Warm Up: Revitalizing Your Thinking

“Love and work are the cornerstones of our human-ness…” -Sigmund Freud

Learning how to stay and grow inside your relationship is an art form, a meditation practice and a work ethic all rolled into one. The nice thing about the work is that it is constructed of basic skill sets you can develop and strengthen just by attending to them and practicing. No one is born a great communicator or even a skilled listener. Many of us grow up in the midst of invisible negative thought patterns that infiltrate our best thinking efforts, without even our notice. Even showing up for your relationship is a skill that gets better when expectations and the meaning of promises are shared and negotiated.

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“For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice – no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.”  ~John Burroughs

It is perhaps the deepest aspect of our human nature to seek security and assurance. This innate need is the foundation of our survival mechanism and fuels the multibillion dollar insurance industry. We spend an increasing percentage of our income to feel covered and yet the unending national conversation about not being sufficiently insured dominates. We look outside of ourselves to secure our future happiness, instead of inside our heart and the relationships that help us become the best part of ourselves. Imagine if some small percentage of all the attention, energy and resources we spend on health, property and life insurance was devoted to implementing a program to insure our loving relationships.

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“I believe that the world was created and approved by love that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.”  -Wendell Berry

Love saves us. Although this line of thinking is usually reserved for religious parables, the truth of life bears out that love is the singular source that enlightens, inspires and guides us to the very best of our selves.  Ask anyone who has had a brush with death what their final moments were filled with, and it becomes clear that life’s most meaningful reckoning happens in our capacity to give and receive love.

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“The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.”   -Thich Nhat Hanh

The majority of relationships fail from our collective inability to make peace with each other. We watch our long-term investments of loving connection wither on the vine rather than take the courageous steps of seeking reconciliation. We are confounded by our egos into believing that being right makes us stronger than being loving. In actuality there is no more powerful exhibition of human capacity than that of forgiveness, which is why it has often been taught as the true action verb of loving.

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“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be….To hold, you must first open your hand. Let go.”  -Lao Tzu

There might not be another word in the English language that evokes as much opening, tenderness and possibility as release. On an emotional level,  the ability to let go is the essence of what real intimacy is made from. Our human longing to hold onto those we love must mature if it is to survive into emotional release. The experience of release is found in all of the tiny, daily acts of forgiveness that most relationships demand. It grows in the trust that offers both partners the encouragement and freedom to follow one’s own heart with no fear of abandoning someone else, or being abandoned. Developing the courage to let go and release is the way to peace in ourselves and in our relationships.

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“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” -Albert Einstein

The sexiest part of the human body lies in the brain, specifically our limbic brain, where our libido resides alongside our processing of emotions, memory and scent. One of the quickest and most assured routes to sexual arousal is through fantasy. We use our imaginative capacity all the time during our waking lives as we envision all the possible futures that our daily life could result in or even in the most negative of circumstances when we allow ourselves to ruminate and overthink bad outcomes for our relationships and aspirations. Yet when it comes to the mysterious sexual fantasy life that lives somewhere in all of us we often keep the door locked.

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“There is a secret about human love that is commonly overlooked: Receiving it is much more scary and threatening than giving it. How many times in your life have you been unable to let in someone’s love or even pushed it away? Much as we proclaim the wish to be truly loved, we are often afraid of that, and so find it difficult to open to love or let it all the way in.” –John Welwood

Most of us are not talented receivers when it comes to love. Whether or not we are able to give love has surprisingly little to do with its polar opposite of being able to open to the love coming towards us. We refuse the love we say we want when we complain about the packaging it arrives in. We refuse the lover we say we want when we blame them for what they are not. We refuse the love and the lover we say we want when we justify our refusal in the storylines of anger, guilt and inadequacy. In fact, most people when pushed to the edge of their refusal to receive love will admit to what may be the most painful universal wound of all – the belief that underneath it all we don’t deserve the love we say we want.

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“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.”  ~James Stephens

Perhaps the single most overlooked attribute that has the potential to transform a life is curiosity. An inborn trait that defines us as small children; it is through our eagerness to explore, desire to understand and to know our world and ourselves that predicts our capacity to learn, change and adapt. Our social network and the depth of the relationships within that network exist in proportion to our curiosity. Like most human attributes, our capacity for curiosity is developmental, which means that it will grow given the proper conditions.

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“Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.”  ~Edward Stanley

If ever there were a part of the body that is underrated for the power and stability they bring to every aspect of life, it would be the hammock of musculature in the pelvis known as the pelvic floor. This group of muscles, ligaments and tendons is the literal foundation for the body core. Although the physiology is almost identical between genders, for women these structures hold up the reproductive organs, as well as the bladder. They are the internal structures that work with the deep abdominal and back muscles to create a sense of core strength.

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“Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.” ~Iris Murdoch

Most of us share a common mis-perception about happiness. We expect to identify it through how we feel rather than viewing it as the perceptual frame of reference that it is. Oddly you could be quite happy at a work task and not feel happy at the moment at all. You may be satisfied with your effort and persistence but frustrated by the problem solving that most projects demand. It may well be happiness but doesn’t make you smile.

It is understandable that we mistake the daily work of thriving for happiness. Advertising consistently misrepresents happiness as bliss. We think “real’ happiness is smiling and laughing together with other like-minded, attractive people in nice cars and clothing. In actuality, bliss, like acute anxiety or deep sadness, is a rare moment in the texture of our daily lives. Intense emotions, whether positive or negative are the threads in the complex and mysterious fabric of life. They teach us how to find our center and provide a guide by which to navigate.

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