The degree to which you love yourself is the degree to which you can love another. Masturbate your heart.
Masturbate your heart. Caress all that you love. Is it selfish to focus on you? Only when you full fill yourself, can your loving service overflow your heart and spill out to others. The following article is based on three basic mind, body, and spirit paradigms of relationships. I will use the word relationships in the broadest sense to include the relationship you have with yourself, husband-wife, wife-wife, parent-child, employee-employer or even nation-nation, as many of the same principles apply. Emotions, judgments and communication are the binding elements in any union.
Relationships are the basic units of evolution. It takes single cellular organisms interaction with others in the vicinity to create a community or larger organism. It takes an egg cell meeting a sperm to create a whole being, it takes the connection between man and woman to allow the sperm and egg to meet in this dance of mitotic division. Our evolution rests upon relationships!
Lynn Mctaggart has written a recent brilliant book called, The Bond, that discusses how we are hardwired to each other from the fundamental level of cells to whole societies. The desire to help others is so great that we experience it as one of our chief pleasures (just as much as eating or having sex). To succeed and prosper we must see ourselves as a part of a Great whole with a greater vision than ourselves.
Our communication, both support and challenge is so essential to establish this bond that it exists at every level from the single cellular organisms to the collection of 50 trillion cells we call humans to nations within our planet. There is a conversation between our cells not unlike the conversation between two people giving and taking more or less, programmed to bring us back into a homeostatic balance, that I shall call Love.
Key point 1#: Communication to establish a bond has components of support and challenge.
Even conflict brings awareness to the entanglement between two entities. “People who fire together wire together”. If we are looking for a relationship that is only peaceful it may be in the grave that you meet this reality. All great relationships wax and wane like the moon and tides, they dance together as if the sun and the moon and move in and out like a heartbeat. It is both these components that make up love and the peace and joy is found in this understanding.
While we are here on earth our purpose is to learn and grow deeper into love. The purpose is to love all parts of ourselves and all parts of others in the world as our reflection.
A patient comes into my chiropractic office a few years ago and reports that today is his 65th wedding anniversary. I ask him to tell me the magical formula that keeps him and his wife strong and together for 65 years. He says there are two simple strategies; 1. Hold on 2. Don’t die. I am not sure if he was meaning his relationship or his sex life but at 85 years old the thought of both scenarios made me smile. His wife says, “But you know Dr. Dena we fight all the time.” The husband replies, “love, if we didn’t fight we’d have been bored and divorced 20 years ago.”
I love this example of real love. Not the fantasy fairy tale that it is all support and no challenge. Both sides exist but attending just to the positive we infatuate with the relationship or just attending to the negative we resent it, when we can embrace both sides then we are in love with it. “Love is the simultaneous, synchronicity of complimentary opposites.” John Demartini
In my coaching around relationships there is a myth that you can fall in and out of love with phrases such as…. “He doesn’t love me like he used to”, “I never did love him” or “I am so in love”. Love is ever present. It is an unlimited resource that surrounds us in different forms. Our perceptions either enhance or discolor the image of it. Love is white light and our perceptions are colors that have been filtered through the mind prism of illusions. Love is a renewable resource of which we are a part. It can neither be created nor destroyed but it changes forms. Love is an inside job; the mantra is “I am love”. “Love the one you are with- YOU”. Feeling worthy of love assumes love to be an outside commodity but “I am love” means whether you are with someone or alone YOU are full filled.
Key Point #2: “I am love”.
Why is it we need to understand that love is both sides? Why are emotions important? When we understand love to be both sides it decreases judgment of relationships as we see how even the conflict fits into the matrix of a loving universe. There are many schools of thought around emotion. Some label it. Depression for example is a label. Some try to dissolve it with therapy, methods and medication. I’d like to suggest loving it. Emotions are the blueprint, the breadcrumbs to your soul. They are the symptoms of your hearts desires not being met. Emotions are your lopsided perceptions, embrace them and use them to understand yourself at greater levels. Find a coach that will honor your emotions and use them to open your soul.
Key Point # 3: Emotions are the Breadcrumbs to the Soul. Use them.
Judgments create emotion. What do you judge most harshly in others? What trait or habit? Where do you have it? Our biblical ideals suggest “do not to judge.” Do they forget we are human? Do they not see the service in judgments? Just as the body is designed with no extra parts, neither the mind nor the heart will have colors and flavors that we can’t use. Show me your judgments and I shall show you that which you have not yet loved. Dissect them carefully honoring the wisdom of the body, mind and spirit. Byron Katie says pull out your judgment sheet, lay them down and turn them around. This is a profound exercise that will cut Jack out of his bean stalk landing him into the heart of the soul with one swing of the axe.
To embrace this definition of love and understand that we all have every trait we as Arielle Ford says we can own our dark side and move further into the light. John Demartini says we have every trait, you can be stingy with your time, stingy with your money, stingy with your sex but you are still stingy. We express the traits according to our own values but we have them all! We move out of a victim mentality of shame blame and judgment realizing that what we see or judge most harshly in another is what we do not love or cannot see within you. Use your judgments to find your shadow.
Emotion –energy in motion. William James, father of modern psychology in 1800’s said there is no such thing as an emotion but a perception and a bodily response. So the implication for you is huge in changing a perception does changes your reality. Actual “Molecules of Emotion” as Candace Pert describes. Candace Pert is a neuroscientist/ pharmacologist whose Nobel Prize work was her discovery of the opiate receptors on cells. She puts a new spin in the old story of the lock and key phenomena. Our thoughts release certain neuropeptides “keys” or chemicals from the brain that travel in the body and are picked up by receptor “locks” in all areas of the body. The fight or flight response is a great demonstration of this process in action. We can think of a rattle snake and have a bodily response- our heart beats faster, our pupils dilate, our palms get sweaty.
There are even insulin receptors in the amaglyda (emotional center) of the brain so you can understand how eating and emotions could dance. The love and joy cocktail of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin are not only made by the pituitary gland in the brain but also in the gonads! Make love to me and my mind for the best orgasm! A beautiful, profound finding for the purpose of this article is that the heart contains receptors for most all of the neuropeptides!! So I will feel you before I will see you.
Key Point #4: Your Judgments are your Shadow
Sexual expression or repression is often a reflection of your relationship as love-making occurs on many different levels. It is an efficient way to triage your relationship. The physical sex reality gives us the ground to dig deeper. Guilt’s of the past, fears and doubts about the future are often symptoms that show up in the bedroom so it is an intimate way into your heart.
In these situations, sexual healing is not as much about lotions, potions, leather, lace and sex toys and improving sexual technique. It is more about heightening our awareness of what’s stopping us from being closer with our partner. It is a process of unraveling ever-deeper levels of truth about our fears, telling those truths to ourselves and our partners, and thus creating a sacred space within which to share our loving expression. So, in a way, effective relationship therapy is really sex therapy and self exploration therapy on one mattress!
“Sexual energy is a tremendous source of vitality and life force. When we own and live our sexual energy, we incarnate – we come to embody the goddess within. We wake up to the moment. Through our sexual flow as women, the worlds are birthed.”~Shakti Malan
What does the phrase “not tonight honey I have a headache” suggest? It is an example of a common sabotage tactic in which the person is challenged or not seeing enough value in the process. Linking values to a shared vision is the heart of the matter. Take a minute to write down your values. List the top 3-5 areas or things you love. Values can be identified by examining where you spend the most time and money and the areas of your life that are most organized. It will be what you talk about the most, read about the most and surround yourself. www.drdemartini.com will provide you with a value determination sheet that will be helpful in this process. My top values would be mind/body healing, writing, speaking, family, yoga.
Now list what you perceive is your partners top 3-5 values. This could be your partner in personal relationship or partner in business. What do you notice? Are they different? The universe sets it up this way to help us love it all. As frustrating as it is often times to see another’s’ perspective the only way to escape the emotion is to learn to love at an expanded awareness that encompasses both sets of values and links it to a greater purpose. An exercise I do when coaching couples is have each do a top 10 list then exchange it and have the partner suggest ways they can help you fulfill it.
Take the love test here http://drdenachurchill.com/2011/12/31/5-steps-save-relationship-lets-dissolve-jealously-create-perfect-partner/
Key Point #5 : Masturbate Your Heart
Knowing what it is that you value most, will help you be clearer and focused in your life purpose. The voices on the outside whether in support or challenge are there to test your certainty of what you love. Write down the activities that creates the orgasm of your heart’s desire and do them. Use your emotions and judgments of others to help you find your way to the S.O.U.L….the Spirit Of Unconditional Love. Understand that the world you see is a reflection of you so……MASTURBATE YOUR HEART and live in Joy and bliss!
If you need additional information visit www.loveyourdivorcesite.com, www.drdenachurchill.com or book a live or virtual coaching session e-mail dena@drdenachurchill.com
The media entices readers about discussing the pain and loss surrounding divorce and fortune splitting taking a place on center stage but is there a side to divorce that goes unnoticed? My book entitled, Divinity in Divorce, aims to present a quieter perspective to divorce to shift the current paradigm. Throughout my own personal divorce journey, sinking into despair, I asked God the question of how to get through this process with love and grace. Regardless of the city, circumstance or country those going through the divorce will have similar questions. A process called the Demartini Method ™ began unraveling the mystery for me and when I found the answer, I thought it would be worth sharing. 