Are You Making a Living, or Making a Loving

The man was enormously successful by America's contemporary standards of material accomplishment: a meteoric rise up the corporate ladder; a 4700 square foot house in an exclusive suburb; over $200,000 annual salary; a beautiful wife and two intelligent, well-behaved children. Yet all he could talk about was the knot in his stomach that wouldn't go away, and the sheer loneliness and emptiness of his existence. He had no true friends, did not know how to talk with his children, he and his wife were distant and angry, and he didn't feel his work or life had any meaning. Is this success?

We have worked with too many men and women like this man: working, pushing and achieving, yet feeling on the inside like a rat stuck on a wheel going nowhere fast. Americans work more hours and take less vacations than any culture in the world. While our standard of material life may be the envy of the world, our inner life is the object of comments like that of Mother Theresa, who said she had never seen such emotional poverty as she saw in America.

Joe Dominguez, deceased author of the best-selling underground classic "Your Money or Your Life", and a rare voice of sanity amid mindless consumerism, was fond of asking participants at workshops, "Are you making a living or making a dying? If you're making a living, at the end of each day you should feel more alive, more rejuvenated, more connected with others, and more grateful to be living the life you have." By this definition, many Americans are making a dying: feeling exhausted, cut off from others, numb and depleted, while chasing illusory material goals whose gratification is fleeting and empty.

We would like to add an additional phrase to Dominguez' question: are you making a loving? That is, is your lifestyle conducive to creating more love, more meaningful connection with others, more time playing, connecting and bonding with those closest to you? Or do you find yourself like so many others today, strapped for time, connecting with others only in superficial or electronic means, or not even bothering to try because you're too exhausted?

Certainly there are emotional fears and blocks that keep many people from living a more loving life, but by far the most popular reason people give for not 'making a loving' is a lack of time. To hear people talk today, you would think that the revolution of the earth has been shortened a few hours since they were born! We're always amazed by the number of couples who claims they are serious about creating a closer, more loving relationship but claim they don't even have ten minutes a day to invest in that pursuit.

As individuals and as a culture, it's time we stop feeling victimized by time and take responsibility for the fact that we have chosen and created every second of our lifestyle. Dominguez brilliantly expanded upon the concept of "time is money": he had people calculate the actual hours of their lives each purchase costs them. For him, money is nothing more than an exchange of life energy. When you go through his calculations, it turns out that for most people a new car costs around seven hours of life energy a week; a vacation costs eleven hours a week; a bigger house costs over twenty hours a week.

This analysis helps you really understand your priorities in life. For example, if you're willing to trade seven hours of your life to drive a new car, compare this to how many hours (or minutes) a week you currently devote to:

* being physically affectionate with those close to you
* looking directly into the eyes of people
* talking to others about meaningful topics
* creating community
* engaging in spiritual practices
* doing non-task activities with your partner and/or children
* live in-person contact vs. electronic (telephone or email) contact with friends, family and/or loved ones
* unstructured leisure time

In short, do you have a lifestyle conducive to creating more love, happiness and fulfillment? If not, the following items can help you begin to take specific steps to creating more love in your life:

* remember that you have created your entire lifestyle by a series of past choices, and you have the same power to create a different one
* your lifestyle choices are unlimited, and there may be many more fulfilling choices than the one Madison Avenue has created for you
* if you're not creating as much love in your life as you'd like because of a time crunch, re-evaluate your choices and begin planting the seeds of a new lifestyle today! For the experiences of love that you give and receive in the future will directly flow from the choices you make today
* keep a "time diary" for a week or month. This will show you clearly the activities in your current lifestyle that are not consistent with your life priorities and goals, and you can then choose to reduce of eliminate them
* examine whether you have sabotaged opportunities to create more time and/or love in your life by quickly filling up your free time or making purchases which require you to work more hours.

The tragedy of modern life is that with all of our technological progress, many people feel unloved and exhausted, and see more work and more money as the only solution. But think of the most connected, most loving days of your life: how many of those depended on lots of money? Probably none of them. By consciously creating a lifestyle that is conducive to creating more love, and removing emotional obstacles to receiving that love, you can indeed have it all: making a living AND making a loving every day of your life.

Loving Ourselves

In creating healthy, loving relationships with others, we need to comes to terms with any parts of ourselves that we feel uncomfortable with. We may have parts of ourselves that we have disowned, denied, or stuck away in some obscure corner of our psyche because we can’t stand to hang out with the uneasy feelings they generate. These parts may have to do with a traumatic time in our past; how we view some aspect of our lives such as our bodies or career; or some dysfunctional pattern we continually engage in. The problem is that anything we disown creates an imbalance. Because the nature of life is to seek balance and integration, those parts will be like the proverbial squeaky wheel, acting out in even more extreme ways to get us to pay attention to an inner need for healing. Moreover, if we can’t love ourselves, we will look for someone else to love us, in hopes that if they give us enough love our unlovable part will get better or just go away. Unfortunately, we will tend to attract others who don’t love and accept themselves either, thus setting ourselves up for even more hurt and disappointment. So let’s talk about how we can learn to love ourselves more fully and unconditionally, and see what a wonderful effect that can have in creating healthier relationships in all aspects of our lives.

1. Dismantle Your Inner Critic - many of us have a mental bully, the Inner Critic, who seems to delight in hurling negative thoughts at us. Whenever a positive experience occurs, the Critic rises up to criticize, put down, discount and otherwise beat the experience into submission. This Inner Critic must be dismantled because our thoughts are creative and powerful: we literally become what we think, and we don’t want to become our critic. The Inner Critic can and will sabotage your success more easily than any external, real-world obstacle. Letting the Critic bully you is like driving on a freeway with the parking brake on - you just can’t go very fast or far. In relationships, the inner critic will tell you that you don’t deserve or can’t attract a healthier relationship.

Dismantling your Inner Critic is wonderfully liberating. Many energy psychology techniques such as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Thought Field Therapy (TFT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) can help dissolve the negative feelings of hurt, shame and/or inadequacy that your Inner Critic can elicit. They can also neutralize the fear and intimidation associated with the Critic. Also, having a written or verbal dialogue with your Inner Critic can result in a major power shift in your inner world. Tell your Critic off for once, then do it again and again, and see what happens. This inner bully isn’t used to being confronted and will often meekly recoil when challenged. If your Inner Critic still resists these efforts, seek professional help.

2. Befriend and Nurture All Parts of Yourself - if there are parts of yourself from your past or present that you feel shame, embarrassment, guilt or inadequacy about, treat those parts as you would a sad or frightened child: with love, nurturing and warmth. These parts really need the healing power of love. Many forms of Inner Child work can be very helpful in this process, where you visualize yourself actually being with and nurturing a part of yourself or your past.

3. Confront Your Own Denial - looking at yourself honestly is another essential ingredient to loving yourself. Imagine stepping back from the drama of your own life, and looking at your relationship history totally objectively. What do you see? What are the themes? What are the successes? What are the recurring unhealthy patterns? Notice if you tend to deny certain problem

Loving Ourselves

We have created a subjective reality in our culture where many of us experience life as a seamless blur of events and people, desperately trying to cram more work in our day, more information in our heads and more ''quality'' in our ever-shrinking time. We live in a world which invites us to participate in ''techno-time,'' where events are measured in millionths or even billionths of a second. On many days, we may have more electronic contacts with people than human ones. It may take us weeks or months to authentically connect with a dear friend or with ourselves. Many people now bring their laptop computers with them on vacation and then check their email every day, ''just so I don't have to go through 300 emails when I get home.'' People salivate at the thought of having wireless internet access on their cell phone, anywhere, anytime. Our amazing technological advances have given us incredible efficiency and instant access to more information than we can ever use. But sadly, technology has also left too many of us disconnected, speeded up, burned out and lifeless. This is what happens when we allow the tyranny of techno-time to rule our lives. How much time do you feel you have when you are immersed in techno-time mode? Unfortunately, time is a great metaphor for life: if you have no time, you have no life.

But there is another subjective experience of time that we can choose to tap into whenever we want. Love's time is not measured in megahertz or nanoseconds. It's not concerned with efficiency or speed. Love's time is neither fast nor slow, for it is out of time, time-less, right here, right now, this second as your eyes read these words. Love's time is measured in meaning, in connection, in authenticity and in love. Love's time asks not how many emails you answered today, but how many hearts did you touch? How many eyes did you actually look into? How often did you connect with and feel your own living experience in your body, the felt sense you carry around all the time, beneath the distractions?

Techno-time ruins relationships by relegating human needs to merely another item on a digitized to-do list that can be deleted with one click. Love's time nourishes the essence of relationships, knowing that our needs for love, intimacy and authentic connection can never be deleted from the human psyche. Techno-time prides itself on efficiency and on the number of things it can get done. Love's time knows that one moment of genuine connection is worth more than a thousand completed tasks. Techno-time tries to squeeze children and lovers into pre-programmed categories and gets angry when things do not go as neatly as planned. Love's time knows that the human heart has its own pace, its own reasons for unfolding and opening and that the process cannot be predicted, rushed, controlled or squeezed. Techno-time believes that faster is always better. Love's time knows that in matters of the heart, speed is irrelevant. Techno-time gets frustrated when having to wait more than a few seconds for a click to execute. Love's time is patient and treats humans as purposeful, living beings whose behavior does not fit into pre-conceived notions.

Look at your relationships, with yourself and others in your life. How many of them are running on love's time? Have you chosen to allow techno-time to impair the quality of your relationships? If so, here are some guidelines to get more love time into your lifetime. As an added bonus, by doing these things, you will invite those that you love to also increase the amount of love time in their lives as well.

Meditate: nothing is better for helping you get out of techno-time than meditation. Mindfulness meditation is particularly helpful for slowing down your mind and getting into synchronicity with your breath and body. If you need help in learning to meditate, some great books to get you started are A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield, Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn and A Gradual Awakening by Stephen Levine.

Prioritize Unstructured Relationship Time: give yourself at least one block of a time a week that is completely unstructured. Do the same when you plan to spend time with your children, your friends, and your lover. The compulsive need to plan and organize every moment is what stifles love's time, every time.

Plan Spontaneity: if you must plan activities, plan things that force you to get out of your head, connect with your body and be very mindful and aware of yourself and others in the present moment. For example, take an improvisational comedy class. Learn to kayak or sail or dance or sing or play a musical instrument. Participate, don't spectate. By responsibly choosing to bring more of love's time into your life and the life of those you love, you will avoid feeling victimized by the techno-time conspiracy all around you. You really do have the power to choose the subjective reality of time that you want to live in. Choose wisely.

How to Communicate in a Healthy, Constructive Manner

Research has shown that there is a structured communication format that can be very helpful for couples to communicate in a more healthy and constructive than they often do. This format is called by a variety of names, such as Active Listening or Mirroring. The basic elements of this communication format are shown below.

If you find that you are unable or unwilling to practice this format with your partner, you may need help from a professional who can help you understand what is causing the problems in your communication. Couples Therapy is very helpful in this case.

There are typically four major blocks to healthy communication which couples experience in their interactions:

1. Arguing or Withdrawing

2. Blaming and Accusing

3. Not Listening

4. Changing the Subject

By using these blocks to good communication, a couple virtually insures that they will not be able to resolve conflicts. Over time, these styles of communication will create resentment, distance and an unhappy relationship.

Fortunately, there are skills which can be learned by most couples, to substitute for each of these communication blocks. In this format, only one person speaks at a time, and the other person's job is purely to listen. Only when the first person is completely done talking does the other one begin expressing what they have to say.

Instead of arguing or withdrawing, couples can learn to:

1. SET THE STAGE FOR HEALTHY COMMUNICATION

For good communication to occur, it must be the right time and place. If either of you is too upset or distracted, the interaction will most likely end up with one of the above four communication blocks predominating the discussion. So if you know you or your partner is too upset to have a constructive conversation, do the following:

-Stop and cool down; leave the situation if necessary for a while
-Set a specific time and place to talk again
-Don't interrupt your partner; let them express
-Acknowledge your partner's concerns

Instead of Blaming and Accusing, couples can learn to:

2. USE "I" MESSAGES

When couples do a lot of blaming and accusing, they start many sentences to each other with words such as "you always..." or "you never...". Their partner is immediately put on the defensive when they hear a sentence beginning with the word "you".

A better method is to take responsibility for what you are feeling and communicate that to your partner. Begin your sentences with phrases like "I feel..." or "I think..."

-Discuss your feelings in a responsible way
-If you discuss your partner's behavior, again do so in terms of your feelings
-Let your partner know your feelings when they engage in the behavior
-Tell your partner the consequences of their behavior to you

As an example of this, if you are upset your partner doesn't call when they're coming home late, you could use blaming and accusing and say, "You're irresponsible" or "You don't care about me" or "You're selfish". Using "I" messages, the same statement might come out like this: "When you stay out late past when you told me you'd be home, I feel hurt, frustrated and angry. When you finally do come home, I really don't want to be close with you. In fact, it usually takes me all day long the next day before I feel like being close with you again."

Instead of not listening, couples can learn to:

3. USE ACTIVE LISTENING

With Active Listening, the listener's job is purely to listen, without interruption, without adding anything to what the speaker has said. The key elements of Active Listening are to:

-Listen to understand: even if you don't agree with what you're partner is saying, pay attention and listen to it.
-Summarize: after you've heard them, paraphrase and repeat back what you heard. "So what I heard you say was..."
-Verify: when you are done summarizing what you heard your partner say, ask them, "Did I hear you correctly?" Let them give you feedback. Maybe you missed an important element of what they said. This is not a test and not about being right or wrong; it's about listening and your partner being heard.
-Be open and receptive for more input: when your partner has agreed that you have heard them on that one comment, ask them, "Is there anything else you want to say?" Let them know that they have the floor until they are finished getting everything out that they need to.

Instead of changing the subject, couples can learn to:

4. STAY ON ONE SUBJECT AT A TIME

By agreeing ahead of time to talk only about one topic and nothing else, couples can make significant progress on an issue. It may take several sessions to hear what each other has to say about a topic, just as it took some time for the feelings about it to develop. Be patient and keep talking.

How to Improve Your Current Relationship

Here is a great exercise for couples to try, which can greatly help enhance the intimacy in your relationship. Begin by reflecting on your current relationship. As you think about your relationship notice what thoughts, feelings and sensations arise within. Allow them to be there, without judging their nature in any way. Then put some attention on your current perceptions of your partner: good, bad or indifferent. Notice any blaming or limiting thoughts you may have about your partner, or what you perceive to be their shortcomings or character defects.

Now let us give you a splendid gift for your relationship. The gift starts with a recognition that unless we have chosen an abusive or chemically dependent partner, our perception of our partner is but a reflection of our own efforts at creating love. Our partner is the perfect mirror who gives us back what we give. When we find ourselves taking an inventory of our partner's defects, it is a sure sign that we are avoiding responsibility for what we have created and brought out in our partner. "But you don't understand! He really IS..." Alas, we cannot change our partner's character. But we can change the present and future quality of our relationship.

A powerful question to ask yourself is this: how would YOU act toward your partner if you thought they were the best partner for you in the whole world? That is, imagine that right now (whether you believe it or not!) the person you are dating or living together or married to the complete and total embodiment of what you perceive of as the perfect mate for you: the perfect personality, the perfect body, the perfect spiritual practice, whatever would be absolutely perfect for you. Next, think about how you would act toward this perfect partner. Would you be attentive? Aloof? Thoughtful? Distant? Affectionate? Sarcastic? Romantic? Crabby? Seductive? Would you rush home and turn on the TV or the computer? What events would you plan? What cards would you write? Make a list of all the things you would do, and how often you would do them.

In this little exercise lies one of the secrets to an everlasting love. The qualities that sustain an alive, loving, healthy intimate relationship over time are not the big gifts or splashy anniversary or holiday presents. Rather, love is enlivened and sustained by the small, repeated kindnesses that cost little in money or time but a great deal in terms of effort and thoughtfulness. So you want to unleash the highest loving potential of your partner? It's simple: for thirty days, do everything that you would do for your imaginary perfect partner with your current partner. Do everything on your list, and do it as often as you would with your perfect partner. Don't tell your partner what you are doing until a month has passed. By doing this exercise, you will give your partner, as well as your relationship, the best gift they could receive. In most cases, your partner will spontaneously begin to be more loving and thoughtful in return.

Why does this work? On a metaphysical level, it works because love begets love, and the energy of your unselfish acts resonates in the loving space of your partner. Service is a great spiritual practice, and serving the world begins at home. It also works on a more mundane level: because many of us practice ego-centered love, we withhold and will not give any more until we feel we have received enough to compensate us for our efforts in advance. Consciously or not, we keep score. But when we visualize that we are with the perfect partner who treats us in as ideal a manner as we could imagine, who intuitively understands our every need, we spontaneously feel like giving, like being loving and thoughtful, simply because we feel grateful and even lucky to be with this person. This exactly mirrors how we feel when we first fall in love: our heart opens wide, and being loving and thoughtful happens effortlessly. This gives us a wonderful vision of what is possible with this person we barely know.

The good news is that we can recover and revisit that vision by making a mindful, conscious effort to be loving and thoughtful. And that is why the visualization is actually a manifestation of the truth: the person who has chosen to be with us today, out of everyone else they could be with, is the best partner for us right now. We can honor and respect the fact that we have been brought together for a profound reason: this is the best partner for us to learn what we have to learn, as we are for them. Too often in intimate relationships we wait passively for our partner to act lovingly towards us, to give us a reason to act in a loving manner; or we wait for the presence of romantic feelings to give us a reason or permission to act in a loving manner. We remember in the beginning how we acted so lovingly when we felt such strong, intense feelings, and we wait for them to return. And if they don't, we assume we're incompatible, or that this is just not the right person for us. The truth, however, is that when the infatuation ends, the real relationship beings. And in the real relationship, true loving feelings are created by effortful loving acts, not the other way around. And when both people experience true loving feelings on a consistent basis, by consistently acting in a loving manner, there is no end to the spiral of love that can be created. So choose now to give your relationship a gift that truly keeps on giving every day of the year.