c o n n e c t from Mindful Living Online

Intimate Relationship as a Spiritual Crucible

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:24:00 +0000

By John Welwood

Living with someone we love, with all the joys and challenges, is one of the best ways to grow spiritually. But real awakening only happens, says renowned psychologist John Welwood, in the charnel ground where we acknowledge and work with our wounds, fears, and illusions.

While most people would like to have healthy, satisfying relationships in their lives, the truth is that everyone has a hard time with intimate partnerships. The poet Rilke understood just how challenging they could be when he penned his classic statement, “For one person to love another, this is the most difficult of all our tasks.”

Rilke isn’t suggesting it’s hard to love or to have loving-kindness. Rather, he is speaking about how hard it is to keep loving someone we live with, day by day, year after year. After numerous hardships and failures, many people have given up on intimate relationship, regarding the relational terrain as so fraught with romantic illusion and emotional hazards that it is no longer worth the energy.

Although modern relationships are particularly challenging, their very difficulty presents a special arena for personal and spiritual growth. To develop more conscious relationships requires becoming conversant with how three different dimensions of human existence play out within them: ego, person, and being.

Every close relationship involves these three levels of interaction that two partners cycle through—ego to ego, person to person, and being to being. While one moment two people may be connecting being to being in pure openness, the next moment their two egos may fall into deadly combat. When our partners treat us nicely, we open—“Ah, you’re so great.” But when they say or do something threatening, it’s "How did I wind up with you?" Since it can be terribly confusing or devastating when the love of our life suddenly turns into our deadliest enemy, it’s important to hold a larger vision that allows us to understand what is happening here.

Relationship as Alchemy

When we fall in love, this usually ushers in a special period, one with its own distinctive glow and magic. Glimpsing another person’s beauty and feeling, our heart opening in response provides a taste of absolute love, a pure blend of openness and warmth. This being-to-being connection reveals the pure gold at the heart of our nature, qualities like beauty, delight, awe, deep passion and kindness, generosity, tenderness, and joy.

Yet opening to another also flushes to the surface all kinds of conditioned patterns and obstacles that tend to shut this connection down: our deepest wounds, our grasping and desperation, our worst fears, our mistrust, our rawest emotional trigger points. As a relationship develops, we often find that we don’t have full access to the gold of our nature, for it remains embedded in the ore of our conditioned patterns. And so we continually fall from grace.

It’s important to recognize that all the emotional and psychological wounding we carry with us from the past is relational in nature: it has to do with not feeling fully loved. And it happened in our earliest relationships—with our caretakers—when our brain and body were totally soft and impressionable. As a result, the ego’s relational patterns largely developed as protection schemes to insulate us from the vulnerable openness that love entails. In relationship the ego acts as a survival mechanism for getting needs met while fending off the threat of being hurt, manipulated, controlled, rejected, or abandoned in ways we were as a child. This is normal and totally understandable. Yet if it’s the main tenor of a relationship, it keeps us locked in complex strategies of defensiveness and control that undermine the possibility of deeper connection.

Thus to gain greater access to the gold of our nature in relationship, a certain alchemy is required: the refining of our conditioned defensive patterns. The good news is that this alchemy generated between two people also furthers a larger alchemy within them. The opportunity here is to join and integrate the twin poles of human existence: heaven, the vast space of perfect, unconditional openness, andearth, our imperfect, limited human form, shaped by worldly causes and conditions. As the defensive/controlling ego cooks and melts down in the heat of love’s influence, a beautiful evolutionary development starts to emerge—the genuine person, who embodies a quality of very human relational presence that is transparent to open-hearted being, right in the midst of the dense confines of worldly conditioning.

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How to Build Intimacy From Mars and Venus

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:51:00 +0000

By Helen Fisher, PhD, Oprah.com What is intimacy to you?" Recently, I asked this of a man I've been seeing. He replied, "Doing things together." I knew what he meant. Most of us have a primal craving to be truly known by someone before we die, to build a deeply committed relationship based on honesty, trust, self-disclosure, respect, appreciation, interdependence, and togetherness. But the sexes often define intimacy differently. When women want to draw closer, we face each other, lock eyes in what has been called the "anchoring gaze," and proceed to reveal our hopes, our worries, our lives. To women, intimacy is talking face-to-face—a behavior that probably evolved millions of years ago when ancestral females spent their days holding their infants up in front of them, soothing them with words.

Men, however, often regard intimacy as working or playing side-by-side. Sure, they might discuss a bad week at work, even troubles in their love lives. But rarely do they share their secret dreams and darkest fears. (When they do, they often use "joke speak," camouflaging their feelings with humor.) And men almost never look deeply into each other's eyes. Their approach to intimacy probably also harks back to prehistory: Picture ancestral males gathering behind a bush, quietly staring across the grass in hopes of felling a passing buffalo. They faced their enemies but sat next to their friends.

This is why, to build intimacy with a man, I do things with him—side-by-side. That way, when I talk, he isn't threatened by my gaze.

Curious to find out more about such gender differences, I asked 4,876 members of the Internet dating site Chemistry.com , "What would you do as an intimate activity with a partner?" and offered various choices. I found that men were far more likely to regard "debating" as intimate. I wasn't surprised: Intimacy requires being in your comfort zone, and men's testosterone is associated with competitiveness. On the other hand, women were more likely to consider "organizing a neighborhood or community party together" and "taking a vacation together with a crowd of your closest friends" as ways to be close. Because estrogen is associated with social skills and nurturing, I wasn't surprised by this either.

What I didn't expect was that 95 percent of all respondents rated "talking heart-to-heart with your partner about your relationship" as something they'd do to be intimate, while 94 percent felt that "doing something adventurous together" spelled togetherness—with hardly any difference between the sexes. If these results are any indication that men are learning to appreciate women's need to talk, while women are understanding the male way of showing love ("actions speak louder than words"), then bravo!

There are, of course, many other things you can do to cultivate togetherness . Help your partner achieve his goals. Face your problems as a team. Develop a private spiritual or religious world. Choose a new interest to pursue jointly. Do chores together. Play.

And get the oxytocin flowing. Oxytocin is a brain chemical that produces feelings of trust and attachment. Men get a blast of it when they kiss, women feel a rush when they hold a lover's hand, and during orgasm, both partners are flooded with the powerful substance. So last but not least, enjoy each other physically. Good sex really does build intimacy.

Does It Have to Be Work?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 06:47:00 +0000

by James Collins, Oprah
Much has been learned about the difficulties that can arise between two people who are in love—and how to address them. We now know how to get our own needs met. We know how to establish boundaries. We know how to use "I" statements. We know that making a relationship a success involves a huge amount of effort. How many times have you heard a therapist, or a friend, or a friend who thinks he or she is a therapist say that a relationship is hard work? It is a constant refrain—"a relationship is hard work." I have heard this so many times that when anyone says the word relationship, I now see an image of sweating slaves in loincloths pulling huge stones up the side of a pyramid.

Doubtlessly, all these insights are very valuable. But I sometimes wonder whether, while we are toiling away at our long checklist of relationship tasks, we have forgotten to do something that arguably is as important: actually loving the person we love.

If only it were that easy, you might say. How can we actually love the person we love when we are burdened by resentment and fear and insecurity and anger and narcissism and hostility and self-loathing and bouts of total irrationality—as when, for example, we become furious with the person we love whenever she does something like call us at the office while we are staying late to meet a hugely important deadline to ask again how to work the new DVD player so she can watch Something's Gotta Give for the 10,000th time?

Well, it might help at least to keep the goal in sight. These days "relationships" seem all travel—canceled flights, lost luggage, rude clerks—and no actual arrival. The point, though, is to enjoy Paris, not to trudge endlessly between concourses at the Charlotte airport. Moreover, there are times when we do love without working so damn hard—when we love a child or a friend or an aunt or a dog or a painting or a tree or the stars—and we can draw on those experiences, I think, to love someone, or fall back in love, before both parties achieve perfect and mutual sanity. Our feelings for our beloved will always be deeper than our feelings for an aunt or a tree (although not necessarily for a dog), and they will always be more complicated, but by recalling what simple, pure, joyous love is actually like, it may be possible to reproduce it under more challenging circumstances.

Love was once associated with joy, fun, and happiness, and it would be nice if it were so again.

How to Be Your Love's Biggest Fan & Best Critic

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 02:05:00 +0000

by Mike Robbins

I saw Michael Bernard Beckwith perform a re-commitment ceremony for a married couple a few years back and it blew me away. He looked at the husband and said, "Your job is to be her biggest fan and her greatest critic for the purpose of her spiritual development." He then turned to the wife and said the same thing to her about him.

As simple of a concept as this was for me to understand, I'd never heard anyone say it quite like that before. As what he said registered with me, I was moved deeply and began to cry. I realized that so often I'd struggled with what felt like my conflicting desires to share my love and appreciation with my wife Michelle, and also to let her know when something didn't work for me or when I thought she was "off" in certain aspects of her life. I noticed that I was usually "hot or cold" about this. I was either completely focused on appreciating her or completely focused on being critical of her, or withholding my feedback to avoid hurting her feelings.

Hearing Michael say this, however, made me realize that both of these things—appreciation and feedback—are essential, not only for the health of a relationship, but also for the personal growth and development of each person.

These two important things, being a fan and a critic, are often seen as opposites when viewed from an adolescent perspective. But upon deeper reflection, it becomes clear that they're intricately connected and fundamentally important for the success of not only a marriage, but any important relationship for which we want a genuine sense of trust, connection and authenticity.

Our ability, or often inability, to express our genuine appreciation for someone else is directly related to how safe or comfortable we feel giving critical feedback to that same person. In other words, the more open we are to giving and receiving honest (and sometimes critical) feedback in a particular relationship, the more capacity we have to express and experience genuine appreciation with that person. And when we don't feel safe or comfortable giving someone honest feedback, or often just aren't willing, it actually diminishes our ability to acknowledge them in a real way. Ultimately, it diminishes our relationship with them in general. Our goal is to be a real fan and a conscious critic of the important people in our life.

What does it mean to be a real fan and a conscious critic?

9 Ways to Keep Your Marriage Healthy at Any Age

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:30:00 +0000

By Kate Stinchfield

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes decades of time together strewn with a minefield of potential relationship wreckers. It’s a wonder that anyone ends up walking off into the sunset, hand-in-wrinkled-hand, with a silver-haired mate. What do those geriatric lovebirds know that you don’t?

Well, the truth is that even in so-called happy marriages, both partners probably fantasize some of the time—or even much of the time—about throwing in the towel. A new Woman’s Day and AOL Living poll found that a shocking 72% of women surveyed have considered leaving their husbands at some point. But despite the occasional rocky patch, 71% expected to be with their husbands for the rest of their lives. So how do you make it to the finish line with your relationship intact?

Each decade will have its own drama, be it child-rearing, layoffs, second careers, and middle-aged angst, along with a big helping of the in-sickness-and-in-health stuff. Here’s how to have a healthy relationship every step of the way.

1. Watch your waistline
Now that you’re married, you can finally relax and skip the gym, right? Wrong. Wedded couples tend to have fatter waistlines, which can spell trouble in terms of sexual attraction and general health. A 2007 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that your chances of becoming obese increase by 37% if your spouse becomes obese. So unless you want “till death do us part” to include chronic health issues like heart disease and diabetes, it’s important to establish healthy eating habits early on. But warding off weight gain isn’t as simple as whipping up a healthy meal together. Eating with anyone—from your spouse to coworker—can cause you to consume 33% more than you would solo.

Being aware of the potential fatty pitfalls of marital bliss may be enough to keep your portion sizes in check. Spend couple time checking out local farmers’ markets on the weekends in an effort to consumer fresher, low-calorie fare. Or schedule an exercise date to work off some of your hearty, homemade dinners.

2. Have a financial plan
Nearly 40% of married people admit to lying to their spouse about a purchase, according to a 2004 poll, and money woes can quickly send your marriage south. In fact, money is the number-one reason couples fight, and relationships tend to suffer during poor economies. You should discuss and agree upon some hard financial ground rules, preferably before you tie the knot.

Don’t fret if you’re a spendthrift and your partner pinches pennies. “It’s probably not a good thing to have the exact same philosophy about money, “ says Ken Robbins, MD, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “But financial issues are best to resolve early on. You want to decide who is going to pay the bills, how much discretionary spending is reasonable, and how you’re going to keep track of it all.”

Next page: How sex and power come into play

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Real Aphrodisiacs to Boost Desire

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:22:00 +0000

By Helen Fisher, PhD O, The Oprah Magazine

Forget oysters and chocolate. The most powerful aphrodisiacs are already inside our bodies.

Mankind has searched for aphrodisiacs for centuries. The ancient Romans slurped down oysters, the Chinese swore by shark fin soup, and the Arabs were keen on camel's hump. But the most powerful aphrodisiacs are already inside our bodies. Humans have evolved three different brain systems to encourage mating: sex drive (lust), feelings of attachment (trust), and romance (being in love). Each of these systems plays a role in desire, and scientists are now beginning to pinpoint the bodily chemicals that trigger each.

Lust: Sex drive is associated with a class of hormones called androgens, particularly testosterone (yes, women produce it, too). Today women with low libido can get a prescription for testosterone, even though it's FDA approved only for use in men. But women can also increase their levels without medication. Playing competitive sports has been shown to trigger testosterone production; in fact, women get a bigger boost than men prior to a competition. Making love can also create the same effect. Studies have suggested that sex raises testosterone levels, so the more sex you have, the more sex you desire.

Trust: Feelings of trust and attachment are fostered by the chemical oxytocin. In a study conducted at the University of Zurich, couples who used a nasal spray containing oxytocin before discussing an ongoing marital conflict were more likely to engage in friendly, positive communication than those who didn't take a whiff. You can stimulate oxytocin naturally with touch. Hold hands while you watch TV, trade massages, or sleep in each other's arms.

Love: The third chemical that drives relationships is dopamine, a key player in the brain's pleasure center that's been found to promote romantic love. Research shows that novelty—taking risks or trying something new—can trigger the release of dopamine in the brain. I'm not just talking about novelty in the bedroom (although that would be a good start). You can get the same effect from sampling a new type of cuisine together or riding the roller coaster at an amusement park.

The afterglow: Scientists may be figuring out how brain chemistry influences emotion, but don't expect to see a real love potion anytime soon. That's because you and I are more than just chemicals. We're thinking beings with a host of experiences, values, ideas, and memories—all of which share the stage with the chemical systems for lust, attachment, and romance. No product will ever trick you into loving someone you really don't like. But if you've already found the right person and want to give your relationship a kick, before you brew up a batch of camel's hump soup, you might give my less-exotic aphrodisiacs a try. Take the test at whyhimwhyher.com

Put Love First

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:05:00 +0000

If you put love first, you can make your relationship everything you need it to be. See if you are really putting love first by answering these questions:

How are you communicating?
Are you actively listening and responding to each other's needs and desires?
Are you connected?
Are life's demands distracting you from one another and ruining your intimacy and romance?

Take a minute to remember the love that brought you together in the first place and reset to reconnect with those feelings. Make sure your partner knows how much your relationship means to you. Make it your priority to put love first this week. And, if your partner commits to doing the same thing, your relationship will thrive! Dr. Laura Berman

The Soulmate Secret

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:33:00 +0000

Loving yourself is important but connecting with another meaningful partner in crime, sorrow, glee has it's merits as well.

I've recently come across Arielle Ford's The Soulmate Secret which offers an insightful take on ways to clear the path to let love find you.

The Soulmate Secret
By Arielle Ford

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Is it your dream to find a life-partner who will love, cherish and adore you? The Soulmate Secret: Manifest the Love of Your Life with the Law of Attraction will show you how to take control of your romantic destiny.

Dr. Laura Berman's Tips for Better Relationships

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:11:00 +0000

Week 1: Create Couples Time
Week 2: Busy Women and Sex
Week 3: Make a Love List
Week 4: Consider Sex Therapy
Week 5: Admire Other Couples
Week 6: Be a Flirt
Week 7: Look for Love
Week 8: Show Your Love and Appreciation
Week 9: Try Something Daring
Week 10: Get to Know Your Hormones
Week 11: Stop Negative Thoughts
Week 12: Give Unexpected Affection
Week 13: Tone Up Your Sex Life
Week 14: Explore Each Other
Week 15: Banish Negativity
Week 16: Combat Stress Together
Week 17: Review and Regroup
Week 18: Get Tested for STDs
Week 19: Declare a Summer of Romance
Week 20: Show, Don't Tell
Week 21: Tune In to Your Senses
Week 22: Ask for What You Want
Week 23: Connect Emotionally
Week 24: Health Checkup
Week 25: Let Go of Hang-ups
Week 26: Invest in Your Sexiness
Week 27: Try Something New
Week 28: Practice Authentic Communication
Week 29: Create Excitement
Week 30: Make a Date
Week 31: Celebrate Sweetest Day
Week 32: Relationship Detox
Week 33: Unleash Your Inner Vixen
Week 34: Make an Emotional and Physical Connection
Week 34: Public Displays of Affection
Week 35: Sexual Health Checkup
Week 36: Find Satisfaction
Week 37: World AIDS Day
Week 38: Write a Love Letter
Week 39: Give a Special Gift
Week 40: Create Special Dates
Week 41: Sexify Your Bedroom
Week 42: Put Love First
Week 43: Have Fun Together
Week 44: Soul Gazing

Relationship Rescue

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:29:00 +0000

Are you in a relationship rut, having the same fight with your partner over and over again? Or playing the same role—nag, enabler—day in and day out? By contemplating the yamas and niyamas, guidelines for living consciously, you can break free from unhealthy patterns and move toward a more joyful future.

The problems may seem to be all about your partner, but if you practice svadhyaya (self-study), you may learn something valuable that can shift the dynamic. For example, do you set your partner up for failure by asking him to do things you know he won't do—and then play the martyr? If you observe your thoughts and motives, you can make your contribution toward healthy change. Yoga Journal