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Introduction

If you can love one person you can love a thousand.  We live in a sea an ocean of thought ambition, technology and passion. And within the turbulence we call life we are all hoping for a relationship that lasts forever, we know this relationship we feel it in our bones it is part of us.  Love is at the heart of our very being.  Sometimes we are confronted at every level, but we can’t give up, we must never give up the idea that we can have a sacred relationship and share love in a way that it was meant to be.  The challenge of this circumstance can seem like a selfish ambition until we realize that the desire for love in our relationships and our personal commitment to a better world are one and the same thing.  The experience we create in our homes affects the world far, far, far, beyond the boundaries of our own reality.  

It is time to change our perception of relationships. It is time for us to recognize the importance and the impact of our relationships on the world around us. Just having more love in our everyday life can have a greater impact than we considered possible.  Our relationships have an effect on the environment that we create around us and so the world.  

What we do day to day in our relationships is far more important than we can appreciate at first glance. On a global healing scale, we may feel powerless to act, but our actions in everyday life reveal us and have an affect on the world whether we intend it or not. Violence causes violence, anger causes anger, love creates harmony. Therefore harmony in our relationships is far more important than just how we feel. It affects our children, our work and our extended family, the world, more than we can know. 

Harmony in love, sacred relationship, is an activity not just a feeling. Harmony at home means that we need to accept the diversities between ourselves and one other human being, and if we can love through this challenge, we can love many. Love one, love thousands. It begins at home. 

We need to rise above the separatism and righteousness to live in harmony with nature. There are just five simple laws of nature that can help us bring the love we seek and so wish to give our beloved, into action. Those laws do not conflict with religion but sit above it, an umbrella, an insight to what life can be like before the religions divide life into competitions for different Gods and Goddess. 

Natural law is woven into the fabric of everything. At a personal level we have choice, and at this level religious leadership can be healthy. However, at a grander level, we have no choice but to be obedient to the laws that existed before humans translated them, defined them and divided them into different faiths. Nothing, even if we try, can defy those laws.  They are the truth behind the truth, they are what exists before religion.  

The laws of nature are the key to great relationships. To fall in love is easy but to stay in love we need to understand these laws of nature.  They help us grow through emotional challenge, rise above uncertainty, return to the state of in-love anytime we choose. Those laws of nature are actually natural. We know them already, however, they can be in direct contradiction to most of the emotion we have and therefore we can find ourselves rejecting what is natural. This is the source of disharmony, living in conflict with what is natural. 

There are many people who, in their righteous stand, argue that they are right. The environmental lobby, the anti globalization lobby, the save the whale lobby, the chop the rainforest lobby. These groups fight for right, they have no trust in nature, or the powers higher than themselves. Their small views of life separate them into war and enemy. They are stuck in their own specialized perspective and their relationships at home would reveal the same broken link. Disharmony in the human heart  is an infection that pervades a whole life, not just an attitude to the environment. (as an example)

Love can exist everywhere, however, it requires more than love to stay in a relationship. It requires capacities and skill to deal with life. It certainly requires the capacity to find the right occupation and to be happy at work.  These five laws of nature are an offer to help you know what is already within you. They are a way of helping you act with consciousness, love and an open heart in all your life, not just at home.

If you can find true harmony with one person, you can find harmony with a thousand.  Then you can really honor diversity and in doing so, move forward in love and life without so much violent righteousness. Let nature be your guide recognize that love and harmony is a life style.

Chapter 1 – Back to Nature – Stillness –  the art of Falling in Love 

Life in the city has been strangely cut off from nature, so we have to learn, actually relearn the practice of mastery of perfect stillness.  Stillness is an essential art and a great asset for any great relationship because it leads to spontaneous acts of falling in love over and over and over again.  The key, in perfect stillness is to learn how to do nothing, to sit under a beautiful tree, to watch the movement of water, to listen to rain on an old tin roof. It is like lying on your back dreaming, but you do it together, and in those moments with the phone turned off and nothing to do, you and your lover can fall in love any time you choose. The key is to be doing nothing. 

Be still, Perfect Stillness is about the art of falling in love over and over, and over and over again. It means that the first time you fall in love with somebody is not the best time, it is just the first time. Perfect stillness is also about falling in love with life. Being alone, with friends, at work with an open heart.

In our lives we experience that connection with nature, that perfect moment of truth,  it’s called falling in love. Falling, because it bypasses the ego, now this involves your mind, and your emotions they are completely out of the way and this is an art we have lost. In the moment of egoless ness, there is no time, so you are not worrying about the time, there is no space so you are not worrying about who you are and where you are and where you are going and where you came from.  So all your worries and particularly all your expectations are gone. Now think about this, all your expectations what does it mean? You are not expecting yourself to fall in love, you are not expecting yourself not to fall in love, you are not expecting to be sexy, you are not expecting to have great experiences, you are just lying there surrendering. So you have to create an environment, and this what a lot of people don’t have in their lives, an environment where they can relax and bond in stillness. The kids come in, the phone will ring, they don’t know how to turn off or they don’t have the opportunity to turn off.  In Perfect Stillness, you are for that one perfect moment in stillness, completely stress free, and disarmed, totally in love. Now you may not think you are in love but this is what we are going to learn.

Reconnecting with nature, and the Perfect Stillness it creates, is also a physical experience. What do you see when you see someone who has found stillness or fallen in love? Their aging drops away, their posture changes, their whole mechanism operates differently, it is a totally beautiful moment, the stillness of love.  So this is the foundation on which I am suggesting we can base a relationship, the sacred experience of being in nature, when everything disappears stillness comes over you and you are just there, in love.  It doesn’t mean making love although we do find perfect stillness at some stages during the time of making love, but this is actually the act of sitting down, lying down, under a tree, in the lounge, everything off, no fire burning, no frills and fancies, no Champaign to dull the mind, just emptiness, simply being together.

That’s why we call falling in love sacred. In this moment the ego just looses control and without warning we fall past the defenses and become in love. Actually we can fall in love anytime we like because that love in our heart is always there. It is hidden behind our mind, our beliefs and our expectations and our worries and our fears all those things that construct the ego sit in front of our love, so for most of us falling in love happens when we least expect it. When we are relax when there is no tension, agitation, or ambition or struggle. Now in this sacred moment we are fully present in love there is no time, no space, no fear, no judgment.  We are spontaneously thrown back into ourselves, and this is the great sign that we are lost, disorientated, we can’t remember our own name, we don’t even remember where we are, time and space vanish, and out of the thin air we fall in love. It is the most amazing experience in life, in fact many yogis and meditators go trying finding the space, but you can find it every, every day by falling in love.  

When you fall in love, our friends laugh at us, they see us, they see us, we are gone, when we fall in love, we are illogical, we are not even rational, And here we are enlightened, just for a few seconds, hours or days, we are enlightened and it does not take a partner to cause this to happen. When you fall in love the whole mechanisms of the ego is gone. You have touched your being and your center and you feel you are at the source of truth. That means you don’t care about global warming, you don’t care whether the children got home from school, you don’t care about your bank account, you don’t care about that contract at work, you are absolutely there in presence. Now, if you can achieve this experience which is not so difficult, a bliss fills you, a fragrance surrounds you, suddenly you are not the same person you were and it hits you very deeply. That is why love transforms so much of life, if you are able to feel in love, you can not hide it is impossible, this is what people fear when they feel love, they fear being exposed (like some single people who had a bad relationship and they fear being exposed again so they kind a stay single) or some people dance around love with a bonk mate or something like that so that they can have the physical intimacy but escape the exposure of love. That is not what we are talking about we are not interested in this book about physical experiences that lack the experience of total bliss and stillness we are interested in the whole bundle, true love, heart, mind, body and soul.  

This is what happens when you fall in love; the mind can’t work, its whole function becomes useless, it is absurd, you don’t even need it, the person that you were longing to become and the person you were longing for are all here. Now what? Your heart was searching for love and now it is here, the ego can’t think, it goes into shock, but this is it spontaneous truth, it is sacred. You can be the bravest hero the greatest tycoon, the greatest athlete even a rock idol or a movie star, but love does not care who you are, or what you do it cuts through you it reveals you and brings our whole being into the vulnerable space of uncertainty, you are lost, your feet leave the floor, this is what you dreamed of and only your ego can save you, prevent it or stop you. Lets be clear about this point, the ego means the self; you have a working-self, you have a healthy-self, you have a business banking-self, you might have a socially conscious self you might have a father or mother and therefore you will have a parenting-self, a self-self, so we are talking about falling pass these selves, these selves we define as the ego.  

And this is what we have to deal with in relationship. The problem we have is that the ego has become so strong, and disguised, we can’t tell which is real and which is ego. We go to spirituality which is meant to eliminate the ego, but spirituality and yoga just becomes another ego trip, legitimized, so instead of breaking down the ego, we most often build it up. The reason for this uncontrolled dominance of the ego is consumerism. We desire more of everything, and the king or queen of desire, is the ego.

Once we were connected to nature, the ego remained a valuable asset, to be used when needed, but held in check by our connection to the earth, the spirit of nature lived in us and we in it, but life in the city has been cut off from nature. The ego is in control of most of us. We have these buildings that have taken the place of mountains and the roar of traffic has been substituted for that of a beautiful stream so something definitely happens to city people because they become brutal and polished they have church and museums and drinks and theater and beautiful clothes and endless shops, there is people everywhere in the buildings in the streets in the rooms but while all this happens a beautiful cloud sails across the sky and few people look up. There is the rush and turmoil and so little time for stillness. 

I was traveling recently and a friend asked me to go for a morning walk, it was an awesome park we went through, we left home and we started talking about the corporate strategy of his business and new ideas for the renovations of his house and a lot of personal things, we walked for an hour and I listened to all his information and was very intriguing and when we arrived to his house I asked him if he would like to do the walk my way all over again.  So this time I asked him to follow my guide in silence, we got to a tree I put my hand on the tree and motioned to him to do the same, just to touch the bark to get his fingers dirty, to feel the texture, imagine the journey the bark had been through just to get where it was now. Then I pointed to the bird that was shuffling in the leaves near by, a beautiful bright color bird and we both smiled at each other and I saw the glint in his eye that was not there before and you know something, suddenly his physical being started to change. We walked on and came to a grassy hilltop.  It was damp from the rain and I lied on it I soaked myself in the warmth and the smell and rolled down the hill like a kid I began to laugh he followed reluctantly to get wet but in the end he was soaked and he was laughing his head off and after a while we walked on, and there was a bridge and we stormed right over that bridge on that first time round but this time we stepped off the bridge and I put my feet into the small creek and searched below the crystal clear water for rocks and stones and he did the same.  

This is a grat example of how it feels just reconnecting with nature. The spontaneous act of  reconnecting with nature, and therefore falling in love, can become an essential part of your daily routine. The idea of meditation at the beginning of the day is more than sitting with your legs crossed staring at a statue or some icon that you have invented, trying to become a person you are not. The idea is to be yourself and to go for a little walk and find things you like and find things you admire, take the Ipod throw it away for a few minutes in the morning, just experience life and try to get life, nature itself to be your meditation tool.  When you commit to be open you truly back fall in love from any time you choose, we go straight pass the ego, straight pass the intellect and that is what we are trying to practice in the morning out there.  There is no me, there is no I what do I think, what do I feel what is happening to me, it is all gone, we are looking at nature we are experiencing the reality of life around us that is the meditation we are all searching for.  

Now the great thing about getting up everyday and connecting with nature, is that finding stillness in the morning sets you up for the whole day. It’s like practicing real life meditation in circumstances like walking around the house, lighting a candle looking at a picture you love, picking a flower, touching the earth even sipping a glass of water or eating a piece of fruit, the great thing about this everyday stillness it means it is not circumstantial.  Now we so often become dependent on practices that make us feel good that require a room or a teacher or an environment we go off to but really what we have to try to do is be there now, in our practice, be there everyday, and be able to return, if we loose our stillness, be able to return to it, whether we are on the bus, or the tram or in the back of the taxi, driving the car and something happens, we need to click get back into the stillness and that is why the practice of connecting with nature everyday, especially in the morning, is so important for you.  

You ask yourself this question, when was the last time that you and your lover lay on the grass on a starlit night, looked up the heavens and opened your heart to love without action, lying there on the soft grass looking out from a tiny home the perfection is obvious even to a troubled soul and under the canapé of the stars one can reach out way, way beyond this little perspective of life and embrace all that humanity has to offer.  We realize, we are just a fragment, a fragment of such a big story, story of love as told in this book. Fragmented humanity unifies with magnificent understandings of that universal vista.  Look at the stars and think how small is this planet how small must my worries be and ultimately how small are my dramas that keep me from living to my fullest potential to understand the whole of creation not just a fragment of it, it is a great gift.   Look up and see the universe, see your life, your religion and your world in a bigger context, a great magnificent order.  Think about your worries and your judgments and your opinions and your values and think about them in terms of tree billions years of creation nature has been running this planet and another 3 to 8 billion years they said it is going to be here and we are worried about the woodchoppers and we are worried about the whales how biased and self righteous have we become no wonder we are finding it hard to really surrender to a moment of stillness in love we think we are in control.  

Lying there, far away from the claustrophobia of air conditioned offices, digitized button pushing television watching lounge rooms let your thoughts drift don’t try and do anything, surrender. More and more in love you become, be alive in this world of nature, let your heart and mind wonder and stay warm, just rest.  

Consider that to find love within ourselves and therefore promote love within our relationships we must learn to be alone because when we are lying there underneath the stars and we are lying there looking up at the stars we are alone, even if we are beside somebody.  Then our mind is no longer in the action of frustration if we can really, really come to peace within ourselves.  

We often stay busy in order to avoid love, sometimes in this stillness of being alone we don’t like our own company and there is no one to blame for it.  Like the monk that used to meditate on a boat and one day in deep water, when the boat was floating he fell asleep and it bang into something he woke up and raged and started to scream before he turned around and realized that there was no one to scream at and he realized that the boat had become his guru.  

A great example of the power of  reconnecting with nature is when I take people up to Nepal, it is the most beautiful place on earth, and I take them up and along the way they are talking and they are chatting and they are excited about seeing it and we walk through villages and trek up mountains and then they get to the sacred lakes and they are chatting and they are talking and they take a few photos and then I watched and they just seat on the rock by the edge of the aqua blue water surrounded by the most beautiful mountains in the world and they stop, they stop, they stop thinking they stop talking they stop photographing they even are not hungry for the few moments that we are seating there, and they see the miracle and they experience the awe the absolute awe of being in love.  But we all can’t go to Nepal or seat in Zen retreats every five minutes to learn this art of stillness all we need to do is seat in nature.  Lie under the stars, sit by a lake, go into a local park during lunchtime and watch a tree grow.  You will find it there, nature will guide you, if you are in love, it will show, in your eyes, in your face, in the way you walk, in the way that you see everything and the way that you feel about life. Try to avoid staying in an office from 8 o’clock in the morning until 6 o’clock at night without one breath of fresh air, even going down the elevator and walking out the front door of the office and standing under a tree for a couple of minutes will help. 

The stillness that comes from nature, helps in dealing with emotional drama too. More than 20 years ago I went though a bad divorced. One day I was a successful, wealthy, healthy and happy businessman, the next I was not.  My wife and my three children, I loved them so much, sailed off into the wide blue yonder. I was just broken down and I could not think of what to do. I sat on a beach one day it was 2 years since they had left and I was still going through hell on earth, and I sat on a beach and I looked up and there was the moon in the middle of the morning, and I was so surprised to see it was a full moon and I looked up and I thought, my kids are looking at that moon, in fact, I bet they are looking at it right now, somewhere in the world and I thought I am not disconnected from them at all. We are all connected it is just that I am physically not with them I am not able to control them and in some senses what I expect from them has no bearing and then my heart so opened, it is quite amazing, my heart so opened because all I could do was feel love for my children and the guilt went away and the blame went away and the anger and the disappointment went away, and all of the sudden I was seating in absolute stillness and I understood what it was like to get behind my ego.  I understood what it was like to get passed my father-self my money-self my parent-self my partner-self I understood that what was behind that was pure love and this is the journey of this first chapter getting passed the ego, getting passed the busyness appreciating the fact that great relationships need moments of nothingness, absolute emptiness in order to celebrate the very foundation of  my heart and soul, in love.

Chapter 2  Respect –Romance in a busy world

Nature grows at the border of chaos and order. No matter what happens, everything evolves at that border. We have no choice about it but if we distance ourselves from nature, and all that it represents we can get very heady, and forget some very important truths. Our relationships, business and health all evolve along this continuum, along an invisible line between order and chaos, support and challenge. If we are disconnected from the laws of nature, we’ll wobble along that line happy one day, sad the next. Totally emotionally up and down and this is sabotage for our relationships.

We need to stay consistent, committed to quality control in our relationships and doing so is automatic to the person who remains connected to the earth. Nature always makes us humble and thankful. I am a country person and people in the country are usually thankful for small blessings. They know how easy their luck can change.

Putting all this aside, relationships in the city are notoriously volatile. We’re not connected to nature in our cars, offices, boats, exercise gyms, yoga classes, conferences, hotels, buses and love life. We’re busy, and busy means gym equipment and yoga gear, get it done as fast as possible so we can do something else. We lose ourselves in ourselves. We lose the preciousness of eye contact because we’re disconnected from nature. We just the world and pollution and green house gas, but our own lives are full of gas too. We’re the pollution, disconnected from the beauty and slowness of nature.

Love is cumulative and little acts of forgetfulness add up to big problems of painfulness. Our relationships are a perfect mirror of the wonder of nature. And in nature, little things count. So, don’t wait for Christmas, valentines day, birthdays or especial occasions to show your partner that you love them.  Make everyday of your life a valentines day, act like today is the most important day of your relationship; turn up on time, do something kind, prioritize your lover over your work all compromises in a relationship add to its demise.  Never forget your relationship is the most important thing in the universe.  

Desire is the mind playing tricks and one of the worst tricks desire creates is consumption. Never happy with what we’ve got, we often hunt for more, even when we don’t need it. We get on the “got to have more” treadmill and can’t get off. Too many people come to their relationships wanting to change something or comparing what they have with some ideal that exists in their mind, always wanting more and better.  But such a perspective will sabotage their love they have.  Sacred relationships grow from the spiritual perspective that nothing is missing.  Even the poorest person is wealthy in some form and therefore can appreciate life; even the most terrible person is beautiful in some form and therefore can be appreciated. This is the universal law, the law of abundance.  The person with abundance does not look into the world and see what is missing; to them there is nothing missing it is beautiful, perfect.  Things just change in form, this is the abundance we crave, this is how we fall in love abundance is what the swami in the cave lives for, because he or she lives for the reality that the universe is an abundant place.  God exists in everything, therefore, there is no mine and yours, there are no boundaries.  In abundance there are no boundaries, no hate, nothing to change, just pure love. 

Sacred love demands that you find appreciation for what you already have and therefore have an abundant mentality. By being thankful for what you already have you close the appetite for wanting to fix the world.  

In modern society one is told to look outside oneself for happiness, it is an approach to life that causes so much suffering because it begins with the premise I don’t have something or something is wrong.  Automatically there is a loss, because I have the premise that I am without and if I do the right thing, I will have, and then I will be happy.  This mindset kills romance and it certainly kills love. An abundant mind set brings out a smile about life a sense of humor the ability to see beauty everywhere any time then appreciation is natural even in the most challenging situations you can hold the awareness of appreciation.  This is romance there is nothing missing.  It just changes in form.  

Nothing escapes, all of nature is interconnected, nothing is missing, it just changes in form. When you understand this transparency in everyday life, you don’t get bent out of shape so easy, you get to process the drama that keeps many people out of love.  Life becomes transparent you don’t get caught. With this mindset, you see with objectivity, respond with spontaneity and honest intent. You appreciate people for who they are not for who they could be. Within stillness you respond with love there is no in between.  This is the spiritual perspective that all the great saints and all the great leaders that have walked this planet in a spiritual sense at least have demonstrated. 

Love needs appreciation; you are perfect, your lover is perfect, you are both perfect and everything else is perfect.  Sometimes we don’t see that perfection and then we start being critical we start wanting to rescue people, we start trying to change what is, but that is the mindset that causes relationships to fail. It is the delusional mindset and this is the mindset that sabotages a relationships.  Simple techniques can help; it is not an attainment but a discovery.  A discovery that there are two sides to everything, nothing is missing there is always two sides and the wise person knows that there are two sides and appreciates the positive.  This is the core of the most loving and potent state of mind that you can create. Spiritually it begins with the acceptance of everyone, including yourself and your partner possess every human trade.   

Even if you could work for the whole of your life and try to eliminate all the negative things within you, nothing is ever missing it just changes form.  

In our relationships we often feel we are not getting what we want but this is not the truth.  We are just not getting what we want in the form that we want it in, but we are getting what we want it just may not be in the form we asked for it.  For example, we might be wanting our partner to contribute in the cleaning of the house and we say you are not cleaning the house, but that is not the truth. Their house cleaning might be financial, their house cleaning might be in their consideration and love for you, their house cleaning might be taking you to a café or restaurant, so it is not the lack of something happening it is just that we want to change the form of it.  And the truth of the matter is, if you don’t appreciate things the way you have them you won’t get them the way you want them.  

So it is fine to say, “it is not happening the way I wanted it” but it’s not fine to say “it is not happening”.  Being critical complaining of something missing it is actually manifesting loss. 

If you see that you are getting what you want in a different form, you are going to think abundance, but if you are always hunting, wanting change, then you’re always going to come into your relationships with negativity and complaints. Then it’s like a broken record, this is missing, that is missing, this is not good enough and this eventually will drive your partner away.  Whatever you don’t appreciate depreciates.  A great example of this is affection.  Let’s say you want a affection from your lover and you believe that they are not giving it to you, and the only way you can comprehend that affection can take place between two people is with contact so you start grumbling that your lover is not affectionate, complaining because your friends have affection you see them kissing in the park, you say why we don’t kiss in the park we are not affectionate.  But your lover might have different ways of expressing their affection, it might be in a sense of protectiveness or strength, or it might be in the sense of working for the long term to find you financial security. Nothing is missing, the real question is what form is it in.  You are having all the affection you can dream of right now, no mater how your relationship looks, it is just in a form you may not appreciate. Real abundance means looking for what you are getting at and being thankful, for the form that it is coming in.

People become as you treat them. Always remember this because if you are walking around bemoaning the fact that you are not getting what you want in the form you want it, then you guarantee that your partner will withdraw from you.  People become as you treat them if you don’t appreciate what you’ve got,  you will lose it.  And it is the same with people, if you keep criticizing and complaining they will become belittled and they will start acting and withdraw the very thing that you will like them to present to you.  Even if the sky falls and they leave you, if you really love them you will let go happily. 

Love has no expectations; all pain in relationships comes from blocked love so an abundant mindset is a wonderful opportunity to bring devotion to your relationships.  The real issue is whether you are prepared to make the abundance between you and your lover a priority in your life. That means to change your mind when you see something that you don’t like.  Look for the positive, look for what you can appreciate and even in the negatives there is a benefit there is a gift, even appreciate the down side.  In the whole universe every molecule has a place a role a gift if you can just be thankful for what you have for the blessing of life it self and remind yourself of how lucky you are then your whole life will change. Even the immune system of the human body is hard wired into the mind of appreciation so when we have thankfulness for what we have our health improves.  When it comes to romance every thought you think every action you take and every feeling that passes though your mind and heart affects your relationship. Romance it is not limited to the small duties and tasks that you perform, romance includes the way you think the way you feel and you have control of this things.  Remembering what you appreciate grows. Your thoughts carry with them a power far greater than most people can guess at.  Truth comes to the surface whether we are running or kissing or talking or reading or working or making love, so choosing our thoughts and our feelings is a vital ingredient of romance.  

This is exactly what you can learn; whatever you are doing now do it with love, do it with appreciation, don’t avoid it, don’t run away from things, appreciate what you’ve got, appreciate the other person, appreciate yourself and in this ways your choices will be made wisely.  It is the same as if a little pebble is thrown into the sea and stirs the water, it is hard to comprehend the extent to which this ripple is going to travel, even a great ocean is influenced by a single stone. We may not see it, we may not be conscious of it but a single thought given the right conditions has the potential to build into a huge tidal wave of opportunities.  We have to monitor our thoughts, be mindful about the way we think of our partner. Any negative thought that we hang on to is going to sabotage our relationship.  

You can control your mind and therefore create a loving relationship but if you can’t control your mind if you are emotional, and your emotions control your life then you are going to have a seesaw “topsi turvi” relationship most of which will end up in emotional disaster. This is an important consideration because how you use your mind, (which controls your emotions by the way), has an effect in your relationship more than any other thing that you do.  Without saying a word you protect and your project and your feelings and your emotions are transmitted to everyone around you but most particularly your partner.  It is all about the way we think the mind set we bring to life. If you can reconnect yourself with nature, get out and get your hands dirty in the garden or simply enjoy a walk in a park, you’ll get to calm your mind, and your thoughts will automatically improve.

If you could, in your daily life examine every action that has created a disagreeable attitude or caused negativity or lack of appreciation and you changed those, it would change your life forever.  A loving human being is not exclusive a loving human being is a loving human being, and they love everybody, so this attitude of appreciation crosses all the boundaries of life, even sitting alone you would be sitting there with a feeling of appreciating of what is before you. 

Every word we speak is important it is not only our thoughts, but if we speak with negativity if we focus our language on negative things, if we talk about problems of friends and problems in the newspaper and talk about all the things like the woes of the world, we are eventually going to sabotage our health.

Staying in love is a matter of creating a loving attitude it is a way of being it is like the culture of your family.  It is more than encouragement it is appreciation, it is more than gratitude for what is good, it is appreciation for both good and bad news.  The four most important ingredients that bring romance and harmony into a relationship are kindness, care and compassion, contentment and of course gentleness.

Chapter 3 – Healing

This chapter is really about healing.  Nature reveals that in every relationship, no matter how small, challenge happens.  You should not beat yourself up, or your partner for that matter, if you are being challenged.  I spent my life searching for ways to reduce disasters and trauma, and so, in this chapter I want to share what I found about challenge, healing and minimizing the odds of disaster.

Everything grows. Every person grows physically, every tree. Even rocks erode and grow into something else. The whole universe grows. That growth is essential. So, our relationships grow too. There is an average growth rate of everything on earth. It’s called the golden mean, and it’s a mathematical thing. Pythagorus and a whole bunch of people far more clever than me, discovered it, and can explain it. The key is, that growth happens and it happens at a certain rate.

When something doesn’t grow, it either dies (nature destroys anything that doesn’t fulfill its purpose) or it gets a mighty shunt. This shunt, we call disaster and trauma. So, we can avoid disaster and trauma by avoiding the shunt that comes from lack of growth. Growth means, in a relationship at least, change.

Stuff happens in relationships and it is not unhealthy, let me explain why.  You know a tsunami? This happens because the small steps of change did not happen and therefore a huge adjustment needs to happen. Like an earthquake or a volcano or even a social disturbance in a whole nation like 9/11 can actually reveal that small steps of change didn’t happen and a huge step of change had to transpire.  So in a relationship, if you have relative peace or you are being distracted by your work or bringing children up well in the world or whatever, and suddenly there is a huge challenge facing you, all that it’s  revealing is that the small steps of change did not take place and now it’s a big step.  Work through that big step and you will be back on track and everything will be fine.  

So, relationships are organisms that grow. When they don’t grow, drama and breakups happen. You are going to learn how to grow a relationship in the next chapter about dreams so, for now, we’re going to discuss how to move (grow) through the challenges of a relationship assuming that, you didn’t grow fast enough and you got a shunt.

Two people who are in a love-centered relationship can grow enlightened from all those challenges. Many people run away from a relationship because the challenge is there but that is not the right time to leave.  If you overcome the challenge and get back on track you’ll find absolute love for your partner and make wise choices because now you are not in reaction.  You know love is more that just a commitment to a good life, there is a huge integrity to love that reaches past the troubles too. If you can recover from a shunt, all the fragility and righteousness of the ego will be diminished, and beyond all the pain and the suffering love can reach right through all that stuff and maintains a long term sustainability.

Healing challenge is one of the most important steps along the way in relationships.  Love is never fixed in a relationship so challenge is actually part of nature’s plan to grow love deeper. You will find with people who sustain long term relationships that they have gone through enormous challenges and if you ask them to look back on their lives and say what took the to this great place this long beautiful relationship they have, they will declare their ability to actually work through some of these really, really challenging experiences they have had, even affairs.  You might think that it is more important to go to your yoga class or go to church or go and do some religious practice in India but this is more important to your spiritual upbringing than any thing else. But truly the ability to come back to love in a relationship where it has been lost it is probably the most sacred thing you can learn to do in that journey from your ego which is upset and hurt, because the only thing that can be hurt in life is your ego from that journey back to love that is the most sacred and spiritual path you can ever take.  All the text books in the world that have been written about love can be compressed into the transformation of anger and disappointment and pain and suffering in a relationship back to love for that person and it is in that moment of love you can choose. You can choose wisely, do I stay or do I go? that is a problem but a least if you grow through challenge and back to love you are not reacting to another human being, reacting to another human being is giving your power to them. 

Loving another human being seeing them as beautiful mirror of you that is the point at which you make a choice about your relationship that is not based on reaction the past or the conditioning that you might have and worst of all your friends advice.  

One of the things in challenging times in our relationship is that we must maintain confidence in our spiritual practice.  During times of challenge all our friends become expert as more and more people read one or two books and have one of two seminars and think they know everything about everything. And unfortunately it makes quite shallow the basis from which we make a relationship choice if we listen to friends.  Really if you dug down and look at the relationships and the personal experiences of people who give most advice most often, they are incomplete.  Incomplete advice is the worst one you can get.  

The core of working through challenge in relationships is to be honest. To experience fully the emotional and the physical and the mental discomforts and the pains and the hurts and just really dig down and give yourself sometime to really experience what is going on.  A lot of people arrest the discomfort too early, they feel themselves becoming emotional or hurt or in some level of suffering and try to arrest it and therefore they are dishonest to themselves because what they say is that they prefer to have love over that emotion, but emotion is important to fully feel what you feel.  That is the purpose of meditation by the way, to sit down quietly by yourself and say what is going on inside what do I really feel. Now if somebody hurts you the most important thing to do is to sit down and say where is that coming from because it is not they hurting you it is a hurt that is within inside you that they are bringing out of you.  

Let’s go through that again, so instead of blaming others for our pain or blaming others for the challenge in our relationship we must flip this up side down, and say they just brought out stuff that was already within me, so in other words if they made you angry or they made you hurt or if they made you sad or if they made you happy, those things existed inside you they already existed there and all your partner did was bringing them into the surface.  And in that way love becomes sacred, a relationship bring out of you all the turmoil and all the negative things and all the positive things to that extent that are hidden within you, you can’t have good without bad if a relationship is going to bring the best in you then it is certainly going to bring the worst of you.

This means taking responsibility for your own happiness because the greatest pain on earth is blocked love, the greatest pain on earth is blocked love so if a person going through enormous suffering is because they are trying to stop loving somebody. Now you see this very often in death and funerals where people are grieving and they grieve for years later, because they think a dead person can’t be loved but a dead person just lost their body and you can encourage people that are going through grief to actually witness the fact that you can still love somebody that has passed and if they open their heart to them  and stop missing all the materialized things which means their cuddles and their hugs and their bodies and their physical things if they stop focusing on that and start focusing on the love that they have for that person, nobody can leave us, nobody can hurt us.  

So, we need to take responsibility not only for the fact that other people bring out our best and worst those best and worst preexisting inside us as our potential but we cause our own pain and we magnify problems by blocking love, we need to learn during times of challenge that the discomfort we are feeling is the blocking of love and the only thing that blocks our love is our ego and the ego is based on myriad of things to try to understand or unravel that ego is nearly impossible by yourself, it is called psychology and it takes a really great expert to really read through the parameters of the human ego.  My preference is to jump over it, understand the fundamentals in which life is built which is love, understand that what trauma or challenge that we are going though is the blockage of love and work thought the things that are blocking it, the first thing we said here is take responsibility the second thing now we are saying is to understand that blocking love is going to make things worst .  

Lets move on now, if you went into nature all your worries and all your fears and all your issues vanish.  Love comes from you and not to you, remember, that what you put into your relationship love and the more you put in the more you get back, you need to remember how you felt for this person in the first months, when you met them how grateful you were to meet them for the first time, how thankful you were how happy you were that this relationship had began and you need to actually own that space and say if I had it once I can have it again.  That is a discipline so the third step in working though challenge is discipline to go back to the old behaviors that caused your relationships to magnified and to grow at a great rate, now those things include small things like a let’s say for example little text messages, gifts, putting flowers in the house and you can remember how you behaved in those two three months repeat those behaviors it is a discipline and can say even though I don’ t feel the same way right now I am going to behave the same, that is not dishonest that is creating an environment for love, and that is the whole fifth chapter of this book.

A sacred relationship brings you out it reveals you; it is not about your lover it is about you.  Naked, striped of all your disguises, your feelings, emotions and issues everything will surface. Who are you really does not matter because you have to take responsibility for everything you feel in a relationship, that is why it is so confronting and why a lot of people stay single, because they want their kingdom or their queendom whatever it is called, to stay undisturbed. They don’t want people coming in and revealing them, exposing them.  Now I have been in relationships with people that say they love me, but they love me as long as I don’t; challenge their little world.  They said I have enough challenge I don’t need more challenge if this relationship challenges me it is not what I want, I don’t want challenge from you, I want love, I want betterment because all the rest of my life is challenged enough. A real relationship can’t exist under those circumstances long term, sure there are periods when in a relationship you might support your partner and actually bent backwards to make sure that you don’t add challenge to their world but you can’t do that long term.  So yes, there are periods, weeks and months where you can say my partner is going through enormous crises at the moment I will back away from giving them any challenge but that is a swallowing of yourself, so the truth of the matter is a real relationship operates at the border of support and challenge and if you just be yourself as you would be in nature as you would be when no one is watching if you just be yourself that is the perfect self to bring to a relationship.  The angry one, the happy one, the sad one, the needy one, the not needy one, the dependant one the independent one they are just being yourself without some fictitious model that people created out of a book or a seminar, this REAL you will be the best in relationships.

So that is the third premise of a sacred relationship moving through challenge apply the disciplines.  Being exposed vulnerable in a relationship is one of the keys to intimacy now there is a lot of rhetoric goes on about being independent and bringing your best self to a relationship but vulnerability means you testify, you admit, you confess how much you really want to be with this person and if they leave it is going to hurt. That is the good thing, it is not about protecting yourself and making yourself immune from pain.  It’s saying I am capable. Now this is to me like going snow skiing, when you go snow skiing with a child that is 10 years old or 12 years old and you watch them go down the slope, typically they will go down full bullet they won’t try to put the brakes on, but after a few crashes after a few times when they have rolled over and even maybe sprained an ankle or done something else, they will start slowing down.  Now there’s allot of people in relationships who start slowing down. They start slowing down because they have been down the slope before they got hurt they know how bad it feels in fact they probably say, “I don’t want to have what I had happen last time, I will be careful”.  And they put the brakes on because they’ve got fear. 

Now it is far wiser to take that 10 or 12 year old kid that fell off on the slope to a ski class and teach them how to fall and teach them how to stop so when they go back to the top of the slope next time they look down and say there is no reason to go slow, there is no reason to put the brakes on because if they get into trouble they know what to do about it.   

So, it is like in a relationship as far as I am concerned, you don’t apply the principles of healing – or be cautionary unless it goes wrong. If you put the breaks on or if you keep applying the principles that make you safe in a relationship every time challenge occurs you are going to stay single and cause your relationship to fail. Intimacy means no brakes, fully open hearted, because this other person in the relationship wants you to turn up vulnerable and I mean that in a more than just the emotional sense.

Long term deep spiritual happiness comes from the contentment that grows out of perspective of love, now what am I saying there I am saying that you need to be content within yourself. Now blaming the relationship for disturbing your cup of tea is not going to work, you need to turn up in your relationship content with yourself. Now what’s that mean, how do we get content?  Well content means you don’t want to change yourself, therefore you don’t want to change others, you realize that growth is going to occur yes, but you become content with things as they are in other words thankful for what you’ve got.  Now the last chapter in this book, chapter two of this book spoke about gratitude and appreciation for another person, being romance.  So romance and contentment is the same topic, thankful for another person, thankful for who you are as you are rather than obsess we try to change them make them better, trying to change your perspective of them. I had one client, she got so judgmental of her ex-partner you know, his hairstyle and his this and his that, in the end she is going to remain single for the rest of her life now because she has such a narrow definition of who is the right guy, instead of expanding her definition of love expanding her definition of lovability she is contracted it, and she calls that spiritual. It really is the opposite to spirituality to say I can’t absorb some of the unique differentials in my partner.

We need to say my love is limited by my judgments and if I can move through a judgment I expand my love.   So if your partner is doing stuff that you don’t like and you learn to love them more, which means seeing the good and bad side equally, then you just grew in your love, and then you are in harmony with nature, and there is no need for a tsunami.  

The last important thing in this process of moving though challenge is to avoid reaction.  Reaction is very primal, it is as primal as a monkey, it is about as primal as an animal mind.  An animal mind reacts, so in times of challenge sometimes our old primal self who still sits inside us, reacts to another person and we want to be angry at them or we want to run away or we want to do something as a result of their behavior. But it is very unwise to react in a relationship, you need to cut yourself some slack, cut yourself some time, make a break, go away from the situation and say to your partner “I need timeout I need a minute” Now that is not a week or a month or a year to deal with an issue, because those are really called separations.  I am talking about an hour at the most, you need to separate yourself from that person you feel reactive towards, to move away to sit down by yourself and say “wow I am feeling reactive I know that is not appropriate” So here is the question I asked myself when I am reacting to another person I know it is my ego so I say these things, firstly, “when have I done what are they doing”. The first step we have to do is to get off the pedestal and we have to say to ourselves “where have I been like them?”.  You need to be honest with yourself and say “where have I done that?” when you can find where you have done what they have done you can say “how did those people benefit from what I did?”  In other words, find the good news in this bad behavior.  

This expands your consciousness instead of contracting it. It expands your love and instead of sitting on your pedestal going “I am all high and mighty I have never hurt anybody and I have never done anything wrong and I have never done that to anybody and I have never been so this and I have never been so that”, you can get off the pedestal come down to earth and admit “nobody can do to me more than I have don’t to myself, nobody can do anything that I have not already done it is just that I have done It in a different way”.  So if they are being nasty, you can say “well I don’t speak nasty words and in my whole life I have not spoken a nasty word but maybe the look in my eye,  maybe the way I do business, it maybe the way I feed your children, I don’t know, but it will be something, there is no maybe about it” 

Whatever behavior you see in another person that is just a reflection of behavior you’ve got because every person is the same, it just changes in form. That is the first step, the second step is to sit there and go what is the benefit to me of it is a negative behavior, what is the benefit to me for doing it and what it the benefit to others for receiving it.  Now please don’t, in this analysis, say the benefit is that I learned not to do it, because you did not learn not to do it because you still have it within you, it is called our human potential. This is how relationships grow us. 

We grow through challenge by learning to love the thing we hate in others, in ourselves first.

Sacred Love  –  Chapter 4

Dream Matching

G’day, this is the fourth chapter of the Sacred Love book and the topic is Dream Matching.  I think this is the most complex of the five chapters of this book primarily because we’re talking about the real ingredient of human nature – Why do people stay together? 

Now, if you really want to underpin this chapter and understand the core of it, just simply understand this, two people can fall in love at any time.  It can be at the coffee shop and look across the table and Wow!  There she is or there he is, and you fall in love.  The question is, how long is that attraction going to last.  Now, the love can last forever and we know how to separate love and relationship but the question is, how long, if you fall in love with someone, are you going to stay in a relationship with them?  

And the answer is this, you’re going to stay in a relationship with another person while they make you happy.  The human constitution is based on seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.  And although there are short term pleasures such as intimacy and sexuality and a lot of these things, the real bottom line for most people is – the definition of pleasure is the achievement of their dreams.  Now those dreams can be a week from now, they can be today in fact or they can be in the next 20, 30 or 40 years.  The idea that the other person in your life helps you live out your dreams is fundamental to the desire to stay in relationship.  Happiness motivates us, the search for pleasure.

Now, the definition of that pleasure, as I’ve already said, changes from person to person.  But underpinning all of these pleasures is the sense of the dream.  There are seven realms of love and therefore there are seven realms of dreams, from the spontaneous dream which is, I’ve got to have it right now, to the long term inspiration of a dream which is, I’ll work for it for the rest of my life.  

Now, a relationship that’s based on the lowest of the seven levels of love, or the seven realms of dreams is not going to last very long if it doesn’t evolve up through the other levels.  In other words, if people come together into a relationship motivated by the idea that they’re going to fulfill their happiness, they’re going to fulfill their pleasures and it’s all very short term, within a very short period of time that person and that couple is going to struggle to find really good reasons to stick it out.

Now, stick it out means, to survive through the challenges.  Every relationship has support and challenge, that was Chapter 3.  Chapter 4 is saying that the reason we will work through the challenges is because there are pleasures, happiness, coming from this relationship.  And those happinesses are based on, once again, the fulfillment of dreams.  

Our souls bind with another human being in a relationship because our souls have a mission.  Now, you can call it your life purpose but even that understates the real truth of the soul’s purpose.  The soul’s purpose is to search for ever deeper and broader definitions of itself.  In other words, to seek more things to love.  So, in a relationship that’s growing and expanding, two people can sustain incredible levels of intimacy and relationship and very strong commitments only if their soul’s real desire translated into the physical body means happiness is being fulfilled.  Let’s look a little deeper.

The dream is called the physical realm.  The dream that my body is gratified, satisfied.  That means the sexual, the contactual, the physical levels of dream or ambition will cause us short term happiness but once fulfilled they just open a gateway to the next level, and we’ll call that the mental levels.  And these mental levels are our ethics.  Mental levels of dreams mean making life safe for us.  It means that we can trust, release ourselves into vulnerability in an environment where our physical needs are being fulfilled and now, our mental, our ethics, our morals, our code of behaviour, our values are being met.  

Once those are being met it simply doesn’t stop there, it opens the gateway to the next realm.  The next realm is our emotional levels.  Now, there are many emotions that come into life and once our sense of safety is fulfilled, our sense of community starts to arise.  Our emotional needs, our needs for belonging, our needs for some sense of fulfillment on a broader scale outside our body, outside our mind but association with a larger group of people and this is what we would call our emotional needs.  And that gateway, if it’s fulfilled in a relationship and we get our romantic needs met, we get our sense of being admired and being respected met, then we just open the gateway to the next level.  

So it’s a never ending story, isn’t it?  You can see this, that people think that if they get their physical needs met, it’s all going to be fantastic but that’s not true.  All that achieves is opening the gateway to the mental needs, the needs for security and then that opens another gateway to the needs for belonging and emotional needs, and that opens another gateway, which is the gateway of the heart.

Now, the human heart wants to do good.  That’s kind of like its mission.  And so when the human heart becomes a primary focus of need fulfillment, it wants to have a sense that things are, as you would call them, respected, sacred, owned, and that heart level is quite ambivalent to the future, it’s quite ambivalent to the past.  And when you hear a lot of people talking about being in the moment, what they’re basically saying is, be in your heart.  Your heart doesn’t care about how much money it’s got because in the moment that’s irrelevant.  And it doesn’t care about what it’s done in the past because in the moment that’s irrelevant.

So, when we talk about self actualisation, self actualisation, the maximum that people can comprehend in self actualisation, is a wide open heart.  And in a relationship with an open heart it means that the physical needs are being met, still, it means that the mental needs are being met, there’s trust.  It means that the emotional needs are being met.  That means there’s romance and respect.  And now, the heart level, which means there’s a purpose to this relationship greater than ourselves.  We have a sense of communion.  We call it sometimes soul mates but there’s a friendship developing and that friendship causes the relationship to come out to the world and make a better world for others.  And this is a very important step but it’s still about self.

When a relationship goes to the next level, which is the fifth level, we start to talk about devotion.  Now the devotional level of a relationship is when we start to say that there is something metaphysical, something greater than ourselves that’s come together in this relationship to cause a creation.  So we might create a business together, we might create children, we might create a home, we might create an orphanage.  When two people have a sense that their relationship has a purpose bigger than pleasure, bigger than romance, bigger than trust, bigger than their hearts, then they have a sense of purpose greater than those things.  And most of that cannot come true until we’ve fulfilled those lower levels.  

In other words, once our children have grown up or once we’ve released the need to have children, once we have transcended the needs for those lower levels then we can start to comprehend that our relationship might be about something more than just ourselves.  It might be about a broader definition of family, a broader definition of community, a broader definition of the purpose of our relationship.  It might be about global change, it might be about building orphanages in foreign countries.  

But satisfying that level of need in a relationship doesn’t stop and if a relationship stops there it will fall apart because eventually the things we are rising up to, if we achieve them, eventually we will, what they call, become green.  In other words, it’s like a still pond.  If the water doesn’t move in a pond it becomes rotten.  And so in a relationship, if there’s not an evolution of the purpose for the relationship it eventually becomes rotten.

The next level is inspired.  Now, this is not necessarily an action word.  Inspired does not necessarily mean there is an outcome as a result of it.  Inspired means that there is a deeper sense of beauty, a deeper sense of the interconnectedness of all things.  So, people, when they’re in inspired relationships start to talk about sacredness, about the beauty of the world and they start to want to travel and go places, not only for the purpose of serving their devotion, which is a level they’ve already gratified, of keeping their heart open, of staying romantic, of keeping trust in their relationship and physical pleasure but there’s a sense of exploration that comes when we get to the level of inspired relationship.  

We want to see the world, we want to participate in the world and we want to immerse ourselves in the diversity of cultures in the world.  No longer are we stuck in the lower levels which is fighting for our relationship or religion as being right.  Righteous religions, where, for example, people of the same religious basis want to collude with people of the same religion and exclude others is a very primal level of relationship.  It’s when people start to see that black or white, green or blue, Catholic or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Bhuddist, no matter what, that we are able to transcend those boundaries because the definition of the world gets bigger.  This is the definition of inspired.

And finally, the highest level a relationship can achieve is unconditional love.  Now, in unconditional love the necessity for physical presence in the relationship is irrelevant.  In other words, if a person passes away or if we split up from our partner or we’re not with them for extended periods of time, if we have unconditional love for that person it means that the lower six levels are being gratified in other ways.  We might be even having an affair or we might be having a relationship on the side or we might be getting trust from our religion or getting a sense of emotional gratification and romance from the sports we do or something like that.  The bottom line is that with unconditional love there is no need for physical presence.  And this is the highest level of love.  This is what they call Sacred Love.  It’s absolutely beyond the physical presence of another human being.  We love our partner, we love people, no matter whether they are with us or they are gone.  Whether they’re in the body or whether they’re out of the body.

So there’s the seven levels of dreams, or seven levels of love.  And what we’re going to say in this chapter is, the glue that binds two people together is the mutuality of dreams.  Now, we drew, in the book, two circles.  Those two circles overlapped by 33 and a third percent.  It’s called the Vessica Pisces, and the Vessica Pisces is a universal symbol, and what the Vessica Pisces represents is the sustainable proximity of any two bodies on earth.  Let’s say for example – even in the universe – let’s say there’s two stars in the sky, how come those stars don’t draw each other into each other’s gravitational field and explode, or why don’t they “zim” apart and fly into the universe?  They’re all rotating.  There’s centrifugal forces trying to fling them out into the universe but they don’t.  There’s some sort of a balance exists between the push of gravitation or the pull of gravitation and the push of centrifugal force.  And if you were able to draw a circle around that star and show its magnetic field or its field of influence, you would see that that field overlaps the next star by exactly 33 and a third percent.  In other words, the two circles of the two stars overlap by 33 and a third percent, and that’s sustainable. 

So, this is the model we use for relationships and we say two individuals, ie. Two stars, two circles, will overlap in their commonality by 33 and a third percent, in other words they will become undifferentiatable in 33% of their lives.  

Now, this may change over age in what exists in that 33%.  For example, two very young, newly married people, their 33% might be physical gratification with each other and as they get older it might be having a baby and their mutality might be in that 33 and a third percent of their family values and their collusion in building a home.  

But time goes on and they rise in their levels of consciousness and they rise in their levels of realms of dream fulfillment and they may start to have to re-evaluate, what are the things that cause that relationship to overlap.  What’s causing those two people to stay together?  And as you go up the levels of the hierarchy of dreams you might find that when you get to the heart level, that 33 and a third percent is a sense of global responsibility or a sense of communal support that you both come together on to agree on, in a sense, or work together on, in helping change.  And it can rise and fall but that 33 and a third percent is really what keeps two people together.  

If we love somebody but we can’t work out how that person will help us fulfill our mission or our vision or our dream of the future, the relationship will gravitate back down to the physical and if the physical needs are being met or they’re not so important any more, then that relationship will have no reason, no universal reason to stay in place.

Now, there’s a lot of morality and there’s a lot of ideologies that keep relationships glued.  In fact, Einstein believes that relationships that last a long time are false.  He believes that the evolution of consciousness, one person and another person, makes almost the idea of people staying together long term impossible.  I disagree with him in the principle that if two people are evolving in their consciousness and revealing their dreams, continually growing their dreams, then I think it’s possible for them to stay together forever.  The honeymoon that lasts forever is a relationship that grows their dreams, both independently but works out how and why those two people are still together based on how they help each other fulfill their futures.  This is the glue that binds lovers together.

Now, in the book, I’ve written a very important section in this Chapter 4 on Vision Quests for Lovers.  And this is not about some Native American tradition.  They worked perfectly but they’re a little bit hard for people sitting in places that don’t have access to a traditional environment like that.  What you can do is do your own vision quest at home.  And a vision quest doesn’t just mean sitting on a rock somewhere envisioning the future.  It’s a six week process that takes about 15 minutes a day but by the end of that six weeks, if you do that once a year you will guarantee, absolutely gold plated guarantee, that the glue that will bind your relationship into the future is re-concreted, re-cemented.  The magnetism that holds two people in a sacred loving relationship is the dreams they have of the future.  And that six week process will re-guarantee, re-guarantee the vows you made at your commitment time when you came together.

Sacred Love  –  Chapter 5

Love is a Lifestyle

The fifth chapter of Sacred Love is Love is a Lifestyle.  I think this is the most important chapter in the book because if you want a really sacred loving, beautiful, sustainable relationship you’d better make that a priority in your life.  I think of all the things I’ve done in my life in the many relationships and circumstances I’ve had, the biggest failing, the biggest cause of trouble has been my belief that I can prioritise other things such as my work or my sport or my health or whatever, and sustain a beautiful, sacred, loving romantic relationship with a partner.  It’s just not the case.  

So, the first thing, the first step in Love is a Lifestyle, is making love a priority in your life, it’s the number one priority.  Your lover has to be the most important person in your life.  Even more important than yourself.  Now I know that’s a stretch for a lot of new age people but the reason a lot of relationships fail is people become self obsessed and the reason really great relationships succeed is people become obsessed with the other person.  

Which leads me to the second point – emotional honesty.  Emotional honesty in a relationship doesn’t necessarily come from being a complete emotional basket case or a fruitcake, it comes from being really aware of how you feel and admitting it to yourself.  Instead of blaming others and saying, you made me feel this and you made me feel that, we have to accept that our partner actually triggers emotions that are already inside of us.  

And being honest about those emotions is really important.  It’s more difficult, in my experience, for men than women, to own these emotions.  I think there’s a vast difference between bravery, which is the willingness to experience an emotion to its greatest depth and wallow in it for a certain period of time, and courage, which is the determination to jump up and run into the face of the enemy regardless of the consequences.  I think in a relationship we have to be brave.  We have to be prepared to experience things that we may not like or may not want to experience.  We may have to face things that we would otherwise choose to avoid, the darker side of things or the more vulnerable side of things.  But this is ultimately the essence of a great relationship.  

Once I remember, in New York I was sitting in my office looking out the window, talking on the telephone.  It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, it was 8.30, I was waiting for a limousine to pick me up to take me to La Guardia Airport and in turn the journey would take me to Nepal.  I was waiting for the car when an aeroplane flew overhead quite close to the top of my building, three seconds later it drove straight into the side of the World Trade Centre.  The shock was just horrendous and people fainted all around me in the office.  I stood there with the skills that I’d been taught through workshops and the collapse process and I came to a sort of a peace with the event very quickly.  I saw the dark and I saw the light, I balanced it all and I came to unconditional love for this event and then I watched people around me grieving and suffering and screaming and emotionalising and I thought, you know what, somehow this spirituality that I’ve adopted, which is very courageous and takes me through drama very quickly, lacks integrity.  

And I went back from that day and started to reimmerse myself in the awareness of what do I really feel?  What do I really experience?  Where is my humanity in an event before I go into a process of healing?  Sometimes I think when we get hurt we look for processes that help us avoid the experience of hurt and that blocks our love.  That blocks our real feelings.  Now, I know there’s the other side to this coin.  You’ll meet people who have so much emotional baggage and so much emotional vulnerability that they can’t step out into life without being aggressive and violent.  Now, I’m not talking about that extreme, what I’m talking about is the willingness to take time out and dig deep into emotional truth.  I think a couple in a relationship need to celebrate the fact that they’ll be angry, they’ll be disappointed, they’ll be hurt, they’ll be happy, they’ll be vulnerable, they’ll be scared, they’ll be all emotions, at any time and they need to take time out and actually witness that with each other.  

Such an emotional awareness comes with time.  A relationship that’s in its early days may not be willing to go to those depths but it’s a target, it’s an objective one should have in entering a new relationship, that eventually you’ll know each other well enough to be really truly honest, emotionally honest with each other.  I think this is a very important ingredient of a sacred relationship.  

Authenticity is a topic that people under the age of 20 don’t need to read about, they do it automatically.  But as time goes on and our ambitions and our careers and our lives and we read more books about how we should or shouldn’t behave, we become less authentic and we start to develop characters that play out roles in our lives.  For example, we might start becoming the entrepreneurial clever person, the party, happy person, the relationship loving sweet person, the parent, the sports hero – we develop characters and we can develop negative ones as well.  Characters that play out sickness in order to get attention.  Authenticity really means that you can’t be an arsehole at work and a loving individual at home.  Love becomes a part of your life and you treat everybody you meet with the same sense of loving affection as you treat your partner.  That doesn’t mean we hug and cuddle everybody but what it does mean is we respect and honour them.  

A loving individual is authentic even when they’re alone.  That means that when they’re sitting in the forest or in the train or in the aeroplane going somewhere or sitting at home watching television, they hold their heart strongly as a priority, they hold it wide open.  They hold their love for life and a flower and a tree.  This authenticity pervades every area of life.  It can’t be held exclusive to one person in a relationship.  I hear many people getting jealous that their lover has loved people in their past or has had relationships in the past or that their lover loves their parent or their friends but a loving person is a loving person no matter who they’re with.  It’s just they choose a relationship with one person for intimacy.  

Be aware, authenticity means not following somebody else’s rules.  That’s the lack of authenticity.  Authenticity means thinking for yourself.  Many people think that they think.  They get the newspaper and they get hyper vigilant about certain moral issues when really the newspaper has reported what has really been transpiring for a long period of time and makes it quite an issue of the day.  We need to be conscious and aware of what disturbs us, what we start riding on in terms of hero worship, we need to be careful of fads and fancies.  Authenticity means that we hold sacred certain moral principles and those moral principles are unbendable.  

Sacred love requires that we hold love, which means in some senses, appreciation for people and their beauty, as a priority in our morning, noon and night.  Space to breathe in a relationship is so important, and in that breathing space one has to learn to recuperate and regain their inner strength so that they can come back into the relationship with completeness.  Space to breath means spending time with friends outside the relationship, exercise and sport, creativity, hobbies of passion, work that you love.  

In truth, 66% of your life will be alone.  Only 33 and a third of your life can be sustained in a loving relationship.  So, 66% of all you do, you’ll be doing as an individual.  Therefore we must learn to be alone with ourselves.  And this is a great key because when we break our own moral code, when we act out of integrity to ourselves, when we breach our own sense of decency and moral behaviour, it’s not other people that get so much affected, it’s ourselves.  And I think this is what’s defined as karma, that if we do things to other people that cause us to feel a sense of responsibility or a sense of guilt or a sense of distrust for our own capacity, to hold our morals and our values sacred, then I think we cause ourselves in our moments alone, great disturbance.  And those disturbances sabotage our lives.  They sabotage our work, they sabotage our health.  

So, to sustain a sacred and loving relationship we must learn to be alone with ourselves and like what we see.  This does not come from isolation, it doesn’t come from sitting in a cave or crossing your legs in meditation or achieving great heights in sport or business, it doesn’t come from wealth.  Learning to be alone with yourself is called contentment.  The ability to say, I like this person.  I can’t change them, I can’t change them.  I am who I am and I’m worthy of love for that.  And the only person on earth who really needs to know that I’m worthy of love for who I am, as I am, is me.  

I’ve spent a lot of time in my own life trying to change myself and now I realise, as the time has past that I’m really still the same person I always was, that any attempt to add a façade or to follow a philosophy was just a mask that I was putting on to try and create a better me.  But really, the moment I stopped the disciplines and practices around those particular activities I was still the same Chris.  I learnt that my circumstances affect my behaviour more than my moral code.  That if I put myself in a very difficult circumstance I would behave badly and I would break my own moral codes.  If I put myself in a relationship that was unhealthy or that in which my heart wasn’t open, then my moral code would start to wilt.  I think this is a priority.  We have to realise that if love is important to us and we are in a place that love doesn’t exist, then we’ve automatically begun the process of self sabotage.  

The key to loving others is to love self.  And to love self we have to come to a place where we don’t want to change it.  Where we are completely content with our own being.  We recognise the divinity of being ourselves.  We recognise that there is a dark side and a light side to everything including ourselves.  That alone, that single awareness can transform a life and prepare us to live in a great and sacred relationship with another person.  

I remember visiting the home of a couple who were looking for counselling.  They had become friends and they were having struggles in their relationship.  They asked me to come to their house to do a consultation.  I walked in the front door and there on the wall was a picture, a photograph in fact from Apocalypse Now with some poor soldier struggling to take a breath in a bamboo cage while he was immersed in water.  This dark and dismal picture graced the front door of his home.  I could write another five books on the topic of environment because I believe truly that environment affects a relationship more than any other thing.  It doesn’t have to be wealth, it doesn’t have to be fancy.  What it has to be is loving.  

In India, in the times that I’ve visited there, some of the homes that I’ve visited have been extremely humble yet they were filled with love.  Candles were burning, incense filled the air and statues reminded the people who lived there of the Gods who really dictated the fortunes of their future.  And yet, in the Western home I see photographs of the dead.  I see reminders of the past that are not complete.  I see bookshelves full of books that talk about pain and suffering and here we have a couple trying to live out the beauty of a sacred relationship.  In some homes I even see antiques bought from places whose origins were not sure.  Were those goods stolen?  Did the families who owned them have a beautiful life or was there suffering and torture?  Tibetan furniture quite often has its roots in the theft of a culture and we bring this into our home and wonder why things aren’t as harmonious as they could be.  

Everything speaks.  You must remember this very clearly.  Every flower, every tree, ever piece of wood, has a story to tell.  The walls of your home, if they are old walls, have been home to people long before you arrived.  If you want to witness this first hand go to Norfolk Island in Australia where the old prison exists.  The walls are now crumbled but this was one of the most mean and vicious prisons on earth.  Norfolk Island is filled with the spirits of those dead people who were tortured, starved and beaten to death.  If you walk around that old prison you’ll feel it.  Even the most skeptical person feels their hair stand on edge as they walk around those prison remains.  Your house, your car, your clothing, your food, all has with it a voice.  A sacred loving relationship has to be conscious of the voices that surround them.  The old jewellery from an ex partner, a gift from a person who is no longer wishing you well, things that don’t have authenticity, money that was taken and wasn’t earned.    

We have to think very carefully about the design of our space, about the things that we bring into a loving relationship.  This includes people because there are some people in our lives who do not wish our relationship well.  Those people, even parents from time to time, may wish us well.  They may wish that our relationship didn’t exist because they have aspirations for something different.  This is the necessity of protection.  We need to protect our relationship.  We need to protect it from the environments that are not healthy.  We need to fill our relationship with environments that are healthy.  

Taking our relationship into places where people are ill – maybe it’s necessary sometimes to visit people in hospital or to go into the spaces of those who are not in good fortune but we need to balance this and recuperate and heal our relationship if it’s been into such a place.  If we’ve argued we need to clear the space of the argument.  If we’ve had breakdowns and hurts we need to clear the space of those hurts.  We need to bring love into our environment, we need to look at what’s on the walls, what’s on the floor, how our furniture is decorated, what’s in the kitchen, how our food was bought, how it was prepared, how it was made and where it came from.  All these things are vital in preparing an environment in which love can thrive.  We don’t know the subtleties, we don’t really see this second voice, we don’t understand the effect of the other energies of this earth but we do know they affect us.  We do know that people who are put into negative environments become negative.  We do know that people become as we treat them and so, if we treat our environment and we therefore honour the sacredness of our relationship through that environment, we will create the best place for love to thrive.

My first marriage failed because I became lazy.  My wife loved me deeply, she gave me all the love a man could ask for but I became lazy.  I didn’t give what I was getting.  Love and the greatest love of all comes from us.  It’s so easy to become lazy and complacent in a relationship.  To be given love by somebody is a great gift but to give love is an even greater one.  And to keep giving love in spite of everything takes a lot of courage, a lot of commitment.  I think this is the conviction that we’re all looking for in a relationship.  We seek love, we want love but we forget that the greatest love we ever celebrate, the best we’ve ever felt is when we’ve given love to people.  

What blocks our love is our emotion, our ego.  We get blocked because our lover might remind us of something that we don’t like in ourselves.  Our lover might do something that we didn’t expect.  Our lover might start to do or behave in ways that we don’t want them to be.  But this is no excuse, this is the metal, this is where we need to stand tall and say, I’m able to love this person no matter what they do.  When we start holding back our love and expecting to receive it more than we give it, then we start to diminish ourselves.  We become mechanical, we become materialistic, we love the passion, the inspiration, the things that make life worth living and we start to dwindle into disease, our body decays.  We start to lose our wealth, we start to lose our sense of passion for life.  

We must remind ourselves every day that the greatest happiness a human being can experience is the love that they give.  We need to work through the rubbish that we put between us and our love.  We need to work through the emotional blockages, the egotistical expectations that we put in the way of loving somebody.  No matter what another person does they’re worthy of love, no matter how bad they are, no matter how bad their behaviour, we can love them.  

I’m not suggesting for one minute that we should stay in environments that are toxic, where our partner breaks the agreed boundaries of the relationship.  Under those circumstances, such as domestic violence we must leave but this is no reason to block our love.  We can actually say, I love you but I can’t entertain a relationship with you.  

That aside, I’m not talking about the extremes, I’m talking about the average, everyday experience of being in a relationship, of broken expectations, of our projections onto our partner, saying this is the sort of person I want you to be versus this is who you are and therefore, I’m going to withdraw love from you.  This is no way to have a relationship.  A relationship is built on the love we give.  We must learn, we must learn the skills of giving love, under all circumstances.

We have children in later life and they will break our expectations continually but still deep down inside we love them.  No matter how bad they become we say, I love this person.  I can’t control them, I can’t demand of them things that they do not wish to do for themselves, I have to just simply love them.  And that love exists in us, in our relationship as well.  It’s the core, the sacredness of a relationship.  We must remember, continually remind ourselves that the happiest we will ever be in our lives is when we give the greatest amount of love to our beloved.  

There are many people who say that if they had to live their live over again they wouldn’t change a thing and I think they’re liars.  Truly, if we had to live our lives over again we’d hurt people less and we’d change the mistakes we made that caused other people harm.  I think the greatest harm we can do any other human being on earth is not turning up.  And we don’t turn up because we make excuses.  We make excuses like, I’m really busy at work, I’m stressed at the moment, my ex partner is still calling me, my children are demanding things from me, I’m tired, I’m confused.  We make excuses and those excuses become the death knell for our relationships.  Make no excuses, we need to turn up.  Turning up means we’ve done our laundry, we’ve washed our clothes, we’ve cleaned our mind.  We’re able to turn up fresh, the past is the past, it’s no longer affecting us.  We’re able to forget yesterday, to learn from it, to grow from it, to take responsibility for causing it and turn up today brave, emotionally prepared, spiritually awakened, ready for a great relationship.

When I talk to people who are going through challenge, people who are experiencing domestic confrontations, emotional violence, it’s always coming from the past, from the inability of one of the two people in that relationship to actually turn up.  People excuse themselves and say, I’ll never do that, or my ex partner caused me to be like this, or if it wasn’t for my family then I wouldn’t have this problem.  But this is lying, this is cheating, this is deception of the greatest kind.  There is no excuse, none at all for not turning up in love.  

We should not expect another human being on this planet to accept our apologies for stupidity.  We should not expect another person on this planet to accept us half.  We should not expect a person to listen to our excuses and listen to us saying, oh I’m so busy at work or Oh, I’ve got so many problems that I can’t turn up for love.  This is rubbish.  Life is too short, we’re here for such a short period of time and love and our relationships are so precious.  How could we let anything get in the way?

This is why personal mastery is so important.  Personal mastery teaches us to experience our emotions, to witness our emotions but not act on our emotions.  It teaches us to be honest about how we feel, to witness and feel the grief or the suffering or the happiness and the joy but never act out of those experiences.  This inner relationship means that we can, at the same token as being honest with ourselves and having personal integrity, we can turn up for love every day, fresh as if we were young again like a child falling in love for the first time.  

For many years I worked with indigenous cultures in Canada.  They taught me many, many things including a deep respect for nature and the world around us.  But one of the great things that I took from their teachings was an understanding of the importance of our ancestors.  We haven’t just arrived here, fresh dropped from the sky like a raindrop that never came to earth before.  We are the product of our past, we are the culmination of thousands of years of evolution and that evolution is built into our DNA.  

Being grateful for the journeys of our ancestors and having respect for the paths that they’ve trodden to get us to where we are places a huge importance on how we behave in this next moment.  We are not separate from anything, least of all our ancestors from the past.  They trod the ground that we now stand on.  They evolved our DNA to where we have it right now, and we will in turn pass it on to our children and they will look back on us and the people before us with some sense of gratitude, thankful for where they are, thankful for the history that brought them to their current place.  Thankfulness is a key to the immune system and it is a great key to happiness.  

To remain constantly thankful for the past is a simple task.  It means that we can lose our thankfulness for the day, we can go through our emotional dramas as we need to go through them but if we hold a respect and a deep love for where we’ve come from, we hold something entirely precious and this, I think differentiates those who are trying to run from the past and create new lives and therefore overly enthusiastic about breaking away from the history that causes them to be who they are, and those who have a deep reverence for the past and are building on it.  

In my own life I was born in the very humble origins of Tasmania in Australia.  A place not necessarily known for its great intellect and wisdom and I was shy about this fact for many years.  From Tasmania we moved to Mildura.  Mildura, at the time was a little country town nobody had heard of.  It was famous for growing oranges and later, for marijuana.  And I hid these facts from the world, even when I worked in America, I hid my Australian origins and created an American accent because I thought that my roots were not important.  I had no gratitude for my past and therefore was obsessed with only having thankfulness for what I’d achieved in the short period I called my life.  I was even intent on separating myself from my own parents.  This existence is shallow, this existence has no core.  

Now I really appreciate the fact that I come from the very humble and very beautiful origins of Tasmania, people connected to the earth, people very grounded in the love and the spirit of nature.  And I have a great deal of respect for Mildura, a place where hardworking people, many of them immigrants, came to Australia and merged their lives with the indigenous cultures of Australia to grow oranges out of dust.  

I see the story differently now and I see in my past how much could have been affected by having a deep and respectful reverence for where I’ve come from.  I meet people in Australia who have come from other countries, who are trying to recreate their lives but I encourage them to sustain a respect and love for their origins, to bring that culture to Australia, to bring their uniqueness, their accents, their cultural uniqueness into Australia and not lose it.  It doesn’t mean isolation from the Australian culture, it means a natural evolution, an organic growth where the two foreign cultures merge to create a new one, a third culture.  Appreciate your history, appreciate your roots, appreciate your parents most of all.  These people, although they may be flawed, are at the least the greatest gateway to consciousness and love you’ll ever know.

My mother died in a car accident when I was three.  My stepmother was an alcoholic and violent woman.  Naturally I developed an expectation of the relationship that I would have when I grew up.  By the time I was five I’d developed a fantasy of who I would be – a la Superman – and who my wife would be – a la – the Queen.  I really thought that the experience that I was having was a fiction, that I’d somehow been given a bundle of bad luck and that with good behaviour and a good search I would find the ideal partner.  I did but I didn’t recognize her.  My head was so filled with my expectations, my fantasies of what a relationship could look like.  But nothing on earth, nothing humanly possible could be sustained and live up to that expectation.  

Our expectations kill love.  Those expectations come from all manner of things.  Some from what we reject in our parents’ relationship, some from what we accept in our parents’ relationship.  Some of our expectations come from books we read, movies we see and novels.  We want the romance, we don’t want the chaos.  We want the happiness, we don’t want the trauma.  We want the love, we don’t want the rejection.  And so we build up a false, or a fictitious definition of what is a good relationship and what is a bad one.  In doing this we make it nearly impossible to be happy in love.  We don’t show up because we’re afraid to cause the drama which will contradict our model of a good relationship.  We fail to argue with our partner and stand up for our rights because we’re trying to achieve a fiction, trying to achieve a passive, non violent, peaceful, loving space with a person.  

But this is not love.  This is escapism, this is delusion.  A great relationship grows at the border of chaos and order, support and challenge.  And it’s the ability to embrace both sides of this and love a person through it that gives us the sacred love we’re all looking for.  Our souls want love.  They are not looking for peace.  That’s us, that’s our ego, looking for gratification, looking to be reinforced or accepted.  Our souls are looking for challenge and support.  They’re looking for growth, they’re looking for depth.  

If you are truly in search of a soul mate or if you truly believe that you are living with your soul mate, you will welcome the chaos and the order of that relationship in equal lumps.  You will welcome both the challenge and support with the same enthusiasm, with the same smile, knowing that love is not measured by either of these things.  

If you take your time to go in nature you will find chaos and order in perfect balance.  If you step off the world and sit on the moon and look back at this planet you will see chaos and order in perfect balance.  You won’t become hyper vigilant and therefore paranoid about global warming and problems that you see as being life threatening.  You will see those as one half of an equation of balance.  Sacred love means that you will welcome both the good and the bad, the support and the challenge, the growth and the decay, the birth and the death, with the same enthusiasm.

Those people who are running from the past will excess challenge their partner.  Those people who are stuck in the past will excess order their partners.  Too much support.  One causes burn out, too much challenge causes burnout.  And the other causes boredom.  To really turn up in a relationship, to really have sacred love, you’re going to have to embrace both sides of support and challenge.  Be prepared to draw boundaries, be prepared to confront your partner’s ideas about who you should be and shouldn’t be, be prepared to be a unique individual.  And at the same token be prepared to soften and surrender when it’s necessary, be prepared to be wrong.

There are many people who complain, oh I have a relationship and I’m married to this person but our romance is dead, we’ve lost the enthusiasm to make love, to be passionate with each other.  And I would spend some time with that person and find them to be always wanting to be right.  And a right person is the most unattractive, most unromantic individual you can ever find.  We’re never right.  We’re right and wrong.  There’s always two sides to the coin.  And the person who can embrace those two sides can choose to focus on the negative or choose to focus on the positive.  This is romance.  This is the ability to say, love grows at the border of support and challenge.  I’m going to challenge my partner, I’m going to support my partner and love will be there right throughout the whole journey.  If I just be myself, if I just turn up today, if I just be myself, I will support and challenge my partner.  I will focus on the positive, I will focus on the support but I will acknowledge the challenge will not go away.  

I’m going to share a beautiful story.  A story of how nature planned relationships between human beings.  It’s a story that happens naturally for those who are below 18, around 20 years old, who are just ready and waiting to fall in love.  We infatuate the appearance of another human being.  That infatuation triggers hormones and those hormones trigger pheromones.  And the pheromones cause us to be physically attracted to somebody.  That results in a sexual and very physical attraction.  It’s a natural way to be.  Sometimes we follow that physical attraction and end up in a sexual embrace with another person.  

With a sexual embrace we may then open up another level of energy, which is the moral one.  Do I like this person?  Does this person have a code that I can understand?  Do I relate to their value set?  Am I interested in them more as a whole human being than just the physical experience and the infatuation that I have with them.  And if the answer is yes, then we may even consider moving this dynamic with another human being to the next level, the emotional level.  Am I willing to trust this person?  Do I feel comfortable around this person?  Do they make me feel good?  Would I like to see them again?  Is it more than physical?  Do I trust them?  Is there an emotional experience that’s taking place here, a chemistry that feels like it could last more than just a day or two?  More than just a month?

If they pass this test the chemicals in our body move us to the next level and our heart starts to open and we say, I have just fallen in love.  I feel love for this person, I feel a bond, I feel a synergy between us.  And that chemistry in our body, electrical impulses and chemical reactions, causes us to want to start causing a permanence between us and this other individual.  If these energy levels are open a next level rises, this level of what can we build together?  What can we create together?  What can we, as a couple, cause on this planet?  And that might be children, or a business or friendships, or whatever it may be.  We will look to manifest something as a result of our love.

If we pass this test and we see opportunity here we will move to a more divine level of love.  We will move to a level where the physical is not the only basis.  The mental, the emotional, the heart, the conceptual.  It moves to a sense of inevitability, a sense of divine intervention, that this person is my soul mate.  

If we can transcend that level of love we can move to a level of unconditional love which means I love this person no matter whether I’m with them or whether they’re here or whether they’re gone, whether they’re happy or they’re sad.  We can move to a non physical level of love.  The non physical level of love is an interesting one because it’s the safest.  This non physical, unconditional love means that we can love everybody on earth safely because we don’t have to get our heart messed up with them, our emotions messed up with them.  We don’t have to get our values confused with them and we certainly don’t have to expose ourselves physically.  In a sense it’s a very high and sacred love but in another sense it’s powered us because we’re afraid, we’re afraid to be immersed, afraid to confuse ourselves, afraid to get mixed up.  

For young people these phases of love happen chemically, they’re automatic.  And as we get older and we start looking at re-entering relationships when we’re in our 40’s some of these phases are broken.  The willingness to be infatuated is replaced with wisdom.  We know there’s two sides to everybody and therefore infatuation can’t happen.  The values become our own and we become quite rigid in saying, this is what I do and you either fit my values or you leave.  

Our emotions – we’ve experienced emotional dramas and therefore we’re wary about colluding with another person or even exposing ourselves to another human being which may in turn cause us to have emotional drama.  We become emotionally closed and finally, our heart.  Our heart can shut, our heart can say, I’m not willing to do that any more because I’ve been hurt.  Or the heart can say, I love in theory but not in practice.  

And so, the chemistry of love gets lost in amongst the wisdom of age, the hormonal changes that come with life, the chemical unpreparedness, the unwillingness to experience life threatening and distracting emotions blocks us from evolving and instead we start searching for spiritual answers which help us transcend all the physical, mental, emotional, heart driven, creative experiences that are necessary to create a good relationship and we start talking about loving people with unconditional love before any other experience has taken place.  

One can understand the passion for unconditional love.  It’s a complete job, it’s a cop out, it’s sacred, it’s the sort of thing we imagine a high saint having.  I love you irrespective of what you do or where you go or who you’re with.  That, I think, in the real world of relationships is a very unhealthy place unless we’re talking about healing a relationship, unless we’re talking about the loss of a partner through death or relationship breakdown.  And then it’s necessary, in order for us to move to our next experience of love, to love our past unconditionally so it becomes ineffective, so it becomes non influential, so it becomes inert in terms of our ability to turn up for our next love.