Vera sought out counseling with me because her doctor advised her to discover the emotional causes of her chronic fatigue. Vera, a successful stockbroker, was in a loving 18-year marriage. On the surface, everything in her life was fine. She had enough money, friends and a good relationship with her husband. Yet Vera awoke each morning battling fatigue and depression. She didn’t want to get out of bed because nothing felt meaningful to her.

David sought my help because of chronic feelings of inner emptiness. David is very successful in his manufacturing business, has a good marriage and two adult children. Like Vera, everything seemed fine. Yet the feelings of inner emptiness drove David to overeat, overspend and indulge in porn on the Internet. Like Vera, nothing felt meaningful to him.

Where you’re stuck, believe it or not, you’re blessed. Because here is where you can meet the alchemy of self-love and a whole new level of progress. 

When I’m frustrated, an inner dark knight moans, “You are broken and there are a thousand armies to hold you back.” This ancient foe covers the sun, chills the air. You will always feel this way. You will always be stuck. And yet this dark knight crumples immediately before the magic of willingness. 

Here is the willingness I have used to change my life:

I am willing to walk past my resistance. 

I am willing to believe that something will shift or give way. 

I am willing to stay true to my love.  

Our relationships with one another are often a source of distress. One major form of conflict we experience with others involves their failure to give us the consideration we feel they owe us. We often suffer from thoughts like these: "She is not being respectful enough." "He is not as kind as I want him to be." "They just don't care as deeply as I do." 

However, if we will be courageous enough to see the truth of the next insight, and then admit it into our heart and mind, we can change the real root of this underlying sense of our dissatisfaction with others along with the conflict it generates: Many times the very thing we want from the person we are with -- for example, respect, patience, kindness, love -- is the very thing that we ourselves either lack at the moment or otherwise somehow are withholding from them. The "catch" here is that we are mostly unconscious to our actual inner condition in these encounters with others, and here's a major reason why this happens: 

Hidden in each of us are certain clever "self-concealing devices" whose sole reason for being is to protect our self-image and keep us asleep to ourselves. One of the ways they work is to show us ourselves as blameless while pointing the arrow of insufficiency at someone else.

What is unworthiness? Of course, it is the awareness of a part of your personality that says to itself, “I am unworthy,” for example, I am unworthy of the love that I have in my life, or the wealth that I have, and more commonly, I am unworthy of the happiness that I feel. Thoughts such as “It’s too good to be true, and “This can’t last forever because it is too good” are experiences of unworthiness. You feel unworthy of what the Universe has given you, that you do not deserve it, that the other shoe will fall, and it is only a matter of time before you will get what you really deserve, which will be painful.

Unworthiness is all these things and more. It is the inmost frightening thought that you do not belong, no matter how much you want to belong. That you are an outsider and will always be an outsider. It is the idea that you are flawed and cannot be fixed. It is wanting to be loved and feeling unlovable, or wanting to love and feeling that you are not capable of loving. It is the feeling that no matter what you do, it is not enough, that you are incurably inadequate, intrinsically and permanently flawed. It is the fear of people seeing you as you really are, the belief that if they did, they would not want anything to do with you. All this is the experience of unworthiness, and beneath all of this is the experience of powerlessness – of feeling powerless to be a real part of Life, to love, to be loved, to affect the world, to be heard, to be worth hearing or to have something worthy saying. It is self-loathing, self-hatred, and no matter how difficult this idea is to even consider, it will not leave you somewhere deep inside, and it is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the Earth school, and everyone shares it. This is the pain of powerlessness.

What do you do when your partner shuts you out?

Do you know that being shut out and stonewalled is even more hurtful than being yelled at? Children would rather get yelled at or even hit than ignored. This is why the worst punishment for prisoners is solitary confinement.

Yet, along with overt anger, withdrawal is the most common form of controlling behavior in relationships. Just as the fear of anger keeps partners from addressing issues, so does the fear of a partner’s withdrawal.

Loretta is struggling with this issue.

“I’m in a two year relationship. My main problem is how can I raise an issue without him turning his back on me and walking away? I have to follow him to get my feeling across only to have him ignore me. He says I am never happy with what he does and feels frustrated that he can’t make me happy. The ignoring makes me feel unloved and rejected. I have told him how it makes me feel but he still does it.”

Traditionally the word feminine has been defined as having qualities traditionally ascribed to women, such as sensitivity, gentleness, being demure, modest, or delicate.

This seems so limited and last mid-Century to me.

In my coaching I often come across women who don’t believe they have the right to ask for what they most want, need, and desire, feeling that if they do ask, they will either be rejected or seen as too aggressive.

This happens in both their business life and romantic relationships.

Oy.

I believe that part of the problem comes from being raised on a diet of books and movies with the theme “let’s all become princesses” as we hope that someday Prince Charming will magically arrive and kiss us out of our comas.

Ugh.

Ladies, don’t you think it’s time to embrace your “Inner Queen” and step into your power and fierceness?

When you reach the end of your life, you won’t look back and wish you had made more money, owned a condo in Aspen, or won a Pulitzer prize. None of that will matter. What you will see is all the people you interacted with in your lifetime and how you affected them. In a split second of life review, you will experience yourself as others experienced you and how they felt in being with you. You will know firsthand the love, caring, hurt, or thoughtlessness you energetically transmitted through your words, thoughts, and actions. Your lifetime effect on everyone and everything (including animals, plants, etc.) will be God’s gift to you at the moment of your transition out of the Earth dimension. Instant karma.

Our most fruitful field for self-discovery and life-enhancement is also the one we least understand or know how to use. And yet, virtually every moment offers abundant chances to benefit from it. What is this highly valuable field of opportunity? Our relationships.

Consider these truths: It is within relationships that we grow as individuals in everything valuable, because it is through them that we become stronger and wiser, allowing us to realize a love that transcends our unseen self-limiting self-interests. Yet, even though we may acknowledge the existence of this path to self-perfection, the essential mystery of exactly how to use this endless resource remains obscured.

How do we use our relationships to change the balance sheet of our lives so that for every measure of impatience and intolerance there may be at least an equivalent sum of compassion and consideration? And how do we learn to use our relationships with others to realize a new kind of relationship with ourselves so that we can discover the beautiful fact that who we really are is all we need to be?

Our willingness to work our way through the following twelve special practices -- to strive to use these higher ideals in our relationships with others -- will reward us with the Real Life our hearts longs for. 

The main purpose of these special practices is to show us how to use each developing moment in our relationships with family, friends, and coworkers to consciously change our relationship with them, and more importantly, with ourselves. 

If we are honest we will admit that, with few exceptions, the usual focus of our attention and interactions with others is centered on our selves and the fulfillment of our desires. "How do I feel about you?" "What do I want from him?" or "When will she realize that I know best?" In other words, the mindset of this largely unconscious self, under most circumstances, is: "Me first."

By forever placing its own considerations before considering any other, this self-serving nature remains the master of its own universe, even if all that revolves through it is its own imagined importance.

An alcoholic demanded to return home from a treatment center. His wife felt that being home where she could take care of him was a good thing even though the staff at the center strongly advised otherwise. Once she had assisted with his return, she did her best, as she had over their years together, to love him with tenderness, encourage him to stop drinking, create distractions, and generally try to make him feel good about himself, or at least better. She appealed to his reason (this didn’t work when he was drunk), and addressed the needs of the most frightened parts of his personality when they were active. For example, he would say, “No one cares for me,” and she would say, “Of course people love you.” He would say “I am washed up,” and she would say, “You have so much to give.” He would say, “I can’t start again,” and she would say, “When the going gets tough the tough get going.”

He feared experiencing the emotional pain that years of drinking no longer masked (which is what the center would have required him to do). His wife feared his rage, mood swings, irrationality, and drinking. Three months after his return home, he drowned in his vomit in bed, too incoherent or weak to prevent his death. There was no compassion in this picture. Neighbors may have thought the wife was compassionate, but what would they think if they realized that her choices assisted his death? Her fears and his fears prevented them from listening to professionals who know about alcoholism.

15 Easy Ways to Practice Self-Care

Resilience, our ability to bounce back from difficult times, is linked with self-love. Yet half of women worldwide feel more self-doubt than self-love, and 60% wish they had more respect for themselves, a new survey finds.

Learning to develop self-love is an important skill in a happy, healthy life. You deserve love just as much as everyone else in your life does. So how can you increase the love you feel for yourself?

A good place to start is by taking care of yourself. By taking time to care for yourself and prioritizing your health and happiness, you’ll also have more love to share with the people around you.

Loving yourself can include focusing on self-care, giving yourself positive encouragement, and taking time to yourself. It may look different for each person! Here are a few suggestions for ways you can practice self-love each day:

One of the basic tenets of Inner Bonding is that our feelings are our inner guidance system. Our wounded feelings such as anxiety, depression, fear, guilt, shame, anger, aloneness, emptiness and jealousy – the feelings that we cause with our false beliefs and resulting behavior – inform us that we are being unloving to ourselves, that we are abandoning ourselves in some way.

Our deeper existential core painful feelings – the feelings that are caused by others and events – are also informing us. Our loneliness, heartache, heartbreak, grief, helplessness over others, outrage, and fear of real and present danger offer us an enormous amount of information about what is happening externally.

The struggle to love and forgive is a heroic struggle. It will affect every other relationship in your life. And guess what? For me, all movement comes from forgiving and loving myself. Go figure. 

I wrote some of this piece years ago, while visiting my mother in upstate New York. I wanted to be the perfect daughter. But there’s something about dealing with our families that’s like taking acid. You go on a trip. Things come out of the blue. People sprout extra heads. Then you come back and you think-- what was that all about?

“Those who see themselves as whole make no demands,” teaches A Course in Miracles. Well, clearly, those who seem themselves as threatened wildebeests act accordingly. 

Being with my mother, I can’t believe how quickly I am triggered. I teach workshops in A Course in Miracles , a form of spirituality which emphasizes choosing love instead of “being right.” But as I hide away upstairs in the cutesy, cluttered guest bedroom of my mother’s townhouse, despising every artificial flower I see, I consider a different line of work. Maybe I could be the anti-Gandhi. Because my blood pressure is definitely higher than my consciousness.

Clutter. It blocks the flow of energy and gets in the way of manifesting our deepest desires.

We know how to unclutter the physical items in our lives and now, thanks to my friend Peggy Fitzsimmons, she is sharing with us today her views on letting go of relationship clutter. Enjoy!

“Our souls are inherently free and our true nature is love. And we also have ego minds that orient us towards self-preservation, lack, and scarcity. When the ego is in the driver’s seat, we relate from fear and separation. If conflict, competing, or power struggles are the norm in your relationships, your ego likely has a tight grip on the wheel. When you fail to treat yourself or someone else as a human being, your ego is present in that moment of relationship. In contrast, when the soul is in the driver’s seat, we relate from safety and connection. If your relationships are characterized by harmony, collaboration, and compassion, your soul is at the wheel. When you treat yourself or someone else with kindness, acceptance, and neutrality, your soul is present for that relationship moment.

The ego drives us to accumulate relationship clutter. Here are some examples:

In Disney’s rendition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the dwarves whistled while they worked. They had a magical way of bringing lightness and joy to their workday.

We live in stressful times. For many people, work is serious and stressful. What if we made it more fun? What if we added joy and pleasure?

What is Pleasure?

According to the dictionary, pleasure is “a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment.” Imagine bringing happy satisfaction and enjoyment to your work. How much more energized, happy, and healthy would you feel?

There are 3 types of pleasure: everyday pleasure (like enjoying a beautiful sunset or a funny video), sensual pleasure (like enjoying a relaxing massage), and sexual pleasure. 

Pleasure Increases Productivity 

Our society values productivity over pleasure. However, pleasure leads to improved productivity! 

Pleasure is just as important as hard work, because it raises your vibration, boosts your energy, relieves stress, improves your health and happiness, boosts your creativity, and opens your intuition. When your intuition is flowing with creative ideas, you can accomplish more in less time with less effort. 

Pleasure also brings you into the present moment and away from your stressful worries about the future or regrets of the past.

Have you ever noticed after going on a pleasurable vacation how much more refreshed and energized you feel the first day back at work? This is called the Pleasure Effect. Building pleasure into your workday allows you to experience the Pleasure Effect every day.

If you are overworked and under-pleasured, you will love these 11 tips to add pleasure and joy to your workday, whether you work from home, in an office, or anywhere else.

11 Pleasure Practices to Add Joy to Your Workday

So much of spiritual growth involves letting go of what no longer serves you and embracing that which elevates your energy and raises your consciousness, your compassion, and your experience of boundless love. 

The Full Moon: A Time of Release

When you release what weighs you down — relationships, material possessions, old stories, old patterns of behavior — you make room for that which is meant for you and is part of your highest good. 

Nature, as the saying goes, abhors a vacuum, so when you create space and set your intention on that which you desire to manifest, don’t be surprised to see it move easily toward you, like metal filings aligning with a magnet! Setting your intentions on higher levels of energy and awareness are key to this process. 

An argument between two people (lovers, spouses, family members) is a kind of psychological battle often filled with personal attacks, accusations, and dredging up past mistakes.

When both parties are exhausted, or one grudgingly concedes, the fight ends – for the moment. But nothing has changed; resentment has just gone underground until it’s dug up again, and hostilities soon resume.

But it needn’t be this way. There’s a little known “magic” that can stop any fight in the moment, and helps prevent the next one from getting starting. It’s the result of what we can call “relationship jiu-jitsu.” 

Jiu-jitsu is an ancient Japanese martial art based in “the art of yielding.” The combatants use special “moves” to turn an opponent’s energy back on them.

But here, I’m using the term psychologically, where the opponent isn’t a person we’re fighting. The true “opponent” to be overcome is a negative, lower level of consciousness in each of us that blames the other for the punishing pattern we’re both caught up in. 

To apply “relationship jiu-jitsu,” at least one of us must see we’re about to mindlessly repeat some old pattern that has no winner. So, instead of acting from the negative energy we feel – having seen the futility of throwing it at the other person who will only throw it back at us – we do something completely new: rather than try to “prove” we’re right, we use the moment to discover something about ourselves that will not only help transform us, but maybe the other person as well! 

How did we evolve the most loving brain on the planet?

Humans are the most sociable species on earth – for better and for worse.

On the one hand, we have the greatest capacities for empathy, communication, friendship, romance, complex social structures, and altruism. On the other, we have the greatest capacities for shaming, emotional cruelty, sadism, envy, jealousy, discrimination and other forms of dehumanization, and wholesale slaughter of our fellow humans.

In other words, to paraphrase a teaching story, a wolf of love and a wolf of hate live in the heart of every person.

Many factors shape each of these two wolves, including biological evolution, culture, economics, and personal history. Here, I’d like to comment on key elements of the neural substrate of bonding and love; in next week’s blog, I’ll write about the evolution of aggression and hate; then, in the next several posts, we’ll explore the crucial skill of empathy, perhaps the premier way to feed the wolf of love.

“In order for me to become a vessel, to be used, I had to have my attachments broken. You can’t be a true vessel if you’re attached. You have to be emptied out.”—Julia Butterfly Hill

---

The idea of becoming a vessel, or conduit, for selfless love to flow through you into the world is part of many spiritual teachings. To be of service in this way can become one of the highest aspirations for those on a deeply committed spiritual path. Julia Butterfly Hill, who spent two years living in the branches of a 1500-year-old redwood tree to prevent it from being cut down, has described her own preparation for this dedicated act of service. She let go of all physical attachments in terms of possessions, but then Mother Nature emptied her of everything else in a fierce wind/rain storm that brought her face to face with the possibility of her own death. She was “emptied out” for the task ahead.

I was at a social gathering speaking with Robyn, a woman I had just met. At first, it sounded like she was a very interesting person and a good storyteller, but after a few minutes I noticed that we were not speaking WITH each other – she was speaking AT me.

I also noticed that I was unable to connect with her, and I started to feel very bored. Being used to noticing and acknowledging my feelings, I thanked my inner child for the information she was giving me – my boredom – which was telling me that Robyn was likely addicted to story telling.

Robyn was using story telling as a form of control to capture my attention and drain my energy. She was counting on the fact that she thought I would be too polite to walk away in the middle of her story. She was wrong about my being too polite!

I do try to be polite, but…

No matter how much love you get from others it will never be enough if you aren’t loving yourself.

Seeking love, validation, approval outside of yourself is a recipe for misery.

You are a love addict when you NEED the love, approval of those in your life in order to feel ok. When your sense of self worth is dependent on other’s loving you, you end up needing other people’s love like a drug.

When you think that you are lacking something inside or that you aren’t whole and complete, you end up seeking it outside thinking that person will somehow complete you.

This creates dependency since you have made the other person responsible for your sense of freedom and inner security. You will never feel free living this way.

The love you get outside yourself temporarily fulfills that unmet need deep within you. But ultimately it isn’t lasting. The more you need the love from outside, the less free you are to authentically be yourself.

A million likes on Facebook will never be enough if you don’t like yourself.

The whole world thinking you are amazing will never be enough if you don’t appreciate yourself.

So what do you love about yourself?