TURN UP – TURN EM ON!

“People who find, live in and sustain a great relationship know that what they appreciate grows, what they don’t depreciates.”

Let’s be really clear here about what we mean by turning up. Lets say you are at work and your work thrives on setting goals and finding what’s wrong with the business and then improving it. You work all day and you do great. You feel good, satisfied and fulfilled and now it’s time to come home. Of course would never stops, is not realistic to think that you can walk out the door and never think about work again. So you walk in the front door and your partner walks in the front door about the same time coming home from their job. There you are two of you standing face-to- face and there is a beautiful moment of love because you haven’t seen each other all day. Now, the hard part starts. You’ve got a head full of work and still operating on the “setting goals and finding what’s wrong model” and your partner has their head full of work and even tomorrow’s work.

Conversations start. Topic? Usually work, often about things that have gone right and wrong. It’s a debrief period. That can’t be healthy. Here you are in a relationship talking about what took place at work, occupying time, using energy, doing your debrief when you got home. I wonder what it was like when you first started dating? Usually when we first started dating we turned up. The date was important enough and exciting enough for us to put aside our work and turn up in a romantic, seductive and healthy space. Because you turned up, your partner turned up, you both got turned on and work got turned off. But each by inch, centimetre by centimetre, second by second, things change and suddenly you find yourself in a relationship with diminishing returns. You might even say that the relationship is not as exciting as it was when you first met. The reason is simple maths you are not turning up as you were when you first met.

Before you begin a new relationship it’s really wise to learn how to turn up any time you want. That’s not dependent on a gorgeous partner being in front of you or one in to seduce somebody over dinner. It’s a skill you learn because turning up is important for you too. when you turn up for yourself you feel fulfilled and that is a really important sense of personal empowerment. If you are waiting for a partner to trigger you so that you turn up, turn off and get turned on then that partner will have you on a string and play you like a puppet.

Now is the time to begin rehearsals. It’s good for you and your health and it’s good for your partner who is just around the corner. Learn how to be present with everything you do. This is called mindfulness. When you eat do nothing more than eat. When you stop do nothing more than stop. Try to eliminate the idea that multi-skilling in is a healthy habit.

Life in the city has been strangely cut off from nature, so you might have to learn, actually relearn the practice of stillness. Stillness is a natural art and a great asset for any great relationship because it leads to spontaneous acts of falling in love. The key, in stillness is to learn how to do only one thing totally. For example: to sit under a beautiful tree watching the movement of water or to listen to rain on an old tin roof. In those moments with the phone turned off and nothing but one thing to do, you become still, connected to everything.

Stillness is about falling in love with life. Being alone or with friends or at work. In my experience the best way to learn this practice of stillness is the corpse pose. That corpse pose has been used in yoga for centuries. In fact it’s considered one of the hardest yoga poses of all. What you do is to lie down on your back palms facing upward, head supported and do nothing. It’s called the corpse pose because you can’t move a muscle. The whole idea is to get used to the idea of not moving. After a period of developing the skill that this corpse pose you can move on to the corpse pose plus breathing techniques but these can only come when you’ve mastered the art of doing nothing.

Once you have regained your confidence at being still, mindfulness, you can apply it 24-hour today. There is no limit to the number of activities you can do with mindfulness, turning up 100% but the most important thing is to be able to walk in through the door of your private life and turn up with your partner.

In our lives we experience that connection with nature automatically. You might see a sunrise or sunset or a Himalayan mountain and then, all of a sudden, for a moment or two, there is no time, so you are not worrying about the time, there is no space so you are not worrying about who you are and where you are and where you are going and where you came from. So all your worries and particularly all your expectations are gone. Without expectations it can’t be emotion and without emotion you are inspired. This skill is useful in relationship as well as sport, business and with friends. But I emphasise, it’s natural.

Reconnecting with nature, and the stillness it creates, is also a physical experience. What do you see when you see someone who has found stillness or fallen in love? Their ageing drops away, their posture changes, their whole mechanism operates differently, it is a totally beautiful moment, this stillness. So this is the foundation on which I am suggesting we can base a relationship, the experience of being in nature, when everything disappears and stillness comes over you and you are just there.

With commitment and practice you can do this stillness together with your partner. It doesn’t mean making love although we do find perfect stillness at some stages during the time of making love, but this is actually the act of just sitting down or lying down under a tree, with everything electrical off, no frills and fancies to distract you both, no Champaign to dull the mind, just the emptiness of simply being together.

Getting Past the Physical!

When you fall in love with someone new your friends might laugh at you because they see you and you are hopelessly gone. Your decisions might even become illogical, not even rational. This is because you have achieved an experience of enlightened stillness. Just for a few seconds, hours or days, you are enlightened.

It doesn’t take a partner to cause this to happen all the time, sometimes, as I’ve mentioned, even a sunset or a movie can trigger this enlightenment. What this means is that your whole mechanism stops. You have touched your being and your centre and you feel you are connected. Suddenly you are not the same person you used to be, and it hits you very deeply. That is why being in nature transforms so much of life because you are able to feel connected. Then you can not hide it and this is what people fear when they think about a new relationship. They fear being exposed for their comfort, their complacency and their real values.

You know that a lot of people say they want to be in a relationship but they fear losing what they’ve got. They’ve got freedom to choose anything they want, that got an open book, they’ve got dreams and hopes that nobody can shatter. So it understandable that some people say they want to be in a relationship but really deep down their fears are holding back. They fear being exposed but that’s going to be a cost for you. You will be exposed and all the secrets you’ve been guarding, all the shame, uncertainty and guilt will surface. What a great opportunity to lighten your burden. I am sure, you are interested in the whole bundle, true love, heart, mind, body and soul. So, that’s why you’d be willing to pay the price experience has told you can be very, very high.

Mother nature is your friend in this. She nurtures and guides you. If you can just open up to her guidance you’ll find everything that’s needed for you to have the relationship that’s perfect. It may not be what you thought you wanted but it will be exactly what you needed. It may not look like you thought it was going to look, but it will look perfect soon enough. Once your life was automatically connected to nature, your ego remained a valuable asset and you used it when it was needed. It was held in check by your connection to the earth, to reality, and the spirit of nature lived in you and you in it, but most people’s life in the city has been cut off from nature.

The ego and our stillness has become all mixed up, and for the greater part the ambitious ego is in control of us. We have these buildings that have taken the place of mountains and the roar of traffic has been substituted for that of a beautiful stream. Something definitely happens to city people because they become brutal and polished, they have churches and museums and drinks and theatre and beautiful clothes and endless shops, there are people everywhere, in the buildings, in the streets, in the rooms but while all this happens a beautiful cloud sails across the sky and few people look up. And because we don’t look up we individualise, we take credit and blame, we try to control everything and lose our connection. And to replace this connection we become physical.

When our connection to what is above us and around us is forgotten we drop into the physical in order to create some sense of self. We become hungry, thirsty, greedy, sexy, and spiritually insecure. In other words we feel lost when we lose our connection and we use the body and its senses to give us some sense of place in the world. But for all the connections we create using the body was still feel disconnected unless we look up and understand that we are in a universe in which nature’s laws govern our existence. In other words we are not alone we are connected to the whole and the relationship is simply one of those connections.

One great danger about physical relationship is the quest for a soulmate. The individual who has lost connection and trust in something bigger than themselves, God, laws of nature, universe or creation seeks to create that connection through another human being. Then, no matter how much intimacy and love exists between two people it will be inadequate because it is being built on a vacuum. It’s very important to find that connection, fill that vacuum and then create a soulmate level of relationship. But if you create a soulmate relationship built on a vacuum you will automatically build fear of loss into your behaviour and that is a shortcut to sabotage.

All relationships are sacred. Even those that last a very short period of time serve us. Our expectation that relationship will last a long time is again a contradiction if we are not prepared to evolve and adapt in our vision, inspiration and purpose in life. That adaptation is a constant. It is one of the more vulnerable things to lose when we fall in love. We can start making our lives and our growth and out choices dependent on somebody else. We must remain true to our connection and sustain that connection irrespective of whether we are single or double.

Now the great thing about getting up everyday and connecting with nature, is that this finding of stillness in the morning sets you up for the whole day. It’s like practicing real life meditation in circumstances like walking around the house, lighting a candle, looking at a picture you love, picking a flower, touching the earth, even sipping a glass of water or eating a piece of fruit. The great thing about this everyday stillness it means it is not circumstantial. We so often become dependent on practices that require a room or a teacher or an environment but really what we have to try to do is be here now, in our practice, be in stillness anywhere, anytime, everyday. We need to be able to return to that place of stillness even in a train or car, while we’re driving or in a meeting. !

We don’t want to make our stillness a practice that can only be achieved in a temple or in a garden. We needed to be a part of urban life, part of the urban landscape. We need to be able to find stillness whether we are in a traffic jam or whether we are in a church, on the bus or the tram or in the back of the taxi: we need to click get back into the stillness and that is why the practice of connecting with nature everyday, especially in the morning, is so important for you and your future relationship.

For me the morning practice is as much about letting the light from the sun into my body as it is anything else. I try to take my shoes off and be barefoot on the sand or the grass, I keep away from concrete and man-made asphalt. I try to expose my skin to the sun even if it’s snowing. Just a few seconds allows the energy of the light to enter my body and this is more important than food. I also allow my breath to be mindful. I breathe in the energy of life and I breathe out the exhaust fumes of yesteryear. This is a very simple practice it doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes I even wave my arms around as if I’m doing some form of martial arts or tai chi but really all I’m doing is leading the energy move through my body. We can’t give what we haven’t got and so the absorption of energy from the atmosphere and from the Earth can really build our potential for love and relationship.

Staying Balanced And Dealing with Emotional Unintelligence – Connecting to Your Higher Intuition, your Inspiration.!

The stillness that comes from nature, helps in dealing with emotional drama too. More than 20 years ago I went though a bad divorced. One day I was a successful, wealthy, healthy and happy businessman, the next I was not. My wife and my three children, I loved them so much, sailed off into the wide blue yonder. I was just broken down and I could not think of what to do. I sat on a beach one day it was 2 years since they had left and I was still going through hell on earth, and I sat on a beach and I looked up and there was the moon in the middle of the morning, and I was so surprised to see it was a full moon and I looked up and I thought, my kids are looking at that moon, in fact, I bet they are looking at it right now, somewhere in the world and I thought I am not disconnected from them at all. We are all connected it is just that I am physically not with them I am not able to control them and in some senses what I expect from them has no bearing and then my heart so opened, it is quite amazing, my heart so opened because all I could do was feel love for my children and the guilt went away and the blame went away and the anger and the disappointment went away, and all of the sudden I was seating in absolute stillness and I understood what it was like to get behind my ego. I understood what it was like to get passed my father-self my money-self my parent-self my partner-self I understood that what was behind that was pure love and this is the journey of this first chapter getting passed the ego, getting passed the busyness appreciating the fact that great relationships need moments of nothingness, absolute emptiness in order to celebrate the very foundation of my heart and soul, in love.

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 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: that say you’ve made some money and your business is going well, so your career is on track, have a bunch of friends and your playing sport to you feel healthy and fit. But in your house you feel lonely, isolated and distant. So, you go out from an Internet date with somebody who respect 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 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.

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.

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 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 of discard 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 that would be a contradiction of the hierarchy of values. What it means is that they have got their act together in all 7 of the 7 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 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 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.

The key is understanding that any area of desperation in somebody’s life will become an attachment to somebody else’s. If you are desperate in financial you will attach to somebody with financial strength and that attachment, flies in the face of harmonious and love filled relationship.

“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 them what they want as a result of you doing what you want. 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…

Embracing Challenge!

You are nature and nature grows at the border of chaos and order. No matter what happens, everything evolves at that border. So you are going to have chaos in your relationship. You can get depressed about it, have panic attacks about it, drink alcohol to avoid it, become a workaholic to try to eliminate it or you can accept it. If you accept that your relationship will have chaos, disagreements or differences of opinion, discomfort, you will be more realistic in your expectations and increase the sustainability of your emotional connection, arousal and love for them.

You have no choice about having chaos and challenge. But it’s up to you what you do about it.

If you distance yourself from nature, then you can do yoga, tai chi, take pills, do therapy, attend a conference or even go live in an ashram in search for peace. But chaos exists in balance with peace. If you repress chaos someone else must express it. So, if you become all harmonious and peaceful in your love, your children, siblings or community might be expressing your balance.

And, it can become obvious that many people who try to repress their chaos end up living that chaos in their health or other areas of their life. Chaos and order are always in balance. Support and challenge are twins, inseparable. In your life you will have both.

The caution here is that many people find their work life challenging. They might say to you “Oh, I’m flat out, I have a presentation to do next week, no time to chat.” you feel their overwhelm, so this person will go home and want peace and support right? They will want a relationship that agrees, complies, accepts so that they feel supported at home to balance the chaos of work. In that way they choose a relationship that is unhealthy. They choose to try to create an all good home, a no debate, no trouble household because that to them, is balance.

A better experience of love and relationship would come from embracing both peace and chaos. You don’t need to have screaming arguments or physical war, it could be as simple as an agreement to disagree. Or to see your partner in trouble and not feel the need to rescue them. If you allow your partner to be in a mess and not fix it, you are accepting that, in love, support and challenge are healthy. And if their work or health is causing their chaos, you don’t have to cause it, and won’t be blamed.

Collusion to express only positive emotions in front of children means a couple are repressing their chaos and that will end up being expressed by the children or at their workplace. So, the motivation to escape stress, challenge and chaos might just make you feel great, but it will, in the long term be the reason your relationships don’t work.

I’ve rarely seen a domestic challenge that has not got its roots in professional and work life and many corporate and professional struggles come from unresolved domestic challenges. So, chaos might be repressed in one area of life and be expressed in another. I used to visit many ashrams when I was in emotional recovery from my first marriage breakup. I soon discovered that some of the most dedicated yogi’s who were so peaceful in the ashram became nasty in business or critical family partners outside the class. The more they aspired to peace the more sensitive they became to turmoil. It’s not as if the world is going to stop violence and war just because they don’t like it and some of those people became mentally unwell because they couldn’t exist outside the ashram.

Sometimes they even went crazy outside the ashram because the bliss they experienced in their fictional half life in the solitude of the ashram bliss was so cruelly counter balanced by the challenges they experienced in their real life outside, they just couldn’t cope.

And that’s the clue to healthy love and relationship. Your relationship is not an ashram. It might be at first but eventually, your relationship will exist in the real world. So if you can have realistic expectations of what a relationship really is, rather than a fictional peace bliss like an ashram, you will make great love together.

Try to negotiate with your partner an agreement that relationships might at first be peace bliss bombs but they eventually become the beautiful balance of chaos and order, support and challenge. If you can both welcome (accept) chaos as a part of order (balance) you will not be attacked because you might be the cause of chaos, you will be welcomed and loved for it.

This is not easy to address when you first meet each other because you can’t even imagine that there could possibly be chaos, but eventually you will introduce things your partner doesn’t appreciate, you will forget the yogurt or drop a plate or even accidentally pass wind in bed and then there will be shame, blame, chaos.

Time Out when The Humour Goes Out!

My friend is a Navy Seal… a really fit man and he now trains other Navy Seals to incredible endurance and depth. They can run and swim and run and swim sleeplessly for days. He told me that all they are looking for is when an individual loses their sense of humour, then they know to pull them out and fail their training. Lost sense of humour about something means the individual has sunk and lost control. You can use this Navy Seal technique in any relationship, work or home. !

If you can’t smile at a conflict with someone and see that you are just arguing because you both only see half a story, then call a time out. Hold your hand up in that basketball Tee position – fingers of one hand vertical and the palm of the other hand facing down forming a Tee. Take time out to step away and get your balance, your sense of humour back.

You are not laughing at them. You are laughing at you. You are laughing at being challenged, confronted, uncomfortable. That’s the key here. You will lose your sense of humour but that’s great, when it happens stop, time out, get it back, It’s really not that serious.

The key here is to enjoy chaos. To recognise that uncertainty and lost control is a fundamental balance to control and certainty. To welcome both.

Winning an argument doesn’t make love. Losing an argument doesn’t make love. The soul doesn’t care about sensory gratification. When you lose that perspective you lose your sense of humour and life and love get heavy. This means to let go of control in every area of life.

Trying to be all nice, peaceful and without quarrel is a nice idea, but if that idea means you have to shrink from your vision, stop doing what you love in order to avoid conflict with your partner, then you will both end up miserable. They will be miserable because they are in a relationship with a people pleaser and that’s boring, and you will be miserable because your heart is invested in that dream and vision, it can’t be compromised.

Relationships in the city are notoriously volatile because people are happy to have only one or two emotions that make them feel good and they are not happy with the rest. We can get disconnected from nature sitting in our cars, offices, boats, exercise gyms, yoga classes, conferences, hotels, buses and because of that, our love life can diminish and suffer. We’re busy. We lose ourselves in ourselves. We lose the preciousness of eye contact because we’re disconnected from nature. We complain and care about the world and pollution and green house gas, but our own lives are full of gas too. The pollution can be in your head, it can be your emotion and then you can become ungrounded, disconnected from the beauty of life. Remember, love feeds the soul and love is the synthesis of all emotions.

So, lets put this into a doable concept. Lets say you are afraid of conflict with your partner. You are worried that if you upset them, then you will lose them. So, you need to sort that out before it starts to become a real hinderance to your relationship or hopes of a relationship. The first option you might think about is acting on your fear, reducing the amount of conflict and therefore avoiding the fear. That’s absolutely going to cause you nightmares, firstly because that tip toeing around is going to make their libido go down and down for you, and secondly it’s going to make you sick, you’ll be living in a synthetic relationship, half human, half robot. There’s a smarter alternative and it involves growing, expanding.

Fear reaction is based on contracting your behavioural options. When you fear something happening you automatically close down options. So, the opposite is what nature would be guiding you to do. First, deal with fear by getting over it. If you fear something then it’s running you, and dictating your actions and reactions. So, in this case you might fear that conflict will make you lose them. That’s the negative …. now, there are two sides to everything so, what’s the positive? The positive to your conflict with them might be that you challenge them, question them, inspire them, meet them, have mental as well as physical intimacy with them, get through their control mechanisms, teach them, energise them, and the benefit of them leaving is that you’d rather piss them off than piss yourself off, which is the result of swallowing your conflicts. The second part is much easier.

When I’ve been afraid of conflict with my partner or someone close to me I’ve felt stifled and like walking on egg shells, for me it lacks everything human when you can’t be you. So, I always go back to the drawing board and find the balance of benefit and drawback of conflict, and the possible reaction of that person. With this, my head and heart are calm so then, by knowing that what I say or do is both good and bad, I relax and choose how you express it. It doesn’t stop their reaction it just reduces my reaction to their reaction. And that’s the winning edge in dealing with fear of conflict.

A person who is fearful of conflict always screws up the dynamic of conflict by either being too subtle and therefore frustrating or being to direct and therefore angering. By getting that feeling that you are going to both help and hinder, get liked and disliked, challenge and order a person with your expression, you relax more, and then, the conflict doesn’t escalate. You just express it the best and most hearable way they appreciate being challenged. This is called expanding your options.

Closing down is reducing your options. That’s like shrinking. Nothing in nature grows by shrinking. Expanding is the model in nature and your relationship challenges are the source of that expansion and while your relationship expands, it stays healthy.

The other perspective might be tempting for you to try to talk them out of their position … you might think you are wise to educate your partner or help them see great global wisdom that you got from your yoga teacher or professor at Chinese Qigong class. You might think it would be easier to change them, than do all that process I mentioned on yourself.

But love needs appreciation; Sometimes we don’t see their perfection and then we start being critical we start wanting to rescue people, we start trying to change people, but that is the mindset that causes relationships to fail. That is the mindset that sabotages relationships. Because wanting to change somebody, even if it’s “for their own good” is telling them that you think something is wrong with them when really, the only thing that needs to change is how you see things.

Simple techniques can help; it is not an attainment but a discovery. A discovery that there are two sides to everything, nothing is missing there is always two sides and the wise person knows that there are two sides and appreciates the positive. This is the core of the most loving and potent state of mind that you can create. It begins with the acceptance that you are connected to, and a part of nature, and that all things, including yourself and your partner, are unchangeable.

Even if you could work for the whole of your life and try to eliminate all the negative things within you, nothing is ever missing it just changes form, so nothing would ever change, it would simply change the form it’s expressed in.

“Many who struggle with unfulfilling relationships have a habit of not being completely real (who they are, what they feel, what they need from others) with the people they wish to be closest. They do this because they fear upsetting the apple cart. These folks fear that if they are their genuine selves they will lose the validation and approval that they feel from the other. They fear rejection to the point that they are not completely themselves in their relationships. Work hard to be open about who you are and what you want and need in your relationships. It may feel risky but the alternative is to continue to partner with people who cannot ultimately give you what you need and who do not know the real you.” Published on February 6, 2014 by Jill P. Weber, Ph.D. in Having Sex, Wanting Intimacy.

Turning A Stress into An Inspiration!

There is a generic and powerful notion that comes from nature that can help you turn every single stress you have into an inspiration, or love as it might be best in a relationship. It starts with understanding that every single stress is an opportunity not to react, not to change something, not to get rid of anything, not to criticise somebody, not to try and evolve your consciousness, not to change locations or shift the world to be a better place. Every single stress in your life is an opportunity to change one thing.

Stress becomes a friend if you know how to deal with the cause of it. A friendly welcome and a friend that can give you the life you choose. If you run away from stress and try and change the source of it you will spend a significant part your life wasting your time and upsetting the people you love most. There are people who are paid to be professional life changers. You go to them to be told what’s wrong with you and what to fix. It’s a good time right now to separate that process from what we’re talking about here. Remembering, that there are contradictory interests in your being, mind, body, spirit and that many of the processes that help you reduce stress are dealing with only one of the three and therefore coming from a completely inadequate position. The inadequacy is not in its effectiveness but it is in the capacity to help you live inspired by nature. That is the essential ingredient of a great relationship.

Stress is teaching you to think different, to change your mind about something. If your mind changes in the right direction, and will discuss this in a minute, then you are evolving. Every tree, every fish, every whale, every Tiger, every mountain, river ocean and city is evolving. Stress triggers revolution. Stress triggers revolution unless the human emotional intelligence intervenes and this is the trap. You must be aware of this trap because it’s a very simple one and yet it can make the difference between staying in a beautiful relationship and living the life you want and being single and living the life you don’t want.

All I’m going to suggest that you do is that when you are stressed you remember a small quote and it goes like this: “there are two sides to everything in nature.”

The more polarised you see a situation the more stressed you will be. If you see a person walking towards you with an axe and you have a fear for your life then you will most likely see a series of potential dangers and not too many potential possibilities. That’s extreme thinking and very very stressful and it’s meant to be that way because in this case stress would trigger adrenaline which would trigger survival and you would either run like hell or grab a gun. Either way you would be put into a reactive mode. There would be no flexibility in your brain. Your emotional intelligence would be zero. Now, I’ve used a horrible example of someone walking towards you with an axe and in this case we can all understand why somebody would react with such radical polarised thinking. But what if they burnt the toast? Or what if they got home late from work? Or what if they didn’t put the garbage out? And in response to wall that you triggered the stress response identical to that suggested above when you saw someone carrying an axe. What if your thinking is so stark in right and wrong good and bad and all that stuff that you can’t flex. Fear does that to us.

Fear paralyses. our ability to evolve. So in the case of the approaching axe carrying person (who by the way had just dropped down a tree and was innocent in their intention) or in the case of a relationship in which we fear being rejected and therefore seek absolute control of somebody else, the result is the same. The stress eventually kills us instead of being a friend.

The difference between stress that kills us and stress that a best friend and guarantees a long healthy sustainable relationship is how we handle our emotional intelligence. If we gravitate to our gut feel we will polarise our thoughts as extreme as possible (refer the axe above) and if we gravitate toward the spiritual side we will merge our thoughts and turn any stress into love and inspiration. The process is complicated all we have to do is say “there are two sides to everything, can I see them both right now?”

So let’s say your partner burns the toast and you feel really pissed off. That’s because your emotional intelligence has hit the bottom of the barrel and all you can see is the downside to your delicious chunk of salt carrying, flower filled, glutenous, fattening, nutrition free, toast being burned. But you could take a moment to think again and say “there must be two sides to this.”

It doesn’t matter what happens. In nature and therefore the universe there are two sides to everything. There are cultural habits that deny those two sides and these come from very low emotionally unintelligent philosophies that we have absorbed subconsciously without question. That’s great because it means we have room to grow. But if we keep shouting the same rules, the same beliefs, the same emotionally unintelligent reactions to circumstances, then we will keep staying the same and avoiding evolving through stress to the relationships we deserve.

I know this sounds simplistic but in nature everything is. A relationship that is not living in harmony with nature one survive just like anything. Simply by adapting your thinking and evolving yourself through stress you improve your emotional intelligence until it rises out of that low level of thinking and becomes heartfelt, and eventually rises further to become inspiration. Your intuition can finally, when it reaches the heart or inspiration, become that trusted friend that you’ve been looking for all your life, but you can trust with your life, that backs you without rigidity, rules or laws to believe in something and to trust something greater than emotion.

Take a moment to try it now. I’m going to challenge you. Choose something that you are really passionate about; for example Japanese whale hunting, global warming, Third World poverty, terrorism, genetically modified food, fundamentalist religion, theft, violence, peace or whatever particular acts you love to grind and see if you can apply nature’s law “there must be two sides to everything.” You can see balance in any of those situations you have involved yourself in a higher sense. This doesn’t mean that you walk away from any of those topics and become careless. What it means is that you become conscious when you act and rather than react based on media and ill informed brand marketing your intelligence has risen above your emotional intelligence and you are using much higher forms of action. You can apply this to your partner in a new relationship but first I suggest you try it with a few of those hot buttons I’ve just mentioned.

Why does this action of seeing two sides to everything transform vitality, humility, gratitude, caring and challenge? The answer is clear. Emotional intuition (emotional intelligence or unintelligence) draw energy away from life and so by seeing the balance you rise above that energy draining way of thinking which automatically raises your vitality (libido). Humility comes second because you are, by searching for the two sides to something, questioning your own righteous beliefs which is in a sense humbling. To be humble is to not think that you are right all the time but to see that there are two sides to everything all the time. So humility is an automatic consequence of this evolved nature-based stress management process. Gratitude is caused when you rise above emotional intelligence and gut feel. To see both sides to an event opens your heart and in your heart is only gratitude. This is not an incomplete gratitude, is complete because it is grateful for both the positive and negative sides. Remembering that we are seeking to find the two sides to everything in nature. !

Why then does caring come as a result of seeing two sides to everything? At the lower levels of polarised thought sit the base emotions that drive many people throughout their living day. Those lower-level emotional unintelligence are fear based. They cause, anger, jealousy, resentment, guilt, hate and fear. So the more balancing you do in searching for the two sides to everything the more likely it will be that those unintelligent emotions will not be running your relationship. They will be replaced with care.

EXPAND = Sustainable Relationship!

For some people there is a dichotomy in a relationship that seems to be acceptable, the struggle between their own ambitions, work and inspiration and the desire to make their partner happy. This is especially true when there is a huge difference in professional career ambition.

When one individual might be satisfied with a part time job that is easy to do and they don’t like being challenged in their work, and the other individual has big picture ambitions, there is an irreconcilable misunderstanding looming that can make day to day life a nightmare.

When you are thinking about entering a relationship with someone you will probably be working on your emotional gut level, feeling attracted, having loving and romantic aspirations and trusting that the two of you will find a way to meet each other’s needs. In short, remain happy and in love.

So, when I start asking more inspiration based questions it might feel confronting. You might say to yourself. “why is Chris trying to ruin my new relationship before it even gets started?”

Ask yourself a better question. Ask, “where will this relationship take me?” If the answer is to more pleasure than pain, more happiness than sadness, more loving than emotion, please stop and think twice because none of that is possible. If the answer is somewhere you would be going if you were living and working alone, such as grow your business or change the world or build a bigger wealth, then you are on the right track.

If relationships are about making babies and building a family you can skip the whole question above. Just know that you will ask that question sometime in the future after the babies are born and the mortgage is set in place. You, and every other person on earth eventually asks that question of their relationship, “where is this relationship taking me?”

It’s probably wise to consider knowing where you want to be in five or ten years. I don’t mean emotionally, I mean materially. Your emotional journey is not conditional on your relationship, so don’t give it that responsibility. No matter how bad things get in relationships or how good they get, your emotional journey is your responsibility. Materially however, two people can merge to create three. You can, with the right partner, progress your health, wealth, career and social network easily. !
It’s wise to ask your potential partner where they want to be in five or ten years too. Look for ways in which this relationship could support that and also check to see whether they have, before they met you, been committed to that result. It’s very easy for people to commit to a dream when they meet someone new but the real test is how committed they were to that dream beforehand.

I met a partner whose career blossomed because we met. My work helped her. But she’d spent years before we met working on growing her career, I was a stepping stone, not a forklift.

This raises the issue of rescue. If you see your role as rescuing your partner from themselves or their situation it is probably a self-righteous position and isn’t sustainable. Maybe it would be better to empower them by accepting that people are where they want to be, even when it’s not good.

I’d go so far as to say “people fall in love with your vision.”

The primary cause of relationship failure is fear. !

When an individual feels so lucky that they have found their perfect buddy then they become fearful of losing that perfect buddy. That means that they begin to kowtow, swallow their intuition, not draw lines in the sand, get walked over, not get their needs met and smile while it all happens. This behaviour causes the partner the perfect buddy, to lose respect. When one person loses respect for another they just push the boundary further and further. When that boundary gets pushed and another person kowtows because they fear losing their buddy, the relationship deteriorates, resentment builds and disrespect grows until, kaboom, it’s over and everybody is in pain.

The irony of this failure process is that it contradicts every law of nature that stands right before us in every tree in every forest and in every ocean we can watch. But we think, from time to time, that we can make up our own rules of relationships and everything will work perfectly. It’s like saying that we can invent a universe with stars, planets, moons and earths and have it operate any which way we like at any time. Do you really think that a relationship between two loving individuals is separate from the laws of nature? How could it possibly be? Only a relationship that works in synchronicity with the laws of nature thrives. Oh yes, there are those relationships that last six months or a year that seemed to defy gravity but they don’t because they don’t last and they leave people bereft and bewildered as to what went wrong and why it didn’t last.

I don’t make any apology for the fact that the failure of relationship is 99% fear. The great thing about this awareness is that you can overcome fear in the flick of a finger. It’s not a lifelong punishment, it’s not a heaven sent curse, it’s not a psychological problem and it’s not a block to a great relationship. What it is is a way of thinking that you and other people might have got used to when you think you’ve found something fantastic and you become afraid that if you be yourself and do what you believe to be intuitively appropriate, you will lose them, or it.

If you study the lives of children you will see that very often parents use fear as a mechanism for control and tutorial. The parent will say if you don’t do what I say you will lose, X, Y, Z. This is a real shaky way to deal with discipline. Firstly, it brings the child into a conflict between what they believe to be their intuitive behaviour and yours. Secondly, it breeds in the subconscious mind a fear of loss which is, as we’ve said before one of the single most predominant and indisputably complicated mechanisms of relationship breakdown. So that’s where this sort of crap originates so now let’s look at how we can de-originate it.

I work with the laws of nature. In the laws of nature there is no psychology. That’s a whole other universe created by people far more intelligent than me to understand the human brain when things are sick. But fear and most relationship associated mental problems are not sickness and therefore I recommend you avoid psychology like it’s the plague, or the clap. Just make it simple. So here is the antidote to the fear of losing your partner. Ready?