The Conscious Heart (39 page)

• What are two or three of your qualities, without which you wouldn’t be you?

• What do you most love doing, such that if you didn’t get to do it, life would have no meaning to you?

• If your relationship worked well, what would you do with the energy and time you have been expending in conflict?

• Imagine you are on your deathbed, and someone asks if your life has been a success. You answer yes. What four or five things have you experienced or accomplished that have made your life a success?

• If you could design your relationship any way you wanted to, how would you design it?

• Think about a recent relationship conflict—re-create it vividly in your mind. What would be the completely healed, positive outcome?

• If you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you most want in your relationship?

• How can you best appreciate your feelings today?

• How can you play with your shadow today in a loving and friendly celebration?

• How can you use every experience to fuel aliveness in yourself and those around you?

• How can you express essence in a way that invites the expression of essence in those you meet today?

• How can you recognize and express who you are at your deepest, most expanded level in a way that invites celebration?

F
OR
P
ARTNERS

H
ere is a simple practice that produces strong feelings of essence. Most people find they have to stay with it for ten to fifteen minutes before the deep essence-feelings begin to build.

Face each other, and maintain eye contact. Take a few moments to just breathe and be with each other.

Take a moment to love yourself, then a moment to love your partner. Keep oscillating back and forth between giving yourself love and loving your partner.

With eye contact, take a moment to be
for
yourself, then focus on your partner and be
for
them, in your spirit and your heart, even if you’re angry. Then focus on your experience and be
for
yourself,
for
your highest expression. Go back and forth, being for your partner, then for yourself.

Keep repeating the cycle until you feel the body-feelings of essence.

F
OR
I
NDIVIDUALS

B
reathe gently and easily into your belly. Let yourself rest after the outbreath until your body is ready to take another in-breath, then ride the breath all the way in and out. Tune in to someplace in your body that is calling, and when breath comes, breathe into that place. On the outbreath let go in that place; just release as you breathe out. Pause again after each outbreath until your body is ready to breathe again, then breathe into any place that needs attention. Continue for two minutes.

Focus on a warm glow in your chest. Let your awareness rest gently on the warm glow, and keep returning to it. Nurture and be with the warm glow until you feel it more prominently. Close your eyes and get in touch with your own source of light. Be with that, and appreciate yourself for being your own source of love and light.

Love yourself for whatever you’re feeling and thinking right now. Think of someone or something you absolutely know you love, and give yourself that same love.

4/Balancing Power

R
elationships can occur only between equals. In every healthy relationship the power is equally balanced. To balance the power most efficiently, everyone should meet at the top by taking complete responsibility. When one person steps out of full responsibility for themselves or the relationship, a power struggle begins. Taking healthy responsibility is one of the most important steps you can take for your own self-esteem and for your relationships. A healthy understanding of responsibility can be very helpful in uncovering and expressing your spiritual self.

Here are some important things to remember about taking responsibility:

• Responsibility is best taken as a celebration rather than as a burden or a chore.

• Taking responsibility restores to you the power over your happiness that you have given to your parents, any authority, your partner, your moods, the weather, or anything else. It is the ultimate cure for self-esteem problems. It says, “We’re equal, and I deserve to be here.”

• Taking 100 percent responsibility for yourself means that you can acknowledge that others are 100 percent responsible for themselves.

• Take responsibility
now!
Don’t worry about whether you created your parents or orchestrated your birth or have toothaches because you bit somebody in a past life. With these speculations we rob ourselves of the time and energy we need to take responsibility now. The same goes for blame. Your childhood is over. Instead of worrying about what your parents or somebody did to you, focus on what you would like to create now.

• Look around carefully in your life for any place you are operating as a victim. Are you perceiving yourself as the victim of another person, past or present? A victim of your body? The way the world is? Let it go: The way it is is the way it is.

• Taking responsibility does not mean blaming yourself. If you take responsibility for an old trauma, you just acknowledge that it happened and accept the feelings you felt and your interpretations of the experience.

R
ESPONSIBILITY
M
EDITATIONS

P
ractice these ideas by saying them in your mind and out loud:

• I am completely responsible for all my feelings.

• I am completely responsible for my well-being.

• I give other people responsibility for their feelings and actions.

• I take responsibility for making and keeping agreements.

• I take responsibility for handling the agreements I break.

• I take responsibility for expressing my spiritual essence in ways that make a difference in the world.

R
ESPONSIBILITY
P
RACTICE

Step One

Identify a major complaint in your life. Look for an issue or problem that has arisen three or more times without a satisfying resolution. It could be in your relationship with yourself, a romantic partner, a business associate, your children, or a friend. Take two minutes to just complain about it in your most unenlightened manner. Don’t try to be nice or polite. You can write for two minutes or complain out loud. It’s helpful to include words like “never,” “always,” “too (adjective),” “not enough.” Give yourself permission to air the dirty laundry.

Step Two

Ask yourself: Are you willing to take 100 percent responsibility for clearing up this issue?

When you ask this question, your mind may argue, go blank,
or say, “I don’t know how.” Remember that the path appears
after
you take responsibility, not before. Just see if you are genuinely willing to step into healthy responsibility.

If you are willing to take 100 percent responsibility, designate a place on the floor that represents responsibility, and actually step into that place.

Step Three

When you’re standing in your responsibility place, wonder about the following questions.

• Given your programming, why was it inevitable that this issue happened the way it did?

• What from the past does this remind you of?

• How do you keep this issue going in your life now?

• What did you learn from this issue that would have been difficult to learn in any other way?

• What positive potential did this issue release in you that would have been difficult to release in any other way?

5/Ending Control Struggles

W
hen we are feeling stuck, it is usually because we are focusing on things we cannot change or control When we shift to focusing on things we can change and control, life smooths out very quickly.

Imagine that there are two files in your mind. If you are a computer person, you can visualize two computer files. If you’re not, visualize two manila office files. Happiness comes from getting everything in your life in the right file. If you organize your two files correctly, you will feel an immediate surge of well-being in your body.

File number one is called “Things I Absolutely Can Change
or Control” The other is labeled “Things I Absolutely Cannot Change or Control” Many people exhaust their energy by putting things in the wrong file. In fact, the unpleasant feeling of drained exhaustion that many people feel is the direct result of worrying about things that are absolutely outside their control, and of avoiding thinking about things over which they have control Typically, for example, therapy clients will come in feeling completely drained. It will turn out that they have been thinking about such things as:

• What other people think about them

• The problems of an adult child

• Whether their mate is sexually attracted to someone else

• The future

• The past

All of these things actually belong in the file called “Things I Absolutely Cannot Change or Control” Thinking about these things exhausts us and keeps us from thinking about issues completely within our control, such as:

• Whether we are doing what we want to be doing

• Whether we have communicated our feelings completely to our partner

• Whether we have told the child in question how we feel about his or her issue

• Whether we have taken an action step in the present that will contribute to the future or heal something in the past

All of these things are well within our power to change and control, but addressing them requires energy. That energy is drained by thinking about things outside our control Think for a moment of the American obsession with weight. You may be one of the millions of people who struggle to control their weight but for whom the issue never seems to resolve itself. If you think you
can control your weight, try an experiment. Go stand on your scale, and control your weight by losing five pounds. If you can do something in your mind that makes the scales register five pounds less, call us collect! The truth is, no one can control their weight.

Weight belongs in the “Things I Absolutely Cannot Change or Control” file. What
do
you have control over that might influence your weight? How much you eat and how much you exercise are behaviors that belong in the file “Things I Absolutely Can Change or Control.” But if you’re worrying about your weight or thinking about what you’ll have for lunch in the middle of breakfast, you’re misfiling. You’re draining the energy it takes to change fundamental habits like eating and exercising.

As formidable as individual organizing is, correct filing gets even more complicated in relationships. In fact, it may be the basis for most power struggles. Many couples try to control something in their partner that they actually have no control over.

Here’s an example of organizing the two files from a recent training.

We said to Debbie, “What’s your big relationship complaint?”

She replied, “Trying to get my partner to tell the truth. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been obsessed with finding out what’s really true and trying to dig it out of people. Frank just doesn’t seem to understand how important this is to me!”