Relationships: Better Communication

Lack of communication is a core reason relationships suffer. When you aren’t clear about expectations, hopes, fears or what you love and want, you and your partner have little chance to come together or, for that matter, even really know each other. Everyone is always expanding and changing and it is communication that allows you both to continue to ‘know’ the always ‘new’ you.

You are always being pulled into distraction; TV, your phone, magazines, jobs, social events, sports, kids and a million other things you allow to keep you from talking. They are easier than having that conversation that might be uncomfortable or might upset your partner.

Find time alone with your partner, undisturbed, and create it regularly. Turn off your phones and make sure you don’t feel rushed to be somewhere else.

Ending the Pain and Fear

Throughout your life you have had experiences that were painful. Those experiences made you first feel unsafe and when you feel unsafe fear arises. It is a natural reaction. You live with expectations that you will be loved, kept safe, be accepted and made to feel worthy, but there are people and circumstances that shake that belief. As a child maybe you were punished or spoken harshly to. Maybe you were made fun of by other children. Maybe as a teen you were rejected by a friend or embarrassed or you failed at something. As an adult you might have been cheated on or divorced. Maybe you lost a child or a spouse. Now the world doesn’t feel safe and loving.

These experiences created pain and that pain became personalized. You recreated yourself to be more loved, accepted and worthy. You hid the parts of you that were rejected by others or what you saw as your flaws. Your pain was the thorn that moved you from living in love to living in fear. It separated you from others because you felt you couldn’t be yourself, authentically, and still be loved. But most importantly the fear separated you from your Self.

We all feel bad, or off, or out of alignment at times. Most times we ignore it and keep doing what we have to. But there is a process you can go through that is immensely helpful in resolving the energy – not just ignoring it.

Stop: Give yourself a minute to become aware, to live consciously in that moment – Stop and create the time and space to experience.  If you ignore the feeling or distract yourself from it, that energy will remain stuck within you.

Look: Have the courage to look at what you are feeling. It’s telling you something. Bring real insight to the situation: What’s the real cause? Non-alignment with your Divinity, resistance to what is, egoic personalization in a circumstance? What’s the false and true story?

The biggest struggle for most people is dealing with the incessant stream of unwanted thoughts in the mind. That goes for any time you try to relax or meditate or simply try to sleep. These thoughts drive you crazy and make you think they are crazy. You resist these thoughts, think they are wrong and try to remove them - or at least fight with them.

The one small change that will produce massive results is to accept your thoughts.

Here’s why:

As you may know, I write a lot about mindfulness – mainly to end your resistance to life and end your suffering. What you are about to read is possibly the most important teaching for your enlightenment. And I am not going to suggest you practice mindfulness. I am going to suggest you go beyond mindfulness.

Most of us spend our time identified with our body mind and emotions. We literally think we are our body, our thoughts and our feelings. Of course this is not the ultimate truth. We are Consciousness, the soul, Atman-Brahman. But we live in the awareness, ‘I Am That’ body, thought and feeling.

‘I am that’ means you are a body, mind and emotion. That limited identification tends to lock you into an ongoing experience lost in a very limited, dissonant, ever-changing experience. Mindfulness has the power to take your attention into the present moment, without judgment. That’s the classical interpretation of Mindfulness. That is immensely beneficial because it takes your attention from ‘I am that’ to ‘I am’. ‘I am’ is one step closer to the soul but it isn’t the soul. ‘I am’ is awareness of yourself now, with the past and future left behind. But it doesn’t eliminate the layers of false identities that are subtler than the body, mind and emotions.

Meditation is about re-connecting. Mindfulness is about creating spaciousness and present moment awareness. Together they create the foundation for transformation to unfold.

Meditation is a journey from an outwardly focused life where the senses are always keeping your awareness focused outside, to bringing the awareness inward and leading it to the Self, a state of pure awareness. Meditation allows the realization of the authentic Self and the essential nature of who you are. Meditation is knowing the Self, realizing who you are and immersing yourself in the light of the Self. Self-realization is your natural state of awareness. It is restoring connection.

Mindfulness is bringing yourself back to the reality of the present moment. It is disengaging from the past and future that capture your awareness, causing you to live in old or future illusory realities and allows you to rest in the now. Now is the only place power resides. Now is the only neutral place from which to make conscious choices, receive what the universe is offering you and seize possibilities. Now is the only place transformation is possible. And mindfulness creates the space for awareness to blossom. You can only move from reaction to response when there is some degree of spaciousness. You can only change your energy to change your life in the present moment.

You have been conditioned to attempt to control life, to mold it into shape, to be the master of conditions and to be in charge of your life. So you are constantly trying to fix and change what is in order to assert control to create an outcome. This process arises from fear and lack of trust. You fear that if you lose control life will spin further out of control and all that you have built and struggled to create will disintegrate before your eyes. You fear the future because you have no trust or belief in the fact that life is looking out for you, unfolding and happening for you, for your evolution, for your expansion and for the expansion of your happiness and awakening.

You watch life and see that, when left alone, life falls apart. If you don’t take care of your house, it becomes shabby and derelict. If you don’t take care of your body, it becomes dirty and disease ridden. If you don’t put energy into your business, it goes into bankruptcy. So you assert control and, to some extent, it works.

But if you feel deeper into this idea of control you will see that it reaches beyond giving energy to something in order to make it thrive. It is true that if you give energy to something it will thrive and this is beneficial. It is the attachment to an outcome that creates the problems and suffering.

I often write articles about consciousness, mind, and science. Usually, I try to paint the big picture, questioning the very way we see ourselves and the world around us. But over time, I'm seeing that if I'm going to write about a deeper perspective on life, I can't not write about the very real movements that are happening in the world around us. Awakening to life has to include awakening in and through life.

One of those very real movements is #MeToo. I've been watching it from afar, noticing it make its way through our society. I began to notice that it was making me silently uncomfortable. When I looked closely, I saw that I was avoiding it, as though it were coming after me. Why was I running?

A trigger is an event that causes a reaction or a response. In you there are unresolved energetic impressions that can become activated and when they become activated they cause a reaction in you. They activate an energy and a feeling or emotion. They cause the mind to respond to the feeling contained within the impression. Most times that feeling is dissonant, because it is unresolved, and so the mind responds in a habitual way of distracting yourself from the feeling or stuffing it back down inside or letting it out and taking others down.

When you distract yourself you over-eat, over-drink, use drugs, gamble, over-indulge in sex, work, TV, social media, or any activity that allows you to ignore what you are feeling. When you stuff it inside you add to the energy’s density and it festers within. When you let it out, it can be destructive to you and others.

A trigger is actually calling for your attention. It is telling you what needs resolution. It is signaling that it is there and it is giving you an opportunity to end your suffering. But there is a natural response in you to want to feel and reach for the pleasant and push away the unpleasant. You naturally resist the unpleasant. This resistance to feeling what is being triggered misses the opportunity for resolution and greater freedom. You will create your life in a way that only allow people, places and things around you that don’t trigger you. But it is the uncomfortable that allows for the greatest growth. It is the trigger that is your teacher, mirroring what is inside you in need of resolution.

Stress is taken for granted these days as “part of life.” And while there is such a thing as “healthy” stress that helps us grow, most of our stress is chronic, damaging, and unhealthy.

Below are 23 signs that indicate unhealthy levels of stress in your life.

Which ones apply to you right now?

Mental Symptoms

#1 – Difficulty concentrating
#2 – Trouble making decisions
#3 – Negative outlook on life
#4 – Anxious or racing thoughts
#5 – Constant worrying

Everything that happens in your life is happening for you. Life is a series of situations that are being created for your awakening. Your destiny is unfolding perfectly for you to return to connection to your essential Self.

Everyone’s life has a destiny which is playing out in harmony with all things. But you have a limited perspective from which you judge everything. When an extreme situation arises in your life you judge it from a human perspective and label it a crises. You see it in a limited perspective. You personalize the situation.

Crisis is accelerated change and change is the vehicle for expansion and evolution to march forward.

Crisis tests your humanity. It is the ultimate trigger for both bringing into awareness what needs resolution and also who you really are; peace, love, abundance, bliss and well-being. Dramatic times create the opening for leaps in expanding awareness. Welcome them, even in the midst of your fear, pain, heart-break and loss. Crisis opens you to seeing deeply.

Fear is a vibrational energy. Fear is an organic, natural energy that is shared by all animals, unlike guilt and shame, which are not natural. When animals experience fear they feel it and shake it off, literally, and move on. We refuse to feel it and it accumulates, causing density. Then we prove to ourselves that the world is an unsafe place. We keep it locked in place to protect us, but then it keeps us locked in place. Fear limits and restricts us. We stay in unsatisfying relationships, unsatisfying jobs, invalidating the universal principle of more. We play life safe. We hold onto our limitations.

When we experience fear we fight, flee or freeze, all of which stop the flow of energy and impede receiving and expansion.

Fear is an immature, primitive reaction. It served primitive man well and served us well as children to protect us. It keeps us safe, but small and needy and weighs us down even as it seems to support us.

Fear exists on the mental level and much of our mental activity is being run on the energy of fear. It is like a membrane that enshrouds us, protecting us from deeper vibrational density within, mostly sadness. It is a self-defense mechanism. 

Courage isn’t the absence of fear. Courage is a willingness to feel fear and move forward anyway. Fear sets up a barrier both to us receiving our magnificence, and experiencing and giving out our Divinity. Fear is a vibrational membrane that locks energy in place. Courage allows our energy to flow by restoring movement. We feel the fear and walk through that barrier of fear. Fear is not wrong but it is limiting. Courage is sustaining momentum and moving through this barrier of fear, moving beyond our comfort zone. Fearlessness equals doing, moving forward, keeping momentum.

Science tells us that the world around us is made of tiny bits of matter called particles. We can get a sense for the truth behind this by breaking up anything around us into smaller parts. The piece of furniture in front of me, for example, can be cut smaller and smaller into ever-finer pieces. No matter how small the piece, however, it will still be particulate - a piece of something.

Science took this process to its endpoint by cutting up matter to the smallest possible size so far, and arrived at what we call elementary particles. Take a look around you. All the objects you see are aggregations of elementary particles that are only about 0.00000000000001 meters wide!

Going beyond the particle

• In this article from Symmetry Magazine, theoretical physicist Greg Gbur says particles "...travel freely through space as a wave."
• According to string theory, particles are the vibrations of a string.
• Invoking mass-energy equivalence, we can say a particle is a dense form of energy.

Accordingly, these waves or vibrations that we localize as particles are also delocalized processes. Let's dig deeper.

There is one symptom of the fear of un-lovability and unworthiness and that is sadness and depression. This wound of un-lovability expresses itself in the feeling of depression. The reason sadness arises from the experience of unworthiness is that it is untrue, yet you believe it. Lack of worth, lack of acceptance, lack of lovability is the great fallacy in life. But you hold worthlessness as a belief on some level and as long as that false belief is in place you will feel the symptoms of sadness and depression.

You believe you are unlovable not because you truly are experiencing yourself authentically that way but because you are gauging and judging your worth based upon the conditioning and experiences of parents, teachers, society, friends, family and spiritual beliefs. You have to fit in, excel, look, act, respond and think like they want you to in order for them to love you. And that is an impossible job with an unattainable result. You live in-authentically to be loved and you dis-connect yourself from your essential self, always living in a created self, seeking to be loved.

When you don’t get what you want you react with anger or you hide yourself away. Either way, deep inside you feel a deep and ever-present sadness. You can’t achieve being loved outside and you aren’t experiencing it inside, where it truly exists, because you are dis-connected to your essential self. As this cycle continues sadness turns to depression.

Worth is determined by how you value something and Self-worth is determined by the extent to which you deem yourself excellent or lacking and how you value yourself.

How do you see yourself? You are, to some extent, living an in-authentic life. You have created an image, a created self to fit in, to be accepted and to be loved. Everything you think, say and do is caught up in your quest to be valued by others. So your self-worth is being determined by an outside person or group of people who have never been able to see the authentic you.

Sometimes we make an intention or a resolution and break it. We feel guilty. We feel bad and angry that we let ourselves or others down, sad we have broken our promise, or fearful we are going down a slippery slope. Maybe we think we have sinned. All this combines to form guilt, a learned and conditioned response to what happens when we violate our sense of integrity. Guilt is self-inflicted. It is not an organic emotion. This dissonant feeling of guilt is telling us we are drifting out of alignment. Guilt is the gap between our behavior and who we want to be. It is an incredible chance to see ourselves clearly and grow.

Guilt impedes our ability to receive everything life has to offer us. Guilt is the foundation for unworthiness and when we feel unworthy, we sabotage life. Guilt locks unworthiness in place. Guilt comes from ourselves, other people, religion, and family. We should place guilt in its proper perspective and realize that we are not the same people we were when that happened, that story is not true, we have learned much since then, and our consciousness has expanded. Recognize the distance between now & then. The Divine doesn’t judge us. On the level of the Divine and Soul, there is only love and acceptance.

When a desire with attachment is thwarted or denied, it turns to anger. Anger arises from dissatisfaction, from not getting what you want or getting what you don’t want, from the expectation unfulfilled. You become more and more attached to your expected outcome and when it doesn’t arrive you get angry. You seek wholeness, completion, and happiness in the fulfillment of desire with attachment and are constantly in dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is the main form of suffering. Dissatisfaction and anger arise from feeling limited, betrayed, from not speaking up, from being pushed around, by not being seen or heard, by being passive and feeling futility. It starts as resentment. Resentment turns into frustration. Frustration turns into anger and becomes rage when not addressed. 

Anger can take on many faces. Some you see as anger and some are more subtle. You think; That person rubs me the wrong way, You roll your eyes, make a sharp remark, you think he’s a thorn in my side, you have a tantrum, feel bitterness, suspicion, hatred, envy, resentment, criticism, annoyance, animosity, sullenness, gruffness, rage, grudges, and you have arguments.

However much you think we are provoked, your anger is always your own creation.

Worry is born from a lack of trust. You have tried to control life, especially when you feel insecure and vulnerable. When you feel your life is unstable you begin to project into the future and worry. You lose trust when you lose stability, when you lose connection to a strong foundation inside. You imagine all the negative possibilities; poverty, homelessness, being alone. You stoke fear-based energies. These arise when you feel disconnected internally and fear arises.

You have such a strong attachment to certain outcomes. When these outcomes appear to be crumbling in front of you, fear strengthens, unworthiness increases and you worry as you see control slipping away, as you see possibilities narrow.

You also identify as your accomplishments, your possessions, your thoughts and your fears. Your self-worth is attached to outcomes and circumstances. So when your attachments and identifications come under assault, when they crumble, you move into worry. You are not your mind, your body, your possessions or your stories. You are limitless love, peace and abundance. When you can move into this authentic identification, you open up to the possibility of peace.