“All it takes to feel loved is to love. We always have the power to feel love. As soon as we stop loving we often don’t feel loved anymore.”  -Betty Peralta

For all the years that I have thought and written about love, it is remarkable to me that I only just recently learned how my own thinking has prevented me from seeing the love in my own life for decades. We all create a storyline that our life mirrors and although it is hard to tell whether the events and circumstances of our life create the story or whether the story attracts the events, the story line becomes so deeply ingrained in our personal history that we often don’t witness its operation. For me, as for most of us, this history began in childhood with my emotionally dysfunctional family, which only grew more overtly unhappy as I aged. By the time I was 13 and the divorce escalated the collective pain into impenetrable defense mechanisms my storyline was set and the filter of my experience of  life was measured by an ever present sense of being excluded, abandoned and alone. These emotional drivers of my life were powerful forces of attraction, as well, and it took years for me to see the choices I continuously made to keep the filter intact.

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“In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.” -Christopher Morley

Beauty is one of the essential graces of living a human life on earth. Beauty is around us everywhere and entraining our own capacity to notice and recognize its presence and its power to transform us begins in our heart. Culturally, we are constantly being mis-directed to a specific, and arguably, limited type of beauty, which parades as fashion in youthful perfect silhouettes, airbrushed wide-eyed models with chiseled features and long wavy flows of hair. This commercial beauty is the kind that drives us either to despairing feelings of not measuring up or seduces us into buying this one more thing that will bring us closer to that exclusive experience of beauty. Yet, most people when asked about where they witness beauty rarely mention Glamour’s cover of the month. Instead, what we hear is about how the evening light transforms the trees in their yard, or how the scent of fresh bread wafted around a corner or the remarkable rose light that canvases the skyline before dark.

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“When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to perceive my world in a new way and to go on.  It is astonishing how elements which seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens.”   -Carl Rogers

Lately, I have had the honor and privilege to create and deliver a workshop on love and positivity for a handful of cancer patients and survivors. Our weekly curriculum is a combination of my years of love contemplation layered with the positivity training about which I have become passionate. It is the most deeply rewarding work I have done in years. I have given up the idea that I have anything to teach anyone, finally understanding that there is no telling anyone anything that they do not wish to know. Instead, I am in awe of the learning that happens within the shared intention of listening deeply both to ourselves and to the sacred intimate connections that emerge without effort, even among strangers when we ask authentic questions about who we are. Increasingly, I am convinced that any idea of planning how things will go is nothing but fiction that I busy my mind with and which ultimately distracts me from the moment at hand.

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“None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward. Because we trust. Because we have Faith.”   -Paulo Coelho

It’s easy to trust when life is giving us what we want, when our relationships are stable and communication flows. Leaning toward trust when our health is broken, our relationship connections are tattered and we can’t find the words to express our own needs is where trust becomes our capacity for resilience. In the moments when life is falling apart, when our best laid plans are dashed and lying in a heap of disappointment that we have the opportunity to grow more resilient. This deep inner work is one of the highest forms of love. It is the work that transforms us into our most authentic and compassionate selves.

I often tell my kids that life is first a problem solving adventure. Watching as they can easily become overwhelmed with life’s adversity has shown me time and again that the outcome often has less to do with the external life circumstances than what we bring to the challenge from inside. I have tried to teach them by example that what transforms all life challenges into something that makes us more whole is our capacity to not give ourselves away. This is a kind of radical trust, tapping your inner resilience, which keeps you present to the truth about yourself and doesn’t allow you to make the situation worse with a downward spiraling story line of victimization and blame.

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“We expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship.” 

-Sherry Turkle

A couple of years ago, not long after I won the Angel Conference I got a text message from a successful local businessman who had agreed to become our CEO and probably had a lot to do with my winning the conference.  He resigned over a text message, not even using the 160 characters allotted, “it wasn’t going to work for him at this time” was all I got.   It was devastating, almost a surreal moment where I had to go back and read the message again.   Did this just end- like that- over a text message?  I felt it physically, a hearty dose of adrenaline mixed with old, deep fears of worthlessness and abandonment.  Although this break up was in the business realm, we all know at least one person who has who had their heart broken over text message.

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 “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” ~Marshall McLuhan

It is hard to imagine that we have already come full circle in our relationship to technology. The relentless drive for more access, smaller devices and ever increasing speed is hitting a wall for many of us. Yet, it isn’t so surprising that the wonder has worn thin when you consider the sheer number of hours that Americans spend in front of a screen. Between 2005 and 2009, our time spent in front of a screen doubled to include at least 8.5 hours per day. Television viewing, likewise, has also steadily increased Nicolas Carr, in his revelatory best-seller; “The Shallows” has documented how these technological trends are shaping not only our days, but the very wiring of our minds.

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“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”  ~Henry David Thoreau, “Economy,” Walden, 1854

Our time is our life.  How we spend the hours of our days is the truest measure of what we create, what we value and how we invest our life energy.  This is why the recent statistics regarding the social takeover of Internet gaming and social media should give us pause for wonder and concern. Facebook, the leader in social media reportedly consumes over 8 Billion minutes of time for its collected membership every single day.  It is hard to imagine what that amount of time represents, so I recalculated it in terms of years- each and every day we give Facebook equates to more than 15,000 years of our collective human attention. Gaming statistics are equally disturbing, Angry Birds, one of the most popular web games of all time has been downloaded 300 million times and is expected to hit one billion downloads. Every hour of every day, we collectively give this game 200 million minutes, or 16 years of our attention. While individually these statistics break down to 20 to 60 minutes, the equation for each of us is more complex than the math. We look to our Internet applications to fill us, to calm us, to entertain us, to connect us in a virtual world, but they somehow also leave us increasingly lonely.

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“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it hardly becomes any of us to talk about the rest of us.” ~Edward Wallis Hoch

My teenage daughter has removed herself from Facebook. Her cold-turkey drop of a technology that had dominated many of her free hours caught my attention. “I noticed how anxious it makes me,” she replied simply when I asked why. “I just want to see what its like; to see if I miss it.” There was surprisingly little withdrawal she said enthusiastically, back to re-reading her favorite books.   “I feel so much better not doing it. I don’t miss it at all.”

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“The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.” -Michel de Montaigne

I am convinced that the most significant and meaningful change we can make within all of our relationships begins with our foundational ability to relate to our selves. This teaching is ancient and lies at the heart of every spiritual discipline.  The Buddha summed it up saying:  “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.” Not only is our capacity for self-love the most challenging healing for most of us to master, but our inattention to this critical inner struggle is often the silent and invisible root of what goes wrong in our other personal and intimate relationships.

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“There is no life as complete as the life that is lived by choice.”  -Unknown

The problem with many relationships is that we don’t trust our own choices. For many couples this lack of trust starts early in the relationship, when we first encounter the difficulties of the relationship or, more challenging still, the foibles of our chosen partner. We question whether we have made a mistake in choosing our partner, and often this question comes in the form of pulling ourselves part way out of the relationship. Look around and notice how many relationships you are in or that you are witness to which are qualified by one or sometimes both partners having one or sometimes both feet out the door.

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