[I'm confessing upfront that while this blog post is longer than usual, it may be one of my personal favorites of anything I've written. I think it's worth reading alongside a cup of tea or coffee.]
I woke up in the middle of the night, quickly scribbled five things, and went right back to sleep. In the morning, I awoke to decipher my barely legible script, and as I often do, carried the note in my pocket all day to keep echoing.
Both occurrences are common; the former often when ideas and constructs are brought to my Divine-self, and the latter to stay connected and increase the awareness of my daily-self. Basically, when my soul is gifted with spiritual insight, I do my best to incorporate (e.g., hammer) it into my brain’s operating system.
These five new principles reject many of the antiquated beliefs and arrangements that limit how you Love yourself and others.
In this new Millennium, there is a growing awareness that outdated forms of relationship are not working, and that something new is essential. The old agreements about why people enter into romantic partnerships and what happens in those relationships are not serving many people. In the past, the rules of relationship were relatively structured and well enforced by families and cultures. Many relationships were based on the need for security and financial well-being in an uncertain world. Often, mates were chosen based on others' expectations, class, race, or religious backgrounds.
With increased financial independence, and ethnic and cultural distinctions blurring, men and women are left more to their own discernment in choosing mates and establishing the rules and expectations of their relationship. However, along with this freedom has come increased confusion and uncertainty in relationships and marriage.
All relationships (family, friends and more) are based on equality and upholding agreements. The largest percentage of these arrangements are usually unconscious and unspoken. In order to create relationships that serve the highest good of individuals and society, I suggest that we must create new agreements that are conscious, spoken, and rooted in self-Love and integrity.
Tip: Need some guidance with discovering your individual unconscious and conscious agreements? Click here to enjoy the gift of a Complimentary Session.
The following Five Principles for The New Relationship are my suggestions for breaking the old beliefs of romance and relationships of all kinds. Once we have awareness of the frayed beliefs, and are ready to discard those that do not serve us, we can go about the work of replacing them with updated ways of relating and respecting each other. These new principles are applicable in romantic relationships, of course, but also have value in your relationships with parents and children, friends and neighbors, bosses and employees, and ultimately and most important, with yourself.
PRINCIPLE ONE: LOVE IS NOT AN EMOTION, IT IS YOUR ESSENCE.
Not who You are, but what You are. You are the source of Love in your life experience.
Love is a grand and wonderful thing. It has been exalted, suffered, written and sung about since the beginning of time.
The meaning of Love and the expression of romantic relationship has evolved and grown with changing needs, religions, and economic conditions. It is a great challenge for individuals and cultures to change traditions and morals to keep pace with the evolution of the human mind. I can think of no area of our society more in need of change, and yet at the same time often resistant to that change. There is probably no emotion more misunderstood, distorted, diluted and confused than "Love."
In fact, I don’t believe Love is an emotion at all. I believe what most people refer to as Love are feelings of joyfulness.
As I detail within Soul Expansion sessions and workshops, I believe there are only five core emotions in the human experience and Love is not one of them. Love is greater than any emotion or feeling, it is the very source by which we were formed and emanated. It is our essence and origin.
Often this concept is difficult to accept depending on our willingness to be open and move beyond our comfort zones and current mental constructs.
For now, I offer a simple analogy: if I create a marble statue; from where was the marble derived? So in your duality of Divine-self and daily-self – your spiritual-self and physical-self; from where were you derived?
You may have been birthed by your mother, but she and your father didn’t actually create you. The sperm and egg from which you were produced originated from somewhere else. They may have raised you, but they did not truly make you.
The hands of the artisan can shape the marble, but the marble precedes the sculpture. Your soul, which occupies your body, preceded and was independent of your parents.
You are more than a son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, cousin, husband, wife, friend, employee, good girl, bad guy, or any of the plethora of roles we assume. At your core, what you are is a fragment of the very same quintessence that has created the sun, moon, stars, planets, galaxies and every creature that has lived before your introduction, and shall arrive after you move onward; You are an expression of Love.
In the previous paradigm, you believed that others were the source of Love, and that you had to bargain for that Love. Love became a commodity that lived outside of yourself, you needed it to survive, and you had to be good and get it right in order to assure your share of the precious commodity.
You came into this world through Love, as Love, being Love. You were the manifestation of Life itself. You came here knowing no fear, no judgment, no conditions, and had no expectations. You simply WERE. In order to gain the acceptance of parents, friends, teachers, and others, you learned to deny your truth and accept theirs. The first truth you had to deny was the truth that you were and ARE Love.
If you believe that Love is a commodity that lives outside of yourself, and that you have to be good or get it right to earn and receive that Love from someone, you will suffer. There will always be the undercurrent of feelings of fear— the fear that you will not be good enough or will not do it right enough.
Even in the moment of receiving Love, there is a feeling of fear that you will do something to lose it. In that fear, you are not open to actually fully receive the Love that you have worked so hard to deserve. You came into this Life as Love, as Life itself. Even though you were required to agree otherwise, it is still true. It was never the truth that Love was something outside of you. In order to enter a new paradigm, you must expand beyond this old belief. You must release the need for the Love from the outside, you must stop bargaining for your supply, and you must stop offering your Love as a bargain to others who are searching for their supply. It does not serve you, and it is a dream of Love based on a lie.
Try out this new conviction: "My nature is Love. I am the source of Love in my life." Know that Love flows through you as Life itself, as that Divine nature that is in and through all of Creation. There is nowhere in Creation that this Divine Force is not present. It is in and through YOU. It is your nature. It is now, and it always has been what you are. Today, instead of going into your world looking for sources of Love, attention, or appreciation, try going out there wondering where you can share YOUR Love. How many ways can you say "I Love you" to your beloved and all of Creation today?
Ultimately, relationship is not about two or more people interacting, but it is the dance of Love recognizing itself.
Tip: Need some guidance with discovering your self-love? Click here to enjoy the gift of a Complimentary Session.
Principle Two: You are not responsible for other people's emotional reactions to your reality.
We recognized through Principle One that most of us were taught to believe that the source of Love lives outside of us, like something that you have to earn by being good or doing it right. Once that belief was established, you were inherently taught that you had the power to create emotional reactions in others.
When a parent says to a child: "You make me so angry when you spill your milk! Why won’t you pay attention to what you are doing!!??" the message seems clear. The child believes that they have the power to make the parent angry, and that it is not good to make the parent angry, so they must do and be different than they are— which in this case means "paying attention" (whatever that is!). You were taught that it is bad to hurt other people’s feelings, to be selfish by taking the last cookie (half of the cookie seems to be okay), or to act in ways that make people angry. You learned to bargain away your integrity and emotional truth to protect the feelings of others. You agreed to create responses in them that assured you that you were worthy of receiving your share of the Love commodity.
Principle Two of The New Relationship challenges all of these "rules. It affirms that you are not capable of creating emotional reactions in other people. At the core of this new commitment is the understanding that we are all on an independent journey, and that each of us interprets reality in our own way. Every one's emotional reactions arise from the sum of their experiences, interpretations and assumptions, not directly from the actions of others. You cannot create emotional reactions in others, and they cannot create emotional reactions in you. You release your illusion of control over other people's emotional reactions, and trust them to deal with their own emotional realities.
The corollary to this acceptance is: "You ARE responsible for YOUR emotional reactions to other people’s reality." You accept that your interpretations of reality-- the stories, beliefs and expectations in your mind-- create your emotional responses, and you take full responsibility for them. You no longer blame others for hurting or betraying you, nor do you believe that others can make you happy. In The New Relationship, the partners are free to be who they are and feel what they feel, and they respect each other’s capacity to honor and embrace their own emotions. They do not manipulate their own integrity in the name of taking care of their beloved.
Each is responsible for their own feelings, thoughts, and actions.
Principle Three: Being the source of Love, you are complete within yourself.
Many of us learned, as children, to deny or disown parts of ourselves in order to earn the Love and acceptance that we needed to survive. These disowned parts of the self we pushed into the "shadow," and those aspects of the self that were acceptable, became the personality (a collection of personas).
If you were criticized for being lazy, you might have become very industrious. If you were shamed for being messy, you may have adapted by becoming exceedingly neat. If your feelings were rejected, perhaps you learned to deny them and to be very intellectual and thoughtful. Whatever the strongest (and most defended) aspects of your personality are, you will probably find a corresponding part that has been disowned because of the judgment of others.
Our soul longs for a reunion of these wounded parts, and searches throughout our walk through life for them. Finding those lost parts of the self in another person can seem very familiar, and exciting. If the other person also recognizes fragments of themselves in you, then you may view each other as the instant remedy for the emptiness within.
The unfortunate truth is that by projecting the lost parts of yourself on to another person, what you are falling in Love with is yourself. Thus, there is no resistance nor boundaries to this Love reunion. The experience of "Love at First Sight" often arises from this mistaken belief that something lost inside can be found outside.
This is the essential difference between a spiritually-centered person and a worldly person. Worldly doesn’t mean that you have money or stature. Worldly means that you think the solution to your inner problems is in the world outside. You think that if you change things outside, you’ll be okay. But nobody has ever truly become okay by changing things outside.
When you recognize that you are complete within yourself, and you know you are the source of Love in your life, you are able to see people for who they truly are. You build your relationships on that reality. The compatibility in your relationships comes predominately from common values rather than from the attractions of "Mutually Compatible Disowned Selves." This opens the door for relationships with deepened Love and higher purpose; to assist our spiritual ascension.
Tip: This principle is big work with a significant life-changing benefit. Need some guidance with deeply finding your own source of self-love? Click here to enjoy the gift of a Complimentary Session.
Principle Four: The truth is more important than the outcome of the relationship.
A consistent mantra within Soul Expansion sessions and workshops is “commit to the process, not the outcome.” We really have no control over the outcome of a situation. We may think we do, but I assure you that we don’t. The best we do have control over is commitment and intention.
So, prepare, because this principle is only for the emotionally brave. You should not read this if you are attached to the outcome of your relationship(s). The archaic model about relationships insist that you should often sacrifice your truth or integrity in order to take care of our partner’s feelings. In the old system, when you believed that you could create emotional responses in others, and believed that those reactions were your responsibility, it was important to create the appropriate outcome. You were taught that to hurt other people's feelings was bad, and to make them happy was good.
In order to create the appropriate responses, you learned to be aware of what other people wanted and needed from you, and to change your reality in order to give it to them. If they had "good" emotional reactions to you, then the feedback you received was that you were are good person. The fear of being a "bad" person is the fear of rejection and abandonment, based on the old belief that the source of Love, comfort, and survival lies outside of you (see Principle One).
When you modify or deny your truth in order to satisfy the need of another, we could say that you are creating a false self to be in relationship with them. If they choose the same, they will create a false self to be in relationship with you -- or, more accurately your false self. The relationship then becomes two (actually many more) false selves, manipulating their feelings, responses, and integrity in order to be accepted by each other.
If you are relating in this way, you may have said or thought; "I just don't seem to experience being very connected to my partner/friend/work/life." Perhaps that is because it is your false selves that are living your life, not you.
In The New Relationship, you know that you are the source of Love, not your partner, family, friends, or work. You know that you cannot control how other people portray or perceive you, nor their emotional reactions to you. You are not holding on to anyone because you believe that they complete you, and that if you lost them it would rip out your soul and break your heart forever. You are willing to show up and be yourself, in the truth and integrity of who you are, without being attached or trying to control the outcome.
In The New Relationship, you and your partner agree that each of your feelings, your reality, and your truth are the most important aspects of the relationship. You are willing to risk living as your true self, and let the relationship grow, expand, and change accordingly. This is paramount. (I encourage you to read the previous sentence again.)
By not being attached to the outcome of any relationship, you learn to trust that all outcomes are perfect for you -- they are not failures or successes, and have nothing to do with your value or worthiness.
In the past, we have put our faith in our ability to control outcomes, to control other people's emotional reactions with our careful behavior, and hold onto Love. With this new belief, we are willing to put our faith in Life itself, trusting that if we live Life as who we came here to be, Life will unfold in front of us as a perfect expression of who we are.
If you are Life, and you live guided by the integrity that arises in you as Life, then you will find that the Life you are resonates with those aspects of Life in the world that are perfect for you. Your relationships with all of Creation will resonate with the deepest parts of who you are, and reflect back to you that perfection.
Live life as you, show up in all of your relationships as who you are -- especially your relationship with yourself! Let go of your attachment to the outcomes, and put your faith in Life. In a very short period, you will realize something more than feeling joyful, you will have discovered authenticity and purpose in your walk through life.
Tip: Need some guidance with discovering authenticity and purpose? Click here to enjoy the gift of a Complimentary Session.
Principle Five: True happiness is the result of Love coming out of you.
Knowing that your essence is Love itself, you ascertain a happiness that cannot be taken away from you. You are not concerned with how your Love is received, because it is your loving, as an expression of your Divine-self, that fills you. Your only desire is to Love all of Creation, to see its perfection, and to know and Love yourself as a reflection of that perfection. Your New Relationship is based on this Love. You are unrestrained to Love without conditions or expectations. You are free.
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