel that the person we’ve met increases our fulfilment
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in the areas we are currently already fulfilled in, and, compensates for the un-fulfilment we feel in the other areas.
! Here is an example: say you've made some money and your business is going well, so your career is on track, you have a bunch of friends and you’re playing sport to you feel healthy and fit. But in your house you feel lonely, isolated and distant. So, you go out for an Internet date with somebody who respects you for your money and your business, likes your career, enjoys your friends and has some interest in sport so you feel supported in your priorities. This brings you to the next question: “how does this person feed the areas of my life that currently feel vacuous?” If we feel that this individual compensates for our loneliness, our sense of isolation and distance from our loved ones then they will become extraordinarily attractive. This is all simply based on our values and getting our needs met. But it is also a great myth.
! When we enter a relationship based on the fact that somebody will compensate us for what is missing in our life we have made a choice based on complete delusion and yes it may last for a while but eventually it will come unstuck. Those contracts of neediness are very much a thing of the past. It's very much the case that if you want a relationship that does not have massive emotional swings then you need to turn up holistically balanced, so your partner can do the same thing.
! What does that mean?
! There are seven areas of life and although we value each area of life differently and may put the majority of our effort into one or two of those areas it's no excuse to be in desperation in the areas of life we value least. If we don't value health that’s okay but if we let our health go to desperation, obesity and addiction, then our partner who possibly values health quite highly will lose interest in propping us up and being the "healthy one" in the relationship.
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! You want to be balanced in all seven areas of life. Again this does not necessarily mean that you are on top of the world in your local priorities but what it does mean is that you have your act together in all areas of life, including spiritual. (Whatever that means to you and your partner)
! Unbalanced in an area of life means that you are highly emotional, possibly desperate, in a "got to" state of mind.
! An example might be that if a person in financial poverty gets into a relationship with a person who has financial wealth then by the end of the relationship the person in poverty will have more wealth and the person who was in wealth will have about half what they had before (in dollar terms). You can go around the seven errors of life and define wealth and poverty as appropriate and the same thing will happen, whether this is health, friendships, spirituality, social life, wisdom, or family. Two people in a relationship end up averaging what they bring to the relationship.
! So falling in love is the easy part. You can fall in love 100 times a day and in fact I'd suggest that you need to fall in love 100 times a day to be available for a relationship. Love is not exclusive. You can fall in love with your work, with nature, with friends and people and this is critical as you'll see in the next chapter. So once you've met somebody that you feel a connection with the next question is, how do you interview them to work out the odds of success for a good healthy growing journey together?
! And the best answer for that interview is to check out whether you are balanced in all seven areas of life and then check out whether they are balanced in all seven areas of life and to make sure that you are not seeking compensation for what you think is missing. Nothing is missing in your life and it's really important to know that.
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Nothing is missing in your life but it may be in a different form than the form that you want it in. Say you want friendship on the basis that you seem to be lonely and lack an intimate friend. The assumption that you are lonely and lack an intimate friend presumes that something is missing in your life and it's on that crooked foundation that if you choose a relationship to substitute for what you think is loneliness and lack of intimacy that you will make a very poor choice in your interviewing process.
! You must arrive complete into a relationship in order to choose a person who is complete in a relationship in order to have a journey that will be complete and joyful. People bring a lot of baggage into relationships in the hope that a relationship will fix their problems. I've met many people who have been struggling as single parents who hope that by meeting a partner that struggle will be over. The struggle is not caused by being a single parent. The struggle is caused by being disorganised and disempowered in the dynamics with children. A partner does not solve such things. In fact, they will probably withdraw when they get wind of that.
! The interview process is very simple: are you complete in all seven areas of life and balanced? Are they complete in all seven areas of life and therefore balanced? On that basis if the answer is yes, then love will flourish and emotions will, if the process in chapter 1 is learnt properly, take a backseat in the journey into the future.
! So you can see here that this person who values their career very highly, then their health, and then the rest of their energy is spread evenly over the other five areas of life. Balance does not mean that they spend equal time in each area of life as that would be a contradiction of the hierarchy of values. What it means is that they got their act together in all seven areas of life.
! With the new technologies in health, a person can spend around three minutes a day doing exercise and still have good fitness. So we can’t measure time as a reflection of
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balance in an area of life. I spend up to 3 hours a day in health and that shows that I love this aspect of my existence. It’s a high priority. I don’t spend a massive amount of time hanging out with friends, that doesn’t mean it’s not important to me, because it is, but it’s not a high-value and so I’m very discerning about how I use that time.
! We are also open to the idea that somebody else that we decide to have a relationship with will have completely different values hierarchy than we do. They may love a social life and we may love sport so it’s a matter of understanding the dynamics of how to support somebody in their values and by doing so get your values met.
! “Hi babe, I’m working late tonight again for the fifth time this week, and guess what, I made enough time for a three day fishing trip to that spot you’ve been itching to go to!” It’s just that old quote we’ve all heard a thousand times but not really understood: “Do unto others etc.” What it’s saying is that if you support your partner’s values by giving
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them what they want as a result of you doing what you want, so you get your values met by supporting others. Actually that’s romance in a relationship and it’s sales in business. Same process, different outcome…
!
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Falling in Love Again Before you get into a relationship bring love into your life in its fullest. This creates space for love in your life. So many people are busy. Busy doing this, busy going there busy making money, busy getting healthy, busy doing the shopping, busy with the children, busy doing their work, busy being spiritual. What space is left if there is panic at every corner?
! Making space for love means to live and work at a pace where love can be in everything you do. That’s not a slow lethargic pace, nor is it a busy crazy pace that doesn’t give you a chance to breathe. Intensity is a pace at which you walk fast but it’s not so fast that you can’t smell the roses on the way. This, I think, is what stops people from falling in love or it’s what keeps people from celebrating love in their everyday life.
! I have met many people who fall in love with that perfect partner and then, when it’s all buttoned down, get busy again. It’s almost like they slowed down to pick something up then put there foot on the accelerator of their life again. Then they wonder why their relationship and their life has become erratic and lumpy. Love is a lifestyle. It means living your life at a pace that allows love to be at the top of your experience as often as possible throughout the day.
! Love is not Valentine’s Day. That’s ridiculous. There are 365 Valentine’s Day in a year. It doesn’t mean you have to give up your job or your sport or your friends. It just means that love coexist with everything you do because you work and live at a pace that can embrace and allow it.
! Work with love, live with love, act with love, a home with love, friendships with love, heal with love. Love is a lifestyle. Love is not separate from our life, it is life. We grow
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with love and stay young with love. Our health thrives on it, our joy is underpinned by it. A person who loves their work is unstoppable, inspired. Create a home with love. Agree to make your home a sanctuary of love. This is a chaotic, vibrant. colourful. creative, nature filled home. A place where feelings and experiences are honest, and challenges are many. Where work is not the core topic of conversation, where the TV is not the centrepiece of the house. A home surrounded by art and things that make you smile. Not always a Haha smile, a mystical smile, because you know that all the challenge of life is nothing compared with love. The key to living with love is the ability to fall through conflict simply by seeing both sides and two opinions for every debate.
! Love is not touching, smelling, tasting, feeling, doing, having, eating, sleeping or sexing. Those are ways of expressing and experiencing love. Love is nothing. Needlessness, emptiness, silence and with all that, connectedness. Just sitting, shutting up, doing nothing but breathing. And then, comes relationship.
! I’ve mentioned in the second chapter about falling in love 100 times a day and that love is not exclusive. That if we are waiting for a partner in order to feel and experience love then we will arrive in a very vulnerable and toxic space.
! It also reveals that if in the interview process, your potential partner reveals that you are the only source of their love, that they are “infatuated with you,” and couldn’t live without you and love you more than anything else in the world, it would be wise to run away. Love is not exclusive, infatuation is exclusive, an infatuation at the beginning of a relationship leads to resentment at some time very soon after.
! If you enter the relationship based on love you will remain with love provided that you can handle the emotional challenges that come to grow in you both. That’s the essence of the first chapter. So we have so far described how you can increase the probability of
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making the right choice to enter the right relationship, to maintain the right mindset, and to decrease the probability of the 5 to 7 year itch.
! Given that you understand the difference between infatuation “that which makes you horny" and love “that which makes you feel connected” you can, base your relationship on love and still, maintain infatuation, romance and therefore the honeymoon. So let's talk in this chapter about the honeymoon that lasts forever.
! To base your relationship on infatuation is a big mistake. We have discussed in chapter 1 how to make sure that you are turning up in a clear space and in chapter 2 how you can make sure that you are turning up balanced, and therefore your partner is balanced in all seven areas of life. But we haven't yet discussed the definition of being in love with somebody.
! If you go out into nature every morning by yourself and sit, alone, with a cup of tea or coffee, and just observe, listen, smell, feel and saturate yourself with the light that comes from the sun for a few minutes you will feel yourself with the love that you can give all day long. If you start a relationship and you stop doing this then you will be hoping that this relationship will fill you up, satisfy you with love and that’s not what a relationship does. Relationship is where you give Love and you can’t give what you haven’t got so it's essential in a relationship in which you want to make love a priority that you learn how to fill yourself up with love every day before the day begins.
! I wrote this about nature. About filling yourself with love. People think it is about somebody, but it is not. It is about filling yourself with love, alone.
! “One day, you look up, and there it is, the most beautiful sight your eyes have ever seen. You are lost, swept away, there is no choice, it happens. In that one brief moment in time you are in love. The most beautiful experience of life and in that moment you are changed
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forever. Nothing happened to cause it. You fell. When you least expected it, there before your eyes, the eternity opened, you fell into love. Whether it lasts one second, one week or a lifetime this love is precious, a treasure to be absolutely revered.”
! Another poem I wrote while connecting with nature… this is the few moments I am speaking about each day, in the morning, that fills you with love to give.
! “There is a perfect moment of truth, and it is called, falling in love. In that moment, there is no time, space, worry or expectation. You are, for that one moment, in perfect stillness, stress free, disarmed, in love. Your ageing drops away, your posture changes, your whole mechanism operates differently. It is being in nature, by a lake, when the moon is out, nothing moves and we can hardly breathe. It is a totally beautiful moment, the stillness of love. This is the foundation on which a relationship can grow, this sacred moment of truth when all else disappears, stillness comes over you, and you fall in love, alone.”
! And another about morning practice of stillness
! Falling in love is a totally sacred moment. We, sitting in nature, just lost control, and without warning, we fell in love. Actually, love is always there, but we are busy and forget. So, falling in love for some people can happen just once in a lifetime or for a wise person, a thousand times a day, depending on how much control we let go of. Sitting in nature, falling in love happens when we least expect it, when we are relaxed, when there is no tension, ambition, or struggle, just sitting, being, celebrating nature. We simply fall in love…accidentally. And that is how we become fulfilled.
! Love is not exclusive. When you feel it, for those few moments, even for a single moment, you are in love, you are love, you give love. That person you feel connected to is completely with you, connected, familiar. It may be a person in the street, someone who brings you coffee, or who just happens to be there. It may be very inconvenient, or a
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dream come true, but for those moments, you fall in love, and you know it. The love was there already. And you don’t know what to do. So, it is important you do nothing but admit it to yourself. It has happened again, and you smile to yourself so as not to be discovered for your experience. Even though, they know.
! In that moment you are fully present. In love there is no desire, no fear, no judgment. You are simply spontaneous, suddenly thrown back out of yourself. This is the sign. You are lost, disorientated, you can’t remember your own name, and you don’t know where you are. Time and space vanish. It is a most amazing experience in life.
! When you fall in love, the whole mechanism of desire stops. You have touched your being, your centre, and you feel you are at the source. Suddenly you are not the same person you were, and it hits you deeply. That is why love transforms so much of life. If you are able to be in love you cannot hide, it is impossible. This is what people fear when they fear love. They fear being exposed because they don’t know how to keep it a secret.
! When this first happened to me I felt guilty. I would be in a cafe and suddenly feel that love and then become confused. What should I do? Should I get a phone number? But that would be sleazy, opportunistic. And besides if I’m doing this 100 times a day I can’t possibly accumulate 100 phone numbers and feel like I’m doing it justice.
! Finally, I read that this feeling of falling in love over and over again is the spiritual reality that we all seek. We want fulfilment, we want enlightenment and each time we feel that moment of connectedness we are fulfilled and enlightened. Then it became clear, there is nothing to be guilty about, there is no need to act, in fact, there is a need to disguise this moment and keep that extremely private.
! I was also tortured by the fact that I could feel this connection even while I was out with my partner. My mistake in these situations was to sexualise this experience of falling in
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love. Sexuality and love are two different things and I confused them for many years. Love is simple, it has no motive: it wants nothing it needs nothing, therefore it already has everything. There is no neediness in love and that’s why, as soon as we see neediness in someone, we automatically know, they are not, as they will probably claim, in love with us.
! The more we realise how fulfilled and full of love we already are the more moments of connection we will have. It means we are not needy and therefore our romance and love is great. Not a straight jacket filled with jealousy, insecurity, disconnected ambivalence or fear.
! So falling in love does not come from the appetite to fall in love it comes from the opposite. When we know we are in love with life and we know we are in love in our heart then there are more and more moments of feeling connected and that reveals, not creates, the sense of love within us.
! Love usually happens when our mind ceases, it is quiet, calm, relaxed. No more wanting, nowhere to go, no tension. When it just happens, you l know it. When you feel this sudden love, the mind cannot work. Its whole function has become useless, absurd. The person you were longing to become is irrelevant. Now what? You cannot think; it is a shock, but this is it, spontaneous, you realise that there is love, always love, inside of you.
! You can be the bravest hero, the biggest business tycoon, greatest athlete, even a rock idol or movie star, but love doesn’t care who you are or what you do. It cuts through, it comes out, it reveals your core, brings your whole being into irrelevance. You are lost, your feet leave the floor.
! In those moments when you fall in love, with your car, your job, a flower, a sunset, a person, a meal, a cat, you bypass all the other layers of the mind. You are not your body,
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although your body is involved; you are not your mind, although your mind sees and feels; you are not your heart, although your heart beats faster, opens and shed tears and warmth; and you are not your spirit, although your spirit rises and you feel touched. When you fall in love, you are lost, naked, exposed. There is no “I ness”, there is nothing to compare because you are not in your mind or body. You fall into love because the body, the mind, and the heart have no reason. Your whole identity is asleep, and you are living in truth.
! Now you may think that this is a lot of fluffy talk about romance and relationships but I would like to suggest differently. This moment we are talking about is when you lose yourself, is where great thoughts, ideas, inspirations come crashing through your logical brain and land square in your mind’s eye. You might even be in the shower and suddenly a great thought pops into your existence and this too is a moment of love.
! There are many people who live their entire existence based on these moments because this is what creates the genius that differentiates the average person from the entrepreneur, the leader, the musician, the poet, the artist and the incredible parent. I’d encourage you to recognise and be aware of these moments, not just let them pass as if they were a moment of flotation. Take the opportunity if you feel a connection or you feel an inspiration to use that energy to generate work in the direction of the purpose of your life. These are vary vary special moments and they are not the domain of a relationship alone.
! So, in summary, to fall in love with a person is easy. To fall in love with a person is to fall in love with life. When you are in love with life you will be open to the abundance of a connection to many people, it’s all love. It is from this realisation that love is not exclusive. that the person who wishes to fall in love is wisest to fall in life with life, then with many people, and ultimately, then, choose the one.
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Making A Commitment When you meet somebody they will put their best foot forward. Take everything you see, reverse it 100%, and you will know the person you will meet after six months. If, with that realisation your heart still flatters and you feel a sense of destiny with this individual then, a relationship that stands the test of time is possible and probable.
! Here’s a process to help you work out whether you’ve really met a person (fallen in love), or become infatuated with them. It’s wise to do this a long time before you decide to make any sort of commitment to them. You would be advised to do at least 50 qualities in
column 1 and then run it through the wringer…. Better now than later.
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Falling in love is the easy bit, staying in love is what you are committing to when you decide that, warts and all, they are the right one.
! The reason you commit to someone has as many variables as a donkey does fart. And some of those reasons stink about the same. Feeling good is the worst of them. Followed closely by a sense of obligation to not hurt their feelings. And, feeling like you add value to their life comes in a close third. All crazy notions of an infatuated heart. Romantic as hell, but emotionally disastrous.
! This part of the book is hard to write because I know, when I was 18 and met my wonderful wife, who eloped out her family bedroom window and ran away with me just a week after her 18th birthday, nothing on earth could have stopped us. And we eloped and committed to 13 years of marriage, three amazing children and a great journey. So, thank goodness I didn’t read this or write it then. However, this might have saved us the torture of the painful separation, when we realised that our original motivations might have been a little on the youthful side.
! There’s no right or wrong reason to commit to someone. However, what might be a good reason to be committed to a relationship at the beginning might need to evolve with time, otherwise the original motive might bring into question why you are still together, fighting and wrestling, 10 years later (or less).
! So, lets lay it out. First attractions can be chemical … appetite and desire… but this will evolve into mental, a sense of respect and adoration for the person and their values and life, and then it will evolve into “what do they do for me?” which means, are my highest values being met. And then, well the real glue starts to surface.
! The first phase, I call the “bonking phase” is where infatuation rules. Infatuation, being almost blind to any downside or negative in another person, causes “horniness” and
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therefore births babies. So, it seems the first attraction is the most common, a chemical reaction produced by the infatuation (bonking) phase which basically becomes blind to any negative qualities a partner might have. Friends and family are not so blind, but often too polite to point them out. So, be aware, that if you are intending to make babies together, do so while the infatuation rules. (I have worked with infertile couples and have simply reversed the slide back to infatuation to cause fertility - it works)
! The second phase is what I call “oh, shit” phase. This is when people start saying under their breath, “oh, shit” what have I done? It’s when cracks start to appear in the facade that person presented in order to make you infatuated. If they presented their whole self, you’d never get that hormonal rush, and you’d be neutral right at the start. A healthy place to be if you are not making babies or not wanting to extend the time before the “oh, shit” phase.
! I think what many people don’t appreciate is that the closer you get to this state of “oh, shit” the closer you are to real love. That’s the vast difference between the hormonal rush that we feel about the ideal of a relationship and the reality, the unromantic and romantic side of a relationship. Sometimes we even have to leave a relationship and become separate from somebody in order to love them.
! Provocation, that feeling of frustration you get with somebody while you are in a relationship does not come from the contrast between what is going on and love. It comes from the contrast between what you expect that person to do and what they are doing. So it’s a problem with your expectations rather than a problem with your love. You can change your expectations if you choose or change your relationship.
! Expectations block love. So it really comes down to this; if your ambition is to have love then change your expectations and hold that space sacred. If your ambition is to have a
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deeply sexual and romantic, hot and pulsating relationship, then hold your expectations fixed, enjoy the upside but don’t complain about the downside.
! You see the thing about expectations is they are a one-sided wish. For example you wish for happiness, but can there be happiness without sadness? Of course not. So you either hold the expectation fixed and embrace the opposite when it happens or you hold love fixed and vary your expectations so that either happiness or sadness doesn’t distract you.
! When you read the newspaper or look up the internet for online dating you will see a list of qualities people are looking for in their partner. The reason these people are finding it so difficult to find a relationship is because of their expectations. Most of those expectations have come about from unfinished bruising from the past. For example; a person who has been cheated on will write in their list of wishes for the new relationship “honesty” as an essential quality. That creates a hypersensitive expectation. There's no problem with that except for the fact that only half of their partner will be welcome. Everybody on earth has a dishonest side. If you argue with that you’re being dishonest.
! So, you have to ask yourself what are you making a commitment to. Are you are making a commitment based on your expectations and the hope that the person you are in a relationship with will meet those expectations, are you really making a commitment to love them or control them? They are two completely different things. One is an ambition for pleasure in a relationship, the other is the ambition for a loving relationship. They are completely different commitments.
! You don’t even have to go far to witness this difference. In the marriage ceremony it says “for better and worse, richer or poorer, sickness and in health” etc. What it means is a commitment to love. But really if you look into the eyes of the people who are getting married they are making a commitment in words only. The real commitment that is
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typical in a relationship is the commitment to joyful, happy, problem free, horny, positive expectations of the future.
! There is a Roman Catholic priest in Ballarat Victoria, or at least there was ten years ago, who used to ask every couple who came for pre-marriage preparation to write two columns describing their potential marriage partner. The first column listed everything they liked about them and the second column listed everything they disliked. He demanded around 100 in each column. Almost 50% of the people who came to him did not go through with the marriage. There were two benefits of this; the first was that children were not born to a horny couple who were not committed to the long-term process of love required to bring children to maturity. The second, was that he reduced the divorce rate and possibly gave those two people the chance to go and meet somebody that they weren’t necessarily infatuated with but were committed to in the true sense of the religious ceremony.
! In working with people over the last 35 years when it comes to long-term relationships people often celebrate the past and how good their life used to be when their relationship was younger. What happens is they made a commitment at a time when things were fantastic but they have no idea of how to get back to that state and then spend the rest of their lives struggling to recreate the joy and love that they felt when they first met and during the honeymoon period. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
! Falling in love does not have to be an accident. Getting infatuated, feeling horny, being romantic, renewing that incredible honeymoon passion does not have to be an accident nor dependent on these fragmented and clumsy experiences like Valentine’s Day.
! You can create this moment of natural perfection any time you choose.
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To become infatuated with somebody and therefore attracted, horny, fertile, virile and raise your libido all you need to do is take a sheet of paper and write two columns just like the priest. But in this case, you write more positives than negatives. The perfect ratio is 7 to 1. Seven positives to every one negative. That puts you into fight flight mode, “got to” mindset, primal and physical attraction. It’s in this mode of thinking that we make disastrous purchases and business decisions and we sometimes even commit to relationships. But it is a heightened state of attraction. Just make sure that your partner is in the same space because if you get infatuated and they are not, then they must, by the laws of nature, flip into resentment.
! The thing that most people don’t recognise is that the honeymoon period is where two people are synchronistically infatuated with each other. But if they get out of rhythm and one stays infatuated the other person goes to the balance point of resentment. During this broken synchronicity, life can be really complicated because there are, menstrual cycles, moon cycles, bicycles and tax cycles that can put one person into an unavailable mode. If you get infatuated and your partner is unavailable they must turn to resentment to balance you.
! You can also fall in love any time you choose. All you do is take the same two columns and turn them into four. You do what the priest suggested and write 50 positives and 50 negatives, then find the drawbacks of the positives and the benefits of the negatives. What this does is completely screws with your mind, your expectations, your judgements and your perceptions leaving your identity no place to go. When that happens your guard drops and the love that sits right behind your ego surfaces. This is what happens in movies, at birthdays, and special moments in your life where a tear comes to your eye unexpectedly. It is simply when your identity fell away and the love that sits hidden under the mask gets a chance to pop to the surface and you can do this any time you choose, it doesn't have to be an accident.
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To make a commitment means you’ve committed to either sustaining your expectations and living the emotional roller coaster of pleasure and pain or you’ve committed to love which means dealing with your identity, falling in love with your partner not by accident, not wishing for it to happen by itself, not dreaming about the past and the honeymoon period, but creating it right here and now in this moment.
! So you can become available for love anytime, anywhere. Over and over you can be available to fall in love with your beloved. Over and over you can experience this sacred moment if you are prepared to be open to it.
! When you commit to being open, you can truly fall back in love any time you choose. We go straight past the ego, past the intellect, and we fall back in love because there is no expectation, no resistance, no question, nothing to defend or protect.
! And this commitment is not just a facade. It’s not a commitment to falling in love and showing your partner that you love them so that they get comfortable. It’s a commitment to sitting in the office, driving in the car, going for a jog, doing whatever you are doing and falling in love. That other idea of only feeling love for your partner whenever you are with them is a tired and ridiculous notion based on the idea that people cannot feel what you feel when you’re not with them.
! There have been an untold number research studies done on the power of the human feeling. I’m not going to elaborate on this here. Children know when their parents are focused on them or not focused on them when the children are playing sport. That study was conclusive, where parents were asked to be distracted by mobile phones and conversations, while another group of parents were asked to be completely focused undistracted. The children were then asked whether the parents were watching them as they played sport and the children were 100% on target.
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It’s the same when you go out in business and get so busy that you stop thinking about or connecting with your partner they know it. When people have affairs their partner knows, they just don’t want to trust their intuition. When an employee at work is not engaged and in love with their work their boss knows. When a business person or an entrepreneur is not confident and committed to their product the investors know. The whole idea of dishonesty or disconnection is just because we are still at a primal level of understanding the human condition, but those of us who have studied spirituality in detail know that communication, non-verbal communication, has a far more powerful impact on the world than any other single human quality. Especially in relationships.
!
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A Conscious way to live You and your lover can become magnetised if you each have a purpose to share. With an individual purpose greater than the both of you, you will create a sense of shared purpose and then your love will be way higher than to be sacrificed defending menial emotions.
! Two people who are in a love centred relationship can grow enlightened from the challenges that come their way. Others might take those challenges personally, or see them as an affront to their expectations and run away, change partners and escape, because something upset them.
! A love commitment is not always a commitment to live together forever. It’s a commitment to love each other forever, but that’s not always under the same roof. Sometimes our destinies separate. Our purpose in life takes us on a route that’s not for both. Sometimes love stays but people grow apart. The commitment to love is also a commitment to a purpose greater than yourself. Sometimes that takes you places you could never plan for.
! It is a matter of priority. Maybe all this is irrelevant if you say “staying together is my priority in my relationship” but then you’ve committed to that as an expectation and that is a personal choice. You’ll be taking the best and the worst of that decision. Both can be managed. But don’t complain at the end of it that there were good times and bad. That’s what you’ve committed to.
! It’s simply a matter of what is the most important thing in your life. It is a choice. The only thing that can come between you and your honeymoon love, are the choices you make.
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Solving Problems in Relationships If you have committed to your expectations as the basis of your relationship, then you will have an untold number of options when challenges come up.
! You can do emotional therapy, emotional spirituality, emotional arguments, emotional conditioning, emotional holidays, emotional violence, emotional manipulation, emotional threats, emotional quarrels, emotional psychology, emotional books, emotional counselling… and the list is infinitely long. Ultimately you are looking for a process that changes the relationship so that your expectations can stay fixed and your relationship, partner and process can adapt to those expectations.
! Emotional engagement in a relationship is great. It’s high maintenance, super sexy, lots of excitement. It’s thousands of options including alcohol, food, holidays, new car, new house, new babies, new boobs, viagra, new clothes, new friends, new yoga classes, affairs, swinging parties, crossing over, and lots and lots of blame. The only way to maintain an emotional engagement in a relationship that is facing challenge is to hold those expectations rigid and blame the partner, or the therapist or parents or some incident for what’s going on.
! When love is the basis for a relationship, love is the solution to challenges. Love resolves emotional and personal issues that come to the surface in relationships. Love turns blame into growth, criticism into self awareness, heartbreak into self-realisation. Love is more than a commitment, it’s also the solution to challenge. Love means changing your expectations, which in a sense means changing your identity.
! Love humbles you. Our identity is what we present to the world. So, if love challenges that identity, it must, by consequence, humble us.
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If you don’t want to be humble, stay single, have affairs, be committed to your emotional expectations because humility is at the heart of love as a cure for challenge.
! Using love to solve problems helps you grow. This automatically means that the old notion of a couple being in a competition to see who knows more, does more, or who lives up to some moralistic ideal is trashed. A relationship in challenge is really painful and the old ways of two ungrateful people, self-indulging their identity, rejecting each other, unable to face reality, blaming each other is a hard road. That is what I call hell. You may be the greatest CEO on the planet, but in your relationship, if you bring that identity and your emotional expectations to the table, you will end up fighting all the time.
! A love based relationship will bring you out. It reveals you. It is not about your lover, it is all about you. Naked and stripped of all disguises, masks, work facades, titles, successes then your real feelings, emotions and issues will surface. Who you are with, really doesn’t matter, because you have to take responsibility for everything you feel. You have to rise above the temptation to blame, or love just stops completely. Blame and victim keep your identity in tact, hold your ego, win the competition but the loser is love. The real power is when you say, “I am the cause of all my issues in this relationship” because with that, you can find love. That is why relationship is sacred, you have no choice but to surrender. If you don’t surrender to love then the fights continue, the depression and frustration builds and this affects all the other six areas of your life. Owning the responsibility teaches you love, blame and victim makes you suffer.
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When you commit to love and a purpose greater than yourself in a relationship, you are exposed, it is weird and frightening, but it is beautiful. You will feel uncertain that you can be loved for all of who you are. You might even try closing down for a little safety, but then the relationship starts to be a war zone. You might try pretending, faking it, but it doesn’t work for long. A real relationship is spooky because you are trapped, your lover and your love are there, right before you, you are in the most special place on earth, struggling and totally exposed. Isn’t that something to look forward to!
! In a relationship you can try to hide from love. You could even compromise and stay in a loveless relationship - pretend your intuition doesn’t exist, that the inner voice is crazy, pretend that the outer voices are absolutely right, you can emotionally shut down, even as I did for a while, live two lives, you can fill the void with substitutes, and bring your children up wondering what love is.
! It’s even possible to focus on sex, children, work, wealth, health, spirituality, religion, friends, ex-lovers, practices, knowledge, art, meditation, yoga, self-absorption, appearance, fame, success, gratification, music, sport, or anything else to distract the focus of your life.
! But nature will not have it. Without love, your heart will shut, your body decay, and your emotions will surface (be revealed) one way or another. Before your days are done, you will get to know yourself, somehow, probably when you least expect it. But you will fall in love with someone and there will be no escape. Love is revealed to you, and you are awake. It’s a bummer really.
! Then the work will begin. Because falling in love is nature’s way. Maybe it’s on your deathbed you’ll say, “I love you” to that person you’ve been angry at, or hiding from. But love does reveal itself. Not as attraction, but as a real indication of the meaning behind the meaning of life.
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! Consciously, to stay in love, you must accept that you are the projector of love and your lover is the screen. You can change the screen but, eventually, it won’t make much difference. You are you, and you carry your projections, beliefs, emotions and therefore, your expectations with you. And you have the power, you can change what you think and how you think, you can change your expectations, maybe on your deathbed, hopefully long before it, and simply own the fact that you love one, you love many, and that’s the truth about that.
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Dealing With Fear! Ok, so we’ve arrived. You admit that you can fall in love, one thousand times a day, but you really feel beyond love, that this one person is in your stars to juggle and cuddle and share the journey with. You know your life purpose so you can hold your self respect while at the same time, enjoying the emotional dive into the experience of infatuation and sadly, the inevitable periods of resentment.
! Suddenly there is confusion, “What am I going to do?” It depends on how long the infatuation lasts and your confidence allows that feeling to last. Love happened when your mind was asleep, and then, after that moment of shock, it woke, got infatuated, and got involved. Now “What am I going to do?”
! All of a sudden you are shaken back to reality, that mechanism of your expectations takes charge again, that wanting, desiring mind is so accustomed to holding a fantasy about what your perfect partner will be like, it takes over again. Now you are comparing. Do they do this, how do they do that. Your defences start waking up, and you’re heading for the “oh, shit” phase before even a month has passed. Now what?
! Whether it takes a few moments, weeks or years, your expectations will try to find ways and excuses to think again, to project its hopes, desires, ambitions and unfinished business into the mix. Your expectations and memories will raise questions about trust, because it’s not trusting. Your expectations come from a self-centred space so it feels like you are totally in your rights to have them. They form a big chunk of your identity. “Oh, he’s so caring” or “oh, she’s so courageous.” Whatever reinforces the idea you’ve chosen right you express, not for any other reason than to try to shut that doubt, that nagging “Oh, shit” what have I done exposing myself to this person. Then, things go south.
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Maybe your strategy is to read a self-help empowerment for angry women book and then you start to say “I want this, I want that”. Or you read a poor man’s guide to love and you start to fantasise and compare how you dreamed the relationship would be and test your lover against that script.
! How many options are there? “I have my standards” says the identity “I don’t want you to be like xyz”. Then some self questioning comes up, “Is this the right time for me?” and then swings back to them: “Are you genuine?” Then memories flood forward, “Is this the same as before?” Then fear comes near “What if you are horrible?”
! Then you can get on a roll: Control - “What are you going to do tomorrow? Sympathy What if you leave me? Guilt spreading - “What if you leave me again?” Doubt “Are you the right one?” Alternatives “How could I do this again?” Strategies - “How can I change you?” Blame - “What is wrong with you?” Shame - “What will my friends think?” An Escape Route - “I will show you to my friends and family!” Uncertainty - “I hope it lasts…?” Fear - “What if…?” Withdrawal - “How can…?” Back to square one “Is this? “
! Your judgements and emotions can start to act like your lifeguard. Aggressively charging in to take control, and in doing so, kills the very essence of what the relationship was built on, by taking priority over love. You fell in love then spend the rest of the relationship trying to find it again through the fog of expectations and emotions.
! “I told you so” becomes the inner voice and the conventional relationship is born. The emotional upper hand thrusts its mighty mind into the mix and extinguishes the spark that made the whole thing happen, expectations kill love.
! The best way to deal with a panic attack episode is to welcome the chaos. Own it, don’t deny it. Some people think that if you deny it, then it goes away. It doesn’t.
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! The lower the consciousness in which we exist, the more emotional drama we have, so the better the opportunity we have to learn from relationships. But the lower the consciousness we have, the more desperately we hang on to our beliefs, judgments and accusations as the foundation of our life. So, although the opportunity is huge, the process is huge too. We need a way of shattering those perceptions, those expectations and whether we stay or go, it doesn’t matter, the key will be, we evolved to love before we left.
! We can run away from those awakenings; get another relationship, make more money, or drink more wine, but there can be no happiness when the those expectations block your love for someone. You carry that blockage to the next and the next and the next relationship, accumulating, and ultimately, sadly, being run by your expectations. When that happens, your body becomes your teacher.
! It’s better to “sh..t your pants” and face the depths of your stuff than to run and get sick. But either way, we learn love.
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Know Yourself Well Your beliefs and expectations, those things that block you from having a love centred relationship are just like clothes that cover your body. Your body is there, hidden in clothes, in the same way our love is there, hidden in your personality, beliefs, morality, experience, memory, hopes, desires. You can take off the clothes and there is your body. Naked. It’s easy because you clearly know what the clothes are and what your body is.
! In the same way you can take off your personality, beliefs, morality, experience, memory, hopes, desires anytime, and be in your truth in love. But if you do not know what the things covering your love are or how to distinguish them from your love, it is impossible to take them off. If you do not know how you are hidden in them, you might think that your personality and your expectations are real, and you spend your whole life developing, protecting and reinforcing your personality, beliefs, morality, experience, memory, hopes, desires thinking that this is actually working on you, your love.
! If you do not know that your personality, beliefs, morality, experience, memory, hopes, desires are only your interpretation of the world, you don’t know how to take them off. And therefore you never really get to know yourself well. You might even spend your whole life doing spiritual work and therapy in search of yourself but instead, simply creating more and better personality, beliefs, morality, experience, memory, hopes, desires. Sort of counterproductive don’t you think?
! And like our clothes, we put personality, beliefs, morality, experience, memory, hopes, desires on in layers. The outer layer is what we know of ourselves as our body; we identify ourselves with our body. We say, “my body is in pain, and therefore I am in pain” there is no separation between us and our body, if our body is happy, we are happy; In this level of identification, when our body is in pleasure, we say we are in love.
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After some time at this level, we will be capable of seeing that we are not simply “our body”, but also “our thoughts, feelings and imagination.” Then we are able to understand that we are not only our body, we are also our mind, “we are not only a physical body, we are also capable of thinking independently, of making choices, it is MY mind.” This realisation in its fullness makes us aware of a larger possibility, which allows the identification of body, mind and some sense of spirit. Then we say, “If I think I am in love, then I am in love”, which means love is having our expectations met. That’s another level of identification with love.
! Most people can’t even separate their body experience from love. They’ve been in the clothes for so long, for years of their lives, since childhood, so they have forgotten that they are in clothes; they have even become so identified with them, that they don't recognise them as clothes anymore. They think these personality, beliefs, morality, experience, memory, hopes, desires are their soul, and spend the whole of their energy rearranging their personality to be better, smarter, prettier, happier, wealthier, more spiritual. This is the barrier. They may even leave a relationship to keep their clothes on. Then the body and the mind love identification becomes real, and love becomes false. This is the hardening of expectations.
! So, if you can let the chaos of “of fear and anxiety” inside of you, then each piece you deal with is getting to love. You see a relationship as a journey of peeling away the layers. Cutting through the myths, the ideas, the intellect, and all the mind stuff that has accumulated. This unraveling is not for the faint hearted. It’s a process. The more the expectations, personality, beliefs, morality, experience, memory, hopes, desires, are developed, the more it justifies sustaining itself by making everyone else, who doesn’t agree with it, wrong. It rejects all the information necessary to peel it away.
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We need to be able to change our “clothes” for different situations. It is easy, but you might find it hard. Many people find it hard to change their emotions. They have come to know themselves by what they think, how they feel, what they do.
! But consider this: the emotions and mind stuff necessary for work success is different to the mind stuff and emotions necessary for relationship success, which in turn is different from the mind stuff necessary for health success and self-discipline. If you go to work and say “I don’t feel like doing that” then you’ll be a nuisance in a team, but in a relationship, it might be a wonderful opportunity to explore another option in bed.
! The process of stripping away the identity’s grip on your mind is worth everything. The mind/emotions can do a lot of things, it can take you from your childhood to your old age, and help you create the life you want, but the mind and emotions cannot love. All the emotion in the world does not make love happen, and all the love in the world does not make romance happen. If you added up all your hopes, dreams, expectations, issues, and desires and made them all come true, you would not have that one single moment in which you fell in love. Love and emotion compete.
! If you confuse feel good emotion and your love, you are going to sabotage your relationship, because there will be nothing to keep the flavour in. It will all be mixed up in that middle ground between total love and total egotistic emotional expectations.
! When you understand the difference between emotion and love, and then prioritise love, you will have found the key, the secret, to dealing with chaos. Chaos is just a sign to tell you where love is blocked. It’s like having your own private life coach right there on your shoulder. Telling you when you are being you and when you’ve lost the plot and have got your pyjamas on backward and then you can act before the natural law of whatever you judge, you breed, attract or become takes over the space.
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Helicopter Views What holds true in Nature, must by inference, hold true everywhere. Your relationship is the most honest and beautiful expression of nature. Are there storms in nature? Are there earthquakes? Are there seasons? Are there perfect calm days? Are there balmy nights? Then, if these and more exist in nature, expect them to exist in your relationship.
! The Universal Laws are a huge and magnificent perspective on life. To understand nature’s perspective on life, we sit on the moon (or up in a helicopter) and look back at life. Up here, it’s easy to be impressed at the beauty of life. You are objective, nothing affects you. We can no longer hold onto the emotions of good or bad, right or wrong.
! Up here, your footy team is fun to watch, it doesn’t really matter from way out here. It’s more fun, less engaged. Up here in the helicopter it gives you the opportunity to take a step back, and hopefully, by seeing the balance, create a balanced perspective, and let your heart talk.
! This helicopter view doesn’t make you right. No, it’s the opposite. A helicopter view makes you right and wrong. That’s what it means, You see both sides rather than the one sided, right or wrong, emotional perspective.
! Then, as you descend back toward earth, emotions rise. Your perspective shifts from a global one to a local one. Back into your emotions, you land, feet back on the earth. Hopefully bringing the wisdom of the balanced viewpoint back and allowing yourself to engage with people emotionally, without getting righteous or caught up in the whirl and spin.
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Surrendering This is nature’s model of a relationship. The two circles represent two people. The circles are their lives and in those circles there are seven areas of life. In this relationship the overlap represents common dreams, passions and a commitment to a future destiny.
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! You can see that only 33% of these two people overlap. The rest is independent.
! That’s a shock to some people. They think relationship means to make one person out of two. They start overlapping all seven areas of life which, at the end of the day, turns out to be smothering and boring. The other amazing revelation about this diagram is that you can choose which areas of your life you throw into the mix.
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One couple came to me complaining that their love life was in tatters. Now given that nothing is ever missing in nature I had to ask them what they talked about and what they did when they were together. The answer was very revealing; they were doing a renovation on the house and that’s all they talked about. The only time they were intimate and sexual was when they went to bed, exhausted at night. In another example of a couple who had the same problem I asked what filled their time: when he came home from work he spent most of the time complaining about how tough life was and what was going on in the office while she retaliated with her version of her day and what was going on in her life. There are seven areas of life and if we decide to fill our relationship with our money talk then something must go. If you want to have a really beautiful loving relationship then fill the time you have together with conversations about relationship, higher values and things that are important, emotionally and spiritually to you both.
! So it’s important to learn to be alone, alone from all influences, all compulsions, demands, longings and hopes, and alone from your relationship. If you are lonely you are likely by a factor of 10:1 to blow your relationship because you will become dependent on it for companionship in all areas of life. Ultimately a relationship doesn’t save you from yourself. 66.676666% of your existence is separate.
! The mother with newborn child must find time to be alone to regain her self consciousness; a business person must be still in order to compose and generate inspiration, rather than be in reaction; the sick, and those in pain, must learn the skill of aloneness to direct it into the stimulation of willpower. This does not mean “doing” yoga or meditation or something similar. It means doing nothing. Dead stillness.
! Busy people are running from, not to something. They stay busy in order to avoid stillness because sometimes in that stillness we don’t like our own company, and there is no one to blame.
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The key is to find the beauty in everything that has happened to you, identify the blessing in every situation. Seek the gift that was created in the event you are attached to, and you will grow. Once you expand beyond the narrow definition of yourself as a one sided being, and learn what it is like to say, “There is nothing about me I need to change”, you find the beauty of your life and that of others. Then doing nothing, being alone will not be a time to think, it will be connected to something bigger than your feelings and ego. From there you will forget the expectations that kill love, and will be free to move into work and a relationship with your true nature.
! Another wonderful demonstration of the ease at which people can find this connection, is in the experience of pure beauty. Three times a year I take students to the most beautiful place on earth, the Sacred Lakes of Gokyo, Nepal. Local Tibetans and Sherpa people treat those seven sacred lakes high in the Nepalese Himalayas with great reverence. My groups walk to the edge of those lakes as we trek into the village for the first time, and just stop in shock. They take a few photos, but then, stop. They sit on a rock, by the edge of the aqua blue water, surrounded by the highest mountains in the world, and they stop. They stop thinking, talking, photographing, and even burping (which is the real miracle), and they fall in love.
! All that was hidden below the emotion and ego has surfaced, and they are just overwhelmed with what was already within them at the bottom of the hills, but couldn’t penetrate the emotion. Here, filled with awareness of what is already within them, people become silent. A new experience of “being” comes over a person. They don’t even feel tired, they are smiling, sometimes they can’t even take a photo. Why, because for possibly the first time in their lives they have fallen in love without the immediate intrusion of emotion. Identity up here is useless, and often too tired to fight back. Love sits and waits for you to let it past all the emotion, the judgments, the expectations and attachments. The beautiful thing about it is that you can find that same loving experience here at sea level in the real world.
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! You don’t need to trek all the way to Nepal with me to learn this, nor sit in Zen for years. You can have it playing with the kids, reading a great book.
! The key here is to own your individuality and self-reliance even while in a relationship.
! This means to know your values, to have a vision in all seven areas of life, to know your purpose and to have the self-respect to spend time alone, thankful and happy, content daily. From this separation the freedom to celebrate the unity in a relationship is possible.
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Don’t Blame The Dingo
! Live your dreams, Do what you love. Be the person worthy of a loving relationship. Welcome every morning with enthusiasm for life. Look at today as a gift, a special gift from your Creator, an opportunity to celebrate love with your beloved, to do the work you love, to be in a world of love. Design your day (the night before,) to make it a day of love. Be a self-starter, start the day with love. Let your first hour be your hour to set the theme of inspired living and thoughts merged with action that will echo through your entire day. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Don't waste it with a false start or no start at all, or a hangover from yesterday. Wake to inspired living. Nature is with you and therefore the whole universe wants your day to be magnificent. Live it.
! ! On one of my many weird and expensive adventures on the path of personal exploration, I decided to traverse a 30-day section of the Himalayas, in Nepal. A friend of mine was famous for her journeys into Tibet and Nepal, I idolised her achievements, and could see myself doing the same. You know the thoughts, “I can do that, it looks really easy”.
! About four hours into this 30-day expedition, and after 6 months arduous preparation, I stopped in my tracks, sat down on my pack and began to cry. After months of training, thousands of dollars invested, getting all pumped up, promoting and chest thumping, I stopped, took off my pack and went into a tailspin. What the hell was I doing out here trying to be somebody else, living someone else’s dream?
! What became apparent was that I had outlived my own dreams. As a child in fairly humble circumstances, we dreamed of food on the table, a non-violent home, a good steady job and a loving family. It was now thirty years later, and the dreams, all of them, I
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had achieved and lived. I was lost, I was living other people’s dreams because I had achieved all my own.
! That day comes to everyone and when it does we usually become so infatuated with a relationship we’ll do anything to get one, or not let go of one that’s finished.
! Our relationships cop a lot of the blame for our blocked dreams, so I have included the topic of dreams in this book as a pre-requisite of a great relationship.
! So, I wasn’t in Nepal because my relationship had failed. I was in Nepal because my vision and dreams had expired, which caused my relationship to expire.
! I believe that there is nothing more influential on a person’s relationship than the authenticity of their dreams. And the authenticity of their dreams is the single greatest determinant of the length of time their relationship lasts. Dreams bind us in love. Not only material dreams, having a family, a new car or a fancy boat, but spiritual life purpose dreams, dreams of building an orphanage, a homeless shelter, a commitment to helping human rights where they are not found.
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When is it Time to Move on
! Sometimes in a relationship, you feel love, you feel attracted, you prepare for relationship and get yourself totally involved, then, all of a sudden, you realise you are living a lie.
! You realise that the person you are with expects certain things from their life, and you are not the one for it. Or, more commonly, you realise that your dreams, your real dreams, cannot be lived in that relationship.
! Then you have to make the choice. You either stay and compromise your dreams and inspirations, which means live at the bottom of the world or you admit it, try to work out how you can change it, and if not, move on.
! Incompatibility of dreams is the one, and probably only reason, to walk away from the one you love.
This happened to me once. I really fell in love with a beautiful woman, but our lives were so incompatible we couldn’t live our destiny together. We made all sorts of plans as to how to shift things around so we could have the dreams we wanted, live on purpose, but also have the priority of our love honoured. But it was all too much of a compromise for us both. So with love we moved on.
! When you don’t live your dreams you are operating in desperation, and that will put a lot of pressure on your relationship. Two people need to be willing to make each others dreams come true.
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That is why it is so important to make sure you and your lover are not bouncing out of a “last” relationship and into this one. All those old issues and unfinished business will drag your dreams down, and your relationship.
! Dreams are the glue that hold lovers together. They are the stepping stones to purpose. After the infatuation phase is over and the “oh, shit” is dealt with, then true love emerges and it is shared dreams that bind lovers in a journey. It is the uniqueness of those dreams that makes the diverse combinations of people possible. The more long-term they are the better.
! The more your relationship helps you live your dreams, the more you’ll value it. In other words, we can meet anyone, anywhere, and form a relationship with them. The question will always be, how long will it last, and how magnetised will you both be to each other. The answer lies in the fulfilment of dreams.
! “In nature – everything has a purpose. Nature destroys anything that is not fulfilling its purpose, including your relationship. “
! If we do not have a long-term vision, life gravitates to low priorities. When we work on low priorities, we attract catastrophes, disasters, and humbling circumstances. High priorities are those activities you can link to your vision. Your vision in turn must link to your purpose. So, a person with a long-term vision is living in the higher levels of consciousness, and can have a love based relationship. The person with short-term vision, which is really body pleasure or pain relief, has a relationship that will struggle with honesty and emotion.
! In your relationship, take the time to identify your dreams of the future. Sit down together and discuss them, make sure that you see each other’s role in helping fulfil that dream.
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A Home filled with Love We put our energy into everything we do. The environment in which you share your love life is one of the most important places to begin to acknowledge, that love is a priority.
! Your home can celebrate love to such a degree that it keeps a relationship together during difficult challenges.
! Designing your home to include the essence of romance is a vital part of creating sacred love in your home. The environment a person lives in affects their mind, their health, and their heart more than anything else in their life. An evolved individual, living amongst thieves, will eventually take on some of their energy. So our space is a vital step in creating sacred love. Here are some suggestions to improve your loving space.
! Be in your element Create zones in your home where work, television, cooking and sleep are separated from intimacy and romance. Have a parents only area, or put the television in a television room, not the family room, so that you, your love, and children if there are any, can sit together without the television entertaining you (distracting you).
! Things have a voice Be mindful of the energy carried by objects. I have seen stolen property, dead peoples ashes, old furniture that carries the suffering of an old relative, and paintings of torture placed in areas where love was meant to thrive. Antiques are wonderful, and some, even the cheap ones, carry such a wonderful charm. But if your love changes after the purchase of a object in your home, or a new painting on the wall, be aware of the fact that those Page
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objects can carry very bad energy. In our busy lives, we don’t take a lot of care about the energy carried by things. We can go out, buy something, and put it in our home without a second thought as to what energy it carries with it. However, we maybe highly affected by that energy. Everything has a story bigger than its functionality, which means things bring a certain feeling with them.
Love thrives where beauty is revealed. The whole science of romance begins with the environment you create. Each of us will see the qualities of this environment differently. Sometimes, we need to consider this very carefully because when two people of different elements are living in one home, one of them can be deprived of the space in which their heart and soul can feel at home. A water person will feel completely unromantic and not comfortable in the home of a fire person. Compromise is not possible. Romance is the water element. Which means that even if you are an etheric person who likes the cold clean lines of glass and concrete, your romance area needs to be soft and cushioned. Try to care for this romance area by keeping it lovingly. Be mindful about walking in there with shoes that have trampled the streets with all the muck. Be conscious of the preciousness of the environment, and you will be conscious of the preciousness of your love.
! Thought travels through walls where no words can pass Beware of people who carry with them worry, anger, and violence in allowing them to spread their feelings in your home. This home is sacred, and in spite of the fact that our homes are open to others, there are some people who wish you both harm. Often they are relatives you feel obligated to, but these meetings are best held in public places if they are not a fan.
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Nothing affects the mind more than the environment in which it rests Be conscious of the affect of dark news, violent television, aggressive music, and bad attitudes on the space you have created for love. I have seen some self indulged people storm through other peoples offices or homes, leaving a trail of the darkest energy behind them. They don’t care about anything other than their right to express their wrath, and certainly have no regard for the impact of it.
! Consider carefully the energy of gifts. I met with a lady to do a consult and she was smothered in expensive jewellery. She had broken up with her husband some 2 years before. I asked about all this jewellery and she informed me that her ex-husband kept on giving it all to her as gifts. Then she went on to say how nasty, mean and awful this man was, and that he wouldn’t leave her alone. The jewellery was his way of stamping his signature on every moment of her life. In a new relationship, discard the stamps of the past relationships. Free your energy and romance for newness. It is like putting fresh water in the vase for the same flowers.
! Speak the truth of love in your home Be mindful of how you speak. Words carry with them a whole other meaning. Words sit in walls, in cushions, on ceilings. A home of an angry person feels angry long after their death. The clothing of a depressed individual carries that feeling. That is why one must be so careful buying second hand goods. A cheating sales person, not only affects their own life by their theft, but the goods they sold are tainted. Your words are an opportunity to freshen up you home. Cut out talk of gossip, bad mouthing, or negative ideas of doing harm to others. Make your home a sanctuary for romantic and loving thought. Beware of
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those you speak to on the phone who would curse and negate you, they will bruise your home and your heart.
! What you think about you bring about. Books are affirmations. On the spine of every book is a message. That book speaks to your subconscious. If you have recovered from alcoholism, then, after you are done, pass the book on. Books on healing keep you healing. Surround yourself with great books, whose spine is a testimonial to the aspiration you have in life. One man I worked with read a biography every week. His main living area had the names of every great leader he respected stamped on the spine of that book. Be assured, books and their titles drive a story directly past your conscious brain, and straight into your heart. That is why my books have simple titles. They are actually working to manifest in your subconscious brain, without even reading the content.
! The soul speaks in pictures Photographs affect a home. Do you see in a guru, more than you see in your lovers eyes. Do you revere some statue more than the silk skin of your lovers inner arm? Instead of worshipping icons of some far off religion or faith, spend the few dollars to have a picture of your lover, your dreams, on the walls of your home. The soul speaks in pictures. Pictures of children reinforce children’s awareness of your love. But this should never over ride or supersede the picture of your beloved lover. Photographs of relatives, parents and friends also have a place, but none should crowd the space of love and intimacy, they are good decoration for the TV room.
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Insist on respect for the sacredness of your home. There are those who would place food on your pillow and care nothing of it. There are those who would put their feet on your photograph. There are those whose children would run out of control in your temple. You have the right to ask for and receive respect for the sacredness of your space. This is defending your territory. One lady I consulted to would receive phone calls anywhere in her home, from people of all manner of negativity. She didn’t know how to protect herself, or her home, from the intrusion of negative feelings, and as a result, could not rest in her own home.
Value the gifts of ceremony. I believe in ceremony as a vital ingredient for a loving relationship. I believe in the value of mindfulness. However, I am not a big believer in big ceremonies, mine are small everyday events. Like taking your day shoes off before entering a home. Like placing things on tables rather than throwing them. Like creating rituals around cleanliness and mindfulness around where the towel goes after a shower. Like bathing before bed, and considering others when it comes to your smelly socks. I believe in the ritual of lighting a candle for dinner time, and turning off the television while we eat. I believe in the ceremony of picking things up, and not doing two things at once. These little ceremonies are just some ideas about how you can create love in your space and it’s not just for your partner, it’s for visitors and children too. Respect is a valuable spiritual, love based, quality and it does begin with our hygiene and environment.
Create an alter in your home. In Asia, there are very few homes that do not have an alter. A place of prayer where memories of those past, tokens of love, respect for higher powers are placed. Those alters can be a simple box covered with cloth, or, in the case of some I have seen, marble covered rooms with golden statues monitored and maintained by a priest full time. It matters not what the alter cost, it matters what it means and how much respect and
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devotion is given to its tidiness, maintenance and care. My alter is often a small leaf I collected from the garden on my way into my home.
Your bed is a sacred space, treasure the privacy of it. When I stay in a friends home, and sleep in a spare bed, I can tell you a lot about the person who slept there before me. In hotels this is a disgusting reality, that people can sleep in your bed, one after the other, and you are next. Their hygiene, their thoughts, and their suffering (on the negative side) can infect that bed and that room, and invade your sleep. When you change your relationship, change your bed. Always keep linen fresh, it is a mark of the deepest self respect. Your head is best facing East at night.
Watch out for ghosts In Sydney, at the Quarantine station in Manly, it is the most perfect retreat centre, overlooking the whole vista of Sydney Harbour, probably the best view in Sydney. But Aboriginal people will not go there, and anyone who does, spends the whole night in fear. I ran some retreats there and didn’t tell people about those “ghosts”, but in the morning nobody had slept a wink. It was so spooky. In New York, where the World Trade centre collapsed, there is grief in that place. It is a very unwise location to build a building now. You can become very aware of the energy left behind in your house, or the energy that comes from your neighbours.
Food carries with it, the energy of the cook. If a couple is arguing while one of them cooks a meal, anyone who eats that meal will experience the thoughts and feelings of the cook in the food prepared for them. How a meal turns out is not only about the level of skill the cook possesses, or the ingredients, but also what they were experiencing and thinking when they prepared and made it. If the cook’s mood was irritated, grumbling, or depressed, the final state of the food will express this lack of presence and loving preparation.
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! Nutrition. I once stayed on a fly through visit with my cousin who lived in Perth, Australia. He was a night shift mortician, with a wagon in the driveway, ready to go out and collect people who died. He was the funniest man, but drank a lot; I think it was to deal with the job. We went for pizza one night and took the wagon. One the way home, pizza on my lap, I asked him why there was so much rattling in the back. He informed me that there was a dead person in there, because he usually waited for a couple of people before he took them to the morgue. To say the least, I didn’t eat the pizza.
Draw the line between work and home. In one home I visited there was so little respect for the energy of love in the relationship that the husband would walk in the door talking on the mobile phone even though he was already late home for dinner. Unable to greet his waiting family, he’d wave to them, point to the phone as if it were some sort of God, go straight upstairs, change out of his business suit, come down stairs, and still on the phone, sit down to begin his meal. Before he arrived, the whole family was at peace and enjoying their evening under the loving care of the mother. Then, when he and whoever he was talking to came in the door, the whole home changed.
Be discerning about home help. The people who help you maintain your home also have energy that can affect the loving space in which you live. Someone who irons your shirt and is filled with hate, affects you. A person who cleans the home with scant regard for the affect of their energy is polluting the home. Like someone in an office who is unable to affect their mood, and who chooses to poison others with their aggression. One lady I consulted to bought her mother along who was very ill into her home, helped her mother, and absolutely ruined her relationship. Page
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Silence and a time of just being is a wonderful gift to any family. In a home that values love, a daily half hour of sitting quietly would be highly beneficial. Intimacy and love cannot survive in a home where stimulation is continuously produced. In fact, that’s how people deliberately avoid intimacy. This idea can be difficult with kids, because it requires parental discipline, television going off, computer games shut down, game boys off, phone off the hook, mobile phones disconnected, the CD player silenced, the dog shut out, and no food to distract. So, maybe a hybrid is possible, a compromised version.
People become as you treat them. In your home, banish criticism. Always search for ways to improve, to compliment, to see the bright side. Try in your home, to be a centre of goodness in the world. No matter what, in your home, defend your loved one and your children from the judgments of others. Defend your lover from friends who would condemn them. Speak only goodness about the world. Do not become trapped in the victim mindset. Remember, if we call a simple person wise, in time, they will become wiser. If we treat a person with romance, then they become romantic. A child who makes mistakes and is encouraged to keep trying, affirmed for small victories, learns to take risks and set high goals. A partner who always hears complaints will eventually lose their libido. The words we speak become the truth we live, we must be very, very mindful in our home.
Save the last dance for me. Romance is revealed in your energy. If you walk in the door of your home and you are exhausted from everything you do outside your relationship, then what chance is there for vitality and love? Now we need to be real. In the first months of your relationship, you’d save energy because you wanted to make an impression, be good, and alive. Don’t let that commitment dwindle to complacency.
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Begin each day with Love Begin each day with your inner work — early is best — and with this to support you, as you move through the day, you will meet each opportunity that presents itself from your own centre. Then you establish and dance with a sense of joy, vitality and enthusiasm for life. With this in place, no activities are work any more, they are an act of love, and you find yourself tireless in it because you have all the energy you require for anything. It is a question of where you begin, and of what you understand your real work to be. Try to start out with an intense love of life, then go wherever that love takes you, and do whatever you are called upon to do from there.
! Many people go out into life and then meet with the numerous contracted energies and complexities that could obstruct their efforts. Only struggle ensures that they begin to think about their spiritual practice as something to attend to once all the “important “ things have been taken care of. Not surprisingly, the person often feels too tired and abandons the idea of developing a spiritual practice altogether.
Be rid of stress
! If you are stressed and hyper a lot of the time, there is really no possibility to open your heart to love. It’s hit or miss, a moving target, if you are rushing around trying to please people, nervous and worried about everything. You cannot be loved, you can only be mothered.
! Maybe this running around is deliberate, a good excuse to avoid the unwelcome and unresolved pain. But all pain is only blocked love. There is no pain that love cannot overcome. You can love them, and yourself again. This is the magnificence of love.
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Most stress is self-induced reaction, and all sustained stress is self-induced reaction. Your love cannot live in a stressful home. Your heart cannot hold love if your mind is stressed. So it is up to you to change this circumstance. Staying stressed is like waiting for the world to change by asking for the world to be covered in leather, instead of wearing sandals. You can make changes to your way of thinking. Love is everywhere, its natural, all else is the ego. In love there is health, youthfulness and spirited living. In the ego, there is pleasure and pain in equal balance.
! We have this opportunity to choose many times each day. We can make the effort to be open and to live with a genuine love and respect for ourselves and for others; we can choose to see all our inner effort as an investment in the quality of our outer life. We can choose love or we can let ourselves be consumed by doubts, fears, judgments, anger, worries and insecurities. You have to choose your outcome carefully. Instead of being consumed by tension you can open yourself, feel the flow of energy pass through you, and grow as a result. Then you become free, free of all the biological, psychological, and emotional restrictions that endlessly limit human beings to an unfortunately stupid and harsh existence.
! When you listen to your heart you have wisdom. This wisdom will allow you the silence to observe others and appreciate their needs.
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To live without stress is not just meditating, although this can release tensions and reactions. It is really about becoming aware of the essence of your own life, and beginning to live from that essence, whether you’re walking, riding the subways, working in your job, or something else. True, honest, heartfelt living is being aware of your heart’s essence at all times. Whether you’re sitting still or moving around, it is there. You wont need a special place or environment in order to feel centred and happy, your whole life itself an act of true love.
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Learn to rest
! To have a full and generous relationship, you must learn how to rest. As a matter of fact, few people know anything about rest. It is a very valuable art. There are those whose sleep is good, but it is not restful, they wake up tired. Real rest evolves from a state of peace and oneness. It cannot happen without freedom from care and a receptive attitude toward life.
! To receive love and affection, (which is more than the mothering of a nervous wreck), you’ll need to be able to rest and relax. To be bubbling with nerves and tension the whole time will give no home for your love to settle, no intimacy.|
Don’t worry about worry Try to keep your mind healthy. Worry is terrible for a romance. There are some people who cannot control their inner thinking, who have excess inner dialogue, worry excessively. In my experience, no sooner do they have the solution figured out to one problem than the next worry is upon them. They affirm some form of necessity to have disturbance in their lives. They thrive on the negativity and hardship of their life and no matter what their ambition, cannot rise above such negative thoughts to go deeper in life than the surface. It is akin to an actor who cannot separate the stage from real life. These worriers, through their own thinking, manifest the demise of everything they achieve.
! We don’t have to sabotage what we have in order to grow. Only by appreciation for what we have, do we get to keep it. Worry is delusional. Insomnia is its friend. Mindfulness can cure them both.
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Override fear We are all afraid, so there is always fear. But if you fear your partner doing something, like having an affair, then you are almost guaranteeing it will happen. Fear acts like a force going in circles. We fear loss, we fear gain, we fear the unknown, but most of all, we fear change. Every ego has a natural resistance to change. We know where we are; we don’t know what might become, or what might become of us. Fear lies at the bottom of so much of our behaviour. If you think like this you are going to wrap nets around yourself.
! Fear acts as a centripetal force, drawing you back into the same patterns for which you have been programmed by much of your upbringing and experiences. It draws you into the same orbit the same old patterns of eating and anger and violence.
! You have to override it. You have to make a conscious determined effort within yourself to override that programming. This is usually quite simple. You just have to deeply want to grow. To destroy the old ego movies and create new ones, bigger reasons, bigger outcomes, less personal investment and more service for others.
! There is no way on earth that you can have a stressful, negative, worried life, and in that time create a harmonious relationship. If we worry, complain, grumble, and are continually upset and angry, we manifest a relationship of disharmony.
! Resist coping mechanisms
! Downers arrive. During protracted downers, or when we are not loving, we react and want to change everything. Our ego takes hold and we typically increase our Page
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consumption of alcohol, drugs, foods and smoking. We can even become more greedy, ambitious and addicted to people. These are coping mechanisms, and we are wise not to let them take over, they are reactions to a temporary situation.
! There was a young girl in Canada, and she tried to commit suicide. I worked with her for a few hours, just after she had tried to hang herself. She was badly burned around the neck from the hanging rope, which broke. I asked her why she tried to end her life and she screamed, “I am a bitch, I am a bitch” and I said, “I know”. She was so shocked she was really ready to attack me. I continued, “So is Madonna, Mother Teresa, Princess Di. You name a great woman and I’ll find the bitch. They use that skill to do what they love. Madonna to shake the world up, Mother Teresa to get funds for children, Princess Di to stop the land mines. Bitch can be loved”. She was smiling in seconds. She nearly died because righteous people condemned her beautiful magnificent innocence. She was an amazing and spirited woman, and because she couldn’t cut out what is natural, she nearly died.
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Romantic Lifestyles Romance is appreciation. What you appreciate grows. Sustainable romance is an honouring, an attitude of admiration. Romance is gratitude. The most romantic person is one who appreciates their partner most. To be romantic you don’t have to buy gifts all the time, most of it comes from your attitude. Romance means you are open, on another plane altogether, and therefore beyond the need for provocation.
! Many people wait for a special occasion to be romantic because it involves serious time and money. This really misses the point because romance is the daily ritual, in everything that takes place, to reflect your love, an attitude of gratitude. If the ego is engaged in a relationship, there will be bright eyes and smile, but if there is no romance it’s like having an enemy against you. Romance is an attitude, a prioritisation, living walking, talking proof that when you say, “I love you” there is emotion behind it.
! Below is a letter written by Anais Nin, someone who truly understood the erotic art of romance. This letter was written to a client who paid her and her partner to write erotic stories for him. She wrote it after receiving a note from him asking her to “cut the poetry and concentrate on the sex” in their stories. In the letter, Nin masterfully defends the essential beauty of romance in the art of love, and emotional desire, the essence of eroticism. I quote
! “Dear Collector:
! We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession.
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It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust whims caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.
! You do no know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising texture, its subtle transformation, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining it’s blood.
! If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, intervention, mood, there are no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.
! How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of discrete and never repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry: Cut the poetry! No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gestures, for a
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lover, when he is aroused by true love, can the gamut of centuries of love lore, What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence. Perversity and art.
! We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses around silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must by now be completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries, into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.”
! When you appreciate your partner, they feel it. In fact, the word appreciation means to make bigger or expand, and romance is exactly that, making someone feel special, better, bigger than they felt before you walked into the room.
! “Don't try to change what people are. Rather develop what they have. Our worst fault is our preoccupation with the fault of others". If you want to get the best out of someone, you must look for the best that is in them. People can only use their strengths to excel, not their limitations.” Kahli Gibran
! Try to make romance a way of life. Try and remember what you did to seduce your lover’s ego before they committed to you, and make that the benchmark for how you treat them now. Making life a seduction is fun, a conscious and beautiful discipline to maintain with your lover. The value of romance, appreciating the small things, showing gratitude cannot be under stated. This is where the ego engages in a healthy way and relaxes enough to allow you to rise to higher levels of communication with your partner.
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Have you ever noticed that after you’ve shown a little love to someone, a heat wave of contentment pervades your entire being? Have you realised that the most profound moments of contentment are those that come in the moments when you give appreciation, unconditionally?
! When you appreciate people, when you simply smile at a stranger in the street, do you recognise that breeze of peace that flows over you? When you help someone up who has stumbled, do you feel that contentment pervading your heart? When you present a flower to someone who is sick, or who is in need, do you feel a sense of warmth well up inside of you? Giving appreciation, not because it was your duty or obligation, or because that man is your father (or a complete stranger), is a gift, and this feeling of warmth is a great reward. Giving without condition or reason, this is true love, an attitude of your nature, the individuality of you, and it is not limited to events, it is a way of life.
! Today, celebrate your love for your lover. Treat them more importantly than yourself. Have the courage to surprise them, gift them, tantalise them, make love for them so they feel like they went to heaven, honour them, surrender to them, value them and treasure them. Do it without fear of failure, or fear of rejection, or fear of being hurt. Do it today like there is no tomorrow, because in love, there is no tomorrow.
! Small gifts, all they need to do is put a smile in your lover’s heart. When we are mindful of the harmony of our thinking, and therefore our gifts, we can then watch our love become a thousand times greater in effect and value. A gift given with anger and resentment will breed that downward force wherever it travels. A gift given with the deepest love is unconditional, so what our partner does with it, is not important, it is the energy we sent or gave that is the power of it.
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All of life is a miracle. The order of nature, the revolution of a hundred million words around a million of suns, the activity of light, the life of animals, all are grand and perpetual miracles. Voltaire
! Leave notes, write emails, SMS like there is no tomorrow. When we write a love letter or email the truth is conveyed between the lines. Words written with loving thoughts behind them will have a far greater effect than a thousand pages of well-written, grammatically correct, literature. Have you ever “heard” a letter speaking? It is not simply what is written on the paper. You can decipher the mood the sender was in, their happiness or resentment, their joy and their sorrow. A letter carries the vibration of thought and feeling, as do all forms of communication.
! Your last thoughts before you sleep manifest in your reality. Whatever occupies the subconscious mind as you enter sleep will be manifest in the earth plane in the day. An intense focus of thought in the last waking moments becomes a prayer. Such thinking is always fruitful. All genuine prayer must be born in the subconscious, in the heart with feeling and depth. Just as you are falling asleep, you list all you have to be thankful for. This is the simple, natural key to romance. Remember not to go to sleep in the midst of an argument, resolve it always before sleep. The cost of an argument that extends into the night can multiply the problems ten fold. The last words before you fall asleep each night are best to be “thank you”.
! Your last thoughts before you sleep manifest in your reality. Whatever occupies the subconscious mind as you enter sleep will be manifest in the earth plane in the day. An intense focus of thought in the last waking moments becomes a prayer. Such thinking is always fruitful. All genuine prayer must be born in the subconscious, in the heart with feeling and depth. Just as you are falling asleep, you list all you have to be thankful for. This is the simple, natural key to romance. Remember not to go to sleep in the midst of
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an argument, resolve it always before sleep. The cost of an argument that extends into the night can multiply the problems ten fold.
! The last words before you fall asleep each night are best to be “thank you”.
! One area of rest that is vitally important, and very easy to achieve, is during sleep. Sleep is so important, not the length so much as the quality of it. You need to value sleep more in a relationship than out of one. In order to enter the deeper levels of rest during sleep, never read or watch TV in bed; use the bed for sleep and loving only. When you go to bed, first darken the room, lie flat on your back with your hands down by either side without touching your body, legs extended about a foot apart, head resting on a small pillow. Keep your eyes open at first, focusing on a point straight ahead of you on the ceiling (because it’s dark, just imagine it). Gently slow your thoughts and allow your eyes to close. Avoid any interruptions and allow all muscles to completely relax. Sleep on your back the whole night if possible.
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Keeping Your Heart Open and Your Mind Free We speak of the heart as if it were a spongy weak mushy place that opens at movies, dribbles that tear down your cheek at the worst of moments, and makes us so vulnerable. And so it might. But the heart is, without doubt, the most powerful human centre that can exist. All humanitarian power comes from the human heart - all compassion, motivation, consideration and inspired leadership. This is the experience we have in the presence of a powerful individual, a leader, performer or lover. An open heart is the greatest power any human can contain within their body. It is the true meeting place of heaven and earth. The symbol of the crucifixion, a vertical line reaching to heaven, the vertical line below going to earth, and our arms outstretched – good and evil.
! The heart is the centre where all these points meet. All the teachings of the great masters who have walked this earth are centred in the heart. This is not, as many people think, acting with love. It is acting with will and the greatest will.
! Will is the power. An athlete begins a race motivated, it is unsustainable in a marathon, then they swing to exhaustion, and wish they could exit the race. A “second wind” comes over them, will power. A power beyond motivation, something beyond human, they don’t want to stop, they want to go forward. They are in the race, simply doing the race. This is the heart.
! When a car falls on top of a person in an accident, some amazing feats of strength are displayed as relative weak people lift huge tons of weight off the victim. This is what happens when desperation is gone, when fear is gone, and all that is left, this second wind, this is will, the heart lifts that weight. It is will power, heart power.
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! When you put two electrical leads together they spark as power surges through the wires; the sparks are hot, on fire, they are the heart. This is the junction of the highest power of love, meeting the highest power of the ego. The spark is huge. This is will. The ego tamed and focused on a purpose bigger than itself, the love channels open, unlocked by emotion. They meet in this centre. And there is the greatest human power known - Willpower.
Love in action - Willpower Discipline is the turning point. The pain of regret always outweighs the pain of discipline. Therefore, as we shift from the ego focus of pleasure, short term pleasure, toward purpose, dreams, and longer term results, the ego loses control and becomes the lion, and you to tamer, The vast majority of spiritual practices like yoga, meditation, tai chi and more, hold this as the most critical ingredient of the transformation between ego life and love life. Discipline.
! Will is a different kind of power. Will acknowledges that there are temptations, that there are always old patterns, but that all the righteousness, devotion and fanatic adherence to dogma will never remove the source of temptation. An alcoholic is still an alcoholic while they are in a phobia about alcohol. With will power, there is a different approach; there is simply something more important to do.
Will does not rely on righteousness or goods that are separated from bad. Like the healing fanatic, who will tell you for hours about the virtues of organic food. No, that is the ego in it’s absolute glory dealing with fanaticism, building dogma, separation.
! With Willpower - there are two sides to everything, good and bad, including organic food. So will is different from the ego. Will asks, “What are my long term goals, and what choices are best for me to make to achieve them?” Like, “I want to travel the world helping children.” I would ask “When?”, and you might say, “Until the day I die”, and I Page
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might say “When?”, and you might add, “Ok, when I am 90”. So now we got past a loose fantasy, with no detail, to a little more detail. Then we go for lunch and you are sitting opposite me, and the menu comes, “What are you having for lunch?” You think, and say, “Oh there are so many delicious choices”, and I would reply, “Not if you are serious about living until you are 90 and still traveling around the world helping children.” Then you might choose the organic salad, because it might help you live your dream. That choice is made with “Willpower”.
Will power comes from the heart. A part of the body just beneath the breast has been labeled as the heart. As humans cannot grasp the idea of a heart outside the body, there is a part in this body of flesh dedicated to housing the idea of the heart. This area is most sensitive to feeling and has been called broken at times, although no physical break actually occurs.
! Thought, memory, will and reason, combined with personality make up the heart. The surface of our personality is mind, while the depth of it is heart. The heart is a clear descriptor of our identity. It is through the heart that we feel ourselves, or know ourselves, as the personality prefers. Once a person understands the nature, the character, and the mystery of heart, they understand the language of their personality. So a real understanding of the personality, and turning it to work for you, instead of for itself, comes from the heart.
! Willpower is what makes the difference between our ability to feel an emotion, which is honesty, and to act on an emotion, which is foolishness.
! It is human nature to have all kinds of emotional reactions to the world around us; these are simultaneously the best and the worst of us. The experiencing of emotions over the whole spectrum of existence is what makes us whole, just as a musical piece is composed using the whole set of piano keys, not just one. The joy of life is experiencing emotion, Page
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but the suffering of life is to act on them. That is the key difference here: Action based on emotion is weak, action based on Will is strong. Will does not act on emotion.
! Take, for example, tears of pity, tears of sadness, and tears of inspiration. To the personality they are all just tears. But when you are in love, the first two are considered wasted energy because they are based on a lopsided emotional reaction to a situation.
! Action is Will, reaction is based on emotion. When we act on emotion, react, our willpower is overridden, and we become like a leaf in the storm, driven by the comings and goings of others. There is no certainty in a life driven by reactions based on emotion. While it provides the flavour and spice of life, it is an appalling guidance system for your decisions and direction.
! WILLPOWER The value of time The success of perseverance The pleasure of working The dignity of simplicity The worth of character The power of kindness The influence of example The obligation of duty The wisdom of economy The virtue of patience The improvement of talent The joy of originality
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In a relationship if there is no Willpower, then there is no love power. If you can’t apply discipline to your relationship, how are you going to go anywhere. Willpower means to process judgment, to give each other priority, it means don’t sweat the small stuff, forget being right, stop giving advice when it is not asked for, learn how to love instead of change things. This is love power. Real discipline.
! If you say you are going to do something in your life, and you don’t do it, you beat yourself up. So, if you make commitments of discipline in your relationship it’s best to stick to them. That’s Willpower.
! If you break them, don’t lie, admit it. Even the worst thing you’ve done is best shared. It is not for relief of guilt or for honesty it is simply a matter of Will.
! Being committed to something is all about having a good enough reason. That’s why vision and purpose and values are vital keys in the development of Willpower.
! People get this when they lose something. I had a friend who had a heart attack. They were so not disciplined; they had absolutely no will power. Then, after that catastrophe, they became a health fanatic. A year later they were emotional again and eating junk. They were disciplined when there was a good enough reason but over time they forgot that reason. They became complacent again. So, your vision is something that must be reviewed and remembered otherwise your commitment will fade and with it your Willpower.
! In your relationship, find a dream that is big enough, that you would love to live enough, and then work out what the cost is in terms of lifestyle. If you aren’t willing to pay the price of sacrifice to get something then it’s better to leave it alone. Don’t expect your relationship to last if you can’t find a dream worth living for.
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After two or three shattered dreams you might find it hard to come up with real commitments for long-term dreams. Simply start with little ones and work your way up.
! The Will of the human heart is an unbridled experience of doing something that you love, rather than something that loves you. Then you bring this choice making awareness into all facets of your life, discernment, and without compromise. Will is the heart choosing long-term benefit over short-term emotional expression.
! A long term loving relationship is not found by reacting to emotion, but has plenty in it. The wisdom of choices made, the sacrifices made in recognition of dreams and Love, then come from Willpower, which in turn comes from a reason that is bigger than both of you. If you do not have the will to choose wisely, then you’ll choose low priority activities to fill your mind. These are self sabotaging because they do not fulfil your dreams. Then your lover will not respect you because you will not respect yourself.
! If you are treating yourself as unworthy of Willpower, unworthy of higher purpose, unworthy of long-term investment, then your lover will not treat you any differently. Remember that nobody does to you more than you do to yourself. Will is love, will power is self-love.
! Self-love is found in the doing of life, not in thinking about it. Self-love is action, action of choices. Your self worth grows when you do things worthy of your own respect. Emotional drama and working on low priorities, working on other people’s priorities, living vicariously through children, is all self-sabotage. If you want to be admired and valued, act firstly on your purpose and vision, with Will and discipline, and then, on your relationship. This breeds respect, self-respect.
! A person who can say, “I love doing this” is far more rewarded on the cosmic level than the identity that would profess, “I love this, because these are the things I get for doing
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it”. Achievements last for moments, but life is a journey. There is no solace for the wealthy person who, surrounded with material items and victories, cannot smile in the face of a days work, or at the idea of walking to the garden for a few moments of reflection. It is in the eyes of loved ones where we find self-realisation rather than the buildings we create to house them. It is in the doing of things of high priority to our dreams that our wealth exists, not in the gratitude of those we help.
! Will turns all the chaos of life into a magnificent order. It is the power of Will, that all of the universe conforms. Nature’s Laws are the Will that controls the entire universe. Therefore, what we call Willpower in us, is more accurately, divine power. Will power is therefore a unifying of physical, mental and emotional strength. Our hands, with all their perfect mechanics, cannot hold a glass of water if there is no Willpower to support it. If will power fails us, a seemingly healthy person will not be able to even stand. Therefore, fish do not swim with their body; they swim with their Willpower. And when you have the will to swim, you swim like fish.
! Will brings us to success, yet when Will fails, it doesn’t matter how intelligent the person is, they too fail. Therefore, it is not the human power solely that moves us, it is a divine power found in the human body that makes unbelievable feats possible. Will controls even the mind, no one can hold a thought in their mind, not for a single moment if there is not the strength of will to hold it. If a person cannot concentrate, cannot keep their thoughts still for a moment, it means that Willpower fails them, because it’s Will that holds a thought. This is why I teach the practice of presence and disciplines like turning up 110% because it is this discipline that helps harness the human Will.
! Will power is love, love is Willpower. If you hear people say, "God is love" it means in reality “God is Will.” The love of God, the Will of God, causes the creation, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It means stay disciplined, at least in one or two of your highest values.
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! When you say, “I love to do it”, it means, “I Will to do it”, which is a strong expression and means, “I fully love to do it with all my heart and soul”.
! An optimistic attitude towards life develops the power of Will, while the pessimistic attitude reduces it. Thus, it’s only ourselves who hinder our progress in life. There is no one in the world that can be a worse enemy to us than ourselves: at every failure we see ourselves standing in our own light, lacking the Will, or reason, to proceed.
! It takes a commitment, training, practice to teach your mind to hold an optimistic thought. In contrast, your mind by itself has no hesitation in holding a thought of disappointment, blame, anger, pain grief, sorrow, or of failure; it will hold it so tightly that you cannot take one of those thoughts from its grip for weeks or months. When a heart is broken people have no hesitation at holding sorrow, but when the mind is requested to hold a particular affirmative thought, often it will not hold it, responding instead by saying, "I am free and I will not be controlled". This is the identity fighting for emotional freedom, and cursing Willpower.
! You must teach your mind discipline by concentration. The enemies are interruptions, busy-ness, panic, television, computers, music and phone chatter. By the power of Will, the mind becomes tied in concentration to the focus of your work. A parent must be strong with a child otherwise they have no discipline, no concentration, no Will. A disciplined mind becomes your servant rather than your master. The thoughts of your vision, and the act of holding the thought in the heart, are both vitally important for the fulfilment of your relationship.
! Often a person will say, "I try my best but I cannot get my mind to concentrate, I cannot make my mind still.” It is true that they cannot concentrate, but it is not true that they try their best. Deep down they argue, “Why not let the mind be free, as we are free?” But the
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easy answer to this is to observe the life of the person without discipline, filled with emotional drama in their work or relationship.
! Self-discipline is the essential quality that harnesses the Will. No matter how difficult or tyrannical it may seem in the beginning, it is worth while. Self mastery is a combination of discipline and applied will. It’s not in vain. To invest yourself in love is to have the Will to sustain it.
You lack nothing if you have will The best way to cultivate will power is by first systematically putting the body through discipline. Daily exercise, routine, eating simple, fixing your diet, minimising alcohol, being committed to weight and health. This simply means not responding to emotion (feelings) to determine what goes in your mouth and what your routine is during the day. it is the minimum, the first step and the essence of a love based relationship.
! Then learning to sit still but properly. You teach your body to sit in the posture that is prescribed to it; it must stand in a place where it is asked to stand. The body must not become restless, or fatigued, by what is asked of it. You'll see this in yoga. The body must answer to the demands of the person to whom it belongs. The moment we begin to discipline the body, we begin to see how disobedient the body has always been. This body is meant to become the tool with which you experience life, not the reason for it. The body can be trained with physical exercises initiated by the mind.
! The discipline of the mind is done by concentration. It can only take place after the body has become disciplined. When you wish the mind to think about one particular thought while it is thinking another thought, then the mind becomes very restless. It does not want to stand in one spot, because it has always been moving about without discipline. Very often, people tell me that during the day their most difficult time is the moment that they want to concentrate. At this time the mind will start to jump. This is because the mind is Page
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an entity. The mind and body need to be your servants, not the other way around. In order for you to manifest your dreams, your mind and body must become your servants in everyday life to fulfil your body with food and pleasure, and your mind with emotion and righteousness. They must act as you wish them to, in order for you to gain real comfort, happiness and an awareness of love.
! There is a difference between concentration and silence. Silence is relaxing mind and body. It is repose and healing. Concentration is holding a certain thought before you. Further, concentration is the beginning of meditation, and meditation is the end of concentration
! This is illustrated in the following example. What time do you rise in the morning? Anytime? Or in time to get you to work? The vast majority of people seek a flexible wake up time, depending on how they feel or what they did last night. This freedom, selfgiven, has a catastrophic impact on an individual’s health, worth, and vitality. If wake up time is fixed, then life is grounded and spins around a fixture. Time becomes that fixture, a marker in the day. Then, emotion is not the master.
! Freedom does not come, as many people hope, from freedom to act on impulse or emotion, nor does it come from stoic rigidity. Emotions must be felt for authentic living, and will power is the ability to feel, and not act. We act for love, we act to create dreams, we feel for honesty.
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BEING THE BEST YOU Just because you find or have found a relationship, it doesn’t mean giving up being great.
! You are attractive because of what you are doing in your life. Don’t make the big mistake of thinking that you are attractive because you are uniquely special. Your vision, your doing and your purpose make you a special catch. Don’t lose track of that.
! Aim for the stars in your dreams and purpose. But measure your life in the little things. God is in the details. It’s the little things that count. Never neglect the little things. Be mindful of the small things, that extra effort, that additional few minutes, that soft word of praise or thanks, that delivery of the very best that you can do. Act with lovingkindness. It does not matter what your lover thinks, you must think for yourself, you must do what is beautiful, loving and true, no matter what, eventually, you have to sleep with you. You are special. Act it. Never neglect the little things. Act with gentleness, kindness, care and contentment, always.
! Learn to celebrate tiny moments of time. One of which is, right now. In the now everything happens. It’s not always a place to be, but it does banish worry, fear, guilt and bring love into your heart. This is where the great painting is painted, the great golf shot is struck, the baby knows it’s loved, chronic fatigue cannot exist, depression has no home in a mind that does not want or desire the future or the past. In this fragment of time, the goal to which all humans aspire, happiness and fulfilment sits waiting to be discovered. If you are always looking at what you want, there is no possibility of celebrating where you are, enjoying the moment. You can’t be thankful and unhappy at the same time. No tension. It requires complete immersion in the act of doing one thing, one thing well, intensely.
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! The four key ingredients that bring the quality of the heart to priority in a relationship are:
! 1/ Kindness because it places the heart and mind of others higher than your own. 2/ Gentleness because it raises the energy of the moment and allows hearts to open. 3/ Care because this is the gratitude that brings us present in the moment. 4/ Contentment because it is without struggle, no trying, just a simple exchange.
! ! Kindness is a gentle attitude, expressed in the way you think, speak and act. There is limitless scope to show this attitude, and no matter how much attitude is developed in this way, it is never too much. It grows great dignity. One can never do too much.
! Gentleness will unlock any gate and find its way to any heart. It is the key to progress. It implies generosity for all, but requires some sacrifice at times. All those recognised to have been Great in their time have been gentle people, but they have never been weak. They have never softened their responsibility towards themselves or deluded themselves or others.
! Care is compassion. It begins at home but expands and grows with people in work and social environments. It is in this growth that care retains its authenticity and power. There are many people who act kindly in public but are cruel and mean at home. This reveals that real care for others has not evolved from their real nature.
! Contentment is the true intention of loves existence. This is a wonderful intention for your life and is a vital part of relationship. Your intention eventually becomes your reality, which truly reflects the qualities of your heart. It is not the meditation you do in the morning or the yoga class you do after work, because these are simply powerful points for connection. Your true heart is revealed by the way you sustain your practice
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throughout the day through the amount of contentment you create in your relationships. This is the real part of your sacred relationship since the thoughts you have moment to moment add up to the relationship you have year to year.
! Truly romantic living comes from the intention of keeping an open heart and embracing kindness, gentleness, contentment and compassion (care) for others. If you direct your intention towards becoming aware of the duty of life, your heart can be held in an open state.
! “Don’t forget to look up! A small boy walking along spotted a coin shining at his feet. He picked it up and clutched it protectively. He felt proud and excited. It was his first and it cost him nothing! From that day on wherever he went he walked with his head down, eyes surveying the ground for more treasure. During his lifetime he found $54.55. The money had cost him nothing except he missed the beauty of 35,127 sunsets, the colorful splendor of 3327 rainbows, babies growing, birds flying, animals running, the sun shining and the smiles of passing people. Too many people go through life so trapped in the same routine trivia that the magnificent adventure of living passes them by.”
! The heart of love thrives on those four ingredients. Gentleness works as the principle thing in every art, and, as the true spirit of humanity, it should be our aim. When we care for each other we feel an innate sense of truth and wholeness. With gentleness, we smooth the rough edges of vanity that hurt and disturb those we meet in life. Like so many things, vanity is separateness, and a defence of the ego. Truly honest individuals recognise themselves in the heart of another and, rather than judge them as lesser, have empathy with them. It is of no service to humanity for us to judge another as less than ourselves, nor more than ourselves. Instead, we need to be gentle, and in doing so, remain humble. So much of life’s stresses can be extinguished at source once we are able to recognise ourselves in others.
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! Your dreams come from your heart, they come true, one day at a time. You will achieve your immaculate dreams, piece by piece, one day at a time, so make your day a step, rather than a leap toward your dreams. Whatever you do, do not fill your day with long and difficult projects, or rushing here and rushing there, feeding your ego, getting nothing done well. Create small increments that add up and take you, step by step, toward your rainbow. Life is a process, the process is love. Love cannot exist in a frenetic scramble of over work, over reach, and over filled schedules. Write down your daily chores, if you must, but make it easily achievable in a healthy state of mind. Don’t drag chores to tomorrow. Be patient; prioritise your attitude, your thankfulness, your love and your lover. Never allow your day to become so cluttered that you neglect your most important aspect -- to love the best you can, to love this day, to rest grateful and satisfied with what you have accomplished. Make your life a romance.
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TURNING UP Some people complain that their partner works too hard, but really, what they are saying is that after all the work is done, that partner is arriving home without energy for romance, exhausted and unappreciative, its almost like they have two offices. If you work long hours and come home full of love and joy and appreciation, nobody will really complain.
! Romance is revealed in your energy. If you walk in the door of your home and you are exhausted from everything you do outside your relationship, then what chance is there for vitality and love? Now we need to be real. In the first months of your relationship, you’d save energy because you wanted to make an impression, be good, and alive. Then for some reason, because we are in a relationship, we think its a done deal and become all self important. The most vital time of your day needs to be the time you spend with your lover - they are not your recuperation machine, they are your focus.
! This vitality is abundant, energy is free, it comes from the air you breathe, but if you are sitting around an office and breathing air conditioned air, and polluted city air with not much vitality left, you can easily burn out. This is why life force, and the awareness of Qi, is critical.
! Qi is the Chinese word for life energy. It is the hidden energy that flows through all things. A living being is filled with it. A dead person has none. A healthy person has more of it than an unhealthy one.
! It is also the life energy that flows through all nature. The earth itself is alive with Qi. Some poets call this planet Gaia, the living earth, and Qi is its life blood. The ancient ones say Qi is love and nothing in the universe can function without it. Yoga, Qigong and
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a million other Eastern arts are the skills of working with life energy, controlling the flow, maintaining the quality, and subsequently improving the health and harmony of the mind and body. In Yoga Qi is called Prana, it is one and the same energy they speak of. In Christian teaching it is the Holy Spirit. In Buddhism it is called Compassion. It flows through everything. You can’t own it, but you can store it.
! Most people blow it. They get a little excess energy, and the first thing they do think of is going for a run. But the inspired individual doesn’t want to exhaust their energy, they want to store it.
! Proper living and awareness of what sucks your energy allows you to become conscious of healthy and unhealthy activity. That which drains Qi is considered unhealthy, that which builds it is considered potent, and with that I wish to share how to store it.
! You can go home from work to your family and relationship with more energy than when you arrived at work if you manage yourself at work correctly. You cannot separate your relationship from your work behaviour. If you act like energy is disposable in your work who is going to pay? Your relationship is going to pay? What sort of partner would call this acceptable? Probably not the one you’d choose or respect. There is no excuse.
! As long as you are mindful of your approach, you will go home from your work enthusiastic and energetic, vitalised, not drained and exhausted. In fact, if you want to draw a healthy line in the sand for your relationship, make it a commitment. No walking in the door messed up and wounded. The process is easy.
! Being aware of energy sucking influences
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The main source of vitality is in the air, and in offices, cities and in air-conditioned rooms it is depleted. It is at its highest in a rain forest or near the ocean. So, you can do yourself huge favours by not sitting in “de-vitalised” air all day. I am not saying go outside for lunch, that’s closing the door after the horse bolted, no open a window, drink vital water, little fountains with flowing water to reinvigorate your environment, put a forest of plants near your desk.
! That is why I take people into nature for a retreat, the difference in their energy and vitality is so profound and it affects people mentally and emotionally. Nature provides it.
! Romance requires energy and that energy is under the pump at work if you work poorly. The key is emotional, not just environmental. If you hate your job, your relationship will sink. The energy sucking qualities of hate and resentment will drain you and leave nothing for your relationship. If you hate your job you deserve it, and your partner deserves better. Only you can change your attitude. Don’t blame the job.
! Sometimes people feel that whatever the work they are doing, it could not be sacred, not intended for them. They blame the work. The missing piece here is not what is wrong with the work they are doing, but rather understanding the work they are performing right now in the context of the bigger picture of their destiny.
! It is in the doing of things that the wealth exists. A person who can say, “I love doing this” is far more rewarded on the cosmic level than the person who would say “I am doing this job because I’ve got to do it” Even an open heart will close if inspirations are not being expressed - the artist must paint, the sculptor must sculpt, the doctor must heal. All your inner stillness must result in action. When you do what you love and follow this inspiration, your opportunities expand ten fold. That’s not to say things won’t get tough, they do, but when you do what you love, the challenge is worth it.
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Most people have not reached a clear state of realising exactly what they love to do and what they are good at. By simply being aware that there is a greater plan for your life that waits to unfold in the course of life itself, you will begin to become in tune with something greater than yourself. Every incident that comes into your professional and personal life will be an opportunity to celebrate and to unravel the mystery of your life.
! So focus on yourself on managing, building and storing your energy, Qi, during the day, and make sure that when you are home and they are with you, you have stored that energy, you are vital, just like that first date.
Turn up for love by eating well Food can be the instigator of incredible romance, or the killer of it. The right amount of food with just a little alcohol, with just a little sweet, can inflame passion and love.
! But overeating, over drinking, inflames your arthritis, produces gas, depletes erectile function and stinks your breath.
! Eating a heavy meal at night is a romance killer. With a full belly, and all available spare blood down there trying to deal with it, how could one expect to be the model of passion with all that going on. What is left is TV and sleep. So romantic! Don’t eat after 6.00pm and make that meal the smallest of the day.
! Then there is the quality of food. You can see a man pull up to the gas station in his beautiful car, he fills it with the finest of fuel, has it meticulously serviced, checks the tires are perfectly inflated, then waddles over to the junk food, pre packaged, dispenser and fills his personal tank with junk. What message is he passing to himself. Car cost me money, I didn’t?
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Intestinal poisoning as a result of bad diet is one of the most unromantic influences around. Ninety nine percent of people suffer from bad digestion. Foods that poison or aggravate the intestine, also poison the body and mind. On the one hand, that individual is saying, “I want a loving and romantic relationship”, yet, priorities observed, they can’t control their eating or drinking habits. Eat for love of self and other, and your love life will be assured. Stay off the turps, or at least keep it to a glass, more may feel good, but only a person without respect would let it dilute the quality of a romantic moment.
! If you can respect your body, you can respect your relationship. How can we imagine that we can act one way toward the most precious asset we have, without which we cannot exist, and act in a completely loving way toward another human. Surely, it is obvious that if we can’t respect our body, respecting someone else’s body is a far cry from truth. Now I am not suggesting that we need to all turn into health nuts, and please don’t read into this that weight is any measure of health. But what goes in, certainly doesn’t come out, it gets stuck in fat and bone and joints. Crap that goes in, doesn’t come out. So, rather than measure how we look or compare our body and get the ego involved, we need to put quality in. That means we have mindfulness over the quality of intent of our diet
! Don’t overeat at any time. Beware of nightshades, high acid (eggplant, raw onion, mushroom, potato, garlic) Beware of excess sugar and sweets (excess sugar rusts and ages the body) Beware of excess coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco and in the other stimulants (messes up the mind and nerves) Beware of processed food (all the sunlight, love, is cooked out) Don’t eat animal organs (filters toxin, so filled with toxin) Avoid excessively hot or cold food or drink (cold kills digestive fire) Minimise dressings such as spicy sauces, spices, additives (makes you too sexy) Avoid overcooked and reheated food (dead, you may as well eat cardboard) Try to eat your main meal at midday, and eat lightly at night.
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! Staying attractive One habit worth developing, is the habit of youthfulness. Even at the age of 90 years, there are attractive people. They are attractive because they have not surrendered to age. Saggy bums, pot bellies, shrunken necks, stooped posture, bad breath, tiredness, boredom are all signs of ageing that are completely a reflection of surrender to slow suicide, rather than a love for life.
! Avoid the collapse of old age, where the lower abdomen protrudes, the shoulders slump, the head drops forward. That is the posture of collapse into old age. Keep the neck muscles strong and your neck long, abdominal muscles firm (inner core muscles as developed in Yoga and Pilates) to support the internal organs. The potbelly on so many men is the true reflection, not of old age, but of collapse of the vitality of youth, the surrender to gravity. To overcome it, is simply a habit of youthfulness.
! In the habit of youthfulness, check whether your chest sags down when you sit. If so, raise it as high as possible without raising the shoulders. Keep the shoulders central and natural, Hold this position when you eat, read, sleep, walk, talk and drive. Make it a habit, it is mindfulness, the art of youthfulness.
! Next, ask yourself whether your abdomen points forward. If so, pull it in with muscle. If the muscles are not strong enough then help them with your hands. After a while the strength will return and it will become a natural position. This must be done throughout the day until it becomes natural.
! Young people have a firm abdomen, model them. 95% of people over the age of 20 have collapsed these vital muscles. With these habits the flow of natural vital energies returns to the body and puts the fire of youth back in the eye. Page
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! Model youth, vitality, vigour, freshness, and brilliance of youth will be yours. With this posture your energy will be young, fresh and attractive, no matter what your age, you’ll be a great, sexy, lover.
! Each tiny blade of grass, every tree, bush, and flower draws its life from solar energy. All living things on earth depend on solar energy for their very existence. You can gain incredible health, happiness and vitality in the sunshine because its rays are potent germicides, they provide one of the most powerful remedies for the nervous system.
! The powerful rays of sunshine are a tonic, stimulant and healer that deliver relaxation to the body. As you bask in the sunshine, millions of nerve endings absorb the solar energy and transform it to the nervous system of the body. The person who is starved of these vital rays of the sun may have sallow, pale, skin. They are often weak, anaemic, ailing people, starving for sunshine.
! We must have the direct rays of the sun on our bodies (early morning and late afternoon are best) and we must eat at least 50% of food that has been ripened by the sun’s rays. When we eat fresh green vegetables, we absorb rich nourishing chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the solar energy that the plant we are eating has absorbed from the sun. It is the richest, most nourishing food you can put into your body. When you put sunshine on the outside of your body, and eat 50% raw fruits and vegetables as part of your daily dietary intake, you will glow with radiant health.
! Overdoses of solar energy are not good, so it should be taken in moderation at first, but seek the sun and health will come in leaps and bounds. I.e Get Outside….. Get Naked (or nearly)
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Surrender Surrender to love. Today, and every day, fall in love, again, and again and again. Give more than is expected of you. Expect no reward. The beauty of love will be half won when you learn the secret of putting out more than is expected in all that you do. Make yourself so valuable to your beloved that eventually you will become indispensable. Find their dream and help them live it. Exercise your privilege to support their journey, go the extra mile, and enjoy all the rewards you receive. You deserve them!
! To be in love, and to stay in love, is to surrender to another person. Then we open to direct communication. There is no trust required if the ego is soft. To be in a relationship, and celebrate the spontaneity of falling in love, we cannot hide. We cannot be embarrassed about our strange collection of qualities. We present everything as it is. And in return we must welcome our lover, without ego, and accept their strange collection of qualities too. Surrender means working together with love. You cannot take the moral high ground and still hold love sacred. You cannot surrender to love and then say, ”IF”.
! Surrender means, “Here I am, and here you are.” There is no need to make you better so that “I can love you in the future”. There is no “if” in love.
! To surrender means you’ll need to get used to marching directly into disappointment, work with disappointment, go into it, and make it an acceptable and important part of your way of life. Your expectations are not true, they are the barrier to the journey of love, so you must stop hoping to achieve them in your relationship, not want to achieve them, but to dismantle them.
! Disappointment is a good sign of loving intelligence, because it reveals an honesty between your expectations and your love. It cannot be compared to anything else; it is so
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sharp, precise, obvious and direct. If we can open, surrender to love, then we suddenly begin to see that our expectations are not going to be met, no matter how much we try. Every time we change somebody, move them shift them, love dies. Wanting things to be different than they are is the mark of the ego. This is not love, this is the ego. They are opposites. So it takes courage to say, “You didn’t meet my expectations, and that revealed how much I needed to grow.” This is sacred love. A moving soft ego, always looking to adapt.
! To stay in love means we come down into the dirty, ordinary, street scene of reality. That is where real devotion and love exists. When we love someone we must learn to trust ourselves, surrender to love. This does not involve preparing for a soft landing, being half in and half out, hedging your bets. Nobody ever succeeded by creating escape routes.
! Love actually means being prepared to land on hard, ordinary ground; on the rocky, wild countryside of confrontation of your own issues. What you don’t like in your lover is a mirror of your ego. Once we open ourselves, then we land on what is, it’s disappointing, and this is the real beauty of love. People can reject your expectations, they cannot reject your love.
! In true love, you have to allow your “self” to surrender. There is nothing to fear losing once you identify with the simplicity of surrender. The only thing that can be hurt is your ego, so if you can develop a soft ego, you will be free to hold that power of love anytime you choose. If your ego can flex, then there is no hurt. Instead of taking the ego and emotions so seriously, take love seriously. Love can shine through everything. The key to doing this is to surrender the moral high ground, and automatically you soften your ego, you.
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Today, love without expectation. Love someone you hate, love someone you fear, love someone you left behind and don’t take their reaction to heart. Make every day a Valentines day, and see how many people you can honour, past present and future. Love them from a place if gratefulness. Love them knowing tomorrow may never come and know that the deepest regret any human being can have, is to hold back their love, even for a second.
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