friendship & love tips

A Definition of Unconditional Love

2009-04-19T02:24:00.001-07:00

Love without condition

"I love you as you are, as you seek to find your own special way to relate to the world, or the way you feel that is right for you. It is important that you are the person you want to be and not someone that I or others think you should be."

I realize that I cannot know what is best for you although perhaps sometimes I think I do. I've not been where you have been, viewing life from that angle you have, I do not know what you have chosen to learn, how you have chosen to learn it, with whom, or in what time period. I have not walked life looking through your eyes, so how can I know what you need.

I allow you to be in the world without a thought or word of judgment from me about the deeds you undertake. I see no error in the things you say and do, in this place where I am. I see that there are many ways to perceive and experience the different facets of our world. I allow without reservation the choices you make in each moment.

I make no judgment of this for if I were to deny your right to evolution, then I would deny that right to myself and all others. To those who would choose a way I cannot walk, whilst I may not choose to add my power and my energy to this way, I will never deny you the gift of love that God has bestowed within me for all creation, as I love you so I shall be loved; as I sow, so I shall reap.

I allow you the universal right of free will to walk your own path, creating steps or to sit a while if that is what is right for you. I will make no judgment of these steps, whether they are large or small, nor light or heavy or that they lead up or down, for this is just my viewpoint. I see you do nothing and might judge it to be unworthy. And yet, it may be that you bring great healing as you stand blessed by the light of God.

I cannot always see the higher picture of divine order. For it is the inalienable right of all life to choose their own evolution and with great love I acknowledge your right to determine your future. In humility I bow to the realization that the way I see is best for me does not have to mean that it is also right for you. I know that you are led as I am following the inner excitement to know your own path.

I know that the many races, religions, customs, nationalities and beliefs within our world bring us great richness and allow us the benefit of teachings of such diverseness. I know we each learn in our own unique way in order to bring that love and wisdom back to the whole. I know that if there were only one way to do something, there would need to be only one person. I will not only love you if you behave in a way I think you should, or believe in those things I believe in. I understand you are truly my brother and sister though you may have been born in a different place and believe in another God than I.

The love I feel is for all of God's world. I know that every living thing is part of God and I feel a love deep within every person, and every tree, and flower, every bird, river, ocean and for all the creatures in all the world. I live my life in loving service being the best me I can, becoming wiser in the perfection of divine truth, becoming happier in the joy of unconditional love.

Tips, tricks and advice for relationship for teens, girls and women

2009-04-19T02:19:00.001-07:00

Here are some things you can do to make the sparks of romance fly:

While your loved one is at work, use your spare key to open their car door and place roses and a card in their driver's seat. This will show your loved one your true feelings.

Don't buy your loved one a commercial type card to declare your love. Make them one and send it to them in the mail, even if you live together. The card will surprise your loved one!

Give your loved one a small decorated box. On the inside flap write "These are 50 of the many reasons why I love you." Create 50 brightly-colored folded strips of paper inside with various phrases...all declaring your love. Fill each strip of paper with something very personal and include some special surprises like a gift certificate to their favorite spa.

Spend the night outdoors together on a really warm, clear night. Name a star after him/her and register that name on-line.

Cook the love of your life what will be a favorite meal. Use candles, a bottle of red or white wine, then follow this up with a back and neck massage. Do this “just because” and ask for nothing in return. For message oils use sandalwood, lavender or ylang ylang. The art is to please your loved one. Watch the night just sizzle!

Send your loved one on a scavenger hunt. Have him find his goodies (prepaid and waiting) at the bakery, deli, wine store etc., and when he gets home meet him at the door in something very sheer. Feed him blindfolded and then hand him a Polaroid camera and tell him to have a ball!

Have a “conversation a day” (on the phone or at home) where you whisper to the other person and let them know you love them and miss them. Your whisper will capture their attention.

The most effective Flirting Tips for Women to atttract their Man

2009-04-19T02:18:00.002-07:00

Flirting Tips for Women - Nurture Romantic Ideas and Rituals

Couples are forever looking for ways to strengthen or enhance their love life.

A very simple and effective way to steal away for some quality time together is to establish a time to meet each day.

This can easily be arranged over the lunch hour and after dinner hours.

One idea is to arrange a time to meet for a drink of tea, or whatever type of drink that you prefer. If possible, arrange to meet in your home where you are assured of privacy.

With tea, enjoy a bite to eat when you can. While polishing off your pot of tea, simply sit for 30 minutes or so and discuss how your day is going and make any plans ahead for the coming week.

This can be a rather intimate time for the two of you and can become a regular ritual.

Many couples with children often want to know how they can add romance to their relationship being surrounded by children.

The regular meeting ritual is one way that couples can both spend some special time alone while setting a wonderful example for the children that their mom and dad really love each other.

For parents with small children, it might be impossible to spend quiet time alone together until after the children are put to bed. The importance of the ritual is the uninterrupted time spent together.

Whatever means you use to be able to do that consistently will pay off in the romance department, now and well into the future.

How to make your man more romantic

2009-04-19T02:18:00.001-07:00

Flirting Tips for Girls

Some men just aren’t in tune with their romantic side. Fortunately, most men can be taught, given the right attitude. Proceed carefully and don't ever pressure your man into romance. Here are some initial tips:

The golden rule is to lead by example.

Remember, you want your man to take the lead, but, on his terms, not yours. Start by pampering him. Do what he likes to do best -- even if that is drinking with the chums, playing a video game, or just watching TV on a Saturday night.

Doing this, a spicy ending to any of these activities will be much more favorable for him. Afterwards, show him you'd appreciate similar attention towards you, and eventually he'll get the bigger picture.

Take charge of a great night out with your man.

Plan an entire night on the town and then let your man just come along for the ride. Women need to appreciate just how difficult it can be for the man to always be the one to find creative and fun things to do.

It can be very romantic for the man when his lady takes charge in this way, finding a new restaurant and activity for them to enjoy. The man can find this very exciting and will be open to romance afterwards, once an enjoyable evening has been spent together.

Turn romance into a competitive game.

Alternate planning weekly date nights with your man and plan an activity that will appeal to his competitive nature. Men will often want to take the lead here because they find great pleasure in outdoing their mate.

Finally, make sure your man knows how much you appreciate the little things that he does for you.

This can be cooking a great meal when you are tired, opening the car door for you, treating you to a chocolate heart when you are feeling blue, any number of thoughtful, little things.

Make a point of mentioning that he does this for you in front of your friends and watch the envy of the other ladies ooze all over the place! Your man will take notice and feel loved! Romantic moments should quicken with this plan!

There are definite things that you can do to encourage your man’s romantic nature. All he may need is a little suggestion, knowing how much he is appreciated and a few well thought out challenges to get his creative juices flowing.

Simple tips for helping your relationship to stay healthy

2009-04-19T02:17:00.000-07:00

Use these quick and easy ideas to help your relationship stay fun

Showing someone that you care and that they are special to you does not need to be complicated. Some of the most touching ways of saying I LOVE YOU are the simplest and most appreciated.

Adapt just a few today and watch as your love life takes wings.....and flies!

Give or get a hug for no reason
Tell the other person that they are important and respected
Kiss them when people are looking
Kiss them when people aren't looking
Tell the other person that you care deeply
Hold hands to show support
Go together for a long bike ride
Give a special present/give any present
Tell them you are there for them when they need you most
Spend quality time together every day
Enjoy a film together and put your arm around him or her during the story
Walk arm in arm through the woods
Compose a special tape of love songs just for him or her
Open up and share your feelings
Open up and share your dreams with each other
On a cold day snuggle up together/do this on any day just because
Sit for a long while together in the park
Take a long walk together
Enjoy a meal together and you pay
Enjoy a picnic indoors and roll around together on the floor
Enjoy an outdoor game of Frisbee together
Pay lots of lovely compliments
Get all heated up and relax in a Jacuzzi
Go for a hearty swim together
Feel close together and just relax
Shop for dinner together and you pay
Cook a good meal together and you do the dishes
Offer a loving touch
Plan and go on a wild trip together
Host a party for all of your mutual friends
Bake a yummy cake
Be quiet together in a library
Cultivate your culture and browse in a museum
Always be there for him or her
Find out what's meaningful for the other person - and then join with them
Get in good shape together
Look deeply into his or her eyes and just gaze
Wash your loved one’s car by hand
Land that big fish together/you bait your own hook
Talk to each other about everything

FRIENDSHIP RINGS

2009-04-19T02:14:00.003-07:00

From just a few buttons and pipe cleaners your children can make their own friendship rings. Measure a piece of pipe cleaner to wrap around your finger, and leave some extra length to twist. slide through button shank, twist ends. Note: There are also many variations to this activity, you can make a neat bracelet by adding several buttons. You can also make a necklace by adding a few buttons on a string.

WHEN A FRIEND MOVES AWAY

2009-04-19T02:14:00.001-07:00

Your child will be upset when a good friend moves away, even if you are the one that´s been transferred their feelings will start emerging in a number of ways. Understandably they will be sad and maybe even a bit angry. There are several things you can do to help them work through this anxious time. First make sure you listen to them, they will have questions about how their life may change, or fears that they won´t be able to make new friends that are as much fun. Make a plan for keeping in touch with their friend. A weekly letter, e-mail, an occasional phone call, even some summer vacation time will keep good friends together. They can plan a secret code, and correspond in code! Make a puzzle letter by writing your notes on one side of the paper only and cutting it into 4 or 5 pieces before putting it in the envelope. They will have lots to tell each other, after all before they spent all their time together, and now whatever they do will is news to the other! Follow through with their correspondence, by making sure the letters they write are mailed. Take pictures of your child with other mutual friends to send.

BEST FRIEND EARRINGS

2009-04-19T02:13:00.004-07:00

Here is an idea for your daughter. When an occasion arrives to exchange gifts with a good friend, make a pair of "friendship earrings". To do this, go to the store and buy 2 pair of earrings. Try to find some that relate to each other and maybe even have a theme (like an activity you both like). Then go home and switcheroo! Each new pair of earrings will have one of each pair. (for example, a pair of sun earrings and a pair of moon earrings become two pairs of one of each sun and moon.)

FRIENDS ARGUE

2009-04-19T02:13:00.003-07:00

Best friends will still have disagreements just like all people do. It is how the disagreement is handled and how it strengthens the friendship that makes this friend your best friend. Best friends accept each other for who they are, not what they have or who they know. Best friends don´t try to change one another. Best friends support each other through thick and thin. Minor disagreements are but they don´t last long. My best friend and I have little "spats", but they make our friendship stronger. We are supporting each other through everything-no matter what!!

BEST FRIENDS

2009-04-19T02:13:00.001-07:00

Towards grade five, it becomes time to choose a special friend, a "best" friend. This should be someone who you can rely on, not someone who is good looking and popular who will use you for your talents. This person should be loyal to you, and shouldn´t be eager to talk behind your back about you. You should be able to trust this person in keeping personal secrets, and not telling. This choice is an important one, don´t underestimate it! And remember, a boy can be a girl´s best friend, and visa-versa. You don´t have to be "Boyfriend-Girlfriend" to be Best Friends. This may happen in the future, but it doesn´t have to if you don´t want it to. Good luck in choosing your favorite friend!

Building Love in Your Relationship

2009-04-08T20:02:00.003-07:00

We recently received the following question: “Can this help people who were 'not in love' when they married?”

This is an excellent question and we'd like to thank the person who submitted it.

First the short answer. Yes, definitely, the relationship skills taught in the Relationship Enhancement program can help persons in this situation.

Now some explanation. Notice that the question asks whether this can “help”. I think this person understood there are no “magic wands”, but that there might be something that could help them to work more effectively at improving their relationship.

By asking the question, this person also seems to be saying, “I really want to keep this marriage together. Even though when we were married we were not in love and love has not developed since then, maybe there is some way that love can grow here.”

So perhaps the question could be rephrased this way, “Can Relationship Enhancement help people who were 'not in love' when they married, but who now want to try to build love into their relationship?” The answer is “yes” for at least two reasons.

First, Relationship Enhancement skills allow couples to resolve conflictual issues. Conflict happens in every relationship, even where there is love. Relationship skills help in finding solutions that are satisfying to both persons and this, in turn, builds confidence in the relationship.

Second, Relationship Enhancement education empowers couples to be empathic toward one another and to feel understood by one another. This essential combination is the basis for emotional bonding that leads to companionate love, which researchers have identified as the more stable and lasting form of marital love. Of course, feeling emotionally close to one another is also the basis for other dimensions of marital love as well.

So, even if you didn't originally “choose your love”, you can grow to “love your choice!”

Marriage Education in the News

In February President Bush stated the following in one of his speeches: “Many good programs help couples who want to get married and stay married...Premarital education programs can increase happiness in marriage and reduce divorce by teaching couples how to resolve conflict, how to improve communication and, most importantly, how to treat each other with respect.”

It is gratifying to see increased recognition of the value of relationship skills education. We invite you to enroll in our program and experience the benefits for yourself.

Love, American Idol Style

2009-04-08T20:02:00.001-07:00

It seems the entire country has been struck with American Idol mania. Ruben's Alabama fashion statement has caused a 205 frenzy. Clay has made the "Opie" look hot (something even the talented Ron Howard couldn't pull off. ) And Kimberly has proven once and for all (and specifically for Simon) that there is more than one kind of beautiful.

As for the judges and Ryan Seacrest, well, the country is completely divided on them. Which got me thinking -- Does the American Idol judge we like the most hold some clue as to the kind of people we're most attracted to? I asked around, and the favorite judge VS. potential mate answers were surprisingly accurate.

Below is the Love Life Idol-ometer:

Crazy about Simon?

Simon draws the strongest reactions all around - we either love him or we hate him. (Personally, I adore him, but that's me.) What does a preference for Simon say about the kind of guy or girl that makes your toes curl? You want someone who doesn't waste words. Someone who doesn't back down to popular opinion but will admit when he's wrong. A person who's confident, and self-assured (or arrogant as hell, depending on your take.) You're also looking for someone who is brutally honest, because you always like to know exactly where you stand. And you don't mind that he's a bit stingy with the compliments because on the rare occasion that he says something nice, you know he really means it.

Straight up for Paula Abdul?

Paula is the sunshine girl who doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. If Paula's your favorite judge, you want to be with someone who lives by the "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" code. The great thing about this person is that they'll always support you, no matter how badly you screw things up. The bad thing about this kind of person is that you'll never really know what they're thinking because they're too busy trying not to rock the boat. The other drawback? If there are problems in the relationship, you probably won't know it until it's all over.

Randy Happy?

Randy is great all-around guy. If Randy's your dawg, you prefer a mate who will give it to you straight, but soften the blow with kindness. (Which means he'd take you to dinner before he dumped you.) This is a person who's honest without being nasty, but always on the level. This is also a person who is generally happy and easy-going, with a strong sense of personal style and a great sense of humor.

Pining for Ryan?

You don't mind two-hour discussions on the variances of haircare products. If you like Ryan, you may be most attracted to arm candy. He's nice, he looks good in a suit, he's probably a fun party date. Enough said. And, maybe, you don't mind dating someone who's prettier than you are.

The World Will Always Welcome Lovers

2009-04-08T20:01:00.001-07:00

On a recent trip to North America, I was astonished to see the media circus -- the focus and attention of the world - surrounding one kiss: the kiss between Vice President Al Gore and his wife Tipper during the Democratic Convention.

In a recent U.S. based global publication, I read an article entitled, "Gore's kiss is so '60s - and probably fake." In fairness to the writer of this article, he is entitled to his own opinion: for that I do not judge him. I guess what bothers me, and what I question is, "Why the hoopla?" Oh right ... I forgot... We are in the arena of politics in The United States. God forbid that a politician shows some emotion and love in front of the voting public! For the most part, all the articles I read about "The Kiss' were pessimistic: they felt the whole kiss was staged, and believed that Al & Tipper were grandstanding for the sake of votes. The article that I mentioned above ends with the following: "And if it is shown, it is credible. It is real. I grew up learning to make the opposite assumption: My deepest instinct tells me that if something is paraded in public, then it must be false - a mere performance."

I am neither a resident nor a citizen of The United States. However, for what it's worth, here is my opinion of "The Kiss." By chance, I saw Al Gore's speech on television that evening and witnessed "The Kiss" between Al and his wife. How did I feel? I enjoyed his speech, listening closely to each word. The message I received not only from his speech, but even more from Mr. Gore's face, was that this man feels emotion -- and more importantly love -- for his country, his late father, his elderly mother, his wife, and his children. There was the speech, and there was "The Kiss." It was, indeed, a long kiss... But, so what? The man, in my opinion, was genuine, full of emotion and love, as the long road of his personal life and political career finally brought him to this moment, when his wife, his family, and the entire Democratic Party affirmed their faith in him as a nominee for President of The United States. He is a human being and did something very natural: he gave his wife a big, long, tongue-in-the-mouth kiss. So what is the big deal, I ask you? Why do we feel that a politician cannot give his wife a long, wet kiss in public when he so desires?

I, for one, commend Al Gore. He is a loving person. He displayed not only his love, but also courage rather than fear. I enjoy watching happy, loving couples. "The Kiss" may have been staged, but, based on my observation, I feel that it was genuine and came from the heart. I feel it is a nice change to see some love in the political arena: what a nice example for the rest of the world, especially for the American people. Based on the public opinion expressed in the countless books and articles I read, I get the sense that people want more love and less fear in their lives. Maybe that is something the media of the world should ponder, before jumping on this anti-kissing bandwagon again.

My thoughts while I write this article bring me to some lyrics of an old song that Jimmy Durante used to sing:

"As Time Goes By."

You must remember this

A kiss is just a kiss

A sigh is just a sigh

The fundamental things apply

As time goes by

And when two lovers woo

They still say I love you

On that you can rely

No matter what the future brings

As time goes by

The world will always welcome lovers

As time goes by

I say to Al and Tipper: just keep kissing whenever your hearts desire, and never lose that attitude of love for one another. You truly are a fine example to the rest of us in the world. As the song says, "The world will always welcome lovers, as time goes by."

Loving Everyday

2009-04-08T20:00:00.002-07:00

One of the most important keys to having a mature, loving relationship is to recognize the importance of practicing the art of loving every day. If you are not prepared to do this daily work, you will never experience mature love. Relationships either rise or fall-- they do not stand still. If you are not putting in the effort, you are neglecting your partner and contributing to the eventual demise of the relationship. Practicing the art of loving, each day, insures that your relationship will rise.

Loving relationships are built. They do not happen by chance. It's the little things that you do (taking a few seconds or a few minutes each day) that will make the difference in your relationship. It's taking the time to share a moment with one another before you go to work, instead of rushing out of the house. It's a phone call at some point during the day to talk to one another. When you arrive home, it's sharing the day's events with each other, instead of opening the mail or collapsing on the couch with the remote control. It's preparing dinner together, doing the dishes, sitting and having a cup of tea or coffee or maybe a glass of wine. It's touching and being physically close while lying on the couch, or holding one another while watching television or listening to music. It's being able to give your full attention to your partner, making eye contact and really listening when he or she is talking. It's validating what your partner says and feels, by providing genuine empathy and understanding. It's noticing and expressing appreciation for the little things your partner does for you. It's letting your loved one know how important he or she is to you, and how much you appreciate his or her presence in your life. It's being spontaneous and expressing your feelings to one another. It's consciously being aware of (and avoiding doing) the little things that annoy your partner: such as leaving the toilet seat up, squeezing the toothpaste the wrong way, leaving makeup all over the bathroom counter, leaving dirty clothes all over the floor... I think you know what I'm talking about.

Expressing your love does not have to be expensive. Spontaneously giving one rose has the same thought behind it as giving a dozen. Little surprises-- gifts, notes, and greeting cards-- make your partner feel valued and loved by you. A new car, a new house, a Caribbean holiday, expensive jewelry, a fur coat, an expensive night on the town... these are all wonderful, but when it comes right down to it, it's the little things, that we do daily, that are most important. The little things are what build loving relationships and allow us to experience mature love.

You have got to take responsibility and make the time to give love to one another every day. By making your partner a priority in your life, and remembering to do the little things that make your loved one feel cared for and appreciated, you will be on your way to realizing life's most wonderful experience: that of rising in love with one another. Coretta Scott King, widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., recently said that if she had to pinpoint the most important message she has learned in her life, "it would be that love is the most powerful healing force on earth, and it is available to us all. If we can learn how to love one another, there is nothing we can't do." So we can rise above, and rise in love, when we practice the art of loving with our partner on a daily basis.

Love = Life Fear = No Life

2009-04-08T20:00:00.001-07:00

Every week, without fail, someone either writes or approaches me with the question: "What have you learned about love?" It is a difficult question to answer completely, because, every day, I learn something new. Each day I watch the world, and I am given new lessons, not only about love, but also about fear. Since I am not one to ignore or avoid a challenge, I will give you what would be my answer to this question today:

I learned that money and possessions do not bring love and happiness to life.

I have learned that, in the words of Katherine Anne Porter, "Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it."

I recognize that love is an art that requires patience, confidence, discipline, concentration, faith, and practice daily, as Erich Fromm told us in his book, The Art of Loving.

I have learned that life and the lives of the ones you love are happening now and today. This is not a dress rehearsal for another life you will have later... Live it with love now.

For so many years, my priorities were wrong. This caused bad choices and unhappiness for me and for those I loved. Priorities are a key component to a more fulfilling, loving life. My four top priorities are as follows: 1) Myself, 2) My Spouse or Partner, 3) My Family, which includes children, and 4) Work or Career. In my opinion, this has to remain constant to experience true love of oneself, which allows one to share a journey of rising love with a partner, which, in turn, is the example partners must set for their children and for all people they encounter in life.

Love is an action. Treat it as such. Actions speak louder than words when it comes to love.

I judge no other man or woman in this world. This it is not my right. I respect everyone for who they are, as individuals, and treat them equally with love and respect.

The meaning of "loving" to me is as follows:

L Life

O Options / Choices

V Vision / Imagination

I Intimacy

N Nurturing

G Giving

In my opinion, love is rising, not falling. You must love yourself, be happy and complete, in order to be capable of sharing a rising love with another. What we should seek is that unique individual who complements us and stimulates our mind, body, spirit, and soul. It has to be all or nothing: partial is not acceptable. To have a truly rising, loving journey with a partner, we must share erotic, platonic, romantic, practical, philosophical, intellectual, and enduring love with one another.

I recognize the importance and beauty of touch. I have no fear of embracing another with a warm hug, or holding a loved one anytime and anywhere. I love to touch the one I love. I love holding hands with the one I love. It is the art of touch that makes loving so sweet. Touch has brought out my feminine side. We all, as men and women, need a balance of yin and yang, both masculine and feminine, to experience love all the time in our lives.

The most important lesson I ever learned came in the final year of the 20th century: the lesson of unconditional love. We all came into this world with unconditional love. We were brought into this world as the purest form of love imaginable. Why did we change? Why are there so many sad, unhappy, and troubled people in the world today? Why are there so many divorces? Why is there so much violence in the world? Why are our young people committing suicide and performing such serious acts of violence and aggression? Why do so many children grow up with only one parent? Why are road rage and air rage such common occurrences today? I could fill a book with these types of questions that cross my mind, each day, as I watch the evening news and read the newspapers of the world. Why is all this happening? I believe the reason is this: we are not choosing love. Too many of us have forgotten the unconditional love we knew when we entered this world.

We constantly hear so many songs of love. Today, one comes to my mind: "What The World Needs Now Is Love Sweet Love." Why do we not choose love? This is a question that the great minds of all time have explored. More books, television programs, movies, and articles in magazines and newspapers have been written, and, yet, still so many of us choose not to love. Why? It is beyond my understanding why we, as intelligent beings, would choose to live in such hate, chaos, toxicity, dysfunction, and most importantly FEAR!!!!! My equation for you to think about is very simple: LOVE = LIFE, FEAR = NO LIFE. There truly is no in between. I choose LOVE. I have seen what FEAR can do to my life and to the lives of my loved ones and so many others in the world's population. In my books, FEAR is unacceptable. It is about time that we stop and recognize the consequences of this choice that we allow, so graciously, to come into our lives.

With the beginning of the new millennium, maybe it is time to start recognizing this most important choice. Each of us faces the choice between LOVE and FEAR everyday. Let us all begin this new century with the intelligence and awareness to choose LOVE over FEAR. Love is the biggest gift you can give to anyone, especially to yourself. Love is the cure to the problems we face each and every day. It is our choice. Fear is a choice that will continue to negatively affect our world unless we do something about it. In my opinion there is no room for FEAR in our world. There is only room for more LOVE.

I love you!

2009-04-08T19:59:00.000-07:00

The famous three words we never hear enough of in our life. Throughout our life span we keep looking, waiting and hoping for something to take us, or lead us, to our true love. Have you ever wondered where we can find love?

What really is this word "Love" that we keep repeating to that someone special in our lives? How many times do you tell your partner "I love you"? Do you really mean it, or do you just like to hear yourself speak? Or, is it just being said because it is part of the vocabulary that your partner likes to hear, or that helps make them feel secure about themselves. So what’s love in the first place? What does love mean to you? Where can we find it?

Before looking for answers, we need to establish things ourselves and understand the meaning of the word "LOVE".

Love, in my point of view, is a flow of energy between two people that can bring awareness of their existence on this plane together, and this helps their relationship, and the harmony between them, to grow. If love is a flow of energy, basically it is not costing you anything so why do we hold ourselves back from truly sharing that love with someone else. Vulnerability, security, or maybe fears prevent us, but how hard are we really trying to achieve "true love"?

Love is already in your own backyard and we seem to have a hard time accepting this. To be able to accept love we need to learn how to give it in the first place. Love already exists in our "being" as humans share the most precious, intimate and secret jewel that is in our soul, our growth, and our spirit.

How much do you love yourself, or accept yourself for who you are? I am not introducing this question in an egoistic or selfish way. The amount of love you attract is really a reflection of the amount you give to others. We mirror what is already in us. You cannot get love from what you don’t have in yourself in the first place. The amount of time and effort you are willing to put into accepting, or inviting, true love to yourself is the same amount you are already accepting or giving to yourself? Are you ready to be in love? Ask yourself this question. Let go of your pride and fears, and invest in yourself. Think about it!

Do not allow one bad relationship to hold you back or stop you from investing in love again. Holding yourself back from loving someone is as equal to, or as important as, attracting love to your own life. We always look to receive love from another person but it is the contrary, you hold your happiness in your own hands. So open your heart and a new love will come and approach you. Don’t go too far to look for that true love. Just start searching for it within yourself!!! Sometimes it is hard to love ourselves because of different occurrences that have happened to us. We lose our own self-confidence and self-esteem. What I suggest, to renew your confidence in yourself, is a change of attitude. Appreciate yourself first, for who you are. Love yourself for who you are, and NOT for the way people want you to be, in their image. You are who you are, and if someone does not like you for what you are, then they are not the right one for you.

Now again comes the question - do you really mean it when you say to someone that you love him or her? Of course in my opinion, you need to distinguish between real love and infatuation. A person that showers his or her partner with material things or gifts usually has two motives. First, he or she is substituting one thing they can’t offer to their partner (love) and second he or she is hiding something from their partner (finding love somewhere else). Where am I going with this, just to say that love has no value attached to it? Either you give love from your soul or you don’t. Let’s just stop kidding ourselves by living a fancy unreal life. Love has no monetary value attached to it otherwise it would not be love. Love is a flow of energy so how can we place a price on it.

Until you find true love in your own heart, embrace every moment and enjoy your exploration of life and what it can bring to you.

Remember, love someone for who they are and not for the way you want them to be. Appreciate them as human souls. Happy discovery!!

Love songs: the hidden menace

2009-04-08T19:55:00.000-07:00

I love you too much

I hate the feeling I get when you're not there

Baby come back

I miss you

I'm waiting for you to make me whole

You make me feel brand new

You make me feel so good

Without you I am nothing

I'll never let you go

If you go away...

Lines from love songs are everywhere. Here I am about to do my taxes when I tune into a session of love songs on the radio. And as I became aware of the emotions that were being automatically generated in me. I realised how much affect these songs can have on a person. I had to put finger to keyboard and ask

'What happens when you listen to songs devoted to sadness, possessiveness, despair, regret, anger, bitterness, self-deprecation and neediness. Answer - You feel like shit!' Is this good? I don't think so!

Each generation has it's style of popular music and one thing that has remained constant is the love song. Love songs are part of our culture.

Love songs create feelings in us. A love song can be a divine elixir that generates wonderful feelings in us or a toxic story that poisons our system and sends us into deep depression.

Unbeknown to us love songs, are programming our brain with affirmations which develop into belief about how life is. Love songs are part of the myth of our society. They are stories that tell how it is. The more we listen to how it is, the more we believe that is reality. We begin to act out the reality and that slows us down from creating new realities.

Pilgrimage to find the lost shit

In my late teens/very early twenties Leonard Cohen was the high priest of sadness. If love didn't work out you lay on your bed, listening to Leonard droning on about being led down to the river, lost loves, missed opportunities. As 'That's no way to say goodbye' oozes out of the speakers, the tears flow freely, the stomach churns with awful feelings, pain wracks the body and despair fills your soul.

Yep, suicide was definitely an option when you listened to Leonard. We lapped it up, we wallowed in the shit and we felt very bad. But wasn't that how it is meant to be. Perhaps, but was it meant that we make it worse and double the bad feelings by submitting ourselves to Leonard's misery. As we listen we get programmed, we fulfil the program and so the world turns. But it doesn't have to be like that. Recovery can be swifter if we stop creating toxic messages and start sending out healthy ones.

So what messages are toxic love songs conveying?

Life's like that - can't and but!

There's no use looking back and wondering... I never had a dream come true till the day that I found you. Even though I pretend that I've moved on. But still I can't find ways to let you go. Just can't stay goodbye.

Translation. People are supposed to move on, but I can't. Can't deletes the positive message and you start to develop the belief that it's ok to stay and wallow cos that's how it is!

I give you control of my life!

'You make me feel brand new'. 'You gave my pride back to me'. 'Without you life has no meaning or rhyme'.

We use this type of language every day. It is power-leak language. When we talk like that we are affirming to ourselves and others that someone else can control our feelings. We are also indicating that we expect it to happen. We are creating a belief about how life is.

'Without you life has no meaning or rhyme'.

Translation. Life is crap when you're not around. To me that is saying it's impossible to have a great life without that person. They get to control your life just by you needing them. They might not even know it!

We can all learn to be whole and to take responsibility for our own happiness. It is a lifelong practice... learning to focus on the possible, the positive and the potentcy.

When we start using language like

'When I'm with you I feel even more alive. [i.e. Being with you is a bonus to what is already wonderful]

'You helped me develop my talents and showed me how great I can be'. [i.e. you facilitated me to feel good about myself and didn't take all the credit!]

'Life is even more wonderful when you're around' [i.e. it already is great you are a bonus]

'You are a star in my universe and I am one in yours.' [i.e. we each have our own universe and we are star guests in the other person's We do not need them to survive, because we are the centre of our univrse. [assuming the sun is the most important planet in a universe]

You're a guest on my show and I'm one on yours!!!

We can create good feelings as well as acknowledging our own power over our feelings. You can stop being the cork bobbing on the waves and turn into a dolphin navigating through the ocean of your life.

I wonder how this new age influence and living from hope will affect the bands of the 21st century. Kids listen to these people. Someone out there can get together a band and make it happen. I shall wait and anticipate... and write about it some more. We can all be part of the wave of change...in our way and when we choose to.

How would you like the world to be...

Write a love song, a story a few words or draw a picture that shows it your way... Write to me.

How could it be more hopeful, fair, loving, balanced?

Love Is Like Mining for Diamonds: It Takes Work

2009-04-08T19:52:00.000-07:00

We all know people who have really unrealistic expectations of relationships. So many hopeless romantics believe that love is the solution to life's problems. Many people confuse lust with love, over and over again. There are people who change lovers often, because they thrive on the excitement of the initial stages of love. These are just some of the more exaggerated examples that come to mind. Many of us have our own erroneous expectations about love. These expectations can set us up for disappointment down the road. What we believe about relationships affects our attitudes toward our relationships. If our expectations are unrealistic, we will inevitably be disappointed with our partners. Many people enter into relationships with the expectation that, if they find the right person, the relationship will take no work or effort. This is a totally unrealistic expectation. LOVE TAKES A LOT OF WORK.

In a new relationship, you are meeting another person's persona: the person that they most want you to see. As you get to know the person better, new layers of each of you emerge for one another to see. As the level of trust in the relationship grows, you both will expose deeper and deeper layers to one another. The deepest layers of each of us formed at a very young age, in response to childhood experiences. If your expectation is that relationships do not take work, then you probably are in for a major disappointment when the deeper parts of your partner's personality emerge. Temptation may come to leave and find a new, "better" partner.

You will find, however, that we are all the same: we all have deeper layers that hide under our socially acceptable personas. If you are unwilling to explore the deeper layers of your partner, or to reveal your own deeper layers, your relationships will remain superficial and unfulfilling. You will feel that something is missing... that your relationships are never intimate... that your partners never understand you... that you cannot understand your partners. You will be wondering why love seems to elude you. You will turn from person to person, looking for the "right" person, but never find him or her. You will never discover the real person that lies behind the mask of the persona in your current partner. You will never create the loving relationship that you desire, unless you are willing to put forth the effort to discover who your partner actually is, and to reveal your true self to your partner.

Many people believe that they understand the cliché, "love takes work." The question is, do they truly understand the meaning of "love takes work"? You will know that you are working at your relationship when you want to run away in frustration, but you stay and talk with your partner -- not just once, but repeatedly. Intimacy grows from the commitment and work that you put into your relationship. Of course, this is not to say that everyone is compatible with everyone else. However, once you have found a partner who meets certain parameters and seems compatible, the balance is 100% pure W-O-R-K.

Are You Fit To Love?

2009-04-07T01:47:00.002-07:00

Are You Fit To Love? is the most important question we'll ever ask ourselves. Let's face it, our relationships are extremely important. In fact they are the essence of our lives. Yet, for many relationships are the cause of pain and struggle often rendering us powerless to bring about positive changes. Single or not, societal standards convince us that when it comes to relationships we can have it all. As a result we have developed a pervasive “what's-in-it-for-me” attitude with an emphasis on superficiality. In addition, much of the available relationship advice compels us to go after everything we want from our partners. Sadly, for many it is not working. Climbing divorce rates and an increase in the number of singles seeking love are proof that our behavior and attitudes are counterproductive. We need to be reminded that being in a relationship is really about being with another person.

Our expectations of each other have become highly unrealistic. Rarely do we look in the mirror and ask: Do I give what I am asking from my partner? Am I fit to love? We resent each other for unmeet expectations. When the resentment grows faster than our love and respect for each other, lovers turn into enemies and relationships into war zones. Today's relationships are failing because of deterioration of characters. It is time we made a point of building long-term relationship success based on the strength of our characters, instead of clever-minded relationship rules and strategies.

Great relationships require great characters, a fact that will never ever change. Our relationships are only as good as we are. We simply must become better people for each other. Becoming fit to love is a relationship reality check that forces us to look in the mirror and become inspired to create a better character within. This powerful wake-up call is not for the faint-hearted, but for the brave. It will dramatically improve our relationships or our chances of finding love.

The happiest people are those in exceptional relationships. We admire and even envy these people. They are heavily invested in their most valuable asset: their relationship and have an abundance of life's most precious commodity: love. They all have one thing in common: they are fit to love. At the heart of all exceptional relationships are three universal principles: mutual respect, moral responsibility and authenticity. Unless we understand and apply these principles our relationships will be subject to resentment, frustration and uncertainty. Being fit to love is taking a radically different approach to successful relationships and here is what it means:

1. Mutual Respect: Your partner is just as important as you are.

Our partner's dreams, hopes, wishes and expectations are as important as our's. This principle requires us to be unselfish and think of our partner as our equal. Given that our generation has made history as ambassadors of our “me first” society, we are more concerned with getting what we want than thinking of another. For Bill everything revolves around golfing. He spends every weekend at the golf course while his wife Jane looks after their two small children. Extra money from their already tight budget is spent on Bill's hobby. Stuck at home with toddlers, Jane has very little freedom or money to do or buy anything special. Despite Jane's complaints Bill seems completely aloof to the fact that he is behaving disrespectfully.

How differently life turned out for Karen and Lucas even though they experience a huge interest-clash. Madly in love, they are making future plans. Karen wants to live in the city in a squeaky clean condo with nearby shopping, restaurants and cultural events. Lucas loves the country, gardening and pets. The differences don't end here. She prefers fine dinning and classical music. Lucas likes roadhouse cuisine and modern beats. This sounds like trouble, but by honoring their opposing beliefs they turned their dilemma into a real bliss. They moved to a small town in between the city and the country. Karen couldn't help but fall in love with the puppy Lucas brought home, even though she was dead set against pets. They simply focused on the positive in their diversities and embraced the richness of each other. They respected their differences and did not insist on their own views. As a result they deepened their love and now live the best of both worlds.

Relationship conflicts arise because of different perspectives and beliefs. Lovers find themselves arguing over who is right, instead solving the issue in their mutual best interest. The ongoing struggle over unresolved issues leads to resentment and frustration even when there is love. Love and respect take a backseat and the relationship deteriorates. This is not only a dangerous game but also the reason why many relationships fail, when they shouldn't. This downward spiral continues unless we stop wanting to be right and be in control. Instead of trying to change each other or putting our needs first, we must realize that our partner is just as important as we are. In grabbing hold of our partner's beliefs or buying a share of his or her dreams we show that we respect our partner as much we do ourselves. If conflict arises and we cannot agree on a solution, we should simply agree to disagree and continue to talk with respect and honesty. Without true mutual respect, it is impossible to create loving relationships with staying power. Being fit to love is the realization that another her person is just as valuable as you.

2. Moral Responsibility: You are always morally responsible to those with whom you have relationships.

We live in a society that elevates self-fulfillment above anything else and the term moral responsibility is hardly part of our vocabulary. We seek self-fulfillment at any cost, even at the cost of others. Regardless of how many times we have heard that we are not responsible for our partner's happiness, we are responsible for his or her well-being. Love is still a moral responsibility to another person. In our relationships we have the power to make each other feel exceptional or miserable. How often do we blame our partners if things do not work out without looking in the mirror to see our own character flaws. We are far more likely to make excuses for our behavior not realizing that everything we think, say or do affects those we love.

Jennifer had lunch with her friend Sally at a quaint restaurant. Jennifer could barley wait to share the details about the blissful affair she is having with this young stud. Sally listened in awe as Jennifer blamed her so-called inattentive husband, Paul. It was a strange twist of fate that Paul sat behind the flower-decorated lattice wall listening to every word his wife said. From here on everyone's life took a different dimension. Jennifer had deceived her husband Paul, betrayed her word, disregarded her children and lost the respect of her friend Sally. This is a high price to pay for moments of sex. What Jennifer thought, did and said affected the lives of those she loved. She had shed her moral responsibility towards those who counted on her.

In our quest for better relationships, we must make our relationship a priority. We must focus on our relationship not elsewhere. As Mary O'Hara said: Love cannot survive if you just give it scraps of yourself, scraps of your time, scraps of your thoughts. We are responsible for the state of our relationships. Realizing that we are indeed morally responsible to those we love is vital to being fit to love.

3. Authenticity: True love only happens when you are real.

Have you ever found yourself laughing simply because everyone else did? Agreed with your partner's opinion even though you didn't share it? Told your lover you had a fabulous time when you didn't or said: “I love you” when you didn't mean it. In other words did you ever do something inconsistent with your true self just to please someone, get attention or get what you wanted? Of course we all have. We have lost the bravery to be real!

For many there is quite a gap between the person inside and the person they present to the world. How about Toni, the dad who rents a Porsche to impress his date, while being delinquent in child support. How authentic is that? Laura, owner of a marketing firm, supports and votes for the political party most of her clients belong to. Yet, she neither has faith in the candidate or the agenda of this party. Debby spends every Sunday at Grant's parents but resents it. To keep the peace she refrains from claiming some of these Sundays on her own terms. Donna, a serial dater knows how to pick guys. As soon as her friends find her new dates socially unacceptable Donna dumps them. Donna no longer takes the time to get to know her dates. Instead she allows her girlfriends to decide for her.

To be validated by our lovers or to be socially accepted we often compromise who we are and what we believe in. Conditioned by our environment we have become products of the culture we live in and are in somewhat disconnected from our identities. No matter how good we are at playing roles for each other, eventually we encounter role conflict and our truth emerges. True love does not unfold unless we are real. Being fit to love means being real. It means removing all the layers of pretense and becoming vulnerable. When we are authentic our relationships become real and we never have to doubt them. To love, we need to know each other the way we know ourselves. Love only works when we are real! Our authentic self is the best of us. It is where our goodness lies imbedded in the strength of our character. To be fit to love we must encourage authenticity in each other.

Regardless of the state of our current relationships or how unsuccessfully we have tried to find love we have the power to radically improve our circumstances today. The three principles of being fit to love are as true today as they will be twenty years from now. Mutual respect, moral responsibility and authenticity are the essence of exceptional and loving relationships. Because people in exceptional relationships are fit to love, they are positive role models in becoming better human beings for each other. They put love before every thought and action. In the process they reap some profound rewards:

People in exceptional, loving relationships live much happier lives

They cope far better with stress
They have better sex more often
They laugh more often and have more fun
They are healthier and live longer
They are more optimistic
They complain less
They feel validated and needed
They feel more secure and stable

No wonder we envy these people. Their relationships are like rock-solid anchors. In times like these, laced with tremendous uncertainty and uproar, their love shields these couples from the restlessness most of us experience. Mahatma Gandhi said: “A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave”. Let's be brave!

Attracting Love

2009-04-07T01:47:00.001-07:00

It is natural to love another person. Love is both ecstatic happiness and deep despair, both sweet and bitter. Your mind may advise you not to love a worthless or unfaithful person, but the heart will continue to love because it cannot accept reason. When wishing for a new relationship, be wise. When you first fall in love, you see a fantasy of the person because you do not know the real him or her. You imagine that you know this person, but you don't see the flaws, because only his or her best side is being shown to you. Remember that in each relationship you risk losing your heart to love. Here are spells and potions to attract your heart's desire.

To meet your intended

Place two pink candles in candleholders and arrange them next to each other, a foot apart. One candle represents you and the other symbolizes your sweetheart. Tie a knot of red ribbon, cord, or string loosely around the candleholders. On the next day, untie the ribbon, move the candleholders closer, and tie them together again. Light both candles and let them burn for a while, then snuff them out. Do this for three, five, seven, or nine days until the candleholders are touching on the last day. Sit with the candles while they burn on the final day, then snuff them out. Untie the ribbon and keep it among your personal possessions for protection as a love amulet.

To aim and fire cupid's arrow

Take a red candle, as red represents life and passion. The light in the flame symbolizes the good power in a person. With a pin, inscribe the name of the one you love around the top of the candle. Pierce the inscription with a new pin, pressing it through the wick so the pin tip emerges on the opposite side of the candle. As you press the pin into the wax, say: “Through your name to the wick, I aim for your heart with this candle I prick.” Place the candle in a holder and position the pin tip so that it faces the direction in which your lover lives. Light the candle and sit with it while sending love to your desired. When the flame has burned through the name and pin, snuff out the candle. The candle can be relit at another time, but should be buried with the pin once it is too small to light.

To attract a new romance

Cast this spell on a night when the new moon is a crescent in the sky. Place a pink rose and a red rose in a narrow-stemmed vase. At a few minutes before midnight, sprinkle three drops of rose oil into the vase's water. Within fourteen days, a new person will enter your life. If you like this person, place the roses in a clean, white envelope. Sleep with the envelope under your pillow and speak the name of your intended three times before going to sleep. You will draw your desired to you.

To beckon a heart to yours

On a Friday night, write your intended's name in red ink on nine small pieces of red paper to ignite passion. Wrap a pinch of dried mint in each piece of paper or smear each piece with mint oil. Throw one of the packets into a hearth or bonfire and speak your lover's name repeatedly until the packet has burned away. Do the same with the remaining eight sachets, and as each one burns, your love will grow closer.

To receive a telephone call or e-mail

Take a whole nutmeg and wrap it in a red ribbon while saying: “[Name of person], you will contact me.” Light a white candle for purity and place the wrapped nutmeg in front of the candle as it burns for an hour. The nutmeg represents your lover's brain; the ribbon represents your desires. The ribbon will transfer your wish to the one you long for and will prompt him or her to get in touch with you. Snuff out the candle and keep the nutmeg in its wrapping by your telephone or computer. The one you desire should call or e-mail within seven days. To encourage more contact, write your love interest's name in cursive writing in a semicircular shape, using green ink on blue paper. Join your own name with the name of the one you desire, continuing the semicircle until it is a complete circle. Repeat the writing seven times on top of the original lettering. Sprinkle a few drops of lavender oil onto the paper and rub the oil over the paper. (Mercury, the planet that governs communication, also rules lavender.) Place the piece of paper under your computer or telephone. As the scent fades, rub more lavender oil onto the piece of paper bearing your names to continue the contact with your desired one.

Love at your door

To draw your sweetheart to visit your home, write his or her name on a small piece of paper on the night of a new moon. Fold the piece of paper in half to conceal the name, and write your name on the outside. Fold the paper in half again and sprinkle the outside with three drops of rose oil to attract love. Place the piece of paper under the doormat. The one you desire is likely to arrive within the twenty-eight-day moon cycle, just before a full moon. Do not let impatience deter you from keeping the piece of paper in place.

Ecstasy When Love Rocks

2009-04-07T01:46:00.003-07:00

Ah, the ecstasy of love. Who wants to settle for anything less? From the first second of our first major crush, ecstasy is what we hope for and dream of, that on-top-of-the-world, giddy, whirly, zing-zangy kaboom of a feeling that squeezes your heart and blows your mind and leaves you wanting to shout to the world, I AM SO IN LOVE SO IN LOVE SO CRAZY COMPLETELY IN LOVE!

Or something like that. Truth is, real ecstasy leaves us so overwhelmingly happy we're usually rendered speechless. We want to express our wild, hungry joy, especially to the person we love, but “I love you” seems so serious and standard, and beyond that, what's left? “You rock”? “Oh, baby”? “Gee, I think we're really compatible”? Ecstasy feels so HUGE, and words can seem so small.

That's why we filled this chapter with the most gorgeous, passion-packed love poems we could find, to help you articulate the ecstasy you feel. Recite one of these next anniversary, or slip a copy into a Valentine's Day card, and you'll melt the heart of your beloved.

Or read these poems by yourself when you just want to feel all warm and sappy about the great love of your life. These are poems to indulge in, like hotfudge sundaes or bubble baths or full-body massages. B e c a u se-d o n 't kid yourself-ecstasy comes and goes in a long-term love relationship (good luck feeling blissful about the holey underwear! the ESPN addiction! the secret porn stash!). You've got to relish the passion while you've got it. And even if you have one of those moments, days, or months when you fear the romance has drained from your relationship, stop and read an Ecstasy poem. Let yourself remember how it felt-how it could still feel-to be intimately, achingly in love with your partner.

The first four poems in Ecstasy describe that breathless, unspoken (because we don't quite know how to say it, and sometimes we're scared to) longing to be part of the very fiber and soul of your lover. The speaker in James Laughlin's “I Want to Breathe” utters one long, run-on whisper of desire, so quiet but so potent you can almost feel him nuzzling the skin and inhaling the fragrance of his lover, willing their hearts to beat in unison. He wants to be completely connected, physically and emotionally, as does the speaker in Pablo Neruda's Sonnet XVII, who tells his lover he wants to be “so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,/so close that your eyes close with my dreams.” The couple in Sharon Olds's “Sunday Night in the City” shares that same interlaced serenity; “Arms linked like skaters,” they lie in bed together, hair ruffled, “long legs crossed like folded/wings.”

This is ecstasy at its most seriously romantic- when the two of you exist in your own little world, when you're overcome by that heart-tugging need for intimacy. The lovers in these poems are bound together not so much by sex (even though they're physically tangled together) as by their deep, consuming care for each other. The speaker in Margaret Atwood's “Variation on the Word Sleep,” for example, wants to protect and nurture her lover even as he sleeps, even in his dreams. She speaks almost reverentially of wanting to hold him-his being, not his body-“carefully, a flame/in two cupped hands.” When we're deep into the ecstasy of love, no closeness is close enough; we can't bear to think that our partner could survive without us. Like the speaker in the Atwood poem, we want to be the very air that our lover breathes-we want to be “that unnoticed/& that necessary.”

On the one hand, the desire for that kind of closeness is perfectly understandable and probably inevitable when you're in ecstasy. You're in a love stupor, utterly intoxicated by the sight, scent, and touch of your partner. On the other hand … yikes! Ecstasy can leave you teetering on the edge of neediness and insecurity. Too much of that heavy-duty “we're the only two people in the world” business can suffocate even the most glorious romance. (Think Heathcliff and Cathy.) Who needs all the melancholy drama when you're supposed to be wildly happy? As much as you want to be one with your lover in ecstasy, eventually you need to develop a little healthy awareness that you two are indeed separate-wild about each other, sure, but separate-individuals who live in a great, big, wide world.

Perhaps that's why we so love the E. E. Cummings poem “i carry your heart with me”-it's fabulously romantic but shout-out-loud exuberant and playful at the same time. The speaker in this poem doesn't quietly yearn to be closer-he trumpets his joy at being close enough. He confidently declares, “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in/my heart)”-separate hearts, carried together. He opens up his world to include not just his lover but also the sun and the stars and “the sky of the sky of a tree called life.”

This is ecstasy at its best, we think, when you can loosen up enough simply to enjoy the pleasure of the moment (rather than worrying about the future or longing for more of what you've got). Li-Young Lee's “From Blossoms,” for example, is all about the bliss of the here and now. As he and his partner devour “succulent peaches” bought at a roadside stand, the speaker is overcome by pure happiness, struck by his desire “to take what we love inside,/to carry within us an orchard … to hold/the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into/the round jubilance of peach.” He celebrates the opportunity to live-if only for one summer day-“from joy/to joy to joy, from wing to wing,/from blossom to blossom to/impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”

Use Feng Shui to Kick Start Your Love Life!

2009-04-07T01:46:00.001-07:00

Can rearranging your furniture really help you to find and keep "The One?" Can storing your underwear in the Tupperware drawer really heat up your love life?

Well, the jury's still out on that one - But hey, it can't hurt, right? According to Feng Shui (say FUNG SCHWAY) experts, little changes can make a big difference where romance is concerned.

An ancient Chinese practice, "Feng Shui is purposefully arranging your stuff around you to gain positive results," says Karen Rauch Carter, author of "Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life."

So, what can you do to get your love life on track fast?

Add a little Feng Shui to the "relationship area" of your home.

As you enter through your front door, the relationship section is located at the farthest right hand corner at the back side of your home.

According to Feng Shui practitioners, specific items in your relationship corner can spice things up considerably – whether you're already in a relationship, or a single looking for love.

Add these items to perk up your love life:

1) Anything red and pink -- Sure, it makes for a decorating challenge, but these colors represent love. You can't go too crazy with red and pink here.

2) Candles -- They create heat, they're romantic, what more could you want? For extra vaa-vaa-voom, try two pink or red candles sitting side by side. (One for each of you.)

3) Round mirrors -- This has to do with a more complicated idea of reflecting energy, but all mirrors are good here, and round mirrors are best.

4) Whatever symbols signify love to you -- Anything goes, and it goes here. Flowers, cupids, romantic photos of the two of you together, hearts, bride and groom cake toppers, candy hearts, chocolate or a Barbie Doll in full bridal paraphernalia. If it means romance to you, put it here.

As you might expect, there are also a number of things that can put a Feng Shui damper on your love life as well.

Try to avoid putting these items in your relationship corner:

1) Negative images -- This is not the place to store that shoebox with old photos of your exes, or any other negative images from bad weather to bad times.

2) Anything that encourages distance -- Put the cactus and your ceramic porcupine collection somewhere else. They're not helping.

3) Anything with a chill factor -- If it's cold, it's bad news. Move the refrigerator and the poster of the polar bear unless you want your relationship to cool too.

4) Singles only -- Avoid photos of yourself alone here, your one-slice toaster and that picture of you as the lone, uncoupled bridesmaid at your cousin Bertha's wedding. Single-girl (or single boy) reminders have got to go.

5) Games -- If you want to avoid games in your relationship, you've got to avoid them here.

6) Distractions - Something coming between you and your one-and-only? Maybe it's the big screen TV or your decoupage supplies. Put them somewhere else.

Try these simple techniques to add a little (or a lot) of toe-curling romance to your life. You'll never know how good it can be unless you're willing to give it a shot.

Fulfilling For Our Dreams : If I Could Reach Higher

2009-04-07T01:45:00.003-07:00

This week my eyes, along with countless millions of others around the globe, have been focused on Sydney, Australia for the XXVII Olympic Games.

Sports have never excited me much, at all, in my entire life. You will never see Monday Night Football, baseball, basketball, or hockey on my television set. Maybe, now and then, I'll watch World Cup Soccer. However, in small doses, The Olympic Games is the exception to this rule for me.

I am not interested, per se, in the actual different sporting events of the Olympic Games. Rather, I am drawn to the competitors and the unique stories of their rise to Olympic status. I watch, with admiration, as these young athletes compete with others from around the world to reach for their dream of Gold. They have been training, long and hard, in their particular event for most of their lives, and training even more intensively these past four years leading up to the Games.

I have seen more sporting events in this past week than I have in the past four years since the close of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. Why do I really watch, you might ask? I love to watch individuals reaching for their dreams. It is inspirational for me, as a person, to watch these young men and women truly putting forth every effort to achieve their dreams. They inspire me, as an individual, to reach higher in fulfilling my own dreams.

There are, and there will be, many stories and memories from these Olympic Games in Australia. Many come to my mind right now, such as the determination, relentless training, teamwork, and support of a small town that enabled the Romanians to bring home the Gold, both individually and as a team, in the women's gymnastics competition. Though, for me, I would have to say that, truly, the one face I will always remember is that of Marion Jones, track and field athlete from the United States. Up until this week, I had never heard of Marion Jones. Earlier this week, I watched a biography of this young woman's life-long struggle to get to the Olympics. Two days later, she was center stage in the eyes of the world as she prepared for her first Olympic Event, the Women's 100 Meter Run. My eyes also were fixed on her as she prepared to begin her event. During the preparations for the race, my mind journeyed back four years to the closing ceremonies of the Olympics in Atlanta. That evening, as we viewed a collage of highlights from those XXVI Olympic Games, singer Gloria Estefan sang a song that she had written called "Reach." I would like to share the lyrics of Gloria's song that were playing in my mind as Marion prepared to go after her first Olympic Gold medal.

Some dreams live on in time forever These dreams, you want with all your heart

And I'll do whatever it takes

Follow through with the promise I made

Put it all on the line

What I hoped for at last would be mine

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be stronger

Know that I've tried my very best

I'd put my spirit to the test

If I could reach

Some days are meant to be remembered

Those days we rise above the stars

So I'll go the distance this time

Seeing more the higher I climb

That the more I believe

All the more that this

Dream will be mine

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be stronger

Know that I've tried my very best

I'd put my spirit to the test

If I could reach

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be stronger

I'm gonna be so much stronger

Yes I am

I put my spirit to the test

If I could reach, higher

If I could, if I could

If I could reach

Reach, I'd reach, I'd reach

I'd reach, I'd reach so

much higher

be stronger

As I watched Marion, I admired her composure, and that ever-present smile to us all. As I watched the false starts and regrouping to begin the race, what I saw in Marion was confidence, concentration, discipline, patience, faith, and love... all of which, I am sure, she has practiced her entire life.

Marion did, indeed, reach higher with all her heart. She followed through with her promise, and put it all on the line to realize her dream of Gold at the Olympics. She was strong and put her spirit to the test. She climbed higher that evening than she ever had gone before in her life. She believed in herself, and went the distance, to reach her dream.

As she crossed the finish line, victorious, she beamed that infectious smile we all have grown to love. What I witnessed, and what radiated from her, was love. Love is what I have seen so many times in the Olympics. Love is what attracts me to watch athletes like Marion compete. I wish to be present, in the moment, to see these athletes' love for themselves, their family, friends, team mates, coaches, and the rest of us in the world.

Marion Jones, thank you for setting an example and inspiring us all to reach higher for our dreams, and, more importantly, to reach higher for love.

Educating Yourself About The Art of Loving

2009-04-07T01:45:00.001-07:00

Katherine Anne Porter wrote, " Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it." Katherine Anne is right: there is no end to it. Each day, we need to love ourselves. Each day, we need to demonstrate our love for our partner and family, and for all those we encounter. So how do we get to the point where we are able to show our love for others and ourselves every day? I feel that the answer lies in how we view love. In his book published in 1956, The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm describes love as an art that requires effort, knowledge and practice. To view love as an art is to imagine that the capacity for love is a seed that lies within each of us, and that growing that seed is solely our own responsibility.

The practice of any art requires knowledge. By virtue of the fact you are reading this article, I assume you are seeking knowledge about the art of loving. Many of us today are reading books by authors like John Gray, Barbara De Angelis, John Bradshaw, Thomas Moore, and countless others. The reason we are reading is quite simple: we are seeking more knowledge about love and relationships. It's very apparent, from the number of seminars, tapes, videos, and books available, that there is need for this type of knowledge.

Have you attended a seminar or read a book on relationships in the last year? Whether you have, or have not, is not important right now. What is important is that you recognize that knowledge is the first step. Take responsibility for your own education. Participating in a seminar or workshop, reading a book, and even reading this article is a gesture of loving yourself. Just do not forget that knowledge acquisition is a continuous process; it does not stop after one or two seminars, or after reading a few books. It takes effort on your part to gain the knowledge you need. Instead of just sitting watching television, you are reading this article right now, but it does not mean the effort has to end once you finish reading what I have to say here. You just may feel inspired, with new ideas on life, love, and relationships. It's up to you to put in the effort to incorporate these ideas into your life... and to keep them alive. It's not going to be easy-- it's going to require hard work and effort. You cannot change life-long habits overnight, after reading one article. Somehow, with the pace of life and the conveniences we now have, we have come to expect things to happen instantly. Improving our relationships and ourselves is about changing old habits, some of which we have had since childhood. These changes do not occur instantly, but require continuous effort over time.

What exactly does "effort" mean, when it comes to loving? In my opinion, effort is time and action. When you get up tomorrow morning, take the time to ask yourself: How can I be more loving to myself today? How can I give more love to my partner? What action can I take to give love today? Use your imagination to come up with creative ways of showing love for yourself and others. Take the time to follow through with your thoughts and put them into action. I am not talking about lavish gifts or tropical holidays; it's the little continuous gestures of love that count. Having a bubble bath, making yourself a special dinner, taking a mental health day from work, sleeping in, taking a drive in the country, spending time at a hobby, curling up with a good book, or even reading material like this or attending a workshop or seminar are gestures of loving yourself. You can give love to your partner in many little ways, too: A telephone call during the day to say, "Hi, how are you? I was thinking about you...," bringing home a single flower or a little gift, going for an evening walk together, giving spontaneous hugs, holding hands, giving a back rub, showering together, reading aloud to one another, or leaving a little love note on the bathroom mirror... the list goes on and on. All it takes is imagination. The possibilities are endless. Its just taking the time for each other, talking during the day, and expanding your knowledge about one another that's important.

We will never know everything. That is the beauty of life, and, more importantly, that is the beauty of love -- for they are really both one in the same. Remember it all starts with you. Take the time to expand your knowledge of love, and practice The Art of Loving, always, to create the loving life you deserve.

Loving Without Losing Yourself!

2009-04-07T01:44:00.002-07:00

You are in love and it feels wonderful. This love is different and you are prepared to do anything to make it last. To prevent this ship from sinking you work hard to steer this relationship into a safe harbor. In the process you lose yourself and your romantic relationship becomes all-consuming!

When Kyra fell head-over-heels for Dan she went out of her way to create the wonderful relationship she had always wanted. She found herself at every hockey game or computer show, watching horror and science fiction movies, at parties with his friends and on vacations with his family. At home, things were not much different. Kyra cooked his favorite meals, kept the house just the way he liked it and listened to the music of his choice. On Dan's advice, Kyra cut her hair short, wore less make-up and exchanged her up-beat wardrobe for conservative pieces. She gave up on her dream to become a firefighter, because Dan thought this profession would interfere with their relationship. She had even given up her night classes, because they cut into their dinnertime. For Dan, this relationship was perfect. All his needs were met and his expectations fulfilled. In an effort to not disappoint him, Kyra lived in constant anxiety over doing everything right for him. She had adapted to his lifestyle, learned to defend his views and even began to talk like him. Kyra's friends witnessed her change from a spirited, easygoing and happy woman to a subdued, obedient and pleasing personality. This relationship had sucked the life out of Kyra, yet she was the last to notice.

While compromise in a relationship is a necessary ingredient for it's success, denying the core of who you are is not. When you finally realize that an all-consuming relationship is depleting you, there will be nothing but resentment and identity-conflict. You will encounter great difficulty in reclaiming yourself while remaining in that same relationship. No matter how much he loves you, he loves the person you project for his benefit. He cannot love what he doesn't know yet, the real you! The outcome of such a relationship is usually a heart-breaking crisis, with no one but you to blame.

The opposite of an all-consuming relationship is a half-hearted relationship. In this relationship you withhold affection until the evidence is in that the other is hooked. I love you, if you love me first is a common trend in newer and many long-term relationships. Fearing that you will give more love than you receive, you put him on probation while gauging your own behavior carefully. You want to control the power and maintain the advantage in this relationship. You judge him according to your expectations and keep track of how he measures up. The higher he scores, the more you are willing to reward him with love and affection. This conditional view imposed by one or even both partners creates tremendous emotional insecurity and prevents the relationship from evolving.

Mr. Scanner and Ms. Grateful have been together for over a year. She has enduring faith that this relationship will be her final one. While she is building “castles in the sky”, Still, Mr. Scanner continues to seek out other available females. Even though he appreciates Ms. Grateful, he has not allowed himself to truly love her. Thinking there might be something better around the corner, he fails to commit wholeheartedly. When one partner has one foot out of the door, both remain emotionally unavailable making it impossible to built a meaningful relationship. More interested in being loved than loving, Mr. Scanner will eventually seek a cure on greener pastures. Instead of fertilizing his own lawn, he may find the cure to be worse than the cause.

All-consuming or halfhearted relationships are not only very unnatural, but also highly unhealthy for each partner. As a matter of fact, these relationships hinder your personal growth and interfere with your happiness. Ironically, both types are guided by fear. In an all-consuming relationship, fear of not being loved, not being good enough as well as fear of abandonment and failure is the driving force. In a halfhearted relationship, fear of being hurt and becoming vulnerable prevents you from knocking down protective walls and opening your heart.

Is there a happy medium? How do you love wholeheartedly without losing yourself? Loving wholeheartedly while preserving your identity and staying the course in life requires a clear roadmap. It also requires a very different perspective of relationships. It appears that while relationships have become far more difficult to maintain, the approach to relationships has become more simplistic. Just make a wish list and check your prospective lover's qualities against your wish list. Even though you know that relationships require work, deep down you cling to a sweet illusion that meeting the right person is all it takes. You will then take off on your magic carpet ride. Think again! Soon that magic rug will be pulled from underneath you. Welcome to the real world of the 21st century. Today, relationships are more defined by social influences than by character. Consequently, you have come to believe that a loving relationship has to provide you with as many benefits as possible. If it looks as if your partner is giving less than you do, you are likely to “check out.”

No matter how you define love, relationships are, and have always been, about loving each other. While love is a must, it is not the sole answer to meaningful relationships. Your relationship IQ may consist of controlling and manipulating him into what you need him to be. You want him to be understanding, listening, compassionate, loyal and trustworthy. It is important that he is real and does not play games. In short, you long for a partner who is wholeheartedly behind you. Ask yourself, are you the same partner? Do you reveal the real you? How much do stage your behavior to keep this relationship afloat? Ironically, many lack the qualities they seek in their partners. How about you? When you fail to give what you seek from him, don't be surprised if it backfires. While there are many right things you can be or do in a relationship, the most important is being the best real you. While putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad investment policy, it is essential in all relationships. If only a part of you is invested, the relationship becomes fueled by go-nowhere-energy and that is exactly where the relationship will land you: nowhere. Once you are comfortable in your relationship, throw your whole heart into it and then try to catch up. If you want a wholehearted relationship, be a wholehearted partner and always remember: You can never get more than you give!

Listen to your heart, for it is so much smarter than you are. When it feels right, feel the fear and love anyway. Love without hesitation and with all you heart. There will never be a fearless way of loving or living in your lifetime. It is true that choosing the wrong partner is detrimental to your health and wealth, but failing to take action when it is right can be equally destructive. Don't let your fear of rejection and getting hurt kill your desires or steal your dreams. You may have stared in the face of love before. Maybe you “chickened-out.” Next time, don't be a chicken!

If you are in a relationship and love each other, here is a universal truth: Love is choice and if you choose it wholeheartedly, you are never going to lose it. Love teaches you to become a better human being. Restore your faith in love and become emotionally available to each other. Put your fears and your past behind and accept this lesson. Become lovable by being loving. Learn to trust by trusting yourself. Giving in to love does not mean losing yourself. Yet, even when it is safe to open your heart, you may feel weakened by the anxiety that this love will disappear.

When in love, how do you preserve your identity and course in life when? Here is the number one reason for losing yourself in a relationship: Your belief that love is something you either deserve or not! Your misguided belief leads you to counterproductive efforts to do almost anything to get love and even more to hold onto it:

You modify your identity to gain approval and love from your partner.
You hold back intimacy to protect your vulnerability.
You have a need to manipulate your partner and the course of this relationship.
Your fear of abandonment paralyzes you

Yet, in reality, love either exists or it doesn't. There is nothing you have to be, or do, to earn it. When it is love, there is very little if anything you can do to destroy it. If there is no love, there is nothing you can do to force it. Love is something that you deserve and if you can believe that, you will accept that:

You can be loved even if you are not perfect
You can be loved just as you are
You can be loved while keeping your course in life
You can be loved without getting lost in love
You can be loved while pursuing your life's dreams
You can be loved, let go and let be

Love is the most powerful human lesson you are ever to learn. It is about overcoming the past and realizing your human potential, a purposeful interdependence through which you become so much more than on your own. Maybe this is why we fear being loved as much as we fear not being loved. Love has so many more solutions than it has problems. Love is not a commodity that is supposed to make you happy. Once you can understand that love is not something to be found, rather it is in you to be shared, you can love wholeheartedly without fear. Don't turn your back on love every time it touches you, because when you give up on love you give up on yourself.

Is It Fantasy We Seek, Or Is It Love?

2009-04-07T01:44:00.001-07:00

For many of us, love begins with deep passion, romance, and hot steamy sex. This is what I call the first stage of love, the euphoric stage. You are together all the time, love everything about each other, see no faults in one another, and cannot seem to keep your hands off each other. As time goes by, you get to know one another. The party manners disappear, and you begin to see that your loved one is not so perfect, after all. This is the point where, if you are expecting perfection in another person, you will become disenchanted, and the relationship will end. You cannot expect perfection in anyone, including yourself. If you do, you are living your life in fantasy, and always will be disappointed.

Contemplate this for a moment: you have just met the person of your dreams. You are attracted to this person physically; he or she has a great sense of humor, is affectionate, romantic, and a fabulous lover. Your new partner does all the right things, pushes all the right buttons, and you have -- and I hate this phrase -- fallen head over heels in love. One day, your perfect, remarkable partner begins to irritate you. You may discover that this person is a slob. All of a sudden, you cannot stand being in his or her place because it's such a pig pen. One day you notice that your once-flawless love, who has run out of clean underwear, goes to the laundry hamper to retrieve a slightly less soiled pair. You go into the bathroom to find it flooded with water from the shower, his razor stubble, or her make-up and toothpaste, lining the sink. To top it all off, if it is a man in question, he left the lid up or did not flush the toilet. So do you dump this person? Based on my experiences in life, I do not think you should.

This is an extreme example, but it could happen. Love will reach a stage where you will begin to notice your partner's shortcomings -- things that you may have overlooked before. So what do you do? Do you give up? Relationships end for many at this point, because the fantasy has been shattered. He or she is not that perfect, after all. When you come to this point, you have graduated to the next stage of relationship. It's a challenge, an invitation, to achieve a new level of intimacy with your partner. Many of us choose, at this point, not to communicate our needs or feelings, but rather to detour into anger. Out of fear, some of us repress our feelings. In many cases, we just plain run as fast as we can. These are all just normal human reactions, when faced with this awakening. Should you choose to be angry, or if you choose to repress your feelings or to run, you are missing the opportunity to rise to the next level of intimacy.

Euphoric love ends for a reason: it is a time when your brain starts having more input than your hormones. When euphoric love ends, you have come to a stage in the relationship where you are thinking seriously about a future with your partner. Questions come to mind, such as: "Can I live with this person, the way he/she is right now?"; "Would I want to have children with this person?"; "Do I want to share the rest of my life with this person?" These are big questions, and they tend to elicit fear. The fear is totally normal, but it catches many of us off guard. Many of us take this fear as a sign that the relationship is not meant to be. In reality, this fear is a reflection of how important your relationship is becoming. When we start to consider a future that includes our partner, we tend to look at them more critically. While this is natural, it's important not to forget the positives that brought you together in the first place. Celebrate this stage in your relationship: it's a sign of growth, a love relationship on the rise. Remember, the art of loving is a lifelong commitment. It is the further development of learning to love ourselves, our partner, and all those around us.

If you and your partner decide to commit to the further development of your relationship, you need to know that this is when the real work begins. Love cannot sustain itself. As Erich Fromm wrote in The Art of Loving, published in 1956, "The art of loving is like any craft. It requires patience, confidence, discipline, concentration, faith, and practice daily." These are words to remember. Relationships change continually. As relationships grow, the level of commitment increases and the love matures. Mature love does not occur overnight. It develops over time, and requires that you give of yourself. Examine your priorities: it all starts with loving yourself first, then loving your partner, and, finally, loving your family. Mature, committed love is the most powerful experience imaginable. It is the foundation of your relationship; without it, there really is no relationship.

Soul Mates - Do They Really Exist

2009-04-07T01:42:00.002-07:00

Throughout centuries, story tellers, and people from different background and cultures always refer to their fascination in meeting one day their soul mates. Is Soul Mate a myth? Do they really exist? Or is Soul Mate a figment of our own imagination that can help keep our hope for a perfect relationship and keep our hope alive. Or is it an escape way for not handling or not looking at ourselves in such a way that we keep delaying our responsibilities and things can be fixed when we meet that perfect relationship with those Soul Mates. Everything is possible! It is up to you and me to decide the bottom line of this puzzle.

If we talk in such metaphysics tone of words used, we will say we are all coming from the same source, one soul, branched out into different ventures or experiences to achieve and in reality we are all Soul Mate. Maybe that’s true but I believe there is more into it than that!!

How do we define Soul Mates?

Soul Mates is another Soul that share the same exact similar way of understanding as the other Soul and in this lifetime so they decided to share their growth and understanding together. It does NOT mean Soul Mates have to be in a relationship to make it work. What do I mean by that? From the motion that a Soul integrate into life through a particular family, geography, religion, or situation for certain reasons. I do believe we choose our family, we choose our religion, and we choose where we want to be born for certain that the Soul itself will identify and in the same time you will be aware of it one day if you are well attuned within yourself. We will not dispute the reasons we go through that because we will have unlimited reasons here.

Let’s start with our choice of a family to be born with. If each one of us look deeper into our families there must be at least one person and many time there is more in our immediate family or cousin that we feel different with. That person can be your father, your sister, your niece, or your cousin. It really does not matter who that person but that person is your Soul Mate where you always enjoy being in their company, listening to them and mainly valued everything they say. Those experiences with Soul Mate we already started at young age. Then we grow up, how many of us we have one or two particular friends around us at school or where our parents moved to the new neighborhood. I bet you everyone can relate to someone. And that goes on until we are adult and the dating game started.

We need to understand one thing when it comes to relationships, as long as we do not rush ourselves into a relationship for a wrong reason and what I mean by that? Well the look of the person, what they drive, who’s his family, how rich they are, or how cute they are, what their education is, or just to be in a certain crowd. All of that will never bring you to Soul Mates. Why it never work because you are looking into the wrong substance.

With Soul Mate there is no Karma to deal with or work at. All you have an enjoyment of being in each others company. The only thing you know about your Soul Mate is whenever you are in need they are always there for whatever or deep your troubles are. Look around you through the years, can you identify already someone that fit that equation. I bet you do.

There are three levels of Soul Mates that I believe exist. I will look into that in my next articles.

It Is So Important For Someone to Love You For Who You Are

2009-04-07T01:42:00.001-07:00

Dear Dr. Ellen: I have been seeing a wonderful man for over a year now who I knew in college just as a friend. He has been divorced for 5 years and is a very successful lawyer. I am having relationship problems and I can't tell if it is "my stuff" or if I really have an issue. I used to model when I was young. He has pictures of me when I was 18 and on his walls in his bedroom and in his wallet. But he doesn't display or carry any current pictures of me. I am noticing how really angry I am feeling. Do I have a right to be bothered by this?

He also wants my hair short and he wants me to lose 10 pounds. And he offered to pay for me to have laser on my face after he told me that his ex had it and she looks great. I am afraid I have another man in my life that is more impressed with how I look than who I am. I have written on email what concerns me and he never takes the time to respond on email. He just tells me that he probably could never be as open as I would like him to be but he will try.

He loves his toys and gets excited like a little boy - his new skis, his new boat, his airplane etc. He talks mostly about physical things, never any deeper. He does see people in a loving, caring way and I really like that about him. He doesn't find fault in people and usually defends them and gives people the benefit of the doubt. He is sweet, kind, fun, a wonderful dad to his son and daughter, (raised his daughter alone) so he has a lot going for him but I can't decide whether this is my abandonment issues coming up or if I have another impossible relationship. I never feel like we talk about the really important things. It is surface. Am I too sensitive, too deep? Is he a man and this is what you get? - Barbara

Advice: Dear Barbara: You have every right to feel exactly like you do because your feelings are never right or wrong, Your "stuff" as you put it is exactly that. You are the sum total of your experiences.

Here is what I tell the men in my program. "A woman falls in love because of the way she feels about herself when she's with you. Most women have said that when they meet "Mr. Right" and they are in love, they feel beautiful, sexy, special, needed, and she has a RIGHT to feel like that for the rest of her life. So a truly, loving relationship is measured by how good she feels about herself when she's with you."

"Male approval is so important to a woman. A woman's father is the first man in her life that either gives approval or doesn't. If a woman didn't have a loving and doting father, she's going to spend the rest of her life looking for the approval she never got. As a man, you have to fill that gap. If you don't, she'll keep looking until she finds it. It's not something she can live without."

Barbara, you are talking to a woman who had her breast removed because of cancer and my husband could care less. I sat in support groups where women cried because their men couldn't make love to them anymore. I feel it is so important for someone to love you for who you are, especially as we get older. You are not a 19 year-old girl anymore, you are a woman. Here is a poem that I have kept for more than 10 years. It was from a book that is no longer in print called, "Always A Woman" by Kaylan Pickford.

"She decided to be a model when she was in her late 40's. Don't tell me I want to look like some barely lived-in face. I have some lines in my face from fifty years of life. They tell me of years in the sun, of sorrows and joys. They tell me of time. They tell me I have lived and that I am still alive. They can't be erased. They can be softened, but not erased. They are as much a part of me as any part of my body. Do they offend? Would I be better looking, more interesting, without them? Would my life become magically different if they weren't there? If I could have kept my face smooth and unlined, would the events of my life have been different? Would I be different? Do I long to be the smooth-skinned, freckle-faced kid I once was? No. I long for the same thing today that I longed for then: to be the best I am able to be. I would feel strange if, looking in the mirror, knowing what I know, I did not see a line from life. Smooth skin goes with the young for every good reason - they have just started. They have living to do."

The fact that he loves his toys, and sees other people in a caring way and is a great dad is fantastic. But it still boils down to how you feel about yourself when you are with him. I have no problem with you wanting your hair short, losing 10 pounds or getting laser work done. I wanted all those things as well. The difference is that my husband said that he loves me just the way I am and if it's something that I want, it's fine with him. If the man I loved only carried a picture of me when I was 19 and was the one suggesting that that I diet, change my hair and laser my face, I'd feel exactly like you do. You deserve to have a man who loves you with all his heart and soul and don't you dare settle for anything less. - Dr.Ellen

Self-Love : Is It Selfish?

2009-04-07T01:41:00.000-07:00

The song "Greatest Love of All," written by Michael Masser and Linda Creed (performed by Whitney Houston) contains the following lyrics: "I found the greatest love of all/Inside of me/ ... Learning to love yourself/It is the greatest love of all." There are many types of love that we have for the people in our lives: love for a romantic partner or spouse, for our family, for our children, for our friends, for humanity, in general, and for ourselves. Which of these is most important? Which should be our first priority? Is self-love the "Greatest Love of All"? Or is it selfish and self-indulgent?

Suppose you find your "soul mate" and feel that all-encompassing love that everyone seems to seek... Should you love yourself above your soul mate? Should your self-love mean more to you than your soul mate's love for you? What about your parents, your children, and/or your friends? Should you put your love for yourself before your love for them? Although I believe that love for others is extremely important, I believe that self-love should - and must - come first.

What about you? Do you agree? Or are you cringing? Do you feel uneasy with this idea? Or does it make perfect sense? We hear, over and over again, "Before you can love someone else, you have to love yourself, first." The saying has almost become a cliché. Yet, on some level, many of us feel uncomfortable with this. Why might this be so?

So many of us, especially women, are caregivers. Whether we wear the label of spouse, parent, nurse, doctor, teacher, counselor, volunteer worker, or any of a host of other identities, many of us tend to put the needs of others before our own needs. We try to please and care for others first, often putting ourselves last. In many cultures, women, especially, have been rewarded for being caregivers - and sometimes punished for not exhibiting those qualities.

In my counseling practice, I encounter a lot of people who believe that to love yourself, or to give to yourself, is a "bad" thing. They see this as "selfish" or "self-centered." I recall an example from my own youth. As a teenager, I wanted to be a performing artist. I loved to be onstage, especially in musicals when I got to sing solos. Admittedly, as a particularly romantic teen dealing with the joys and tears of crushes and heartbreaks, I had a way of creating some drama in the rest of my life, as well. Once in a while, my mother would admonish me by saying, "You always wanted to be the center of attention!" The tone in which she made this statement clearly conveyed that I should feel ashamed of myself. It worked: I did. Whether or not she intended it, I got the message that expressing myself in any way that might be different, that might call attention to myself, was deplorable... and to enjoy my own talents, to recognize my gifts -- or (God forbid) to feel good about myself -- was even worse!

My mother was very concerned about preventing her children from becoming conceited. It never occurred to her that she might want to put as much effort into fostering our self-esteem. I can't really blame my mother: like all of us, she is a product of her generation and culture. She only taught what she had learned, herself. I find it a shame, though, that our culture seems to create so many people who lack self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-love. I think that our main focus, especially with children, should be on "building them up." Instead, so many people look to "take someone down a peg" if that person seems too "cocky" or self-confident.

When I talk of self-love, I am NOT advocating that we should stop caring for others, and just focus on ourselves. Being in service and giving back to your community is something I believe is very important. Showing kindness to others and demonstrating our caring for our loved ones is a key to having a fulfilling life. However, maintaining a balance is critical. You cannot keep giving to others if you do not give to yourself, first. It is like pouring water from a vessel: you cannot pour and pour without ever refilling it - eventually, it will run dry. Like that vessel, we, too, need to refill, recharge, and re-energize. We need to replenish ourselves, by loving and giving to ourselves.

Learning to love yourself may be the greatest love you ever experience and achieve. Self-love is not "selfish" or bad. When you love yourself, you will feel good about yourself, and you will feel better about the world. This will make it easier for you to give love to others. Especially if you are a parent or any type of caregiver, you must not forget to take time out to care for yourself. When you take time to re-energize, you will have more energy both for yourself and to share with the people you love and those in your care. The person who feels self-love is generally happier and much more pleasant to be around than the person who lacks self-love and self-esteem. Embodying self-love is the greatest example we can set for our children, for our loved ones, for our friends, and for all those we encounter in our lives.

Help – I’m Being Stalked! When Love Becomes an Obsession

2009-04-07T01:40:00.002-07:00

If you think you won't be stalked, think again. According to statistics put out by the National Center for Victims of Crime, 1 out of every 12 women will be stalked during her lifetime and 1 out of 45 men will be stalked during his lifetime. Which begs this question: Why would someone stalk another? To be sure, the answer is complicated, however there is a certain type of stalker that we should all be concerned about. What follows is the definition of an Intimacy Stalker, including a few of the motivational reasons behind their behavior as well as a possible personality type: (Source Adapted from)

THE INTIMACY STALKER

Reasons Why They Stalk

Believes the victim is an ideal partner.

May believe the victim is in love with them.

Believes that the victim is the only person who can satisfy their desires

Personality Type & Victim Characteristics

Isolated and shy
May live alone and lacks other intimate relationship in his/her life.
May suffer from a mental disorder, including a narcissistic personality disorder.
May stalk complete strangers or those who they have just met socially.

Stalking Behaviors
May write inappropriate letters to the victim begging for attention
May make repeated telephone calls to the victim
May send unwanted gifts to the victim
May secretly follow the victim
May break into victim's email account to monitor discussions with others
May become threatening or violent if rejected by the victim

STEPS TO PROECT YOURSELF FROM A STALKER

To begin with, if you feel that you are being stalked, take the situation seriously! Don't ignore the person's behavior and assume that it will go away over time — chances are in won't! Here are a few things that you can do to protect yourself:

Consider obtaining a restraining order
File police reports for harassment and save them
Destroy all personal paperwork or buy a shredder. Some stalkers have been known to go through their victim's garbage to secure personal information.
Keep a daily diary of harassing behaviors. This may prove useful should you have to go to court.
Tell your friends, co-workers and supervisors of your situation so that they are aware of the threat. You may also want to advise human resources.
Change your telephone number and get a caller ID Box.

Of course, the points suggested above are not intended to act as a complete list. To find out more about stalking and strategies to deal with it, visit www.stalkinghelp.org. Remember that intimacy stalkers seek closeness and attention from their victims. Often when they do not receive what they are looking for, they become angry, hurt and possibly violent. Look for the warning signs and be sure to take threats seriously. You don't have to live in fear.

Maintaining Your Individuality in Love

2009-04-07T01:40:00.001-07:00

What is the distinction between mature love and a common misconception of what love is: the symbiotic relationship? Mature love is stable, a union of two people who respect themselves and each other. Symbiotic love is needy and dependent. Symbiotic relationships demand that one person has power over another. This results in the loss of the integrity of both partners. Mature love means that both individuals in the partnership have room to be themselves, even while being together. In the symbiotic relationship, one partner is driven by need and fear that the other partner will leave. In mature love, each partner is free and whole, choosing, rather than being driven, to give love to the other partner.

Mature love requires giving your love with no strings attached, with no expectations. Many of us have learned from society that to give means "to give up" or "to give away" -- in essence, creating a deficit in ourselves. Further, we learn to give only as much as we expect to receive in return, lest we end up feeling cheated by giving more. Giving, as it exists in mature love, is quite different from these types of messages we have received. Rather than being seen as a sacrifice or an investment in future returns, giving in mature love comes from a desire to give and an ability to do so. In the words of Erich Fromm, author of The Art of Loving published in 1956, "Giving is the highest expression of potency... more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness."

In a symbiotic relationship, one partner gives up a significant part of himself or herself in order to maintain a peaceful relationship. This individual, ruled by a fear of being alone, will sacrifice parts of his or her identity for the sake of keeping the relationship intact. Short-term conflict is avoided, and the status quo is maintained. In the long run, though, there is a price to be paid: the loss of one's individuality. If one partner idolizes the other and is willing to sacrifice himself more completely, then the other partner has more power and control over the relationship. When the balance of power is unequal, the relationship becomes unsatisfying for both partners; almost inevitably, it ends. There are a lot of people willing to give up an awful lot to avoid being alone. They are willing to give up who they are, what they are, and what they want and need. They are willing to sacrifice their individuality for the love of another.

Any person who is willing to make such a sacrifice lacks self-love, and thus is incapable of maintaining a mature, loving relationship. Self-love is where love for others has to start. Giving up your individuality will eventually come back to haunt you; you will end up feeling anger, resentment, and/or regret. The outcome of one partner resenting the other is the deterioration of the relationship. People need relationships, but they also need to be fulfilled within themselves. When you give up your dreams for the sake of your partner's, you do so at the cost of your own individuality and personal growth.

When you enter into a relationship, it does not mean that your personal life stops. Your life does not totally change because you are with another person. You have to maintain your own individuality. You have to have your own personal goals. You need to maintain the friendships, hobbies and interests that you had before you met your partner. If you give these up for the sake of your relationship, you are giving up your life. When your partner first met you, they were attracted to you as an individual. It's important that you keep your individuality-- that's what attracted your partner in the first place. Maintaining your individuality will enable you and your partner to build a mature loving relationship.

Many relationships fail today because one partner has given up too much of themselves for the other. You have to love yourself first, before you can love another. If you enter a relationship and give up all the things that define you as an individual, you are not giving yourself the love that you need. Sooner or later, if you lose your identity, if you stop giving to yourself, you will be unable to give to your relationship.

It's important not to confuse identity and individuality with flexibility in your relationship. Individuality is about the things that make you who you are. Flexibility is about compromise. Compromise will always be necessary in any relationship that you have. In order to compromise, you have to be committed to honest communication of your feelings and needs at all times. In building a life together, problems will arise.

Problem solving through honest communication is the key to building a mature, loving relationship. Neither you nor your partner should give up anything that makes you the unique person that you are. It's up to you and your partner to find the balance that you both need to succeed in a rising loving relationship.

Where Has The Love Gone

2009-04-07T01:38:00.004-07:00

Sexual intimacy is the major thing that distinguishes your relationship with your partner from your relationships with other people. Sexual intimacy is also a limited resource. If you are being intimate with people other than your partner, you are robbing and sabotaging your relationship. Affairs occur for a variety of reasons. In my opinion, the foremost reason that people engage in affairs is that they are in need of love and intimacy that they feel they are not getting from their relationship. Why do so many seek love and intimacy outside of their relationship? The question that comes to my mind is, "When and how did the love and intimacy in the relationship start to vanish?"

At the start of a relationship, during the euphoric stage, the sex is incredible: you are in love, and you could not imagine being with anyone else. Reality eventually sets in, as it always does, and the euphoric bubble bursts. You spend less time with your partner, and, especially, less time making love. Many of us get into a pattern of making work or other things outside the relationship a higher priority, putting ourselves last, and continually running ourselves ragged. Particularly when you have children, time and energy are precious commodities. As one woman I talked to once said, "You are so tired, the last thing you really want to do is do that one thing that got you in this situation in the first place." Some reasons why sexual intimacy becomes neglected are fatigue, lack of time, or lack of privacy. Another is lack of interest: sometimes lovemaking becomes routine or a little boring. People frequently have affairs to recapture the excitement of the initial stages of a relationship, or to escape from the predictability of daily life with their partner. There is no doubt that life's daily pressures take a toll on our loving relationships. Fatigue and boredom make us lazy and complacent, so we start to take one another for granted. No wonder the passionate intimacy we once had fizzles out to next to nothing.

I feel that when sex disappears, it is usually a sign of a problem in the relationship. I feel that two people can have a passionate, satisfying, fulfilling sex life with one another, forever. Before I share how, take a moment to contemplate one idea. If there is nothing else you remember from reading this article, remember this: Sex is fun. So often we complicate it and make it a topic for serious discussion. Sometimes this is necessary, but sometimes you just need to look at sex as playtime for you and your partner. Sexual intimacy is the defining factor that makes your relationship with your partner different from all your other relationships. The sexual intimacy that you share with one another is what makes your love for one another ever so sweet.

Like every other facet of your relationship with your partner, sexual intimacy is an integral part of the practice of the art of loving. Like every other facet of your relationship, you have to make the time for sex with one another. I am not saying that you have to pull out your calendars and isolate a specific day and time when both of you are free to have sex. Some days there might be more time than other days, but it is important that you set aside that time together. Having time together allows you to communicate and to engage in activities with one another. It allows for some romantic time and sexual intimacy together, if that's what you both want. It all starts with you. Both you and your partner have to make time for one another.

When sexual intimacy starts to disappear in a relationship, many couples fall into a trap that I call the standoff. In a standoff situation, neither partner is honestly communicating their needs with one another. One or both of them are afraid of being rejected by the other, and so neither partner initiates physical contact of any type, and it virtually disappears. The hand-holding, hugging and kissing -- all forms of affection and touch that they once had -- vanish. When this type of situation occurs, you have to step back together and look at what is happening. You have to communicate with one another to discuss the sensitive issue of why physical closeness between you has deteriorated.

From Euphoric Love to Rising Love

2009-04-07T01:38:00.003-07:00

You have found the one for you, and are experiencing euphoric love: deep passion, romance, and hot steamy sex. Perhaps you feel like you are "falling in love." Now I ask the question, "How can we reach the next level of loving?" In my opinion, mature love is about rising, not falling. Falling is something out of our control, whereas rising is a conscious growing process. So how do we continue rising in love? How do we graduate from euphoric love to mature love and intimacy?

What you have at the beginning of your relationship is a tiny seed: the start of something, the beginning. The initial stage of love, with its intensity, passion, and physical closeness feels deceptively like the seed of love has matured overnight into a flourishing tree. I hate to disillusion you -- I love fantasy like the next person -- but during this stage of love, your relationship is still that itty-bitty seed. When you plant a seed, it germinates; it begins to grow and develop. At the euphoric stage of love, you and your partner are like the seed.

Your love is only starting to grow. You might feel 40 feet high, but you are still 6 inches in the soil. Just as the planted seed requires nourishment and care to grow, so too does love. Planting your seed in good quality soil, giving it the right amounts of nutrients, water, and sunlight will produce a strong, resilient, healthy sapling that has a chance to mature into a full grown tree. If neglected during any stage of growth, it will weaken and deteriorate, and if completely neglected, it will die. The same can be said about a loving relationship.

Love is a living, growing, dynamic thing. It grows in stages that require sustenance and careful attention to flourish. Without the proper care, love will eventually fade. Lets look at the first ingredient for growing a seed: the soil. The soil is you and your partner, as individuals. The soil conditions must have all the right elements to stimulate growth. Self-love is the foundation for fertile soil. For love to grow, both you and your partner need to be happy, self-fulfilled, and content within yourselves. Many of us look to our partner to save or complete us, to make us happy. However, looking to another to make you feel loved, without first looking to yourself, will never work. Remember, it all starts with you. If you do not love yourself, you are not going to be able to love another individual. Neither will you be able to attract an individual who ultimately makes you feel happy and fulfilled. Before you enter into mature love, you, as an individual, have to know who you are, what you need, and what you want out of life. You have to do all of the work on yourself, first. If you are angry or hurt, and have not dealt with past emotional baggage, you are not ready for mature love. Your soil is not healthy enough to nurture and support the growth of something larger than yourself. You are not ready for any kind of solid, lasting, loving relationship. You have to be honest with yourself to know if you are ready to commit to mature love.

If you find yourself ending relationships once the euphoric stage has ended, you need to go back and work on yourself. Other people are not the problem-- it's you. We find it so easy today to blame others or outside circumstances for our difficulties, especially when it comes to affairs of the heart. Be truthful with yourself. We are all human: We are not perfect; we all have flaws. If you find yourself moving from one abusive relationship to another, you have to ask yourself, "What is it about me that makes me attracted to this type of person? Why do I choose to be a victim? Why do I choose to repeat this pattern?" If several past partners have left you, complaining that you smother them, maybe you need to ask yourself why you feel so insecure. If you have had relationships in which you have given up your dreams and goals, your individuality, for another person, maybe you need to ask yourself, "Why do I need to live my life vicariously through my partners?" or "Why do I sacrifice myself for others?" When you have examined yourself and are comfortable with who you are, when you are honestly able to love yourself, you are ready to commit to mature love.

What does it take to cultivate mature love? What does it take to rise in love? How do you take that little seed and grow it to that forty-foot high, mature tree? It does not happen overnight. A forty-foot tree does not grow in a year; it takes a lifetime. So does mature love. It's a lifelong commitment that requires patience, confidence, discipline, concentration, faith, and practice daily. Mature love does not happen on Valentine's Day, Christmas, New Years, birthdays, or vacations; it happens every day of your life. If you only put forth the effort at certain times of the year, your relationships will wilt and eventually disappear. Daily efforts are required to maintain your relationships, whether they are with your partner, children, or coworkers.

The Circle of Love : Do you love yourself?

2009-04-07T01:38:00.001-07:00

Why do many people continuously get trapped in the vicious circle of relationships based on infatuation? It is simple: they do not love themselves, and therefore they are willing to forfeit their individuality, including their wants and needs, just to have somebody in their life.

The degree to which you love yourself is the degree to which you will be able to extend love to others, and inevitably to find the one for you.

Do you extend as much kindness to yourself, as you do to others?

Do you love yourself?

Take a few moments. Ponder these questions carefully and soulfully.

Look at the second question again. Are you guilty of giving up time with friends and family - or, perhaps more importantly, giving up the pursuit of your dreams -- for the sake of another? If this is you, don't panic or feel bad: you are not alone. Millions of people are in this vicious circle. The good news is that you can change, reverse this pattern, and move from a vicious circle into a loving circle.

Don't know where to begin?

Let me provide the "Circle of Love" road map, so you can recognize the road signs on your path to love.

It all starts with you. You are the center of your "Circle of Love".

Finding the right person with whom to share your life is not the first focus of loving. The primary focus is how you live your daily life: it's developing your capacity for loving yourself, so that you may better love those around you. It all centers on you. On a daily basis, increase the love you give to yourself. Be kind and loving to you. Start doing things for you. This is not being selfish: this is an act of self-love. You will be amazed how your new attitude towards giving and receiving love returns to you.

Love extended to others in a healthy way is like the knowledge that a teacher shares with his or her students. At the end of the class, the teacher retains the knowledge and the students have gained the knowledge. Love is like the teacher's knowledge in that it should be shared, not given away at one's own expense. The more you share love, the more love you will gain.

There is a world of difference between the person who possesses self-love and the person who does not. The former is truly giving in sharing love with others, whereas the latter is not. It all starts with loving yourself: this will allow you to give a more enriched love to others. Once you reach this point, your Circle of Love will expand.

Within an expanded Circle of Love, you will be able to extend, attract, and recognize committed love. Once you have the committed love you seek, you can rise to new levels of love in your life. Love's Journey is an endless road, and your Loves' Circle just keeps getting bigger.

Erich Fromm in his book, The Art of Loving, described love as an art that requires patience, confidence, discipline, concentration, faith and practice daily. Today, more than ever, knowledge and skills are required to master The Art of Loving.

Your life and the lives of those you love are happening now. Your life today is not a dress rehearsal for another life you will have later... Live it with love now.

Love: Never Give Up!

2009-04-07T01:37:00.001-07:00

This inspirational story of true love proves to us that love can come when you least expect it. If you think that the circumstances in your life will inhibit any chance of finding the love of your life, you may be in for a surprise. Rae thought that she had no chance at ever finding her true love but she always kept that glimmer of hope alive in her heart. The following story shows us to keep that spark of love alive in our hearts and to never give up.

Cinderella After 50

Rae was washing the dishes. Why didn't I wear those gloves? My hands are burning. This had been a doozy of a year for her. "Donna, did you pick up the mail?" She looked at Donna, her 19- year old daughter, standing in the hallway with her baby boy perched on her hip. "Yeah mom, no check. What are we gonna do?" The baby boy had a handful of his mother's hair and was yanking it in rhythm with his baby chant. "We'll get by until then. Go into the garden and collect some greens for supper."

Rae's marriage of 32 years had finally ended, the last few years were strained and she was miserable. It had just fizzled out and left her feeling like she was in a vacuum, a void. Her pregnant daughter had returned home the same month that her husband had moved out. Such timing..She thought, how can I raise another child. I'm exhausted, and I've done that already.

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise; Rae immersed herself into her grandson, the light of her life. His big brown eyes and dark skin contrasted with her green eyed, blonde haired daughter. Donna had tried to strike out on her own a year and a half ago. She returned home pregnant and broken hearted. Had fallen head over heals with a man that turned and ran when she announced her pregnancy to him. Donna just thinks with her heart. Never takes enough time to sort things out and expects people to love as deeply as she does.

Rae thought her golden years were supposed to bring rest and relaxation, a reward for all the sacrifices she had made for her family. Did she ever have that wrong! She and Donna had to clean houses to get by. Dragging the baby, diaper bag and play pen with them. They worked all over the county. Driving throughout the smoggy city to get from one $40.00 job to the next. So much for my golden years. Mother and daughter scraped and scavenged to get by. They collected their client's hand-me-downs and resold them at yard sales. They stopped by the furniture shop to get scrap wood for the fireplace and turned the flower- beds into a vegetable garden.

Rae was slapping the tortillas into the frying pan, making the quesadillas her grandbaby loved so much. "Where are those greens?" She got her answer as her Chubby, round faced baby climbed up the steps into the kitchen, his little fists full of kale leaves. Singing a little song "nana, nana, mama nana." He stretches his arms up to his Nana and offers her the greens.

Rae scoops up the baby and shows him the quesadillas in the pan. "OOOOOOO..bites." "Let's wash those greens little man, you're going to eat those too."

Rae looks at her grandson and kisses him all over his face. "Mom, can you watch Denny tonight?" There is a candlelight walk in honor of Martin Luther King. "Of course dear, you go to your thing tonight, I'm not doing anything."

As Rae lies in bed, tears well up as she looks at her life situation. When is it going to be my turn? I spent my whole life, raising my children, doting on my husband, for what? Yes I do have nice kids, I rarely see my other three, and if it weren't for Denny, my Donna would still be in Arizona. I would be all-alone. She hardly dared to think about Donna and the baby moving on someday. They gave her a reason to keep going. Rae cried herself to sleep again. Her hot tears soaked the pillow. Will I ever find love again? How can I, at 50, even meet a man? It seemed so hopeless.

Time seemed to be slipping by so quickly. Rae's needs were all but lost due to the fact that just making the mortgage payment and getting food on the table took all she could muster. She was sitting at the table one evening paying the bills when Donna, with Denny on her hip came charging in, excited about something. "Mom, I met an incredible person today at the meeting. He's coming over tonight to give me a tarot card reading. He said he would read for you too if there was time." What is Donna getting into now? Mildly annoyed, but intrigued at the same time Rae replies, " You know your friends are always welcome."

There was a knock on the door. A small built man in his 40's stood on the front steps. He flashed a smile and introduced himself as Carlos. His high energy was infectious and Rae immediately felt comfortable with him.

The three of them sat at the kitchen table. After some small talk they jumped right into the reading. Carlos shuffled the cards and looked directly at Rae.

He laid the cards out and studied them for a few minutes. Rae was a bit anxious as skepticism crept into her. Carlos looked up and smiled that smile of his. " There's a man coming into your life and he'll hit you like a freight train." Donna lifted her brows at her mother. "That sounds promising mom. What do you know? Maybe Mr. Wonderful is out there looking for you after all?" "This sounds a bit too good to be true, Carlos." That's all Rae said. Carlos just smiled and said, "maybe."

About a year from her tarot reading, Rae saw Donna talking to one of the neighbors at the monthly yard sale. Donna came into the house teary eyed and obviously upset. "What is the matter?" asked Rae." "Mom, Mrs. Butler is sick and needs some help. She wanted to know if we could clean house for her." Of course we can, what's the problem?" "She has just been diagnosed with cancer!"

Rae had known Mrs. Butler for a long time. Their children went to the same schools and were in the same scout troop for years.

House cleaning evolved into nursing care as Mrs. Butler's health deteriorated. The two women became very close as Rae cared for her and Mr. Butler. Mr. Butler was devastated and having a hard time coping with the fact that he would most likely lose his wife, the love of his life for 40 years. Rae stayed strong and stood by the Butlers until the very end. As the cancer worsened and Mrs. Butler slipped closer to the edge many of her friends pulled away, not able to watch her suffer. Rae stayed and helped Mr. Butler; they talked long into the evenings, working out feelings, trying to cope with the coming loss of friend and wife. Mrs. Butler passed away with her husband, Rae and another friend at her side.

With every end follows a beginning

Six months passed, Rae was back in her routine when she received a phone call. It was Mr. Butler. "Rae, will you join me for dinner? You're the only one I can talk to. She agreed to dinner and they went out. Charles and Rae talked until the restaurant closed. The waiter asked them to leave. They sat on a bench outside the restaurant in the park and opened their hearts to one another. It was now 2 am. A patrolman asked them to go home as it was so late.

Several days passed and Charles called her again. They went out several times a week, talking and sharing late into the night. After several dates Rae realized that she was falling head over heels in love. She was scared and excited at the same time. She had saved enough money to take Charles out. They went out to breakfast and talked into the afternoon. They walked on the beach together, hand in hand, tossing their shoes on the beach; they sat together in the warm sand and watched the sun set. Charles took her hands in his, saying, "I feel as if I have waited a lifetime to finally find you." You fill me with such joy and life. I'm falling in love with you."

Charles drove Rae home. As they said good night they both agreed that they had been brought together for a reason. It was meant to be that they both have a second chance at love. It was as if a veil had been lifted and they could see each other as lovers.

He walked Rae to the door and kissed her for the first time. The passion welled and they stood at the door for a long time, embracing each other as they passionately kissed. "I love you Rae"! " I love you Charles, Rae breathlessly replied. They had to tear away from each other as Rae unlocked the door and entered her home. Donna walked up as Rae, face flushed, tried to catch her breath. "All right young lady where have you been? It's after one o-clock in the morning." Donna was beside herself giggling, "I've waited a long time to say that mom."

Charles and Rae were married 6 months later. Charles introduced Rae to Royal Scottish Country Dancing. They danced and partied several times a week. The wedding was a dream wedding. Everyone wore traditional Scottish attire.

Charles and Rae danced and whirled for hours. People feasted and laughed and cried with joy to see two people so much in love. A harpist played soft music while Rae and Charles exchanged their vows.

Rae and Charles sold their homes and moved to Oregon, where they bought their dream home. Their children and grandchildren are all one big happy family and even Rae's ex-husband and wife join in the family festivities. Donna was married shortly after her mother and finally had the family she always wanted. They all lived happily ever after. This is a true story.

Priorities : Family, Self, Work, Spouse

2009-04-07T01:36:00.001-07:00

I have a question I would like you to ask yourself today. Answer the question honestly, without giving it much thought right now. Just give your immediate response, keeping in mind that there might be components to the question you currently do not have in your life: for example a spouse or partner, or children. Imagine that you have all the categories that I describe in the following question. You cannot put two categories together or omit a category. Simply answer the question with a quick response, identifying your top priority (1) from the list below, and then identifying your second (2), third (3), and finally fourth (4) priority on the list. Please answer this question before continuing to read the rest of this article.

Prioritize The Following Four Items:

Family (Which Includes Children)
Self
Work (Career)
Spouse (Partner)

This is, without a doubt, one of the most important questions you can ask yourself today. It is a question that will continually come forth as you go through life. I feel that it is critical for each of us to have clarity about our own priorities. When you are faced with the challenges of your daily life, I believe that the answer to this question will help you to make better decisions and, more importantly, more conscious choices for yourself and your loved ones.

I have asked this thought-provoking question to thousands of people over the years. It is a very sensitive question that has stirred much emotion and, more significantly, thought about "What truly are our priorities for life?" I have heard many varied answers to the question. In many cases, an individual immediately becomes defensive, trying to change the question. This situation occurs, especially, when two members of a couple discover that their answers are totally different. Unquestionably, I have hit a sensitive nerve with many whom I have asked this question. The question brings out resentment, hurt, emotional baggage, and fear: things that many people have kept hidden from their partners and, primarily, from themselves.

I came up with this question when I was in my late thirties, after I had been through several relationships. I honestly have to say that I wish someone had posed this very question to me years ago. It would have saved me from a lot of emotional pain and anguish. It initiated a change in my priorities for my life.

At this point, you may be asking yourself, "So, Paul, what is your answer to the question?" The priorities for my life are the following:

Self
Spouse (Partner)
Family (Which Includes Children)
Work (Career)

Why do I put myself in the number 1 position? Quite simply: I cannot truly love my spouse or partner - or anyone else, for that matter -- unless I love and give to myself first. Why do I place my spouse or partner second, before family and children? It is the example of my love for my spouse or partner that is the most important gift I can bestow upon my children and family. Why is family, including children, third on my priority list? Because of my love for them: they are far more important than work or any amount of material reward that I receive as a result of these efforts. Loving one's self, then spouse, then family, makes work all that much more enjoyable and rewarding.

I could devote an entire book to this very subject of priorities. We could examine all the "What If?" situations that pop up daily in our lives, but I will leave those to you. I would like you to think of my answer as a guideline for life. Each and every day, I try, to the best of my abilities, to live my life based on this order of priorities. The results have been truly amazing. Not only me, but also many others have recognized the key role that these priorities play in our lives. Whether or not you agree with my particular order of priorities, I feel it is important that you give careful consideration to the question of your own priorities. In my opinion, how we choose to structure our priorities is what makes the difference between just struggling unhappily through life versus enjoying a loving.

Is love forever?

2009-04-07T01:34:00.000-07:00

Debbie, 33, a credit collector for a shipping company, recently ended a three-year relationship. "From the moment I met Jerry, I knew he was right for me but experience taught me to proceed cautiously. After about four months of dating, I decided my first impressions were right; he was everything I always wanted in a man. We had three happy years together and Jerry repeatedly told me how contented he was to have found someone with whom he could share his life.

"We did everything together, took business courses, went on vacations, even saw the same movies. Living together was comfortable, but for some reason the thought of marriage never appealed to me. We had talked about having a family some day, but whenever Jerry brought up the subject, I felt I was not yet ready. Jerry wanted to take our relationship to the next level but I felt comfortable with the way things were. For the first time in our relationship, it dawned on me that my relationship with Jerry may not be forever. This frightened me because I truly loved him but I knew that I was not ready to get married to him.

"When I finally realized Jerry really wanted marriage, a strange thing happened. I began to feel uneasy with our relationship. Things were not like before; I lost some of my excitement and desire to be with him. It's as if I was inconsiderate to him after he had been so good to me. I felt like I did not deserve to be with him. We finally agreed to go our separate ways, and even though I miss him, I feel that somewhere along the way the love I had for him was lost.

"It's been four years since Jerry and I ended our relationship, and I am still trying to understand what happened between us. I've been seeing other guys, but so far I have not experienced the closeness I had with Jerry. My friends tell me I'm not yet ready to settle down with anyone, and maybe there're right. In my relationship with Jerry I felt free to be myself. We lived together like buddies without feeling tied down to each other, (at least that's the way I felt). When he became serious about marriage, I no longer saw him as a buddy, but as someone who was going to tie me down. I just got scared."

Do you believe this relationship was one of true love? Some may say it was a mistake because Debbie and Jerry were not truly compatible and should not have been together in the first place.

In my opinion, this relationship was successful because both participants enjoyed three fulfilling years of their lives together. Someone once said if you can have one moment of true happiness in your life, grab it because true happiness is not easy to find.

Love is a living entity; if it stands still, it could die. To be alive means to move forward and go where life's journey takes you. Love may die only to be reborn again in a different form. Perhaps both Jerry and Debbie will move on to find love in different places, but they will always cherish the love they once shared with each other.

Tracking down your Soul Mate

2009-04-05T23:08:00.003-07:00

Sure, we all dream about meeting the right person. . . the one that we are meant to be with forever. Dreaming about it is all fun and easy, but the real question is, where do you find this soul mate of yours? Fate? Well yes, if you believe in fate, then yes, it will have something to do with it, but not without effort on your part. Fate needs you to give it direction so that as a team, you can find the person you have always wanted as a part of your life.

The first thing you have to do before finding your soul mate, is finding yourself. What qualities are important to you? What are your morals and beliefs? How do you show your affection and how do you expect it to be presented to you? These are questions necessary for you to ask yourself before going out there. Giving yourself an interview will make things clearer of what type of person you are really looking for, instead of just going on a blind search.

It is very common for a person to date people just for "dating". While dating is a fun and useful experience, it is not advisable to just go out with anyone just to have a date, or to enter a relationship because you do not want to be alone. When you go out on a date, it is important that you use that date as an opportunity to observe and see if the person is someone you would like to see again and if they carry the qualities you are looking for. If, for example, if you are searching for a person who is in touch with his or her romantic side, but go on a date with someone who likes acting rough at baseball games and loves hunting, then you could pretty much see where the relationship would go. You should be able to sense these qualities after a few dates.

Once you have realized that these dates will not lead to a relationship you have dreamed of, then obviously the person is not your dream mate either, and it would be best if you stop seeing each other to prevent any misleading expectations. Continuing to date someone just because you entered a comfort zone or do not want to hurt their feelings will only hold you back from meeting who you are really meant to be with, not to mention waste precious time for both you and your date's. Gently break it to him or her that you find them to be a very interesting and nice person, but you feel like going solo for a while and then move on.

Tracking down your soul mate will require patience; so do not feel frustrated or hopeless if you do not find him or her in a certain amount of time. Good things take time to be brought together and you will come together when the time is right. The time becomes right when you look out for the right signs. Such signs would be:

• Being strongly attracted to each other physically.

• Being strongly attracted to each other's personalities.

• Having common interests.

• Sharing the same values.

• Major respect for one another.

• Someone who makes you feel truly special and worthy.

• Someone who puts in a great effort to show you their passion for you and the things that is important in your life.

• Meeting on the same emotional levels.

These are some major and important signs to look out for when trying to track down your soul mate. It will not be difficult to realize because you will know when things are right and the way you want it. When you have found such a person, it is good for you to remember to take things one-step at a time. Sometimes people jump in too fast and end up getting hurt or realizing they jumped to conclusions a little too soon. Take it slow and observe how things are going. See if the person who seems to be perfect in every way for you, remains to carry the same qualities as the relationship proceeds.

When time has proven that the two of you are truly compatible in ways you have always dreamed of, then the relationship may go to the next level and the two of you can make a serious commitment and start focusing on building a future together. Like before, it is important that you pay attention to how you handle a commitment together and if you both agree on what kind of future the two of have in mind. Staying on the same levels is a huge sign that you are with the right person.

Finding your soul mate will the best accomplishment you will ever make, but it does not stop there. Finding the right person is just the beginning. Keeping the right person takes work too, on both your parts. The two of you will have to continue valuing each other for the rest of your lives, respecting each other's individuality and dreams. Refresh your memory of how the two of were brought together and why you both decided to make a commitment to one another. As long as you keep the magic between you alive, your relationship will continue to grow the love and care you both never imagined could ever happen to you!

Communication and Teamwork Can Help Prevent Feelings of Resentment In A Loving Relationship

2009-04-05T23:08:00.001-07:00

How do we prevent feelings of resentment from entering into our loving relationships? In exploring this all-important issue, I feel it is critical that we remember, first, that not one of us in the world today can forecast what the future holds for us. On rare occasions, we may accurately predict that something will happen one minute from now, but even the best of psychics cannot know, for sure, all that will occur months or years into the future. We can plan for our future, set goals, and take action to achieve our aspirations, but, ultimately, the future is really out of our hands. That is the magic of life: that unknown factor that makes each day so wonderful and exciting. Waking up in the morning, we never know what will take place that day. We only have a broad sketch based on the activities we have mentally planned for that day.

Such is the case in all aspects of our lives, whether it is career, family, or a loving relationship: there is that unknown factor that makes life so sweet. Do you think that Bill Gates, as a young man working in his parents' garage, knew that 25 years later he would head one of the largest technology companies in the world? Did Bill know that he would marry Melinda, one of his employees? I don't think so. Such is the case for all of us. I meet couples daily. Having a curious nature, especially when it comes to exploring aspects of love and relationships, I always ask couples how they met one another. For some, it was love at first sight. For others, they were childhood sweethearts who grew together first as friends, and then, later on, as lovers. For many, it was a chance meeting. Often, there was no attraction at the beginning, but over time a bond of friendship and love developed. The point I am trying to relay is that we cannot predict our future, financially or relationship-wise. If you meet your future spouse in college and marry after graduation, you have no idea what the future holds for you in your relationship with your partner, or in your career. All you can do is plan with confidence together to fulfill your goals and aspirations, individually and as a couple.

Committed, loving relationships are, in my opinion, one endless conversation that hopefully will last a lifetime. The conversations that you have at the beginning of your relationship are especially important; these early conversations with your partner can help prevent any feelings of resentment that might arise later on in your life together. I feel that each member of the couple needs to dialogue with the other about his or her goals and desires: both goals for him or her, as an individual, and goals for them, as a couple in a loving relationship. One important area to discuss is the matter of career and finances. Does it really make any difference that one makes more money than the other? That one partner is a doctor and one is a construction worker? That one partner stays home with the children and one partner is the breadwinner? What if the future brings an unexpected change in your finances? Even if one partner starts out, clearly, as the major breadwinner, you never know when an inheritance, the lottery, a business deal, the stock market, or, God forbid, an accident, may drastically alter your financial picture. Should the differences in your net worth or earning power make a difference to you, as a couple? No... I feel it should not make the least bit of difference at all in a secure, loving relationship. Unfortunately, however, relationships are ending at an alarming rate because of such problems.

Career and finances is one area of relationships in which feelings of resentment may arise. Perhaps the partner who is the primary breadwinner feels that he or she is carrying too much of the financial burden; as stress rises on the job and leisure time feels scarce, he or she may come to resent having to be "the responsible one" in the couple. A partner who stays home with the children may come to feel overworked and underpaid; he or she may resent that all the work done in the home brings no prestige and little acknowledgement. It is not uncommon for friends and family to pass on their judgments and opinions, as well, to fuel this resentment fire. When, suddenly, one partner is feeling resentful of the other, we may find ourselves wishing that we could turn back the clock and have those important early conversations with our partner. If the conversations had occurred, and a solid foundation was in place, these issues might not be shaking up the relationship now. However, we cannot turn back the hands of time and change the past.

How do we overcome these feelings of resentment, and, more importantly, fear that enters our lives? My thoughts in answering this question drift back to when I was growing up in a very large, multicultural, metropolitan city in Canada. I attended school with children from varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Many were recent emigrants from war-torn and poverty-stricken countries. They came to Canada to find a free and safe place, with opportunities, in which to raise their families. When I visited my school chums' homes, it was not uncommon for me to see many family members living together under one roof. These people all worked hard and pooled their resources to buy homes for one another and bring other, less fortunate, family members to Canada. I have fond memories of these childhood visits, especially of someone's Grandma enticing me with delicious home baked goodies. These families were a team: living, working, and helping one another to succeed in their new homeland. There were no scoreboards and no feelings of resentment: each person contributed to the best of his or her abilities for the common good of the family unit. Today I recognize the love these families had with no fear, resentment, jealousy, or judgment for one another.

Feelings of resentment are easy to overcome, as long as each person is willing to participate in conversation to extinguish these feelings. It is never too late for dialogue with anyone, especially your loved ones, and, most importantly, your partner. In many cases, couples would benefit from the assistance of a therapist or counselor, to help them get their relationships back on track. It is much easier to repair what was once a loving relationship than to start over: trust me, I have been there before, myself. I recognize today that life is not a scoreboard. A loving relationship is a combined team effort between two individuals. Loving relationships are not built on careers, business, family heritage, dollars and cents, resentment, or fear. They are built from teamwork: each person contributing and doing his or her best. Practice The Art of Loving daily with love, trust, and respect for one another and enjoy your journey in rising love together.

The Three Levels of Soul Mates

2009-04-05T23:07:00.001-07:00

From my own personal experience of being involved in certain relationships, I have come to realize there are three different levels of Soul Mates. We discussed Soul Mates in a previous article of mine, 'Soul Mates - Do they really exists" now we should keep our eyes open and pay closer attention to our relationships, in order that we might recognize those soul mates.

Soul mates have different tasks to fulfill in your life, and likewise theirs. It is not always the case that these relationships will exist on a level where 'physical' interaction is involved and this should not be confused with their initial task toward you. Some Soul Mates are here only to serve as being a link between two other Soul Mates of theirs in the first place. This alone is a very important and significant task, as without that link the reunion of the other souls might not ever happen. We will identify with the different characteristics of those Soul Mates together and you should, therefore, be able to detect some of them who are present in your life at this time.

As you can see, there is no limit to what a true Soul Mate might do in order to provide their support and, on many occasions, it is not fully understood why they do so. You might question my statement and wonder why a Soul Mate will give up his or her own Soul Mate to provide a link for someone else to move on in! I mean is this not the dream we are searching for all of our lives? Well, that's beauty of Soul Mate, that is, unconditional love!

Soul Mates are a universal flow of untapped energy that we can relate to as love and many of us do not understand the meaning of this. It is the same thing we keep avoiding all our life when we don't invest ourselves fully in our relationships anyway! On an unconscious level, Soul Mates tap into that energy of unconditional love.

Regardless of the level of your Soul Mate, it does not mean in any way or form that Soul Mates have to be involved in a physical relationship in order for them to be together. In any of those levels, it is very easy to fall into the trap of taking things for granted. This should be avoided at all costs. Both Soul Mates have to be ready to embark into their journey together, and this is very important for the relationship to succeed.

Here are the three levels of Soul Mates I have come to realize and understand through experiences of my own:

Level One: Your mirrored image – These are a rare example. However, it is possible that they do exist in each of our lives at one point or another. We might have one or two in a lifetime from this category, if we are lucky! What makes them special? Soul Mates of this sort come into our life in a fast, weird and unexpected way. The situations and events in our lives begin to change of their own accord, in order to accommodate the arrival and the reunion of both Souls. In such a case such as this, it is can almost be said that it is 'written in the stars!' Both Souls have to be ready for each other, as I did explain before it is not enough to sustain the relationship at its full potential, only by existing as Soul Mates. This level is the strongest and most powerful type of Soul Mates. They do have many similar interests and share an almost equal interest in their life direction. They will think alike, and in many cases will be able to continue speaking a sentence where the other one has left off. They are a mirror of each other, although they do not have to be exactly the same. However, each one compliments the other with their individual strengths and weaknesses and they will understand each other by being on same 'wavelength'.

Level Two: Your Supporter – Soul Mates of this sort are everywhere around you. Try to take deeper look at the people who surround you. Just look around when you are in dire need of help or guidance in a 'life or death' situation or at a time when you have a heavy burden on your shoulders. Who is around you and ready to listen to you when you really need their assistance? Think of the people who bring you comfort and peace when you need it, or who answer your call when you need some help. These types of Soul Mates do have unconditional love towards each other which can sometimes be difficult to comprehend. Is there someone in your life, of whom, you can relate to being there in that fashion?

Level Three: Your Provider – We encounter these types of Soul Mates in situations that might feel 'weird' or perhaps in some un-expected places. We like to refer to them, sometimes, as being our angels. If they occur, they usually will not stay in our lives for a great length of time. You might come across a Soul Mate of this kind when you are just wondering along the street, thinking away to yourself and from nowhere someone will provide with you a small message that will open up a possible answer to those 'thoughts' you have upon a certain circumstance in your life. These Soul Mates are placed on your path 'out of the blue' and we might never see their face again! We then carry on, feeling blessed at having had them in our life at that necessary moment. Their role is to provide us with an answer or a push toward making a small decision in order to keep us moving in our lives and struggles at that time. Can you relate to such an occurrence in your life?

I asked my guides the question, "will I ever meet my Soul Mates?" They replied, "You keep searching throughout your life for the perfect partner for you, but, have you ever questioned if you are a good example of a Soul Mate for someone else?" In reality, the importance is not in hunting to find the right Soul Mate or partner for you. The importance is in whether you yourself are willing to be the 'right' Soul Mate or partner for someone else! Life is a two way street, but, are you ready to be the right one for someone else?

In the end, we all can be the 'right' Soul Mate for anyone we choose in our life, but only when we are ready to treat our partner as a human being, as a soul and to cherish every moment spent with them. Also it is crucial that we learn to let go of the fact that we do have differences between us and any 'ego' that exists in any relationship. How ready are we? That's the bottom line! The search has to start from within ourselves first".

From my account of how Soul Mates exist in our lives, we can see that they are everywhere around us and we have been blessed since the day we were born! How much real attention do we pay to the people around us? I believe that most of the time we do take these people for granted! Why? One main reason is because we become too self-centered, leading to us disregarding those people around us who provide us with help, who listen to us and generally do sympathize with us in our time of need. After all, it is not only about providing someone with sympathy, but about acknowledging people for who they really are.

I would also like to mention here that any relationship that brings the union of 'Old Souls' is above all and the best time and example of soul mates being together, the reason being, for what they will bring to each other in terms of growth, understanding and appreciation. As a result of their union their wisdom, compassion, value of each other and evolution of consciousness will flourish in a way that would be almost impossible for them to achieve if they were united with another soul that is less highly evolved than what they are themselves. In such a case the older soul will always feel a huge gap or that there is something missing in the relationship in terms of their overall understanding and awareness of each other and it is only because the souls exist on two completely different levels of consciousness. I will not go into too much detail here on the subject of 'Old Souls' as I will have an article next month which focuses primarily on this topic.

At the end Soul Mate is about unconditional love. If you have that and you can provide that to anyone around and especially towards your partner, I believe you find your Soul Mate after all!

Wishing you all to be with your Soul Mates!

Love on the Other Side of the Fence

2009-04-05T23:06:00.000-07:00

We all have heard the old cliché, "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence." So how do we feel about love on the other side of the fence? Is love on the other side of the fence better? In some cases, it is, but in many cases, it is not.

I have encountered many people, over the years, who find themselves in a new relationship after searching in greener pastures. These same people, however, eventually miss their old partner whom they know, in their heart of hearts, was the one for them. I recently read a letter, penned to Ann Landers by "Heavy-Hearted In Philly," who said:

"I would like to share my story because I know a lot of people think of their lives the way I thought of mine. Sometimes you feel lonely and unloved in a marriage, even after 23 years. You feel as if there has got to be more to life, so you set out to find someone who can make you blissfully happy. You believe that you have found that someone and decide he is exactly what you want. So you pack up and say goodbye to that 23-year marriage and all the friends you made when you were part of a couple. You give your children the option of coming with you or staying with their father. You live the glorious life for a few years and then a light bulb goes on in your head. You realize that you have exactly the life that you had before -- the only difference is that you've lost your friends, your children's respect and the best friend you loved and shared everything with for 23 years. And you miss him. You realize that love does not just happen; it must be nurtured through the years. You cannot undo what has been done, so you settle for a lonely and loveless life with emptiness in your heart. Ann, please print my letter so others will not give up something that is truly precious and let them know that they won't know how precious it is until they have thrown it away."

This woman from Philly, after 23 years of marriage, set out to find someone new to make her "blissfully happy." In my opinion, this is a very unrealistic expectation. We cannot expect a relationship or another individual to make us "blissfully happy." We have to be happy within ourselves, first and foremost. Establishing a relationship with the right person should only enhance our happiness in life. Philly says something very significant that I am sure she wished she had realized at the early stages of her marriage: "Love does not just happen; it must be nurtured through the years." If you are currently exploring the question, "Am I happy in my current relationship?" If you are currently single and asking yourself, "Am I ready for a relationship?" You need to understand what took this woman over 23 years to realize, so that you do not make the same mistake. We have to incorporate the art of loving into our daily lives, as individuals, and as part of a couple in a loving, committed relationship. We have to understand, as she found out much too late, that: "love does not just happen, it must be nurtured through the years." With this understanding, and while practicing the art of loving, you will be able honestly to answer some very important questions to yourself: "Are you the one for me?" and "Are you not the one for me?"

True Love and Chemistry: Exploring Myth and Reality

2009-04-05T23:03:00.002-07:00

When you think about the qualities found in a true "soul mate" relationship, what one word comes up most often on the top of your list?

Is it CHEMISTRY? Probably.

Just the mention of this term conjures up powerful feelings and images for anyone who has ever been in or seeking a love relationship. It is often described as a feeling that leaves you breathless, excited and weak in the knees. Palms sweat, the heart races and the body tingles with nervous anticipation.

It is believed by virtually everyone that true love cannot exist without chemistry. Therefore, the conclusion most would-be lovers come to is that if they experience these intense feelings towards someone, they have the basis for an ideal and lasting relationship.

Right? Maybe not. For this definition of chemistry is limited to one's physical response to another person. It lacks an entire dimension that resides in our values, beliefs, personalities and worldview.

In order to know you have the right connection with a potential (or existing) partner, it's important to have a basic knowledge of what real chemistry consists of, instead of embracing only the myths that surround it. This can be difficult to do. This intense, physical passion is the stuff that Oscar winning movies and best-selling books are made of. So, take a step back for a minute and see if you recognize yourself in the following.

Sarah is a thirty something, very attractive and successful, professional female. She has been in a relationship for over a year with a man who is unfaithful, disrespectful and incapable (unwilling) to make any commitment to her. Yet, when he makes late night "booty calls", forgets her birthday, or stands her up repeatedly - she remains available and willing, in spite of her general unhappiness and upset over their "relationship". Why? "I think I have mistaken great sex for love. I feel this intense chemistry and physical intimacy when we are having sex, even though he offers me nothing else. Over time, it has left me unhappy and feeling badly about myself."

John is an attractive, intelligent, 30 something male who owns his own successful business. He's dating a woman that he thinks he is in love with. He has knowledge that she has been out with other men. She cancels dates and is often critical and emotionally distant. She refuses to discuss commitment or taking the relationship to the next level. Yet, she turns to John for emotional, physical and financial help whenever she feels she needs it. Why does John continue to see her? "She's beautiful and the sex is great". We have such strong physical chemistry. It's almost like an addiction for me. My friends can't stand her and even I know she's not really a "keeper", but it's hard to walk away.

These vignettes are great examples of how physical chemistry can be mistaken for the real thing. The attraction on one level is strong, yet these are not relationships that have the right elements to grow into happy and satisfying partnerships.

So, what is missing?

Kahlil Gibran defines it as "spiritual affinity". It's the hidden element of chemistry. It's when two beings meet and connect on a deeper level. It can only be felt in the heart and soul. It's about friendship, respect, humor and the feelings of warmth and contentment that come when you are in his/her presence.

People often report finding one without the other. This is understandably a cause of great frustration and confusion about whom should we choose and why. In order to understand this better, it is helpful to know how and when each facet of chemistry occurs.

Physical attraction (or lust) generally begins during our first contact with someone. It can DEVELOP into something more over time, yet some pull is there from the beginning. The chemical that results from this attraction (and intensifies it) is phenyl ethylamine - or PEA. It is a naturally occurring substance in the brain. Essentially, it is a natural amphetamine. It stimulates us and increases both physical and emotional energy. The attraction causes us to produce more PEA, which results in those dizzying feelings associated with romantic love. Another substance that is released by PEA is dopamine. This chemical increases a desire to be physically close and intimately connected.

When these chemicals are being secreted in larger doses, they send signals from the brain to the other organs of the body. If you wonder why you or someone is attracted to the "wrong" person, it may be because you are high on the physical response to these substances, which overwhelm your ability to use your head and exercise "good judgment and common sense".

"Spiritual affinity" develops over time and repeated contact. When these feelings begin to emerge, the brain produces endorphins. These are more like morphine and result in an increased sense of calm that reduces anxiety and helps to build attachment. As relationships move into this phase they are characterized by more comfort, commitment and friendship.

Generally speaking, all "soul mate relationships" require at least some measure of each of these. The important thing to remember is that they come in stages, which is not to say that the physical attraction passes as one moves into a deeper connection. However, it changes. We cannot sustain those intense emotions as we travel down the road to commitment and a shared life. However, in healthy relationships those moments of intensity can and do occur for brief intervals at intermittent times.

Remember not to confuse great sex or deep friendship with romantic love. Instead, look for a measure of both of these in your feelings for another. For then you have the ingredients that lasting love is made from.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Q. I am an attractive, professional and intelligent female. I see myself as someone who has good common sense and judgment. Yet, I have gotten myself into a relationship (of sorts) that is making me miserable. I have been seeing a guy for over a year. We have a fantastic sex life. We really connect and are in tune with each other this way. We also have fun together and seem to relate well on a number of levels. The problem? I have found out that he has been with two other women since we have been going out. I was under the impression that we are a couple and was shocked by this information, which came through a friend.

What do I do? I really like this guy and even have feelings of love. I know he cares about me, but has not wanted to discuss the issue, which has led us to an impasse. I don't understand why he feels the need to be with other women. I feel like a fool for not just dropping him and moving on. Any help with this would be appreciated.

A. His refusal to discuss it is a bad sign. I think you know this only too well. It appears that your impressions of how well you get along and relate to each other are accurate, at least on a certain level. You are very attracted to one another, etc. So, what's the problem? HIM.

There could be a number of possibilities that have to do with not only who he is, but also to his past experiences and views of commitment, etc. But the only issue that you need to focus on is his (apparent) inability to remain monogamous- at least with you. This is only a hunch, but there's a strong possibility here that he is one of those individuals who crave the feelings that come with the early and more physically exciting stage of attraction. This early time in a relationship brings that rush of adrenaline that causes the heart to race and produces a feeling of being "high".

Some people cheat on loving partners- whom they sometimes care deeply for- because of their addiction to those intense feelings. This is how some "good" marriages come apart or why some people report a lack of control over a behavior that they know is destructive to them and to those they love.

Regardless of why he does this- unless he sees this as a real problem that he wants to change- you have no control over his behavior. Therefore, you need to focus on your own physical and emotional well-being. Continuing an intimate relationship with him could be dangerous to your health and your self-esteem. I recommend that you take a break and give yourself some time. When you are ready to date someone new, you will know it. Until then, you can spend some time thinking about what you desire and need from a relationship and what you must have and won't tolerate from a future partner.

END NOTES

This issue was written to help you to have a clearer understanding of what REAL relationship chemistry is. When you have a good understanding of how you choose potential partners, it should help you to evaluate your choices better and make the right one for you. It is also helpful in understanding any problem you may be having in a present relationship.

What is your Love Personality?

2009-04-05T23:03:00.001-07:00

It is an obvious fact that we can learn and know what true love is. What we are often not aware of though, is that there are different love trends. Does it even matter if we understand love trends? If we are in a happy relationship, then that means it is all fine, right? Yes and No. Although, your love with your partner might run smoothly for a while, it can take a turn we often never expect. This is why knowing about love trends is helpful.

What may have turned you or your partner on at first, might not be a turn on later. How is this possible if they seemed so crazy over certain things before? The reason is quite simple and reasonable. When we first get involved with people, the attraction and lust is so strong (not that it would not be later), that the way one seduces the other is not truly focused on, but simply instantly appreciated, since they are so drawn to one another.

As the relationship proceeds and the bond builds, you will start getting in touch with your own style of loving and expecting your partner to match up to it. At times, this will be just the case. Couples can share the same love trend, but at other times, they can differ. If your trends do differ, do not look at it as negative, but as a way to combine them and form a creative love trend together. It should not be one way or the other. There is no such thing as the wrong way to love, except for obsession, controlling and abuse, of course-which is not love anyway, although some feel it is.

How do you even come about recognizing the love personality of yours or your partners? It is not difficult, but does require quite a bit amount of observation. Start by making notes of your romantic qualities and ideas of what great romance, sex and seduction is to you. Do you like walks on the beach and dining at cozy, romantic restaurants? Or do you like setting up your sexual activities by setting up a scene and playing along with it, or just going with the flow? By knowing what trend you follow, you will then be introduced to your romantic identity and know what you need from your partner.

There are several types of love trends that you should know about. It will help you come to a deeper understanding of what type of lover you are and your partner as well. People, whose personalities follow the emotional trend, are lovers who pay attention more to the meaning behind things, instead of the thing itself. A man who does not really care for picnics on the beach may still love the event due to the intention behind it. He sees the effort his mate put into it and sees the love and caring meaning that his mate had when the idea was thought of and planned. Emotional lovers are sensitive and love sharing with their partners and are also very spiritual. They do not hold back from expressing their true feelings.

A Creative trend follower on the other hand, may have some of the same traits as an emotional lover, but focuses more on discovering new things and trying them out, taking risks for a bigger thrill. They love to plan and be a part of interesting activities with their lovers because they like going through adventures and new territories together. These types of lovers are found to be quite exciting because they seem to be more mysterious and full of surprises and imagination.

Then you have the traditional trend follower, who likes to follow the rules of what society considers the right way to handle a relationship. They believe in having one partner, following the dating and romance guides to the point (bringing a girl some flowers when picking her up at the door for a date, just to mention one). They also believe in being organized, being financially responsible and planning the events that will take place in their lives with their partners.

Love At First Sight

2009-04-05T23:02:00.002-07:00

Love at First Sight. Perhaps, it is the most romantic thing that can happen to anyone. It makes people lose their heart and mind within a matter of several seconds. Love is a very strong emotion which, sometimes, is even impossible to control. Love at first sight can happen anywhere, anytime - in a subway, while walking on a street, or seeing a beautiful face from across the room ...

People who haven't experienced love at first sight themselves, probably don't believe that it can be real. There are many skeptics who say it is just passion or lust that attract people to each other, and refuse to believe that one can really fall in love with another person at the first moment their eyes meet.

And do you believe in love at first sight? Some scientists after studying human brain activity noted that it is quiet possible, but everyone is free to believe or not to believe. There are people who really experienced this wonderful moment. They say that as soon they have raised their head and met those eyes, they instantly knew that they were looking at the person of their dreams.

Psychologists say that love at first sight depends on our psychological state at the very moment. Sometimes we will not even notice those charming eyes, and other times they can deeply impress us. Also they say we need approximately 30 seconds to fall in love or, to be more precise, to establish whether the person is attractive, and a potential mate. By the way psychologists claim that men fall in love first.

"The study gets at the basic perceptual aspects in mating," said psychologist Jon Maner of Florida State University, who decided to find out how people react on strangers they have never met before. "It shows how quickly, strongly and automatically people are attuned to physical attractiveness whether looking for mates or guarding their mates from potential rivals," he added in an interview.

In the study university students were shown pictures of very attractive or average-looking people for just one minute, and after that they were asked to look at other things. The reaction time of the participants was measured, after what the psychologists were able to determine that half a minute was enough for students to decide if someone is attractive. The researchers also noticed that people fixated on attractive faces for half a minute longer after the one minute time limit.

"These are the kind of people we might prefer as romantic partners, but it doesn't mean we'd be able to have a relationship with them because highly-attractive people are very sought after," said Maner.

A lot of factors play role in the situation of falling in love from the first sight. When you fall in love at the first sight you are usually ready and willing to do so. There is less chance that it will occur when you are tired, depressed or your head is exploding with problems. The main part in falling in love is given to the physical appearance, voice, gestures and smell. One person intuitively searches in the other the qualities and the features he likes and enjoys the best. It is a known fact, that beautiful people attract attention the most, but sometimes it is wrong to fall in love with them right away, because those people are most probably spoiled by attention from others as well, and, therefore, might not even notice you, or simply leave without attention.

So how is it possible to understand if what happened to you is love at first sight?

1. First of all, try to understand what is the first thing that got into your mind when you saw a person. If the first thought is physical, then it probably is not love. But if you are excited and overwhelmed by a desire to get to know the person better and take things slowly so they work out for you, then it might be a good sign for a deeper relationship.

2. A person's attractive physical qualities are something that anyone can see and appreciate, but when you really fall in love with someone, it means that you will not appreciate and notice only his/her physical appearance, but also will notice other qualities that no one else can see. If you are able to notice such features, but your friends, for example, are not, then it is another good sign that you might be falling in love.

3. Falling in love with someone means wanting to know everything about that person, from their likes and dislikes to their life experiences. Just have patience to learn about them slowly, be understanding and supportive, and at the end, everything will work out for you in a best way.

Still, the cases when people really had fallen in love from the first sight and lived a long and happy life after are very rare. People may dream of a beautiful stranger that waits for them just around the corner, and sometimes it takes patience and time to find a real love. People must understand that this kind of things do happen, but not as often as they would like them to. And if out of nowhere you just suddenly start feeling the growing wings behind your back, still try to keep your feet on the ground because if it is really a deep and true feeling, nothing will ever happen to it, but if it is just your illusions that you accept and see as a reality, then disappointment from falling back on the ground can be very, very painful.

Romantic Love Can Last Forever

2009-04-05T23:02:00.001-07:00

Romance does not necessarily have to fade away in the long-term relationships and transform into a friendship-type love, according to a new study. Romantic love can last a lifetime and lead to even happier, stronger and healthier relationships.

The study's lead researcher, Bianca P. Acevedo, PhD, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that many people identify romantic love as passionate love, which, in her opinion, is not true. The scientist explained that romantic love has the same intensity, involvement and sexual chemistry, that has the passionate love, with the exception of an obsession. Obsessive love is always accompanied by feelings such as anxiety and uncertainty, and never survives for a long time.

To come up with this conclusion, Dr. Acevedo and co-author Arthur Aron, PhD, analyzed 25 studies with more than 6,000 individuals that were engaged in the short-term and long-term relationships. The researchers planned to figure out if romantic love was associated with more satisfaction in a relationship. In several studies, the relationships were classified as romantic, passionate/obsessive, or friendship-like love, and categorized as the short- or long-term.

The first study involved 17 short-term relationships of single, dating or married college students with the ages between 18 and 23, whose relationships lasted less than 4 years. The second study analyzed 10 long-term relationships of middle-aged couples, with the marriage experience of 10 years or more. And, finally, two other studies included both the long- and short-term relationships in which it was pretty much possible to distinguish the two samples.

The results revealed that those individuals who said that they had a great romantic love, were much more satisfied in both the short- and long-term relationships. Participants from both the short- and long-term relationships, who reported that their love was mostly based on friendship, only moderately associated their relationship with complete satisfaction, and those who reported passionate love in their relationships, were more likely to be satisfied for the short period of time, rather than the long term. Also, couples who expressed the most satisfaction with their partner, turned out to be much happier and had higher self-esteem.

According to Dr. Acevedo, when partners feel and know that they are there for each other, it always creates a strong bond between them, and leads to a good relationship, which, in turn, contributes to stronger feelings of romantic love. On the contrary, when people start feeling insecure and jealous, they start also experiencing less satisfaction, which in many cases leads to misunderstandings and conflicts in the relationships. All this can point to the signs of an obsessive love, she said.

This new findings may change people's perceptions and expectations of what they really want in long-term relationships. The scientists wrote that companionship, or friendship-type love, which is what people usually see and expect as the natural transformation of any happy relationship, may be an unnecessary compromise. Partners should fight for their love with all the possible means, Acevedo said. And couples who have been together for many years and wish to rekindle their romantic feelings, should remember that this is an attainable goal that, like most good things in life, requires patience, energy and devotion, she concluded.

The new findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Review of General Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

Virtual Dating And Love

2009-04-05T23:01:00.000-07:00

With the popularization of personal computers and Internet services all over the world, a growing number of people become more and more involved in on-line love affairs and even on-line marriages.

Many of you must have heard different kinds of stories about online dating, which also is known as cyber love, since the rising of the internet. All this became all of a sudden very popular and started affecting our culture, as well as has given millions of lonely people new opportunities to find their romance, and sometimes love, in ways never before possible.

Most of people today have an e-mail and an access to Internet, whether it is at home, or at work. Many spend a lot of time online for work, for fun, and also to connect with friends and family. But then, there is a group of people, for whom the web means the whole world. They can spend every minute of their lives glued to the PC.

First of all, it is very convenient to communicate with people without even leaving a room. You can get to know someone through e-mail, live chats, even have a virtual date if you have a webcam. If anything goes the way that does not suite you, all you have to do is simply disconnect an electronic connection. Looks like a very comfortable and easy thing. But there are few nuances that you might want to take into consideration if you are about to start your virtual relationship.

There is nothing bad actually about the virtual communication and relationship, but it will not hurt to remember that internet is full of irresponsible addicted people who always take an advantage from its flexibility. The process of an online relationship, however, is very different from real time dating process. The online environment is, by its very nature, very restrictive.

On the Internet, communication and interaction are limited to typed words. Voice, emotions, intonation, physical appearance, gestures and expression are all imagined to help build some image and understanding of another person. And very often, the image of the perfect mate is projected, and afterwards, transferred. What is expected to be the perfect soul mate in reality just turns into fantasy.

However, there is a thing that must be said in favor of the internet. It gives people the good opportunity to meet and keep in touch with other people who they might have never met in a real life. With so many people using the Internet, there is always a chance that you could find your mate, just use your common sense, be patient and willing to bring a friendly online relationship into the real world. Afterwards, whatever happens whether in real life or cyber space will all be in your own hands.

Some say that it is against the nature of love to be deprived of the sense of sight, the look, the movement, the body language being present. But those who prefer internet relationships claim that the virtual relationship is based mostly on intense emotions, which appears to be significantly above the simple contemplation of the flesh.

Do not forget that internet dating is often used as an escape from a real world into fantasy. Online, we can be anyone we want to be, or pretend to be, even if we do it just for a few hours. This escape from reality, however, makes online dating more complicated. Because not only you, but someone else as well, might be using the same tactics and playing with you. Not everyone is decent and honest. Internet relationships should be considered as incomplete relationships. A person who looks for a potential soul mate online must want and be prepared to meet offline, too.

Virtual lovers, especially men, often prefer to move very quickly from online courtship to intimate subjects, therefore omitting all the important dating stages. In cyber romances everything is accepted much easier and usually people don't realize the other person's little endearing or annoying personal features. This, in its turn, very often can lead to a serious emotional attachment to a person one would not even stand to be close in real life.

Who is in reality there, on the other side of your personal computer, you will find out, only if you two decide to meet in a real life. Many people do not even want it because very often real meetings of virtual lovers end up with mutual disappointment. For example, he can be actually fifty instead of twenty. Or can even appear of same sex with you. Or the picture you have been sent was not his. That is why people in many cases prefer to live with their idealistic fantasy, rather than encounter the obvious disillusion.

In fact, there are many happy endings from online romances. There are many couples that met over the Internet and are happily married. For those who are left disappointed, whether in real or virtual life, there is a real pain and hurt that always accompanies love and feelings. No matter what kind of relationship you decide to chose for yourself, just know, that it requires common sense, patience, dedication, honesty and reality.

Passion For Opera Compared To Love At First Sight

2009-04-05T22:59:00.000-07:00

According to Claudio Benzecry, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, USA, the passion for opera is like love at first sight for its fans.

Throughout the three seasons, between the years of 2002 and 2005, Professor Benzecry observed and interviewed many opera devotees who have been attending the Colón Opera House in Buenos Aires on the upper, cheaper floors, and concentrated particularly on those in the standing room. The scientist mainly focused his attention on the fans coming from the various middle class backgrounds, who had not been raised to enjoy opera. Benzecry studied and analyzed the way the new fans were starting to learn, feel, believe and behave in opera, as well as tried to find out which were the favorite parts that people described, and how they invested themselves once the first impressions started to fade away.

The majority of people who have been interviewed, described the intense attraction they felt the first time at the opera house as something extraordinary and explosive, which had intense and continuous physical effects, that could be compared to love at first sight. After that began the learning process, when the fans needed at least several years to discover how to truly appreciate opera.

According to Professor Benzecry, there were three ways in which opera devotees learned about the art. In all three cases, contact with other fans who had already been enjoying the experience was the cornerstone. Most of the passionate opera lovers learn to enjoy opera internally in the first place, when they are responding to parts of the music with emotional reaction,s and afterwards externally, when they start reacting publicly in the appropriate way.

To begin with, individuals start to learn about opera not in a formal way, when they arrive to the opera house and take part in non-musical moments of the performance, such as talking to others, standing in lines for tickets and door lines, as well as socializing during intermissions and bus trips to other opera houses. Before a performance starts and during the intervals, opera fans gather in order to talk, share and compare their impressions and experiences of opera.

Secondly, fans get to learn about opera more formally from the music professionals, when they start attending classes, lectures and conferences where they obtain useful information and knowledge about what they should be looking for or expecting in opera, what features of the experience they favor, and how they should act during a performance. And finally, fans learn about appropriate behavior at the opera house from elder passionate fans with greater experience, who pass on opera etiquette, such as advising when it is appropriate to boo, sit quietly in silence or clap.

The new research shows that passionate opera devotees enjoy opera not because they just liked it somehow from the first time and were moved by it, as might be expected, but rather because they believe that opera is the art that needs to be learned first in order to be appreciated in a proper way.

Professor Benzecry concluded that "fans get hooked when they are still outsiders, before having an active apparatus to interpret the experience, or are thoroughly socialized in what constitutes the enjoyment and how they should decode it.... Learning through interaction happens not at the beginning, as expected, but as the logical continuation that helps to shape the initial attraction."

The new findings are published online in Springer's journal Qualitative Sociology.

How to Tell if a Guy Likes you - Five Ways to Tell If He Is Interested?

2009-02-27T04:46:00.001-08:00

I wanted to write a different post this time, on relationships and a bit on how to understand how men think when it comes to women…

I know relationships are not very related to Affiliate Marketing or making money online but we all need to have a break after all our money making and this post could help some girls understand men better.

I thought considering I am a man it will be a good extra perspective for some girls.

So why are guys so hard to read? Also how can you tell if a guy likes you? Or were you just imagining it?

Was he watching you as you mingled? You may have noticed him when you were standing and talking with some other people. Or were you just imagining it? When you looked back up, he was talking with some other people. Your eyes met for just a few seconds, and then you looked away. He looked at you at about the same time you saw him. You think maybe he noticed you, or maybe it was just your imagination or just wishful thinking.

5 Signs on How To tell if a Guy Likes You..

“Whatever the situation here are five ways or signs to help tell if he is interested in you.. These are indications and should be used as probable guide, not as the whole 100% truth..”

step 1. He Tells some of his Friends about you… (How to Tell if a Guy Likes you?)

Hearing about compliments or discussions started about you from his friends is a good sign he likes you. Anything positive said about you while he is away is a way of him hoping this information will eventually get to you. If you hear about these compliments from other friends while he is not around many times it is a sure sign…

step 2. The look he gives you may be different… (How to Tell if a Guy Likes you?)

He gives you a look that is almost like saying more than hello. It is almost like the smile is a inner knowing or looks like it makes his day seeing you. You may know notice a lingering smile even after he looks away from you.. This is another important sign of he is interested.. Even if he is all the way across the room, “that look” can say it all… If you notice this many times this is almost a guarantee..

step 3. The conversations or chats he has with you… (How to tell if a Guy Likes You?)

The conversations or chats are an important aspect to tell if he likes you… If he gives you multiple compliments about aspects about you this is a way of him showing a sure sign. Also he may play with his hair or show some other nervousness that shows you another sign. You may even notice him looking for a wedding ring on your finger. Ultimately he may ask if you if you have a boyfriend which is definite indication of him liking you..

Look at aspects of what he is talking about, if he asks you lots of questions about you that means he is really interested in you…

step 4. You keep noticing him around… (How to tell if a Guy Likes You?)

You may notice him many times in a day or several times a week… Whatever the reason this is a big sign. He is probably shy is some way and is hoping by making many unexpected meetings you will eventually work it out or ask him out your self. Or maybe he is hoping that eventually he will have the courage himself to do it… Whatever it is, if this keeps happening with multiple excuses as to why it shows interest…

“It is like it makes his day complete to see you smile which is true, if he likes you…”

step 5. Understanding all the Steps… (How to tell if a Guy Likes You?)

Look at all the 4 steps above on How to tell if a guy likes you?… Any combinations of them are all good indications.. There are many other signs such as him wanting to spend money on you or buy you a drink. The reason i did not add this money value as a definite indication is because it could be just a friendly gesture.. If however it is in combination with one of the signs above it is a definite indication of liking..

All the signs above on How to tell if a guy likes you? are written from an Online Internet Marketers perspective, maybe not all guys are like me but i am sure a lot are… I hope this helps more girls out there understand a bit more from a guys perspective…

How to Tell if a Girl Likes You? Five Ways to Tell?

2009-02-27T04:40:00.000-08:00

I would go into 5 ways to tell if a Girl likes you? for the guys..

With this post I did plenty of research so If you happen to disagree with one of my signs of a Girl liking a Guy, please comment below your thoughts.

1 ) How to Tell if a Girl Likes You - Smiles - Smiles are a good sign to know if a girl likes you, mainly because girls control smiling often with most guys, to not give them the wrong idea. If a girl smiles at you often this is a massive sign..

2 ) How to Tell if a Girl Likes You - Inclusion - The girl or women includes you in her conversations often, indicating the probability she wants you in her life more. In conversations with her friends you may over hear your name mentioned heaps this is another good sign..

3 ) How to Tell if a Girl Likes You - Fidgeting - When alone with her on occasions she seems quite fidgety or nervous like she wants to ask you something. Sometimes this can mean the opposite, however if you notice body language and that she is trying to start conversation with you it is a good sign.

4 ) How to Tell if a Girl Likes You - Noticing Her Around - If you keep noticing her around and you can feel her watching you this is a massive sign. It sounds like she is wanting you to be around her often, hoping for you to notice or is hoping she will get the guts to talk to you about her feelings. She probably is partly worried you feel different about her as well..

5 ) How to Tell if a Girl Likes You - Flirting - She keeps flirting with you and showing affection often, this is another way to tell. Especially if she is not like this with other guys I think you can safely say this is the biggest sign out of the lot.

Overall telling if a girl likes you can be hard yet if you look at some of the ways above you will notice some by themselves may be nothing yet with a couple combined are massive signs. Generally overall from experience, Girls love confidence so approaching a girl about your feelings can never hurt. If you miss read her feelings it is okay, she will forgive you for miss reading, I am sure.. Good luck!

How Do I Get My Ex-Boyfriend to Love Me Again

2009-02-25T21:27:00.003-08:00

If you are asking yourself, "How do I get my ex-boyfriend to love me again," you need to start by looking deeply into yourself and your own behaviors and actions. If you have been acting inappropriately, do yourself a favor and stop right away. After all, whatever you have been doing has not been working well. For example, if you tend to follow him around or show up everywhere you think he will be, he will perceive you as being creepy or like a stalker. These are not attractive qualities, I assure you! In the end, what you have been doing to get him back is probably what is driving him further away from you.

The next time bump into your ex-boyfriend accidentally at a restaurant, store, or other public place, it is important of course to at least acknowledge him. But, do not go up and demand his attention or get in his space. Rather, just approach him and say hi, then go back to whatever it was you were doing previously. Or, let him know that, out of respect for him and to make things less awkward, you are going to walk away from the situation and leave that place. Just be nice and polite about it, but leave. At the very least, your doing this will force him to see you in a new, more independent light.

It is important during this awkward, in-between time in your relationship that you avoid acting in any expected, predictable ways. Whatever inappropriate behaviors you may have been exhibiting since the breakup, stop them right away. If you have been calling him constantly, for example, just stop. If you have been dropping by to see him, do not do this anymore.

If you do call him once in a while, be calm and very polite. Assure him that you called because you care about him as a person and you want to make sure he is doing well. Then, just say goodbye and hang up. If you want him to love you again, you need to get him interested. Create a sense of mystery about your real intentions. At the end of a conversation, for example, you want him to wonder about what is really going on in your head and heart.

At some point in this process, it will be important to give your ex-boyfriend the chance to make a move and ask you out again. When he does, seize the opportunity and be ready to act. Take it slowly, but take positive steps toward being in love with him again.

On Long-distance Relationships: How To Make Them Work.

2009-02-25T21:27:00.001-08:00

The answer is...it depends on how much you want it to work. True love can overcome any odds thrown in its path if you want it bad enough. So the question is, how do you do it? Well, I do not think that anyone knows exactly how to make it work, but I can certainly provide some points on making it work.

1. COMMUNICATION is the key.

In every relationship, whether near or far, if communication is taken for granted, it can cause the relationship to quiver until it eventually dies a natural death. That's why in any given circumstance, communication has to be given utmost importance. There are so many available media to ensure that the communication stays open. From snail mails and phone calls to chat systems and e-mails or e-cards. These media can be effective means to convey your hearts desires to your loved ones. Let them know about what you've been doing and thinking because in that way they will feel like they are there with you. This will also help you feel close even though you are miles apart.

2. Send off CARE PACKAGES.

It can be anything -- a little gift of flowers; a collection of the letters he has sent you designed artistically into a scrapbook; or your sweetheart's favorite jewelry -- it's really only limited to your imagination. Engaging yourself in this way is beneficial for both of you. You get to concentrate on gathering these items and putting them together, thus keeping your mind off not being together to a certain extent. Your loved one will see how much effort you put into it and how much you care. Even if it is nothing more than a card,it shows they mean enough to you that you can take the time to let them know. It never takes much money to show a little love with a small gift. Trust me, it can melt a heart!

3. Keep yourself BUSY.

You couldn't just sit there and wait 'til he comes back to you. What if he doesn't come back at all and all you did was sit and get your tummy flabby, won't that make you just miserable? You won't just be stunting your growth as an individual in the process but you'd also be developing emotional insecurities. In order to avoid that, you have to focus yourself on other things while waiting. Try to identify your passions. Get in touch with your creative nature. If you are a homebody, you can read tons of books which can help you grow intellectually and emotionally or you can choose to lounge before your computer and surf for hours to learn invaluable things over the internet. It's an endless "ways-to-make-yourself-busy" list and it is up to you to decide whichever you're interested to get involved in. But remember, being "busy" is not an excuse to forget your "special days" and worse yet, your loved one. You're doing it not just to occupy yourself but also to allow yourself to grow even with your lover's absence.

4. HONESTY is the best policy.

The path to true intimacy and connection especially in a long distance relationship is through "total honesty" to each other in the fullest sense of the words. By being authentic and telling your full truth to your loved one about your thoughts, feelings, needs, wants, issues, boundaries, etc., you are gradually building up a zone of confidence and comfort for both of you. This is very essential if you want your relationship to really last. Seeking to avoid conflict and maintain harmony by censoring yourself can work for a while but it won't take much time until your suppressed truth comes out in other ways, such as withdrawal, resentment, "acting out," etc. I know, sometimes, telling your whole truth can be difficult and even scary, but it will result in the kind of relationship that you really want-- a relationship where all the cards are laid in the table.

5. The value of TRUST

Trust is a very fundamental aspect in any relationship. That is because having trust in a relationship takes away doubt. When you trust someone you never have to question their motivation about anything and with mutual trust that relationship is solid. You must learn to be true to the relationship and must never give way to insecurities, strange feelings, suspicions and quick impulses because these will only bring your relationship down. Don't push away negative comments, or advice. Just trust in yourself and your partner. If you two are true to each other and have no hidden motives then you'll be alright. Remember "Love never fails."

6. COMMITMENT is a habit not an achievement

In every relationship, it is a must to be able to learn how to commit and be committed. For most long distance relationships, the very reason why they fail is because both parties couldn't go on with the commitment and they feel too weak to withstand the tribulations of time.If you have committed yourselves to each other without shilly-shallying, then you have a good promise ahead of you.Your comitment to each other will keep the passion alive and the fires burning thus sustaining the growth of the relationship.

7. PATIENCE is a virtue.

Being in a long distance relationship requires being steadfast and persevering. If you aren't this kind of person and you're involved in a long distance relationship, then as much as now, you better try to learn to be patient. Focus your attention on all the positive aspects of the relationship and never give your hopes up. Showing that you value your partner and the relationship and that you are willing to work patiently through it will let them know you truly love them.

8. WEBCAM

This is applicable only for those who have the comfort of having their own personal computers at home.But for those who don't, there are computers-for-rent in cafe's with webcams already attached to the computer system. Having a webcam is actually very fun and exciting. Even if you aren't together but looking at each other's face in the broad screen makes you feel like you're just so close, so near to your loved one. My boyfriend and I use Yahoo messenger to express our emotions with smileys and it's melting my heart to see him smile in the cam when he gets my messages.

9. Make special occasions SPECIAL.

It is not everyday that a special day comes so when it does, it must be celebrated no matter how far apart you are. When I speak of special occasions, I mean birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, New Year and Valentine's Day. During these occasions, you can plan out some heavy-duty phone call or an extended online time for the evening. Regardless of whether you talk every night or a couple times a week, be sure you both carve out some time for that particular night. If you're too stingy to settle on a lengthy phone call, but have cheap and unlimited online access, plan to send instant messages to each other or meet in a private chatroom somewhere. If you can't be together, at least you can be "talking" and "spending some private moments together".

10. ENJOY LIFE!

Not because your loved one is away, it doesn't mean that your "life" is taken away with him as he sets on for greener pastures. You have your own life to live and you must live it up to the purpose you were created for, with or without your loved one.Anyway, we have our family and friends. What are these social beings surrounding us created for anyway?

Remember,there are definite hardships associated with this relationship style but it is important that those who thrive in a long distance relationship see the suffering, difficulties, distance and time as tools in cultivating their love and rearing up the maturity in their relationship. The best you can do is to strive to be the best of who you are as a person while your partner is away so that when he comes back to you, you are already a full-grown individual whom he will love even more and be more proud of more than ever! For now, just be happy in knowing that across the miles there is someone who thinks you are so special, they are willing to engage in a terrible thing such as a long distance relationship. Keep in mind that your suffering is not forever since your loved one will be back soon and when that time comes, everything will be much sweeter than it was back then.

How To Overcome Jealousy In Romantic Relationships

2009-02-25T21:26:00.003-08:00

To overcome jealousy in romantic relationships in romantic relationships, learn how to handle competition. Attractive people are approached for dating all the time. Accept what you cannot change and walk around it. To remain top on the list you must be able to beat others who might be in competition for her/his love. Jealousy will only eat you up and leave you feeling bad, sad and unloved. Do not walk in the shadow of ignorance. If you do not reveal your jealousy, you will learn so much about your lover. He/she will voluntarily tell you about who is chasing after him or her but just with a light touch. Your reaction might determine what should be communicated to you in the future. If you are abreast with his/her admirers you are way step ahead because you have a chance to beat them before they start their game. To overcome jealousy in romantic relationships encourage openness in a relationship.

To overcome jealousy in romantic relationships, talk about it. When your lover knows that it is makes you uneasy when you are in a company of some people, he/she is a position to do a lot to save you the agony. She might start flirting with you when the company is around and may be the public show of affection will reduce your insecurity thus help you overcome jealousy in romantic relationships. She is best placed to assure you her love and take it a step further by announcing it to the whole world. Do not die with your feelings. Confess what your love for her is driving at. Chances are it will do you more good than harm. Off course when you declare your emotions it will be a sure sign of love and affection towards her.

Why i encourage communication is because some things we do as human beings are intentional. Your lover might be subjecting you to so much heartache in a mission to prove a thing. These are games lovers play. Some believe that a jealous lover is a true lover. Due to the rising levels of betrayal and malice in the dating scene, people are keen to look for real love. She might be raining praises about another gentleman just to watch your reaction. If you respond positively, the subjection stops and life continues. If you consider it a weakness and persevere you are subjected to more. Do not overcome jealousy in romantic relationships on your own. Involve your lover and you might even discover it was not your weakness after all.

Why I Think It Is Wise To Make A Confession In Relationships

2009-02-25T21:26:00.001-08:00

Revealing your past is important to your partner if you are hoping to go far. He/she would rather hear it from you rather than hear it from a third party. The revelation that you are hiding something from your lover paralyzes all the feelings and break any existing bond. The consequences are so severe that i would rather you tell him early enough. A great hindrance to confession in relationships is that many people put a front when they start dating. They walk in other people's shoes and hide their true identity. Before they even know it the relationship is established and it is then that it becomes so hard to confess their real self to their lovers in fear of being rejected.

For instance many women do not go around telling every interested lover that they have a kid. In their assumptions, such a revelation would spoil the fun of the moment. This is most common with campus girls. They fear to be stereo typed by these gentlemen because they are mothers. This is a big mistake. What will happen to your solid relationship when you are out of campus? Should you terminate your relationship to save your face? How will your lover feel once the truth is out in the open? You would have owned up to your baby from the word go. Such a confession in relationships should be done prior to any plans of your life together.

If you are a married man you will agree with me that it is very hard to move on with your marriage relationship after an affair. It actually requires a lot of grace from God. You have strayed enough and now you are back home with the revelation that your partner is the best lover you could ever get. It becomes harder especially if you were rude and harsh to her just because you were outsourcing some love. Will you move on like nothing happened? Such confession in relationships help married couples to collect the pieces and move on. It would be good if you apologize and explain the facts which pushed you away. This will prevent another similar instance. Explain why you are back to stay and forge a way forward. If you do not confess your sins, the guilt won't let you relate well with your partner. The declaration that your significant other has forgiven you makes it easy to move on and restrict you to a morally straightened relationship.

The Real Cost Of Divorce

2009-02-25T21:24:00.000-08:00

Divorce extracts a heavy emotional cost from the partners. When you get married, you have many dreams and aspirations that you want fulfilled in the next few years. You invest a lot of time, money, effort and emotions into making your marriage successful and create a cosy family home of your own. Divorce is the death-knell of everything that you wanted to achieve from your marriage.

This is why it creates immense emotional turmoil, with the partners blaming themselves or the other for the debacle. Marital separation creates negative feelings such as anger, grief, revenge, hurt and guilt. Many people are unable to come out of the emotional black hole and their life takes a turn for the worse. Quite a few shy away from marriage for ever, instead preferring only live-in relationships.

Litigation Expenses

Marriage is a legally enforceable contract that gives certain rights to the partners and imposes many obligations. There is a proper legal procedure to dissolve it. To separate, the partners first have to settle crucial issues such as division of assets and liabilities, with whom will the kids stay after divorce and how much maintenance will be paid to the wife.

These are all very weighty issues for the partners. The family assets are bought with one’s hard-earned money and the partners are loathe to give them away to the other. The issue of child custody raises the temperature even more as partners are greatly attached to their kids and fight tooth and nail for the right to live with them. These disputes necessitate the hiring of a solicitor by both the partners. Legal fees can burn a big hole in the pocket of the contesting spouses.

Division of Assets and Finances

When people get married, their incomes merge. They bring assets into the marriage and also buy new ones, such as house, car and white goods. As long as the partners remain married, nobody is bothered about who is spending what from whose money. However, once divorce papers are filed, all the family assets have to be divided among the partners.

The wives usually gain in this while the husband feels unfair treatment has been meted out to him because he was earning all through. The wife though argues that by being a full-time home-maker, she sacrificed her career and should be compensated accordingly. The division of assets and income leaves both the partners disadvantaged.

Effect on Children

The children are considered by psychologists as the real victims of divorce due to the emotional suffering and trauma that is inflicted on their minds. They undergo stress and anxiety as they watch their family home disintegrate before their eyes. They also develop a guilt complex and think that their parents are leaving them because they couldn’t rise up to their expectations.

Such children of divorce begin to under-perform in school and develop a lack of confidence. Their personality suffers. They often lose trust in human relationships and when they grow up, they themselves are unable to enter into stable relationship with others. That is why it is often said that divorce runs in the family and people who saw their parents divorce are more likely to file for marital separation themselves.

Changes in Lifestyle

Divorce triggers many abrupt changes in lifestyle and social situation of the partners. The divorced individual regains his or her personal freedom. You can enter into new relationships, spend your money any way you want, come home any time, travel anywhere, move to any part of the country and generally live a free-wheeling existence, not accountable to anybody. Divorce can give a real sense of empowerment or it can create massive insecurity and depression, depending on the temperament of the individual.

Relationships with Other People

Divorce changes your relationship with not only your spouse but also with his or her relatives. Your in-laws with whom you got along so well during marriage now become almost strangers and you feel uncomfortable interacting with them. Your ex-partner’s friends too do not show as much warmth as they used to show earlier. Worse, the children do not get to see their grandparents anymore. Consequently, your social circle shrinks to your own immediate friends and relatives.

Have Fun With the Love Calculator

2009-02-16T19:53:00.001-08:00

Have you ever heard of the love calculator? Well I had never heard of the love calcualtor until my daughter told me about it. It is an online tool that was invented to let you know if you and your partner are compatible.

You just find one of the sites on the internet that offers the love calculator and enter in both of your names. The rest is done by the love calculator.

I thought I would try out the love calculator for myself. I just went to google and typed in love calculator. Lots of love calculator links came up.

You will get back a love report after the love calculator compares your names. Some love calculator sites will have you enter in both of your birthdays.The love calculator is a fun tool that they can use out of curiosity to see if their new friend is a love match.

The love calculator is even popping up on myspace all the time now. Dating and meeting people has really changed drastically since the invention of the internet.

Who would have thought even 15 years ago, how popular the internet would be? Now, not only is meeting people online popular, but so is using the love calculator.

The love calculator is actually only intended for entertainment purposes though. To find out true love matches, the love calculator has a secret formula. A lot of people really believe the love calculator is a true predictor of their relationships.

The love calculator is so popular that people all around the world use it every day. In fact, just today around 8,000 people will use it. The love calculator can be found on several different sites. Have some fun the next time you think you have found a love match and check it with the love calculator.

You can find some love quizzes online too. These quizzes are fun too. You and your partner can learn more about each other by taking the quizzes.

People of all ages are using these online games and love calculators as a way to get to know one onother. With the way people are working so much these days, online dating has become acceptable. Why not get free and fun, online love advice too?

I know I had fun using the love calculator. So will you. Now that I know what it is I will tell my friends about it so they can have fun with it too.

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Do You Need to Use a Love Calculator?

2009-02-16T19:52:00.001-08:00

A love calculator calculates the compatibility between you and a partner. Some love calculators use names while others use dates of birth to measure compatibilty between two people. Most astrology sites have love calculators that can be used for free but others charge a membership fee.

Percentages of compatibility are given by a love calculator. While some love calculators give you only a percentage, others will give you tips on how to improve compatibility.

There are two methods used for love calculators. The first method will ask you to type in both names. The love calculator is based on the assumption that a name can tell a lot about a person. The second method uses dates of birth. An old Hebrew tradition the asserts numbers are associated with letters of the alphabet is the basis for this method.

A love calculator can offer compatibility percentages, tell you if you are a perfect match, and indicate how well you communicate with each other. There are some who view the love calculator as a prank or a game. There are others, however, who won't make a move without consulting a love calculator.

This writer visited three different love calculators to determine reliability. Results varied from as low as 10% compatibility to as high as 80% compatibility for this writer and her husband.

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Why the Love Calculator is something you should try with your relationship

2009-02-16T19:51:00.000-08:00

"Is he the right one for me?" that is the most important question in any romantic relationship. You will both be assured of having a happy life together if you can answer this correctly. If not however, you will definitely end your relationship but not before you end up miserable together. And generally, those who are in love or people in a relationship make ill advised and hasty decision regarding their relationship. As a result, regret their decision later once they get married or get seriously involved.

This happens in real life but it is even more common in relationships built over the internet or through matchmakers. That they have found the right one online is something that we hear often nowadays. However, we also hear complaints of incompatibility resulting to matches that eventually did not work. In extreme cases there are even those who pretended to be someone else. This is why it is important for you to try the love calculator.

Before you waste another minute with someone you should try to see if he is what he seems and if you are compatible. This is applicable not just on online relationships but even in couples who are already dating. Before you truly commit yourself why not ask the basic questions. See if he truly loves you. See if he is really the right one for you.

You may not believe in the love calculator at first but once you have tried it, you will see that there is some basis in it. You may be wondering how it works. Well, you know that seers have been fortelling the future of the person since the time of the oracle in Delphi using the name and birth of the person. This is the same way that the love calculator works. The love calculator will calculate the rate of success of your relationship with the use of your name and the name of your partner. Some love calculator use even uses astrology that is why they ask for your birth dates. But the love calculator works even without the dates because it uses the predicting powers of the Zodiac, Astrology and even Chinese symbology.

So before you enter seriously into a relationship or commit into something more serious, why not try the Love Calculator first and see if you are making the right decision. It would be better to know if you are compatible and have a chance of having a lasting relationship before you commit yourself into something that is serious or permanent.

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How Free Ecards Can Give You Benefits?

2009-02-16T19:50:00.002-08:00

There are various ways through which, you can greet your friends and relatives on special occasions, but greeting cards are widely used by the people for greeting others. The only change in trend is that 70% of the people send online electronic cards, instead of sending traditional cards. This perspective of the people has increased the growth of online card greeting companies, and it has decreased the sales of traditional greeting cards. Increasing online free ecards are also posing a threat on the retailers of paper cards. The notable features, which ecards provide include no cost, variety, quick services, convenience in sending and customized messages.

There are various benefits which you can get from ecards. For example, these cards are free while good traditional cards are available at higher prices. In this way, ecards can save your money and search cost. With the change in technology, the consumer shopping patterns have also changed and businesses have to adjust with the needs of the customers, in order to survive in this market. The changing market from traditional cards to electronic cards also highlights the changing behavioral patterns of consumers.

It is very interesting to note, that even the retailing card companies are shifting their business from brick and mortar to online brick companies. For example, American Greetings Company was considered as the second largest company after Hallmark but because of the reduced sales of the company, it decided to start an online website. You do not have to pay a single penny for sending ecards to even hundreds of your friends. You can find a huge collection of ecards from several websites.

When you send ecards to your relatives and friends, you show an emotional feeling of yours towards the other person. People, who cannot give each friend a separate gift on a special occasion, can at least greet them through these ecards. Most of the people are always unable to express their feelings in a greeting card; therefore, the readymade poetic statements can also express the feelings of the senders. Another benefit of sending ecards is, that they can be saved in your email boxes or in the computer memory.

Ecards have changed the concept of giving greeting cards on occasions and nowadays, greetings cards have become more than what there were. You can send people all categories of cards, and you will get them from a number of websites. Ecards can express your feelings for your friends and relatives, and the best thing about these cards is that they are cheap.

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Couples making love positions

2009-02-16T19:50:00.001-08:00

Seems like people needing information about couples making love positions are much happier to search this info on the web in the privacy of their own homes. This is understandable. This is a difficult topic to talk about. Perhaps you are having problems in your sex life. Perhaps you are needing coaching. But it can be difficult to ask for help on such a sensitive topic. Well, we will try to give you some tasteful and respectful advice here that will help you out.

First off, it is completely natural and healthy to have a regular, positive sex life with your significant other. In a long-term committed relationship, regular love making is a critical part of intimacy. And to keep things exciting and new over the years, couples make seek to find new and interesting love making positions. This is also very normal and healthy. The only issue is making sure that both parties are into it and support it. If they do, go for it.

Unfortunately, our research on this topic is not yet complete. We've been searching around for positions to tell you about, but we've found a ton of smut and other stuff that just isn't appropriate. So we are going to post this now, incomplete, and come back as we find more stuff for you.

Love match based on birthday

2009-02-16T19:49:00.003-08:00

Are you trying to find your love match based on birthday? Well, I have news for you. This doesn't work. I know that many many people think that this type of "science" will help them determine if their loved one is a good match. But it just doesn't.

I know, this is not the answer you wanted. But it's the case nonetheless. Your ability to have a long-term, intimate relationship with someone that leads to years of fulfillment has nothing to do with your birthday. That's right. It has absolutely nothing to do with your birthday.

So what will make your love the "one". Well. It depends on many things. There are many things you can consider if you are trying to determine your computability. First off, how strong are your feelings for each other? If they are strong, this is a great start. How compatible are your views on life? Religion. Politics. Raising children. These are big issues in life and if you are well aligned, there is a strong chance you will stay together.

Are you attracted to each other physically? I know this gets more attention than it deserves, but it is an important factor. Not THE most important factor, mind you. And certainly not as important as all the media wants you to believe. But it is important nonetheless.

Do you and your significant other have money issues? This has been found to be the number one source of conflict for couples by many studies. So perhaps, instead of looking at your birthdays, you should be considering a second job or saving more money to help your relationship last. Yes - That's right. This does not mean you need lots of money, no. You need to be similar in your approaches to money to avoid long-term conflict and fighting.

100 questions before marriage

2009-02-16T19:49:00.001-08:00

Before getting married, it is important to know the questions you should be asking. Many people are looking for the ultimate list of 100 questions before marriage. They want to do their research and determine if they are a good fit. Good thinking. Now is the time to check this out. This is a big decision, so I think you are on the right path.

So where is the list of 100 questions before marriage? Well, it's not totally that easy. You also need to know how to ask them and evaluate the answers. Yes, it's not that cut and dry folks. You need to think this through and there will be answers that you don't totally like. There will be some marriage questions that you don't understand the answers to. But, it's still better than not asking them at all.

Love Calculator Is A Tool Of Fun

2009-02-16T19:48:00.001-08:00

Do you know what a love calculator is? It is an online tool, which is used to determine the level of your love with some other person like your friend, relative, spouse or partner. It is an online and totally free tool. Most of the people love to use it also because it is very user friendly and just in a couple of seconds you can get the result out of it. It becomes a sort of fun when you use a love calculator. For using a love calculator you just have to enter your name and the name of the second person and then press "calculate" to determine a quantitative measure of your love.

You must be amazed to know about a love calculator. Over the period of time love calculators have become so attractive for the people that various types of love calculators have been introduced. When you will type love calculator on any search engine you will find dozens of websites offering love calculators. You can check your love computability with someone by putting names, date of birth and stars. In this way a love calculator can help you calculate your love with any of your friend.

Some people are very crazy about love calculators and they even consider the results of love calculator as real results. For example, individuals who frequently use dating websites usually go on links of love calculators to check their compatibility with people on the dating sites and then they decide to make a date. Love calculator is the interesting tool but the results of love calculator can never show the actual love of a person. It is wrong that people calculate their love for others through a love calculator and then determine the nature of their relationships.

There are thousands of people around the world which use love calculator at a specific instant. It has estimated that at a specific moment almost 8000 individuals use a love calculator. Sometimes love calculators appear on the screen as a pop up ad and you just click and get a few minutes entertainment. If you have arranged a get together with your friends then you can arrange a love computability game to increase the fun of your party. Therefore, enhance the fun of your boring life by using love calculators which are available online.

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Sugar Daddy Matchmaking, Shocks the Timid

2009-02-16T19:47:00.000-08:00

Sugar Daddy Matchmaking, Shocks the Timid

Sugar daddy matchmaking services have struck a chord with moralists from all

around the world. From Christians, Muslims, Mormons and even some feminist

groups, the verdict has yet to be made as to whether there's a difference

between Sugar Daddy dating, and, eh hem, prostitution.

You can't argue that it's something unseen throughout human history, but

with the advent of online dating, never before has it been easier for young,

attractive and often ambitious individuals to find wealthy men, or seldom,

women, to support them in mutually beneficial relationships. In the Western

world, these types of relationships have been looked down upon as nothing

more than hooking, with even more derogatory terms applied to those who

participate; johns, hookers, sluts, hoers, and the list goes on.

Yet in 2006, a man named Brandon Wade decided to show the world his own,

unique perspective on what a modern arranged relationship could be - at its

best. "I created my site precisely because there weren't any dating services

built on the fact that in today's society, girls looking for men who can

provide them financial stability in no-strings-attached relationships had

few places to go, and among those, the options were sketchy at best" - says

Mr. Wade.

Sugar daddy match sites have since taken off, with the online dating niche

now boasting over 3 million active users across several new sites offering

users pretty much the same thing: discreet, up-front, sugar daddy

match-making opportunity. The men and women who use these sites create

profiles split into two categories; sugar daddies and sugar babies. Yet not

all daddies and babies fit into the category of Older Man pampers Younger

Woman.

Sugar mamas, and gay male sugar babies are just two examples of the 'sweet &

low' variations amongst modern day sugar daddy players. There are all types

of people creating arrangements on these sites that allow them to list their

expectations right on their profile. One site even has a spot for sugar

babies to list their desired monthly allowance right on their profile,

giving a potential sugar daddy an idea of how much he'd have to put-out at

the end of the month to keep his sugar baby kept.

Anyone interested in seeing if such a bizarre trend is real may simply type

"sugar daddy arrangement" into google, and you'll find yourself inundated

with dozens of sites, some classy, some sleazy, offering men and women a

safe and private way to connect over their shared interests.

If your intersted, feel free to visit any high end site focused EXCLUSIVELY on Sugar Daddy relationships & Sugar Daddy Dating.

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All About Love Sayings

2009-02-16T19:46:00.002-08:00

Love sayings help us to describe our feelings towards our beloved. Love is an eternal emotion which people have felt and will continue to feel forever. Love saying are love quotations. Because of the universality of love, these love sayings are very popular. Love sayings make you feel warm and loved. One of the most amazing benefits of love sayings is that they inform you about the feelings and expressions of numerous people about love. Love sayings equip us with a variety of views on love. Love sayings are also a way of learning from other's love experiences by which you understand the universality of love Sometimes love sayings are also a great source of humour and fun.

Coming up with your own love sayings is a great way to express your personal perspective towards love. Love has many aspects and everyone has a particular view about it, as they describe in their personal love sayings.

Often when we talk about love sayings , people only perceive them as romantic quotes, however, it is not the case since love sayings describe all sorts of love. You not only love your girl friend or boy friend, in fact, you love many relationships you have like your parents, your siblings and your friends and for this reason, love saying are not limited to your spouse alone. These love sayings make all these relations all the more strong. The beauty of relationship is perked up with love sayings.

True love is a rare gift, which not all of us find in life and most love sayings agree with this perspective. This is true especially in a romantic love context. Love does not imply joys all the time, in fact, we come to know from love sayings that love has both seasons within it autumn and spring. Love sayings make the affect of joys and sorrows of love all the more strong. Love saying talk about all sorts of experiences in love, good and bad simultaneously.

It often happens that we fail to discern between true love and obsession or lust and in this case, we find lots of love quotes explaining deceit in love. You can find lots of love sayings lamenting the loss of love while at the some time, there are endless quotes which celebrate the joy of.

The numerous love sayings confirm the infinite aspects of love and experiences of different lovers. Despite the endless experiences and expressions of love, it is a universal emotion and it remains the same in all sorts of love; all love saying articulate the same essence of love only the expression is different.

Love

2009-02-16T19:46:00.001-08:00

Love is one of the most amazing emotions there is. Many well known writers, philosophers and business people have reached the conclusion that romance and love is the most important thing in life. It's easy to lose site of this when every day issues are get you down. But as you start to get those things under control, you realize that having love in your life is a critical component of happiness. If you are too far from that place to really believe it, you should spend some time reading the greats. Hear what they have to say about love and romance. Consult with some rich people. If you don't know any, read about them. They all ultimately come to the conclusion that love is more important and romance is too critical in life to be overlooked. Try our love calculator from our friends.

So welcome to the love and romance section of Blogskinny.com. On this topic page, we cover many topics related to love, romance, dating, online dating and finding a mate in general. Additionally, we have fiction about love and romance. There are many resources for you here, no matter if you're looking for interesting articles or blogs on the topic of love and romance or are in the dating scene yourself and are trying to find tips for online dating or non-internet dating.

Muchos Gracias!! Mi Amigas Christmas Party!!

2009-02-16T19:45:00.003-08:00

It has always been our barkada’s customary way of celebrating Christmas Party 2 days before Christmas in each other’s home since College and this time it was held possible in my abode. Each one of us prepared presents for her Manita since we are all girls and we’re very excited and can’t wait to open each other’s gifts. Well, a bunch of thanks to the shopping sites on the Internet, Amazon and E-bay for helping me out on what gift I have to give to my manita. It's indeed a great Discount Shopping service they have provided and really gave me an idea to save time and money.What a great value!

Well, some brought cakes, grilled chicken, delicious pies, mouth-watering ice cream, “Pancit Guisado” a form of sautéed noodles and it’s the perennial item on the Filipino dining table, and of course at your service prepared Kare-Kare also one of the Best Filipino Cuisines, cake, fruit salad, and Lumpia.

We were very happy then when the party started eating and gobbling the dishes and sweets served on the table, chitchatting, and of course the most spectacular course in the party sharing each other’s presents and picture taking. We all decided to have our party overnight since we wanted to attend “Misa de Gallo” which is a Spanish phrase for Midnight mass, more literally translated as "Rooster's Mass." It is said that the "Rooster's Mass" owes its name to the idea that a rooster would have been among the first to witness the birth of Jesus, and thus be the one to announce it. So as practiced here in the Philippines, this custom lasts for nine days, starting on December 16 up to December 24. It’s actually would be my 3rd day since I missed my 3rd day when I went to Tagum and unfortunately missed consecutively the following masses. So, just now that I continued attending it together with my friends.

At the break of the dawn we were so excited and I guessed most of us didn’t sleep for the Misa de Gallo. So we fixed ourselves, went to church, and after the mass, I introduced my college friends to my Rosary Group mates in the Church and headed back home to eat again and sleep. That was indeed a great experience for us and I hope in the following years we will still wake up celebrating and merrily celebrating one reason that is the Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ... Seize the day!! ?

Provides MSN News & Updates. Including MSN Names and MSN Quotes, Yahoo Avatars, MSN Display Pics and

2009-02-16T19:45:00.001-08:00

The smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect. Language experts defined them as symbols composed of punctuation marks, designed to express some form of emotion in the form of a human face (in computing, of course). MSN Emoticons are a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. Everybody is familiar with MSN Smileys, on the Internet.

And thousands of them are being created just as you’re reading this article.

Today people can hardly imagine using computer chat programs that don't translate keystrokes into colorful graphics. Instant messaging programs often contain an array of faces intended to express emotions ranging from surprise to affection, from anger to embarrassment.

In web forums and instant messengers, even e-mails, such as MSN, text emoticons are often automatically replaced with small corresponding images, which came to be called emoticons as well. Originally, these image emoticons were simple and replaced only the most straightforward and common character sequences, but over time they became so complex that the more specialized emoticons are often input using a menu or popup windows, sometimes listing hundreds of items. Some of these graphical emoticons do not actually represent faces or emotions; for example, an "emoticon" showing a guitar might be used to represent music. Emoticons are also commonly used in online computer games.

What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice. That is also available for the MSN Names or MSN Quotes we choose to use on the chat rooms, e-mails, forums etc. Using all sorts of funny names or intelligent quotes makes the communication more interesting. Of course, many and different characters are hidden behind them and their own monitors. But that is not the purpose of using these specific electronic tools.

For example, there are certain websites which provide MSN Names for Boys and MSN Names for Girls. You can pick up from a wide range of categories. For instant, if you are the cute guy or girl next door, then you might be tempted to pick one of the Cute MSN Names, Funny MSN Names or MSN Smileys. You might just be that awesome prince that every teenage girl is expecting, therefore you should get an Inspiring MSN Name.

If you find yourself at great distance from your beloved, I think she/he would be impressed by some of the Love MSN Names, Friendship Names, and Flirty MSN Names available at any time for you on specialized websites. It would be so easy to impress the person you like or love, just by simply using one of those names. Especially if you are not a spontaneous or very original person!

But then again, one day you might want to try something else… maybe you are in a special mood, or that’s just the way you are. And then I’m thinking about special Rude MSN Names or Dirty MSN Names. Who said these aren’t cool? Browse on the Internet and check out some of them.

For 25 years (since its advent), “smiley “ - a simply a cartoon looking face showing a smile, has evolved into a variety of different facial expressions including frowns, angry grimaces, blushing, crying , looks of surprise and thousands more. Emoticons have expanded beyond facial expressions to a variety of still or moving images, including words character actions and images.

A Versatile Night Out For All Occasions

2009-02-16T19:44:00.001-08:00

You know what it’s like. It’s always great to look forward to a night out with your friends, but sometimes a visit to the pub or simply going out for a meal can be a bit repetitive. It can be good to try something a bit different, but where do you go?

Luckily there is an answer that will appeal to most adults, and you can still enjoy a meal while you are there as well. Bingo clubs are a great venue for many different types of get togethers. If you speak to anyone who has ever been to a bingo club they will no doubt tell you that one of the things you will remember is the atmosphere.

Everyone loves the chance to win some money, and with these types of club you have a chance to win a significant amount if you end up scooping the jackpot. It would certainly make for an even more memorable evening!

There are plenty of smaller prizes on offer as well though, which gives everyone a good chance of winning something, but even if your luck isn’t with you on your first visit you will probably find you already want to arrange a return trip.

Another advantage of choosing a bingo themed night out is that bingo clubs are always fairly easy to find. No matter where you live you are sure to have one close by. This makes it easy for everyone to meet up at the club itself.

You might also be surprised to learn that bingo can actually stimulate the brain. You need to be quick and attentive to check your numbers and see whether you have any of the ones being called, and that helps to build up your mental capabilities. If you start going regularly you will notice how much quicker you become at this.

If your first group night out is the first time you have ever tried bingo, you will wonder how some people can manage several cards on the go at the same time. When you are in a group having a fun night out, you might even have trouble keeping up! But if you carry on over time you will soon find yourself playing several cards at once – and these of course also give you more chances of winning.

It’s clear that one of the main benefits of this kind of night out is that it could end up providing you with a brand new hobby to enjoy on a weekly basis. And if you play bingo that often, who knows, that big jackpot could soon be coming your way.

Daniel Collins writes on a number of topics on behalf of a digital marketing agency and a variety of clients. As such, this article is to be considered a professional piece with business interests in mind.

Making, and keeping, friends at university

2009-02-16T19:42:00.000-08:00

Leaving for university is a huge step in life and one that comes with mixed feelings. The dread of moving to a new city, possibly living with strangers and having to fend for yourself is counteracted by the sense of independence, the thrill of a new adventure and the prospect of a lounge full of traffic cones.

One of the best things about university life is it gives a huge opportunity to meet new people. Although you may be leaving some childhood friends behind as they move to other cities, you'll probably find many like-minded students on your course. Like you, most of them will be feeling a bit nervous about leaving home to embark on a few years of study in unfamiliar surroundings.

One way to meet people with similar interests is to join a club. University websites and information centres will have lists of all the groups available both on and of campus, and there will normally be a wide range available - sports clubs, religious groups, drama associations and quirky ones like toast appreciation societies. The earlier you join these clubs, the more quickly you'll make new friends and settle in. Even if you're not sure if a group is for you, it's always best to go along and give it a try.

Getting a part-time job is another good way of meeting new people, but it can also be a distraction from your studies - which should always be the main focus of your time at university.

Once you've found a few people to spend time with, exploring the city can become a collective activity and something to allow you to bond even further. If you take an angle on your exploration you will find it more fun - whether you search for all the best shops, visit pubs around the city or just buy a day ticket for the bus and see where it takes you - you'll find that you forge great memories whilst getting to know your new hometown.

By the time your exams have passed and the summer holidays come round, you'll again be in the position of leaving your friends - although this time only temporarily. Being carefree - and rich enough - to visit all your new mates over the summer would be an ideal situation; however, many students need to work over their holidays to earn enough money to see them through until the next student loan payment.

One way to keep in touch when you're not at university is to download a free instant messaging programme. These allow you to have conversations using either text or voice, share files and create plans for the next term. Then when you meet up again for your next year of university, you'll already be up to speed on each other's activities and ready to make the most of each other's company. Plus instant messaging can also be used to keep tabs on those old friends you waved goodbye to, so regardless of where you - or they - ultimately end up, you'll only ever be separated by a keyboard.

Disclaimer: Matthew Pressman writes for a wide variety of commercial clients. This article is intended for information purposes only and readers should seek additional information before taking any actions based on its content.

Love's Philosophy

2009-02-10T07:10:00.001-08:00

The fountains mingle with the river

And the rivers with the ocean

The winds of heaven mix for ever

With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single,

All things by a law divine

In one another's being mingle

Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven

And the waves clasp one another

No sister-flower would be forgiven

If it disdain'd its brother;

And the sunlight clasps the earth,

And the moonbeams kiss the sea

What are all these kisses worth

If thou kiss not me?

Valentine Day Poems

2009-02-10T07:09:00.000-08:00

My Valentine
Valentines is near
Just wishing you were here
You will always be near
My heart will never be the same
Beneath my skin, my soul lies waiting for you
Everyday I think of you I feel blue
Never give up hope
Remembering the first kiss
All I ask is to be with you
And for you to be my Valentine
For I will always cherish your heart in mine

Valentine Day SMS & Messages

2009-02-10T07:07:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day is a special day, and gives you more reason to send short and sweet messages to your loved ones. Here is a Sweet and Short Valentine Day's SMS and Messages.

Love so much my heart is sure. As time goes on I love you more, Your happy smile. Your loving face no one will ever take your place. Wish you a Happy Valentine's Day!

No poems no fancy words
No poems no fancy words
I just want the world to know
that I LOVE YOU my Princess with all my heart.
Happy Valentines Day.

Love is not a decision
Love isn’t a decision, it’s a feeling.
If we could decide who to love,
then,
life would be much simpler,
but then less magical.

O my dear Valentine
O my dear Valentine
Whats life ?
Life is love.
Whats love ?
Love is kissing.
Whats kissing ?
Come here and I show you.

With you it's Valentine's Day 365 days a year.

Love is the language our hearts use to speak to one another. For you, my dear, my heart sings.

I loved u then, as i do now, always and forever.

If Roses were black and violets were brown, my love for you would never be found but roses r red and violets are blue, all I want to say is I LUV U!

Valentine Day History

2009-02-10T07:06:00.000-08:00

One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl, who may have been his jailor's daughter, who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed 'From your Valentine,' an expression that is still in use today.

Valentine's Day

2009-02-10T07:05:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day is a holiday celebrated on February 14 by many people throughout the world. Every time is a good time for love, but February 14 still is something special. Valentine's Day is the biggest single day of the year for sending electronic greeting cards. The day is most closely associated with the mutual exchange of love notes in the form of "valentines."

Forgiveness & Love

2009-02-06T06:10:00.001-08:00

These are common complaints, often accompanied by a host of painful emotions, extreme bewilderment and a desperate "Why?" An instant later, the culprit will be judged and sentenced. Full of remorse, those separating cry "If you would change, I wouldn't leave!"

Both parties to a conflict, in their confusion, ask the same questions and reach the same conclusions. "I'm right. You're wrong. It's settled! Why argue?!" Both are honest about their experiences, but see opposite realities. The inconsistency of alternating from absolute judgment to confusion is never realized.

In ancient times the state of "confused absoluteness" was known as "a house divided against itself." It is caused by the disease, "blockage of Personal Truth." Seldom does it occur to this confused mind that "I am the one present in every experience of my life, perhaps I'm involved and the cause of my own pain." Only for a fleeting moment can this mind conceive that it might have set up what is happening . . . again.

Pain signals blockage of Personal Truth. The person in pain easily identifies the "guilty party" and it is always "them!" The typical solution is blame, guilt and separation. So starts another downward cycle into more pain and resentment . . . again. Sound familiar?

There is an end to struggle; there is joy and aliveness beyond pain! The primary requirement for healing is a willingness to admit "If I'm in pain-- I'm in Error." Then comes a desire to do one's work. Next one must find effective tools for correction and be willing to use them consistently. Haphazard use of the tools will not produce desired relationship or financial changes and healing.

A new mind-set must be accepted to undo blockage of Personal Truth and rebuild the personal thought system that has led to confusion, pain and loss. Transformation starts with a "renewing of the mind." Through these ideas, which may at first sound crazy or impossible, thousands have healed themselves.

Total explanation of this new (though ancient) thought system is not my objective here, that would take volumes. My goal is to present practical, workable tools and a glimpse of the philosophy that backs them up. What is needed next is an open mind.

YOU CAN LET GO AND CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

2009-02-06T06:09:00.002-08:00

The steps to healing begin by understanding:

1. The purpose of the world is to heal you and bring joy! Anything less is self-inflicted.

2. Reality is the output of the human mind, in ancient times called the "mind of man."

3. Pretending someone else is the cause of your mind's disturbing output is projection.

4. Blaming someone else for your reality is irresponsible and the key to victimhood.

5. Feeling like a victim is destructive to mental, emotional and physical health.

6. Pain is the energy that results from holding onto dis-integrative energy. Pain warns of the need for forgiveness and healing.

7. Forgiveness is the only PERMANENT solution.

8. Forgiving is NOT something done to or for others. It is an internal healing process.

9. The transition is simple, not always easy.

10. It takes commitment and work to heal!

11. The rewards are beyond what your mind can presently conceive.

TRUE FORGIVENESS is the master release process. It is a tool that opens the energy field of the "body" and liberates stored, destructive energies. It is not "letting someone off the hook" for their offenses. The root meaning of forgiveness in the ancient Aramaic is "to cancel, untie or let loose" and is a tool for undoing or changing a reality in the mind.

Verbal release is a simple first step. Identify your emotions and thoughts. Say, aloud, if practical, "I totally release from my life and body all feelings of _______ (be specific with your feelings-- i.e., fear, anger, criticism, etc.) and I release the thoughts that _____________ (be specific with your thoughts-- life hurts, no one loves me, I'll never make it, etc.).

To summarize, TAKE RESPONSIBILITY! The requirement for liberty? Be accountable for your thoughts, your emotions and your realities. It's your life! Recognize and undo dis-integrative energies. Learn to forgive! The person or event you think "causes" pain only surfaces what is yours and is already within you. You have the opportunity to heal . . . again . . . Don't miss it . . . Again?!

YOU CANNOT SOLVE A PROBLEM WITH THE MIND THAT CREATED IT!

2009-02-06T06:09:00.001-08:00

The basis for true healing of mental, physical and emotional trauma is knowing that the body is not real -- it does not exist! Scientifically, this was said best by Albert Einstein: "What we have heretofore called matter is energy whose vibrations have been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter!" Ancient teachings called matter "appearances" and cautioned not to judge by them.

What appears as a body is in fact an energy field, integrated and organized by what is in back of and superior to it. There are only two qualities of energy relative to any energy field:

1) Integrative--i.e., enthusiasm, love & joy that express as creativity, health and aliveness.

2) Dis-integrative--i.e., fear, anger, criticism or revenge that leads to pain and dis-ease.

In ancient teachings the holding of "dis-integrative" energy, called "defiling the temple" was referring to it as "sin." When this energy is stored in tissue, they warned, it violates the integrity of that tissue, causing disease. The wages, or result, of defiling your temple is that you die. This was not religious dogma, but simple physiology!!

Pain and dis-ease are beneficial signals that warn of error. Pain is never a sign of someone else's mistake. It is the body's "error message" and invites us to be responsible for the quality energ y we put into our systems. Most ignore the message, and wonder why disease strikes. They wish someone would invent a "magic bullet" that lets them continue destructive habits and never pay the piper. "Let me hate and gossip, have fear and anger, let me put down whom I wish. Let me ignore nutrition, eat junk AND PLEASE, let me be well and happy!" An insane wish! We can't sow wheat and reap corn, nor engage in negativity and have health, we are reaping as we have sown!

Failure to be aware and release negativity leads to an endless succession of similar events. Hence, the question: "Why is this happening to me . . . again?!" Inappropriate "positive thinking", pretending all is well when it is not, produces the same result. Appropriate and honest thinking is the goal; self-correction then follows naturally when in error.

The only restorative processes are those which face and release negativity. The body then uses its own recuperative powers to rebuild.

The Invitation

2009-02-06T06:07:00.002-08:00

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself, if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day, and if you source your life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘YES!’.

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in empty moments.

The Importance of Being Happy

2009-02-06T06:07:00.001-08:00

The option of "choosing happiness" may be a forgotten key in the quest to create a more sustainable - and happier - human family

The number of people in the world - 5.3 billion and growing - is not just a number. It's a symbol for 5.3 billion unique and individual lives being experienced all over planet Earth, lives that are marked by blessing and disaster, joy and despair. Is happiness, for every one of our human siblings, inevitably linked to physical and social circumstances? Or is it an ever-present possibility, reachable by a simple decision?

Barry Neil Kaufman believes that Happiness Is a Choice, as the title of his new book boldly proclaims. Kaufman - "Bears" to all who know him, for his size and bear-hugs - is the author of Son-Rise (the story of his son Raun's recovery from supposedly incurable autism) and seven other books, as well as the co-founder and co-director of the Option Institute and Fellowship, a teaching center in Sheffield, Massachusetts. He and his colleagues live and teach the belief that we can be happy, and teach others how to be happy, in any situation. Should this claim seem only mildly outrageous, Kaufman goes further and suggests making happiness our number one priority.

Kaufman explains his thinking - backed up by two decades of teaching and personal experience, especially with the families of special needs children - in the following telephone interview. Why is a lengthy look at the nature of happiness included in an issue an population and family planning? Because it's impossible to imagine that a global family of any size will be sustainable if it isn't happy - and cultivating true happiness may indeed be a major key to achieving sustainability.

Alan: Population, more than any other single issue, often gets the blame for all the rest of our social and environmental problems. It tops many people's list of things we should be doing something about. But here you come along and say that cultivating happiness is what we should be doing something about. What do you mean by that?

Bears: I think the population explosion - as a place to focus, as a core belief that this is the main problem we need to solve - is actually a distraction. Let me explain why, and why I would say that there is perhaps nothing more pertinent than choosing happiness.

When I use the word "happiness," I'm thinking of something that other people might use different words to express. They might say "peace of mind" or "inner ease." Some might say "communion with God." Some might say "a sense of self-fulfillment." Whatever the wording, we know what it feels like inside of ourselves when we have a sense of comfort, peacefulness, centeredness, solidity. I call that happiness.

Now, if you look at the social and political changes occurring throughout the world now - all the people sitting down at the table and trying to restructure their relationships by designing new countries, new political boundaries, new political and social philosophies - there is one thing that becomes chronically obvious. People are trying to redesign the external structures by which they relate to themselves, but they're bringing to the table what I call the many faces of unhappiness. What you hear are accusations, judgments, calls for revenge and retribution. Ironically, it is with hearts and minds heavy with discomfort and displeasure that they are trying to hone a better external relationship. For that reason, a lot of those conversations and negotiations are perhaps destined to fail - either at the tables themselves, or in the structure that they ultimately design - because they're not designed by people who are approaching that table happily, comfortably, and open heartedly.

I sometimes wish I could work with such people and help them to be truly present and non-judgmental. I'd want to help them prioritize being comfortable in themselves before they got to the table. With that perspective, not only would they be much more productive, they'd also be able to hone structures that would serve more effectively.

Alan: Happiness Is a Choice is a rather bold title. How did you come to write such a book?

Bears: For about 20 years my wife and I have been teaching people this extraordinarily simple but life-transforming idea. Whether they're dealing with a diagnosis of cancer, with being the parents of a special needs child, with divorce or financial difficulties or lack of employment, whatever the circumstances, we teach people that happiness is a choice, and choosing happiness on a sustained basis has enormous dividends and benefits.

Now, when I started to explore this point of view many years ago, I was as big a resistor as anybody else. I was constantly blaming others for the way I was feeling. There was some comfort in that, but at the same time, it was a trap. The trap was giving over my power to what other people said, to what other people did, to the circumstances around me - and becoming a victim.

We teach people how not to be victims. We show them how to think differently, and also to speak differently. After coming to one of our workshops, they might say things like, "When you're late for an appointment, I get myself frustrated. When you ignore me, I get myself angry and upset." That ownership of their feelings, describing themselves as the designer and architect of their responses, gives them and everybody else an amazing opportunity - because if we can design our responses one way, it suggests that we have the power to redesign them if we so choose, and to experience things quite differently. In fact, we're omnipotent in that respect.

We have been taught and brought up systematically to use unhappiness to take care of ourselves, but we can systematically unlearn those lessons. We can choose again in a very different way, with a lot more productive results.

Alan: What do you mean when you say we're trained to use our unhappiness to to care of ourselves?

Bears: Most of us have been brought up to utilize unhappiness as a motivator. If we want to lose weight, we get uncomfortable about the rolls of our belly or the size of our buttocks and thighs, as a way to judge something and motivate ourselves to diet. We frighten ourselves out of smoking cigarettes using threats of emphysema and lung cancer. And I've worked with so many parents who talk about yelling at and hitting their children as a way to motivate them to change.

So we use discomfort to move ourselves, and when that discomfort becomes more intense, we're not simply angry with ourselves, we're angry with someone else. Next, we're no longer simply angry with them, but perhaps we're picking up a stick or a knife or a gun. So to me it's clear that the solution - globally, socially, and politically - is not simply designing social, political, or market-driven systems based on the current fantasy of what works, but really helping people change their attitude about how they live with themselves, their families, their communities, their countries, the world.

Alan: You mentioned earlier that we have a certain kind of omnipotence in terms of having the power to choose how we feel. Yet most people's experience is that they're up against some external omnipotent forces - social, political, economic - that make "choosing happiness" very difficult, if not impossible. What do you say to somebody who's feeling caught up in the tide of social unhappiness, or controlled by external structures?

Bears: You know, we can take a finger and point at anything. We can point to the economy, social prejudice, bigotry, and say these are the reasons that we are unhappy. But we're not unhappy because of those things. We're unhappy because of the way we choose to see them and experience them. That results in what looks like unhappiness and despair.

I'll give you an example. Over the years we've adopted children that other people perhaps see as unadoptable - children who came from areas of great poverty, great nutritional deprivation, who were abused physically and in other ways. These were kids who people said would be very hard to change and socialize. But that has not been our experience, not only with the children who became part of our family, but with anybody we work with.

As a result, we have a mixed-race family - Caucasian blood, Hispanic blood, South American Indian blood, and African-American blood. Sometimes our children get exposed to what people would call "racial prejudice" or "ethnic slurs."

Once, my two oldest daughters took one of my young sons to a pizza restaurant. This little guy is a mixture of all kinds of blood - he gets very black during the summer, he has very wide lips and a thick nose. He's the cutest, most wonderful little munchkin. They were with some teenage friends, and one of them said, 'Oh, are you baby-sitting for that little boy?" And one of my daughters said, "No, he's our brother." She explained about when he was adopted - how he couldn't roll over or move, how he was thought to be brain-impaired, how our family worked with him for two or three years. Now he's doing great - he's in the third grade and getting A's. She was really excited to tell the family story.

Then the other teenager said, "Oh. So you mean essentially your brother's a Spic." This came out of nowhere. Now, the daughter who was speaking suddenly jumped up and grabbed this other youngster and screamed, 'Don't you ever talk about my brother like that! How dare you!" She got very upset and really angry - unhappy. Now, on the other side of this little boy was another one of my daughters, and when she heard that commentary about her brother, she started to laugh.

Later, when they all returned to the house, we got all the children together to talk about the event and how all the kids felt about it. Interestingly enough, the daughter who ran to defend her brother's honor felt that what the speaker was saying meant something about her brother, and therefore she had to defend him. But the other daughter thought that the speaker's words meant something not about her brother but about the speaker - she thought it was rather silly and funny that somebody would be prejudiced in the first place, and especially against this little boy. That's why she laughed.

Both of these young girls were part of the same experience, yet they had two dramatically different responses to it, because they saw it in different ways. We ended up realizing as family that words are only as powerful as you make them. If somebody says something ethnically prejudiced to you, and you give that word power, unhappiness might result. However, if you didn't give those words any power, you could not only still be comfortable in front of them and know they mean nothing about you, but you could actually - out of your happiness - still be loving of the speaker and maybe even helpful in teaching the speaker how to see things in a different way.

Alan: The attitude you're describing is what some might call a spiritually advanced attitude - the kind of awareness that some people pray or meditate for years to attain. How is it possible to develop that kind of attitude quickly, and on one's own?

Bears: In Happiness is a Choice, we have taken the best of what we have learned from working with people for twenty years - people who want to adopt a loving, accepting, embracing attitude - and encapsulated it in such a way as to create ultimately what we call the "Six Shortcuts to Happiness." These are simple perspectives that we can implement in our lives to make changes quickly and immediately - things like letting go of judgments and being present in the moment.

Let me give some background. Most of us in this culture were brought up under the umbrella of certain perspectives on personal psychology. Perhaps the biggest umbrella was the Freudian one, which says that most of us are dominated deep inside by a cauldron of steaming feelings called the unconscious or the subconscious. It's difficult to deal with, part of it's unknowable, and you spend your life trying to cope with it. The more humanistic, updated version of that philosophy, which is just as prevalent, is what I would call the notion of the dysfunctional family: something happened to you in your past, and that's why you are the way you are. You search for and try to save the wounded inner child, and maybe you'll be able to save a portion of yourself.

But whether we point to an unknowable interior, or point to the distant past, we lay blame on that for how we're feeling and how we're behaving right now.

That's simply another victimizing perspective. When you do that, you're giving up an aspect of your self-empowerment and attributing it to things either gone by or things outside of your control. We teach people that if you have a perspective, a set of beliefs, you can change those beliefs quickly and immediately - and if you do, not only will your feelings change, your behaviors will change as well.

Let me give you another example. A man came to one of our workshops, also entitled 'Happiness Is a Choice,' and he reported that his wife would scream at him and be angry much of the time. In response, he would get angry right back. I asked him, in the context of the workshop, why he did that. He looked around at the others and said, "Because if I don't get angry, I'll end up being a wimp or a doormat." Then he started to laugh. He said, "You know, I never won an argument with my wife by being angry at her. I don't want to do that anymore." So I asked him, "What do you want to do?" He said, "I just want to feel differently, no matter what she says. I want to prioritize feeling good with her no matter what she does." Would he do that? He looked at me and smiled and said, "Yes." He left.

Four days later he came back and shared a rather wondrous story. The night after the workshop completed, his wife started screaming at him. He looked at her lovingly and said, in a gentle voice, "Nothing you say or do will diminish my love or good feelings about you." She huffed and walked away. Later she screamed at him again and he looked her right in the eye and said exactly the same thing. He continued to do this over the next three or four days no matter what she did. He said it was very exciting for him because she wasn't changing, and the circumstance hadn't changed, but just by making that simple decision of positioning himself differently and seeing things differently, he was already having a much better time. He felt his whole emotional make-up had changed just by creating that situation.

On the fourth day his wife said to him, "Listen, Buster, we have to talk. On the first day when you said that to me, I wanted to kill you. On the second I still wanted to kill you. But by the fourth day, I was genuinely touched that no matter what I did, you wanted to feel good about me." He said that conversation and several subsequent conversations resulted in dramatically changing their relationship for the better.

The process is simple: it's based on deciding. It's based on choice. That's why we say "Happiness is a choice, and misery is optional, not inevitable."

Alan: What's the difference between "changing one's beliefs" and denial? When does "choosing happiness" become the opiate of the masses?

Bears: Let me tell you a story that was a key turning point in my own life. For three years, my wife and I had been teaching the Option Process, a simple method for helping people become happier, even in the face of great difficulties. We saw it as wonderfully therapeutic and educational. Then something happened in our lives: Our third child was diagnosed as irreversibly neurologically damaged and impaired. He was labeled as autistic. He didn't look at people. He didn't acquire language. He basically spun in circles and rocked on the floor all day. He was also tested as having an under-30 IQ, considered severely retarded.

When we started to search around the country - in fact, around the world - for some help and input, what people kept saying was, "Oh my God, this is terrible. It's awful that it happened to you. Thank God you have two healthy children. You might as well start to get used to the idea of putting this little boy in an institution, because there's not much you can do with him."

I remember saying to my wife, "Listen, we've been teaching people that you can switch your perspectives any time you want and create a different response to circumstances. Could we take this very dramatic, seemingly difficult personal circumstance and change it - or at least start by changing the way we looked at it?"

Some time later a physician said to us, "It's really terrible that this happened to you." I looked at him and I looked at my child, and I said, "He's very different, he's very bizarre, but he's beautiful, he's peaceful, and he's gentle. I think there's something wonderful in his uniqueness, in his different-ness." The doc said he thought I was in denial because I wasn't acting "appropriately" - uncomfortable and distraught. At another clinic they told us our son was uneducable, and we said "He's breathing - there's always hope." They shook their heads, again to say that we were in denial. Then another group of clinicians said to us, "There's really nothing you or we can do." So my wife and I looked at each other and said, "Let's make up something to do."

As a result of that choice, we developed and designed our own program for our child based on love and acceptance. We worked with him twelve hours a day, seven days a week for over three and a half years. He not only emerged from his so-called irreversible and hopeless condition, he became an extraordinarily extroverted, highly verbal, intelligent and socially interactive youngster. Just six months ago he graduated from high school as a high honors student, and be is now attending one of the finest universities in the United States.

What those doctors thought was an "appropriate response" to the situation is what I would call paralysis. Here at the Option Institute, we teach people not to be "realistic" in the way that society demands, but to be unrealistic. "Realistic" means functioning within accepted norms of what's possible and impossible, so that your behavior is appropriate to the accepted collective mindset. If I had been realistic with my son, he would no doubt be rocking back and forth in his own feces in some nameless institution instead of being a straight 'A' student, a member of the debating club, and a fine tennis player and skier.

Alan: So in your experience, the social teaching that we must react with unhappiness in the face of suffering and misfortune dis-empowers us to respond effectively.

Bears: Absolutely. We were taught to react that way, and we systematically teach our children to do it all the time. For example, one holiday season I was with my family in a food market, waiting to check out. There was a little girl in the next line who was trying to grab some of the candy that her mother was about to purchase. The mother pushed the candy to the other side of the cart and said "No, not now, you can't have it."

This little girl started to cry, and then to scream, and everybody was looking at her. Suddenly, the store Santa Claus pushed through the lines, reached the center of the commotion, whipped out a chocolate candy cane and delivered it right into this little girl's hand. While the tears were still flowing down her cheeks, she immediately stopped crying and broke into a big smile. Everybody nearby went "Aww, isn't that wonderful," and a woman behind us said rather boisterously, "Santa Claus saved the day!"

One of my daughters, who was thirteen at the time, looked up at me and said "Papa, Santa Claus didn't save the day. Santa Claus just taught her that by yelling and screaming, she gets something. So guess what she's 'gonna do in the next store?"

In effect, we teach that lesson over and over again. Part of why we do that - and this might sound ironic - is because people are afraid of their unhappiness, and so they are also afraid of it in their children. They try to protect children from feeling uncomfortable, but that emotional protection actually fuels the belief that feeling and expressing discomfort is the best way to get our needs met. It doesn't work that way. Misery just breeds more misery.

Alan: And sometimes more babies. One thing that stands out in reviewing the literature on family planning and population is that people who don't have a sense of community and trust - who don't feel loved and cared for by society, or economically empowered to take care of themselves - have more children. The only people they can traditionally trust are their immediate family, so they have a bigger one. How can we begin to care for other people's children, and increase the amount of love and trust flowing across family lines?

Bears: Here at the Option Institute and Fellowship, we do a lot of work with families, especially families with special children. Parents are always amazed, they tell us, at how loving all the staff are - how "their love seems so incredibly real and tangible when they reach out towards my child. I don't understand how this is possible," they say sometimes, "because they don't know my child." Maybe this story can explain it.

As a way to express our gratitude for our work with our one special son, my wife and I decided to adopt other children who wouldn't otherwise have the same kind of chance. We were called by an orphanage where we had once worked, and they said, "We don't normally make a call like this, but there's this little guy here who needs a very special environment. We feel that nobody will probably ever take him. He's about five years old, and we think maybe he would thrive or at least survive if you would consider adopting him." So I asked about his circumstance, and they said his mother died when he was two and a half, and about three or four months later his father got very upset for some reason and decided to kill this child by slitting his throat twice with a knife.

The little boy survived. The father was ultimately imprisoned, and the little boy was put in an orphanage. He ended up in the back wards, because he would go to sleep standing up. Although his vocal cords were intact, he wouldn't speak very much. He seemed strange and different.

So this woman from the orphanage asked me, "Well, what do you want to do?" And I said, "Based on what you're telling me, we'd be happy to take him." "Don't you want to talk to your wife?" she asked, and I answered, "I'll talk to her later, but I'm sure it will be fine." "Well, do you want me to send you a photograph?" "That won't be necessary." She didn't believe me, so I said, "Is this a beauty contest? Because for me it's not, so it doesn't matter how he looks." And then she said, "Well, you could meet him first to see if you would like him." This is what I told her: "Since I know liking someone is a decision, I don't have to meet him. I'm deciding right now on the telephone with you that I'm not only going to like him, I'm going to love him. I'm just going to decide to do that."

I spoke to my wife later that evening and told her about this little boy, and asked her whether we wanted to take him. She said, "Yeah, let's do it." And I said, "We already did, five hours ago," and we laughed together about that.

Several months later, after all the paperwork was done, we were at JFK airport in New York City. I was standing behind a rope in the International arrivals building. People were coming off this plane from South America, I was looking over the rope, and I immediately recognized one of the people from the orphanage. I saw him holding this skinny little boy in one hand. I got incredibly excited, so I jumped over the rope and he spotted me - and so did this little boy. I came towards them, knelt on one of my knees, opened my arms, and the little boy broke from the person from the orphanage and started to run towards me.

It seemed as if time was in slow motion. In those few seconds it took him to cross the aisle to get to me, I looked at this child I'd never seen before, and I made him incredibly familiar. I looked at a little boy who was going to be my child, and I realized that I was making the decision, as he was moving towards me, to love him. And I felt a power of love when he jumped into my arms that was as sincere and as deep and as abiding as my love for any of my other children - and I have six children, some of whom had lived with me for fourteen, fifteen, eighteen years. There was an incredible lesson in that for me, which was that love doesn't take any time.

You don't have to know somebody to love somebody. You don't have to have a certain kind of chemistry between people in order to open your heart and open your mind to love them. Love, like happiness, is a decision. And when I realized that, I felt I knew something about loving people that I had never quite understood before. In our work, we teach people that you can make those kinds of decisions and those kinds of choices.

So how do you teach somebody to open their hearts and minds not only to their own children - and that's really the place to begin - or to the child-ness of themselves, but to children around them? Children of different races, nationalities, ages, whatever? I say we begin by finding a happy, loving place in ourselves. Because once we can do it for ourselves, we can turn toward somebody else and do it. The erroneous path is trying to reach out and love another before we learn to love ourselves. It begins inside. We make those changes inside.

Clear Your Mind And comfort your soul with a new definition of everyday words

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WISDOM: Rather than judge, try to understand. Rather than push away, try to embrace. Rather than cling, try to let go. Eventually we can stop trying and really do it.

DISCOVERY: Knowledge cannot be found under a rock. Knowledge is what we conclude about what we see under the rock.

SIMPLE: When I let myself know how to do it, I call it simple.

SHARING: Sharing is allowing you a place in my space.

LOVE: To love someone is to be happy with who and what they are, accepting them without conditions.

GUIDANCE: The only healing that ever takes place is self-healing. Medications and massages just encourage your body to do what it knows how to do.

ON BEING HUMAN: They say feeling bad is only human... but I like to celebrate my humanity, not with unhappiness, but with my loving and caring.

HAPPY PEOPLE: Happy people are loving. Fearful people are busy with other things.

THE ONLY PARADIGM: The way we choose to see the world creates the world we see.

BLINDERS: If I look only for what I expect to see, I'll miss all the other things in the garden.

TRAIL BLAZER: All dreams appear impossible until someone makes them happen.

What Happens When You Let Go?

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We hear the expressions ‘Go with the flow’, ‘Let go and let God’ and ‘Surrender to Spirit’. What is it that we are supposed to be letting go of and to whom? What does it mean and where do we start? Words like God and Spirit mean different things to different people. Perhaps we agree that it is a concept of creation or consciousness, a Divine flow or the natural order of things. We probably think all our problems could be solved if we could just win the lottery. But perhaps, what we really want from life is more along the lines of loving and caring relationships, joy, fun, happiness and harmony, where we feel we are being useful. How do we ensure that we achieve that?

First of all, you have to want to change. If you feel that life is a bit humdrum, a treadmill and you are getting worn out trying to control each part of it (otherwise it is bound to fall apart!) with the odd distraction that gives pleasure - are you ready to change? By following your intuition and ‘going with the flow,’ life can change for the better.

OK. We are ready. A new life is afoot. Where do we start?

As the wise old sages say ‘out of stillness comes wisdom,’ so first of all we need to stop our thoughts distracting us. I am sure we’ve all had those sleepless nights, with a never ending stream of thoughts going around in our head. We need to apply some sort of discipline to put us back in control of our own thoughts, so that we are controlling them and they are not controlling us.

Begin by finding some time in each day, even if it's just 10 minutes, that is just for you. A quiet place in the garden is ideal. A time to relax and be still, where your attention will not be dragged onto something or someone.

Sit quietly and as each thought pops into your head, quietly and firmly say no and don’t pay it any attention. Don’t bury the thoughts, but let them float up and pass by like feathers on a gentle breeze, letting them go. Release, release, release. Keep doing this for at least 10 minutes each day, for however long it takes, until you have achieved a permanently quiet mind. A silent mind, allows you to get in touch with your intuitive side. You are trying to live from your spiritual nature and not from the dictates of your mind.

Check every now and again during the day and ask yourself ‘Am I in my head or my heart’? That means ‘am I doing what the mind is telling me I should or must do or am I listening to my intuition, and doing what interests and feels right to me? If you find you are doing something that doesn’t interest or excite you, stop and listen again to your inner voice. In each minute, you will find there is always one thing that is more right for you to do than anything else.

Following this feeling of rightness is called ‘being in the flow and Divine order’. When you live your life in this way, the weight of the world is removed from your shoulders and any struggle or suffering is replaced by joy, happiness, love and excitement.

It may not be achieved in an instant, but with a bit of determination and really listening to your inner voice, each moment will become a minute and then an hour and a day. Soon you will be experiencing a new life in all its magnificence and beauty.

You have ‘let go’ and now ‘miracles can happen’.

Using the Mirror of Life

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Often, we are so stuck in our old beliefs and patterns that we aren't able to see the changes we need to make. Even when we feel frustrated about our problems, we may not recognize what we need to learn to change things. That is why we need to use the mirror of life.

Everything in our lives reflects where we are in the process of developing integration and balance. We can use everything that happens externally as a mirror to help us see the areas within us that need healing and development. Whenever we have a problem, especially a recurring or chronic problem, it is always an arrow pointing directly to some aspect of our psyche where we need more awareness.

If we accept that life is always trying to teach us exactly what we need to learn, we can view everything that happens to us as a gift. Even experiences that are uncomfortable or painful contain within them an important key to our healing, wholeness, and prosperity.

We may have difficulty understanding what the mirror of life is trying to show us, but if we sincerely ask for the learning and the gift in every experience, it will be revealed to us one way or another.

One of the clearest reflections we have to work with is the one provided by our relationships. Everyone we attract into our life is a mirror for us in certain ways. All of our relationships -- our families, children, friends, co-workers, neighbors, pets, as well as our romantic partners -- reflect certain parts of us. How we feel with someone is usually an indication of how we feel about the parts of us that they mirror.

We all attract certain people into our life who have developed qualities opposite to the ones we are most identified with. In other words, they mirror our disowned selves, and we mirror theirs. These are often the most highly emotionally charged relationships. We either love them, hate them, or both! We feel very attracted to them, and/or very uncomfortable, judgmental, annoyed, or frustrated with them. The stronger the feelings, the more important a mirror they are for us. We have drawn them into our reality to show us something about what we need to develop in ourselves. The fact that we have such strong feelings (one way or another) toward them means that they are showing us a part of ourselves we need to acknowledge, accept, and integrate.

This does not mean we have to be with them or hold onto a harmful or inappropriate relationship. It just means that as long as they are in our lives, or even in our thoughts and feelings, we can use the relationship as a learning experience. It also does not mean we are supposed to become like them. They may carry an energy we need more of, but they may be too far to the opposite extreme, or they may express that energy in a distorted way.

Still, we can look for the positive essence in the opposite qualities they carry. For example, if you have been taught never to express any anger, you will probably at some point find yourself in relationship with a person who expresses their anger frequently and vehemently. Life is giving you a strong message that it's time for you to learn to acknowledge your own anger. It is not saying you have to become like this person and go around dumping your anger everywhere. Instead, you need to find the appropriate balance, learning how to assert yourself and stand up for yourself.

If you have strongly developed being energy but have difficulty taking action, you may find that someone important in your life is a compulsive doer who can't relax. Naturally, you don't want to go to that extreme, but this person is your teacher, to show you the energy of action that you need to develop. Of course, you are a teacher for them, as well, but it usually doesn't work very well to try to show the other person what they need to learn from you -- although we all succumb to this temptation. It works much better to concentrate on what we need to learn in the situation. Once we use the mirror to understand what we need, and actually do the work to develop a disowned self, the whole pattern of the relationship will shift.

If we are strongly identified with power, we will attract vulnerable, needy people. This mirror is reflecting our need to recognize and accept our own vulnerability. If and when we do that, the needy people in our lives will either become more empowered, or will move out of our lives. If we are overly vulnerable and disown power, we will find ourselves in a relationship with someone who uses power one way or another. We will feel overwhelmed, controlled, or victimized by them until we own our power, at which point the relationship will either dissolve or become more equal.

As I mentioned in the last chapter, we often seem to gravitate toward a romantic or business partner who has an opposite approach to financial management. If the difference is not too extreme, this can be a complementary and harmonious balance in which we appreciate and learn from each other's strengths. If we are highly polarized, however, it can be painful and frustrating, leading to a great deal of conflict and stress.

Still, it is a gift -- an opportunity to recognize how identified we are with one polarity and a chance to develop the opposite energy we need. Like any relationship issue, it requires that we communicate with one another, and be willing to listen and empathize with each other's feelings and perspective. If we feel stuck in our ability to communicate, it may be an appropriate time to call in a skilled third party -- a therapist, marriage counselor, or mediator -- to help us through. Personally, I find that most of us need help at certain times to get through the deep issues that are reflected in our intimate relationships.

The topic of relationships is a complex and fascinating subject, which I can only begin to touch on. Still, if you grasp the basic idea of how our relationships show us the next steps we need to take in our personal growth, you can begin to use your relationships as powerful guides on your path to true prosperity.

Love Yourself!

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Remember that the goal of this teaching is to facilitate the lessons of unconditional love and acceptance. There is no possibility of accomplishing this toward others if you have not first learned how to unconditionally accept yourself.

Here are seven steps to lead you in that direction.

· 1. Trust in your perceptivity.

· 2. Ruthless truthfulness with yourself.

· 3. Acknowledging that the world and those in it are perfect and making a commitment to be tolerant.

· 4. Allow yourself your own power and constant choice to be appropriate with it.

· 5. Erasing fear and the chief negative feature to live in gentleness and joy.

· 6. Truly experiencing surrender and therefore power and control, which leads to the true integration of personality and essence. This allows you to fully experience the physical plane as well as the truth, love, and beauty of the other planes.

· 7. Humility

1. Trust in your perceptivity.

The first step to self-agape has to do with developing your ability to perceive. Perceiving is not thinking about, nor is it figuring out or scrutinizing. Remember that perceptivity is a function of your emotional center and that perception is a feeling. This is the ability to size up the truth of a situation, experience, or person by instantly and emotionally sensing what is so about them.

You might walk into a business meeting where a number of people are present and you can instantly perceive whom you can trust and whom you should be careful about. You can instantly perceive as well whether you are going to get anywhere with this team or whether you are going to waste time and money with them.

The aphorism "Don't guess, perceive", applies to this step. This is an important way to look at perceptivity. Your society does not encourage people to follow and trust their own intuitions and perceptions. Characteristically older souls, because of their experience, have inherently good perceptivity skills. The problem tends to be that older souls lose confidence in their perceptivity when they live in a young soul society that places a low value on intuition and perception. Thus, this first step to self-agape is to trust and develop the skill of perception.

2. Ruthless truthfulness with yourself.

The second step to self-agape encourages you to be completely honest with yourself. Ruthless truthfulness means the courage to state what is so about yourself and your perceptions at any one time. This truthfulness does not have so much to do with perceiving as it does with telling the truth about what you perceived. Often you perceive accurately but then deny what you saw, or distort is so much that the truth becomes unrecognizable.

You may accurately assess that the business team gathered is a bad mix of personalities and that your endeavors will come to grief. However, if you should slide to the negative poles of your over-leaves and become, for example, ingratiating, you may deny to yourself and the others your original perception. You will act as if everything is fine and proceed foolishly into a mess.

Knowing and telling the truth, however, can be tricky. Because the truth is unique for each individual, one person's truth is another person's lie. In addition, truth is not always constant but changes as the soul matures and gains experience. The truth for a baby soul is different from the truth for a mature soul. The truth for a baby soul is that law, order, and obedience to authority are the most necessary ingredients to live a good life. The truth for a mature soul is that individual search and questioning of authority is necessary for a good life.

Ruthless truthfulness is a form of compassion and need not be seen as a way of putting oneself down or being self-deprecating. Being self-truthful is not beating yourself up but seeing in a detached way what the reality is and what must be done.

3. Acknowledging that the world and the people in it are perfect and making a commitment to be tolerant.

The third step focuses on acknowledging that people are perfect the way they are. Perfect means that each person is following his or her own path just the way that they should. In other words, every person is learning their lessons in his or her chosen ways. The important lesson one person is learning may be the important lesson that another person learned ten lifetimes ago or will learn three lifetimes from now.

Therefore perfection does not have to be a high ideal or look like your pictures of what the world is supposed to be, but in fact what is.

The concept of perfection in "what is" has always been one of the most difficult for students to understand. You may ask, how can the world be perfect if there is killing, war, famine, and disease? How can so-and-so be perfect if he lies, cheats, and steals from me? Should I do nothing, then, to correct or stop these things? The answer is paradoxical. Yes, all these things are being perfectly done and everyone is learning their lessons exactly the way they had hoped (on an essence level, of course). However, part of this perfection is that when you perceive injustice you perfectly move to correct it. Therefore physical reality is a game that everyone gets to play, the unjust and the just, and in the illusion of time one will eventually become the other, and the game continues.

4. Allow yourself your own power and the constant choice to be appropriate with it.

Personal power is the result of telling the truth. Telling the truth gives you presence, and presence is perceived as power. Being appropriate with power is a unique task for each individual.

The more powerful a person is, the simpler the message. The philosophical writings of young souls are often lengthy, complex, and difficult to read. The message of old souls tends to be far simpler. The teachings and concepts of Jesus Christ are immensely powerful and are phrased in the simplest possible terms, as in the parables and in statements such as "Love your neighbor as yourself." The Buddha taught the eightfold path based on the simple truth that to crave is to suffer. Meher Baba said, "Don't worry, be happy." What could be simpler?

5. Erase fear and your chief negative feature to live in gentleness and joy.

Attention and awareness are the chief tools for erasing fear. Fear is a by-product of the false personality and when you shift your identification away from the false personality and toward essence you automatically begin to dissolve fear.

All seven chief features -- self-destruction, greed, self-deprecation, arrogance, martyrdom, impatience, and stubbornness are based on fears. A major life task each lifetime is to erase the neutralizing effect of the chief feature so that you can reach your goal. When you are realizing your life goal, whether it is acceptance or growth, you feel the joy of essence work. The experience of joy always leads to gentleness.

6. Truly experiencing surrender and therefore power and control.

This allows you to fully experience the physical plane as well as the truth, love, and beauty of the other planes.

As you can see, step six contains a paradox, calling on you to experience surrender while at the same time experiencing personal power. You need to be able to hold this contradiction at one and the same time in order to be in control.

In one sense, surrender means no longer resisting the events and experiences of the physical plane. Surrender does not mean giving up, but embracing essence-directed lessons and opportunities. When you stop resisting being in a body and the karma that accompanies it, you begin to rapidly accelerate your spiritual growth. As you accelerate you become more powerful because you learn to fear nothing.

Spiritual growth allows you to access the higher centers -- higher intellectual, higher emotional, and higher moving. As you begin to open up to the higher centers you begin to experience the truth, love, and beauty of all the planes within the Tao.

7. Humility

This seventh step is the experience of completion after you have mastered the first six steps. The seventh step allows you to let go of attachment to that achievement and this neutrality is expressed as humility.

To truly love in this way does NOT mean:

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· To surrender to weakness.

· To accept things that are harmful.

· To encourage weakness or irresponsibility.

· To accept dirt or ugliness in thought, feeling or action.

· To exploit or use people.

· To put people into sleep.

· To tolerate laziness.

Unconditional love causes you to see what has really caused a situation and to see through the outer appearances to the true needs or yourself and others, without criticism of yourself or others . It causes you to see the basic good in yourself and other(s).

Unconditionally loving people see their own errors and joyfully self-correct them .

They love themselves, others and the Source of Life, and therefore the whole of life. In particular, they are inclusive, and can maintain love and goodwill towards both the apparent "victim" and "oppressor" in a situation.

They seek to radiate their inner harmony and joy, peace and healing into any situation - without conditions or expectation of reward, and independently of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others.

They are group conscious and do not react by immediately taking sides.

They serve the cause of peace and goodwill, and can often find ways to a fair solution of conflict that are not available to emotionally charged people. Gandhi taught the use of ahimsa and satyagraha, which is the willingness to cooperate harmlessly with the good intentions of the other for the true benefit of both.

The Forgiveness Process can be seen to be a process which moves us towards this goal of unconditional love.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

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It is the exploration of what this might be that we do from now on in this seminar - and in life after the seminar! Its mystery and depth cannot be explained. Yet we all recognize its presence and its magic. It reveals itself through joy, which can even increase in adversity. We can learn to see ourselves as moving towards becoming able to express it ever more fully. We can learn the steps in developing this quality, which is still in the process of evolving or revealing itself.

Unconditional love is enlarging the self, and an act of will. It is not a feeling or an emotional reaction. Think of the difference between falling in love, and growing in love through all difficulties and conflicts. Unconditional love is an act of mental and spiritual will, it cannot and does not take place upon the emotional level, which is where the problems first register. Unconditional love is extending oneself in the service of the spiritual growth of oneself and/or another, independently of reward or the behavior of others.

“The Path to Love”

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"You were created to be completely loved and completely lovable for your whole life."

All of us need to believe that we are loved and lovable. We began life with confidence on both points, bathed in a mother's love and swaddled in our own innocence. Love was never in question, but over time our certainty clouded. When you look at yourself today, can you still make the two statements every infant could if it had the words?

I am completely loved.

I am completely lovable.

Few people can, for looking at yourself honestly you see flaws that make you less than completely lovable and less than perfectly loved. In many ways this seems right to you, for perfect love is supposedly not of this world. Yet in a deeper sense, what you call flaws are really just the scars of hurts and wounds accumulated over a lifetime. When you look in the mirror, you think you are looking at yourself realistically, but your mirror doesn't reveal the truth that endures despite all hurt:

In a way it is amazing that you do not realize this, because underneath everything you think and feel, innocence is still intact. Time cannot blemish your essence, your portion of spirit. But if you lose sight of this essence, you will mistake yourself for your experiences, and there is no doubt that experience can do much to obliterate love. In an often hostile and brutal world, maintaining innocence seems impossible. Therefore, you find yourself experiencing only so much love and only so much lovability.

This can change.

"In spirit you are unbounded by time and space, untouched by experience. In spirit you are pure love."

Although you perceive yourself in limited terms, as a mind and a body confined in time and space, there is a wealth of spiritual teaching that says otherwise. In spirit you are unbounded by time and space, untouched by experience. In spirit you are pure love.

The reason you do not feel completely loved and completely lovable is that you do not identify with your spiritual nature. Your sense of love has lost one thing it cannot afford to do without: its higher dimension. What would it be like to restore this lost part of yourself?

Mind, body, and spirit would unite--this union creates the love you have to give. You and your beloved would unite--this creates the love you have to share.

In our deepest nature each person is meant to be the hero or heroine of an eternal love story. The story begins in innocence, with a baby's birth into a mother's loving arms. It proceeds through stages of growth, as the young child step' out into the world. With more and more experience the circle of love widens, including first family and friends, then intimate partners, but also taking in love of abstract things, like learning and truth. The ripening journey brings us to love of giving, and the blossoming of higher values, such as compassion, forgiveness, and altruism. Finally there is the direct experience of spirit itself, which is pure love. The journey climaxes in the same knowledge that a baby began with, although it couldn't voice that knowledge: I am love.

You know that you have fully experienced love when you turn into love--that is the spiritual goal of life.

Not many people find the spiritual goal of life. The aching need created by lack of love can only be filled by learning anew to love and be loved. All of us must discover for ourselves that love is a force as real as gravity, and that being upheld in love every day, every hour, every minute is not a fantasy-it is intended as our natural state.

"However good or bad you feel about your relationship, the person you are with at this moment is the "right" person, because he or she is a mirror of who you are inside."

This book is about reviving love stories that should never have faded. The union of self and spirit is not only possible but inevitable. The spiritual meaning of love is best measured by what it can do, which is many things.

Love can heal.

Love can renew.

Love can make us safe.

Love can inspire us with its power.

Love can bring us closer to God.

Everything love is meant to do is possible. Knowing this, however, has only made the gap between love and non-love more painful.

Countless people have experienced love--as pleasure, sex, security, having someone else fulfill their daily needs--without seeing that a special path has opened to them. Socially, the "normal" cycle of love is simply to find a suitable partner, marry, and raise a family. But this social pattern isn't a path, because the experience of marriage and raising a family isn't automatically spiritual. Sad to say, many people enter lifelong relationships in which love fades over time or provides lasting companionship without growing in its inner dimension. A spiritual path has only one reason to exist: it shows the way for the soul to grow. As it grows, more of spiritual truth is revealed, more of the soul's promise is redeemed.

When you find your path, you will also find your love story. People today are consumed by doubts about their relationships: Have I found the right partner? Am I being true to myself? Have I given the best part of myself away? As a result, there is a restless kind of consumer shopping for partners, as if the "right" one can be found by toting up a potential mate's pluses and minuses until the number of pluses matches some mythical standard. The path to love, however, is never about externals. However good or bad you feel about your relationship, the person you are with at this moment is the "right" person, because he or she is a mirror of who you are inside. Our culture hasn't taught us this (as it has failed to teach us so much about spiritual realities). When you struggle with your partner, you are struggling with yourself. Every fault you see in them touches a denied weakness in yourself. Every conflict you wage is an excuse not to face a conflict within. The path to love therefore clears up a monumental mistake that millions of people make--the mistake that someone "out there" is going to give (or take) something that is not already yours. When you truly find love, you find yourself.

Therefore the path to love isn't a choice, for all of us must find out who we are. This is our spiritual destiny. The path can be postponed; you can lose faith in it or even despair that love exists at all. None of that is permanent; only the path is. Doubt reflects the ego, which is bound in time and space; love reflects God, eternal divine essence. The ultimate promise on the path to love is that you will walk in the light of a truth extending beyond any truth your mind presently knows.

How to be Totally Loving

2009-02-06T06:00:00.001-08:00

"The first step in being fully loving is that you must fully love your Self. And this you cannot do so long as you believe that you were born in sin, and are basically evil.

If you believe that humans are by nature non-trustworthy and evil, you will create a society that supports that view, then enact laws, approve rules, adopt regulations, and impose restraints that are justified by it.

If you believe that humans are by nature trustworthy and good, you will create an entirely different kind of society, in which laws, rules, regulations, and restraints are rarely required. The first society will be freedom limiting, the second, freedom giving.

God is fully loving because God is fully free. To be fully free is to be fully joyful, because full freedom creates the space for every joyful experience. Freedom is the basic nature of God. It is also the basic nature of the human soul. The degree to which you are not fully free is the degree to which you are not fully joyful and that is the degree to which you are not fully loving.

To be totally loving means to be fully free.

We should allow everyone to be able to do anything they want.

That is how God loves. God allows everyone to do anything they want.

It is normal in your society to punish. It is abnormal in your society to simply allow a consequence to assert itself to reveal itself.

Punishments are your announcement that you are too impatient to await a natural outcome. Punishments are someone else's decision that one has done wrong.

Consequences are one's own experience that something does not work. That is, it did not produce an intended result.

In other words, we do not learn quickly from punishments, because we see them as something that someone else is doing to us. We learn more readily from consequences, because we see them as something that we are doing to ourselves.

The biggest punishment that you have devised is the withholding of your love. You have shown your offspring that if they behave in a certain way, you will withhold your love. It is by the granting and the withholding of your love that you have sought to regulate and modify, to control and to create, your children's behaviors.

This is something that God would never do.

True love never withdraws itself. And that is what loving fully means.

I am love. One does not have to practice what one is, one simply is it.

I am the love that knows no condition, nor limitation of any kind.

I am totally loving, and to be totally loving means to be willing to give every mature sentient being total freedom to be, do, and have that which they wish.

Even if you know it will be bad for them?

It is not for you to decide that for them.

Not even for our children?

If they are mature sentient beings, no. If they are grown children, no. And if they are not yet mature, the fastest way to lead them to their own maturity is to allow them the freedom to make as many choices as possible as early as practical.

This is what love does. Love lets go. That which you call need, and which you often confuse with love, does the opposite. Need holds on. This is the way you can tell the difference between love and need. Love lets go, need holds on.

So to be totally loving, I let go?

Among other things, yes. Let go of expectation, let go of requirements and rules and regulations that you would impose on your loved ones. For they are not loved if they are restricted. Not totally.

Nor are you; You do not love yourself totally when you restrict yourself, when you grant yourself less than total freedom, in any matter.

Yet remember that choices are not restrictions. So do not call the choices you have made restrictions. And lovingly provide for your offspring, and all your loved ones, all the information that you feel you may have, to help them make good choices - "good" being defined here as those choices most likely to produce a particular desired result, as well as what you know to be their largest desired result: a happy life.

Share what you know about that. Offer what you have come to understand. Yet do not seek to impose your ideas, your rules, your choices upon another And do not withhold your love should another make choices you would not make. Indeed, if you believe their choices to have been poor ones, that is precisely the time to show your love.

That is compassion, and there is no higher expression.

What else does it mean to be totally loving?

It means to be fully present, in every single moment. To be fully aware. To be fully open, honest, transparent. It means to be fully willing, to express the love that is in your heart full out. To be fully loving means to be fully naked, without hidden agenda or hidden motive, without hidden anything.

And You say that it is possible for human beings, for regular people like me, to achieve such love? This is something of which we are all capable?

It is more than that of which you are capable. It is that which you are. This is the nature of Who You Are. The most difficult thing that you do is to deny that. And you are doing this difficult thing every day. It is why your life feels so difficult. Yet when you do the easy thing, when you decide to come from, to be, Who You Really Are - which is pure love, unlimited and unconditioned-then your life becomes easy again. All the turmoil disappears, all the struggle goes away.

This peace may be achieved in any given moment. The way to it may be found by asking a simple question:

What would love do now?

This is a marvelous question, because you will always know the answer. It is like magic. It is cleansing, like a soap. It takes the worry out of being close. It washes away all doubt, all fear. It bathes the mind with the wisdom of the soul.

What a good way of putting that.

It is true. When you ask this question, you will know instantly what to do. In any circumstance, under any condition, you will know. You will be given the answer. You are the answer, and asking the question brings forth that part of you.

Do not second-guess this answer when it instantly comes to you. When you second-guess is when you fool yourself - and can make a fool of yourself. Go into the heart of love, and come from that place in all your choices and decisions, and you will find peace."

Be Careful of Attachments

2009-02-06T05:59:00.002-08:00

Most of us have the inclination to very easily become addicted or attached to that which gives us pleasure, be it people or something else. There is a tendency within us to repeat the good experiences and at times we are prepared to do everything possible to repeat the enjoyable experience in the future.

The consequences are bad enough when the addiction is to some substance and we can see it clearly in others but somehow we fail to realize that when our addiction is to a particular person, we are more foolish than the drug addict. Because a person has a free will and could decide at any time, not to give you the repeat of that pleasure. Not only, because, for some reason he can’t, but it could be for no reason that we could comprehend.

With people, just as with substances, we should never let ourselves be addicted or attached. Addiction is an indication that we have not discovered our self-sufficiency within ourselves. We see ourselves as a person needing to be pitied or taken care of, which leads us to expect or even demand that others do what they can to help us to enjoy life.

It is much easier to be on the giving end but make sure that you do everything possible that the receiver does not become addicted to you. For when he realizes that he cannot be without you, he will want you but also resent you as the drug addict his drugs. He will both dislike himself for being needy and detest you for being his need.

As you can see from my reasoning, why all major religions and philosophical thoughts have this in common: Do for others what you want them to do for you.

Another way to look at this is:

Each one of us claims a certain amount of space for himself, protects it and does not let anyone unauthorized to go over its borders. For instance, you let your loved ones come closer to you than you let a stranger.

Do not cross someone’s border if you where not given that privilege, even if he crosses yours. Be gentle and nice but do not let him into your space much more than he lets you into his. Do not let anyone trample you under their feet. Unless you really think that it would do most good for all.

When you value his and your freedom equally he will have to choose to value your freedom if he is to enjoy your fellowship. Of course, if you have nothing of value for him then there is nothing you can do.

Besides the above principles in relationships, do not let familiarity come between you and your partner or a spouse. Have the attitude that they owe you nothing. Give them your full attention when you are with them.

When your partner comes home after being away for some time, make sure that, if at all possible, you meet her/him at the door with a loving gesture, what ever way it is appropriate in your culture.

Treat them as the most important event in your present life. Could there be something more important in your life? Really? Does not a loving relationship make life worthwhile? Ask any one in love and they’ll tell you that it is so. But why does that love disappear? It disappears because the above principles are not applied.

How to Influence Those You Love

2009-02-06T05:59:00.001-08:00

To whose influence are you most open? Who can tell you just about anything and you gladly listen to them? Are they not the same people in whose presence you enjoy being?

Does the person that you want to influence seeks your presence or avoids it? If he avoids you then most likely he/she will avoid your influence as well. If he is communicating to you to leave him alone, then the best thing you can do for him and yourself is to assure them, if possible, of your love and concern for them and then give them full freedom.

You can influence them only when they seek you out for your input into their life. I am not talking about infants here but even with them, they accept your guidance when they want you.

Develop into the kind of a person that they will enjoy being with. Be just the listener if that is all they would like you to be, for now, and do not give them you opinion or advice unless they ask you for it or you could carefully ask them for permission to share with them what is on your heart or mind.

If they do not want to hear it, then they would not pay attention to your wisdom anyway, especially if you try to force it on them. Do everything possible not to awaken their resistance to what your say or to your presence.

Would you not feel the same if someone infringes on your freedom of being and doing what you like? Unless, of course, you have asked them to disciple you, then you would be on their side working against the resistance within you.

You are wasting your time advising them, unless the person trusts you and believes that you desire them good and sees that you have something of value to add to his own wisdom. Unless they desire your help, do not offer it to them, it’s counterproductive.

There are no exceptions. If you think you know of some examples then look again and you would probably see that it is just an appearance. There is more to it than what it is on the surface.

Person values nothing more than his freedom. To survive, he may temporally go along with some limitation on his freedom but only for a time, until he can attain as much freedom as he possibly can. Do you not do the same? Then what makes you think that in this aspect the other person is different?

In relationships, the most beautiful satisfaction, joy and love are experienced when there is full freedom, without any fear and addiction.

To achieve such relationships, one needs to trust Life and work on himself, so as to be able to give to others what he wants for himself and not be demanding. We are mirroring to one another our inner states. Smile and most will smile back to you.

Love is freedom! If you love someone; and he wants to leave you – let him go; and if he comes back to you later and you want him back then enjoy him, but only for the period of time that he would enjoy being with you and you with him.

Wouldn’t you like to have such a freedom also? So, then give it to others and it will be given to you. That is the Law of Life.