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Grow Your Love
Posted by: | CommentsWe wanted to give you a head’s up, in case you missed it in the magazine, on a real good article from Yoga Journal entitled Grow Your Love. Lots of wisdom from a solid handful of couples (yours truly included) who share the similarities and useful awarenesses between the practice of Yoga and the journey of Relationship.
Here is a little snippet to whet your appetite:
“It’s no secret that relationships require work, but, as in yoga, you can find a happy balance between effort and ease when you apply your awareness. “A lot of people feel like, ‘If you loved me, we wouldn’t have to work at this,’” Feldman says, but he thinks that’s an unrealistic attitude. The trick,when it feels like too much effort, is to find more ease. To help couples with this, Feldman and his wife help their clients discover “love rituals”—small gestures practiced up to three times a day for two to three minutes at a time—so they can reconnect with the partner as a source of pleasure rather than pain.”
Hope you enjoy!
What to Do When You’re Upset With Me ?
Posted by: | CommentsKate and I highly value a skill we call “Self Soothing” because we know that our partners, family members and friends are virtually guaranteed to trigger age-old reactions in us. Of this we can be certain. In order to create a safe space for our closest relations to let us know what happened, we must be willing to listen carefully to “their world” or their perspective on what happened. This is one of what we call the “willful practices” on the path of relationship. When we can’t hold onto ourselves, we are bound to interrupt our partner and usually kick-off another round of defensive behavior that often devolves into the blame game, you know how it goes, “I’m right, you’re wrong, here’s why”.
I was feeling poetic and penned this little self reminder this morning. Hope it’s helpful.
You’re upset…I can breathe and relax…
And let you be upset…And breathe some more….
And try to feel your pain, even if it’s me you’re upset with…
I can relax….And hear about what’s upsetting you…
I don’t need to defend myself…I don’t need to justify my behavior…
I can breathe and just be with you…In your upset….
I may have defensive thoughts from time to time…But you still are not wrong… Read More→
There Are No “Little Things” in Relationship!
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For better or for worse, the “little things” in relationships, both good and bad, matter more than we’d like to believe. We’ve spoken before on this blog about our belief that daily life IS foreplay for couples. We know that large, regular doses of kindness offered to our partner make for great connection and intimacy. Continuing to water and feed the garden of our relationship is critical.
But there is another grouping of “Little Things” that we all must pay attention to… the Weeds! In honor of Summer, it seems appropriate to look at what our love interests have in common with our gardens. Weeding our relationship garden is critical. Weeds not dealt with can wreak havoc on those wonderful plants we’ve been cultivating for a while. We have one in particular that attaches itself to other plants and gradually chokes the life out of them. Can you see where I’m going with this? I see it every day in my office; “small” problems or conflicts left unattended gradually suck the juice out of the relationship.
Believe me, I pull a lot of weeds out of our flower gardens. The problem is, many times I don’t get the whole root and they just grow back again. In our relationships, the weeds or frustrations we experience also have deeper roots. Without getting at these our conflicts simply return again and again in one form or another. They’ve been doing that our entire lives. There are no magic carpets we can sweep them under or weed killers that take care of the problem long term. “If we don’t deal, we can’t heal”. It’s an ongoing project. Read More→
