Category: Love

Love has remained a mystery throughout the history of humankind and is one of the most powerful reasons that keeps us up at night.

The latest neuroscience research confirms that we are hardwired for connection. A study by Harvard University that looked at what factors contribute to human happiness found that “Happiness is love.”

Yet, for the majority of us, cultivating loving, healthy relationships is still an outcome we have not been able to arrive at effectively.

What are the factors that contribute to our failure, and what can we do within our control to improve our relationships?

Are you afraid of your own shadow?

Have you ever found yourself-acting out of character, doing and saying things that did not take you to your desired outcome, and that you later regretted?

If you have, you are not alone. There seems to be something in us humans, which we are not aware of, which is a major obstacle in our quest to achieve all great human pursuits.

Could it be that the problems we face and our never-ending energy spent in trying to control situations, people, and things are a manifestation of a dance of opposites inside ourselves? Could it be because we don’t yet know or have power and control over our own dark side—our shadow?

When we break our challenges down to the basics, we can see that anything that presents as “an issue” in life is a never-ending battle between darkness and light, good and evil, fear and love.

We have adopted the stance that only we are good, and the bad or negative parts of our human experience are others’ issues or are outside of our control. However, our state of health, our relationships, and the discord in our smaller and our global communities reflect that we could be missing the boat by not making amends and working with (instead of against) our dark side, our shadow!

This may be the perfect time to realize the impact of fully recognizing and embracing our shadow—the one thing that stands between us and our ability to reclaim our personal power and change the trajectory of any aspect of our existence.

What is our shadow?

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the father of psychoanalysis and world-renowned for his theory of individuation, described the shadow as “any unconscious part of our personality that we do not identify in ourselves.” The shadow is the collection of the parts of us that were rejected, not rewarded, or not acknowledged by our environment during the early years of our life. We therefore hid those parts away establishing them as “unacceptable” and rejected. But what happens with all that stuff we put away deep in our unconscious?

Imagine if while you were sleeping at night, there was a stranger walking through your house. How would that feel?

What if instead of a stranger, your significant other is in your kitchen cleaning up after your wonderful dinner while you are given the luxury of some needed self- care before retiring to sleep at night? How would that feel in comparison?

All the things we have disowned in ourselves formulate a stranger, or shadow, that we carry along in all that we do and which, without our permission, runs our life on autopilot.

But our shadow is also the ultimate ticket to our personal freedom from everything that does not serve us.

Getting to know our shadow and bringing it to the light is kind of like replacing the sensation of a stranger walking through our house with the sensation of a person we love and trust, whose actions are predictable, tried, and true and aim toward the best outcomes for us.

Shadow work involves the exciting discovery of what we don’t yet know about our self and bringing back to the surface that vulnerable part of ourselves that was unprotected and unrecognized when we first formed our inner self.

How do we know when our shadow runs our life? What can we do about it?

The shadow is a universal element among all of us. I have one and you have one too. However, since our shadow is comprised of all the things that we stashed away throughout our life, by default, most of us are not aware of its existence. We work hard to maintain a self-image that is acceptable to the status quo and that provides us with the biggest rewards and acceptance from our environment. But what I have learned from deciding to venture down the path to make friends with my shadow is that our shadow is truly the biggest saboteur in anything we ever strive for.

Here are some ways our shadow sabotages our life without our permission until we choose to invest in the work to blast it with light:

  • We find ourselves wasting a good chunk of our energy in judging others.

According to Carl Jung, anything that we have established as unacceptable and we do not yet recognize in ourselves, we unconsciously project onto others. Projection is a defense mechanism where any of our intolerable thoughts, traits, feelings, or actions are ascribed to other people as an attempt to establish a false sense of superiority for ourselves and to continue to deny their existence in us. Judging others as a way of finding relief with the things we have not yet processed and made coherent stories of in ourselves creates major issues for us.

The problem:

  1. It deprives us of the opportunity for change.
  2. It alienates us from others, disrupting the sense of trust and authentic connection, which is hardwired into our DNA.
  3. It forms a lifelong source of unnecessary suffering.

The solution: If you find yourself choosing the path of defining another’s experience by subjecting them to your disapproval and judgments, take a step back and instead of judging them make a list of all your judgments. This list presents an incredible key to unlocking the secrets to what it is you judge unconsciously in your self. Ultimate freedom is when we are free of judging others, which is a clear indication that we have come to the point where we love and honor ourselves, and our relationships are defined by empathy and goodwill, even when we have to communicate unpleasant emotions.

  • We have a hard time being accountable.

Saying or doing something that hurts another’s feelings is part of our human experience. A problem arises when we are made aware of the impact of our actions and are not able to take responsibility. Instead we shift the responsibility onto the other person. We have mastered the art of acting as if we were accountable, for example by saying “I am sorry,” but we don’t blast with light what was the true force behind our actions. We apologize for the way the other person feels, instead of acknowledging how, momentarily, we disrupted connection with them through our own actions.

The problem:

  1. We continue to disown the one thing we have control over and perpetrate a behavior that does not serve us.
  2. We allow our shadow to keep us imprisoned in unconscious games of manipulation.

The solution: The next time you find yourself in a position where someone is brave enough to hold you accountable for your actions, see it as an invaluable pearl of knowledge toward the incredible adventure of discovering your true self. After all, our behaviors are born from our state, which is driven by our emotions. Recognizing the negative emotions that propel us to not want to take responsibility for our own mishaps, which sabotage our efforts toward anything noble, is a powerful way to carve the path ahead towards self-mastery!

  • We work so hard to present a positive self-image, but deep down our fears drive our ship.

Fear is a powerful human emotion and one that has kept us alive for millions of years. However, there is a healthy dose of fear and an unhealthy dose. An unhealthy amount of fear has a tremendous impact on destruction of ourselves, our community, and the world we live in today. We are afraid of our own brother and sister; we are afraid of our differences; we are afraid of losing what we have; we are afraid of things that are not here now.

The problem: “Whatever we focus on becomes our reality.” Neuroplasticity, which is the greatest neuroscience discovery in the last 150 years, has proven this statement with hard-core science. When we look at ourselves, our fellow human beings, and life situations from an unconscious stance of fear, we not only operate at diminished capacity, but we continue to aid in the development of nerve cell connections in parts of our brain that are associated with weaknesses and not with inner strengths.

The solution: The next time you find yourself experiencing physiological arousal that relates to fear, such as increased heart rate or defensiveness, recognize it and chose to put your attention on something neutral, like your breath. Once you reinstate your internal state of balance, you can spend some time exploring what it is you are truly afraid of. The practice of challenging our challenges by having a dialogue with ourselves is extremely powerful in dismantling emotional bombs of self-destruction. Then we can have a fair battle and defeat the imaginary culprit called fear, that is ever present when we don’t own our own shadow.

  • What we say, what we think, and what we do are not in alignment.

We say we are fine when our body language shows we are obviously upset. We say we want true, authentic connections, but we aren’t brave enough to let others see who we truly are. We think that we are “easy breezy” and that we need nothing from others, but then we are upset when our needs are not met. We love someone with all our heart, but we don’t do the small things often that build the foundation of safety and trust. We deny and challenge reality when someone points out our incongruences.

The problem: There is a tremendous amount of energy that is used up by our body and mind trying to reconcile differences, both practically and from a neurobiological perspective. Many of our physical and emotional health issues are a result of our inability to practice energy efficiency in ourselves. Internal misalignments clearly are the result of the disruption of the dance of the opposites within us—our shadow self and our true self.

The solution: Chose today to be the day you commit to recognizing and making friends with the parts in you that lead to any and all misalignments in your life. One of the biggest parts of our shadow is its’ bratty nature and the collection of ways it will act up when ignored and unattended, such as: manipulation, entitlement, self-righteousness, taking everything personally, criticism, stonewalling, contempt, and much more. Lighting up the candle of knowledge by simply recognizing the ways we ourselves are incongruent is the most important step toward creating harmony, first and foremost, within ourselves. After all, we cannot receive anything from the external world until we master it first in ourselves.

For the greatest part of my life, I thought that my path to wholeness was all about reaping the fruits of my labor to be a good citizen to the world I am blessed to live in. But when I found myself at the peak of my outward success with no fulfillment, accompanied by unexplained health complications, I was finally set free to see the truth:

True mastery can only be found when we dare to consciously face the dance of opposites within our true self, and are brave enough to get reacquainted and make amends with the dark aspects of our being.

When we have the courage to take the journey into discovering the parts of ourselves we have disowned and end the facade of our false self it is unnerving and challenging. However, this journey truly is the greatest adventure we can ever possibly take.

Things will continue to happen that challenge us. But freeing ourselves of the fear that comes from what we have forbidden ourselves to see and, finally, not being afraid of our own shadow is the first step toward entering the grace of our unlimited potential, our true divinity, and being the change we want to see in this world.

The great big fall

Fall is my favorite season!

There is something special about the smell of the earth after the first raindrops of the season. I am enamored by the way the foliage gets washed away by the rain to make space for new beginnings. The temperature drops, inviting us to make a fire and snuggle up to our favorite person while eating slow-cooker delicacies.

But I also love fall because it reminds me of an undeniable part of our human experience: the regular and never-ending points in our journey when things “fall” apart in our life, and we experience a significant amount of discomfort and suffering. Our automatic response is to think that “when such and such a thing happens, when we arrive to a certain outcome, when we realize a specific goal, then we will no longer suffer.”

However, the truth is: we cannot go through life unless we experience a significant amount of suffering. After all, there are many things in life that we cannot control that impact the fiber of our life and experience.

The question then becomes, what do we do when things fall apart?

  1. What if we temporarily make friends with pain and let it tell us its’ secrets?

One of the human choices that often leads to things falling apart in life is betrayal. In its simplest form, as our dear Brene Brown says, betrayal is “to choose to not connect with someone when the opportunity is there.” The secret the pain of betrayal opens us up to is that betrayal is the mutual choice between two people to feed a lie. We humans can only behave based on our level of consciousness at a given time. It’s nothing personal. But we too, play an active role in any betrayal in our lives. If we focus on what is within our control, we can use a betrayal as an opportunity to address and question what it is deep down that we were afraid of. We can look at what it is that we wanted that compelled us to play a part in this story. Although betrayal leads us to doubt ourselves and our choices, it is a great opportunity to identify illusions. When we use painful experiences of betrayal to uncover what it is that we were truly afraid of, we slowly but surely learn to neutralize our fear, harvest its pearls of wisdom, and open up to the possibility of learning to trust in ourselves again.

2. Challenge yourself to identify the little things that give you comfort during difficult times.

When things fall apart, we tend to hide our pain in ways that are not conducive to our wellbeing. We tend to withdraw, get down on ourselves, maybe drink an extra glass of wine, or lose sleep by mulling over the specifics of the disaster we encountered. It is important to keep an ongoing list of things, situations, and people that provide us with a sense of goodness for when difficult times show up in our lives.

This could be a walk in nature; listening to a positive Ted Talk; cooking your favorite, wholesome meal; creating a little piece of art; or committing to a daily, loving kindness meditation.

But most importantly, during difficult times, we need to resist the urge to stay isolated, and instead connect with people that make us feel cared for. Social connection is one of the most compelling antidotes to the toxicity of discomfort and one that is abundantly available to us, as long as we are willing to nurture it.

  1. Focus on taking just the very next step.

When things fall apart, our automatic response is to feel helpless and let our internal resources be used toward imagining a catastrophe! We don’t consciously realize the power of our mind to hi-jack our nervous system and shut down our ability to access the executive part of our brain. For example, studies show that rejection and toothache both activate the exact same region of our brain (anterior cingulate). If we focus on simply determining what is the very next step we can take to turn a situation around, we can slowly but surely disengage from operating from a threatened, defensive state and turn on our executive part of our brain, activating the reward centers through action (pre-frontal cortex). Mastery is the result of consistent small steps daily. Don’t worry about the imaginary disasters that could come, but focus on the very one thing you can do now to move you toward the direction that will bring you back to balance.

  1. Remember the impermanence of everything, and practice being comfortable in discomfort.

Whether you pay attention to the changes of colors in the trees around you, the challenges you have already overcome, or a memory from childhood, everything in life is a temporary perspective.

Nothing lasts forever. Regardless of how challenging an experience may be, simply remembering that nothing lasts forever can be just the ticket to calm our nervous system down and feel comfort at times of discomfort. A realistic outcome to shoot for to ensure that the trajectory of our life remains positive is looking for growth in discomfort. Breakdowns in life can be profound moments of breakthroughs, much like the seed that has to break through the earth to bring forth beautiful blossoms in spring.

  1. Accept that some days will be dreadful no matter what we do.

We can do all the right things, take all the right steps, incorporate powerful daily practices, and yet we will never be able to avoid experiencing moments of ultimate disappointment and dread. We could get laid off, lose someone we love, or experience an ultimate betrayal from someone who we thought was our number one confidant. Life is an incredible adventure of never-ending highs and lows. Embrace the fact that some days will be a complete disaster no matter what we do.

I can’t say that the series of victories and unfortunate events don’t leave a lasting mark on our life experience. Yet the miracle always happens.

Tomorrow morning, the sun will rise again, the school bus will show up in time to pick up the kids for school, and you will encounter your neighbor’s good morning wish as you take your dog for a walk.

Despite how bad a great fall may seem, every new day gives us the opportunity to start over and change our life—one decision, one choice, and one step at a time—bringing along fresh perspectives and ingredients: new leaves on the trees, new loves, new joys, new sensations.

What is a healthy relationship?

Love has been the nucleus and heart of human experience throughout the history of mankind. Wars and battles have unraveled under its spell!

Love has touched the souls of many artists, poets, and geniuses, as well as all of us mere folk, who today have established that having a “healthy love relationship” is the number one goal of existence, beyond financial and professional success!

In fact, George Vaillant, the director of the longest longitudinal study of human development, which was designed to uncover the parameters that allow people to live happy and healthy lives, summarized the conclusion of the seventy-five year study with three simple words: “Happiness is love.” (Vaillant, George E. Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.)

Love appears to be so important, yet only a small percentage of us have succeeded in cultivating long-lasting, healthy relationships.

Why are we having such a hard time arriving at successful outcomes in love relationships? What are the real obstacles in the way of grasping the powerful force of healthy relationships? What does a healthy relationship look like?

Here is what I learned from reviewing the most substantiated, evidence-based research and from my own humble experience when it comes to what healthy love is all about.

  1. A healthy relationship involves seeing things for what they really are.

We seem to have this conditioned notion that someday someone will come along that will be our perfect “match.” This person will know just what to say and how to say it with the magical ability to speak our “love language.” This someone will never disappoint us or let us down. This unreasonable expectation can be a real culprit to a healthy relationship, because when we meet really wonderful people that have a lot to offer, they cannot possibly fulfill this unrealistic standard. Then we tend to blame them for our needs not being met.

The end result is rupture of the relationship and an endless search for the phantom “perfect one.” If we look at the definition of the word relate in the dictionary, we will find that “to relate” actually means “to make a connection between two different things.” A healthy relationship involves committing to the practice of becoming better and better at making a connection between our differences with another. If we want a healthy relationship, it’s time we let go of the search for the phantom “perfect one” and turn toward the real people who are here and now willing to hold our hand through the everyday challenges of life.

  1. A healthy relationship requires honoring and embracing how powerful a love connection truly is.

In the aftermath of every failed relationship, we have the tendency to blame love (along with the actual failed relationship or the person) and minimize the importance of love in our life, coming to the conclusion that we are better off without it!

The latest findings in biology and neuroscience clearly confirm that we are hard- wired for connection and that our interactions with loved ones act as regulators in the brain priming our emotions. The more strongly connected we are with someone, the stronger the mutual force. Healthy, positive relationships seem to have a tremendous impact on our nervous system. They contribute to a well- documented diminished-threat-related activation in our brain in the face of a situation that is perceived as stressful, which is linked to powerful benefits in cardiovascular and overall health. In order to be able to cultivate a healthy relationship, we must embrace the power of a secure attachment, recognizing it as the primary drive it truly is and the role it plays in our happiness and health.

  1. A healthy relationship is willingness and commitment to growth. There is no better mirror to our beauty and our unresolved baggage than a love relationship. It is easy to go through life alone, maintaining the facade we have built of who we want the world to think we are. When we choose to be seen for who we really are it can be unnerving and scary.

The opportunity for growth can be found in truly understanding that we are reflexive beings driven by memory. This means that anytime a life situation that is perceived through our five senses awakens negative memories from the past and triggers the emotion of fear, events will start happening without our permission in such a way that we ourselves sabotage a positive outcome of the situation.

A love relationship where the stakes are so high is a potent trigger to past experiences that did not turn out well and resulted in pain. When parts of unresolved trauma are activated, what’s called implicit memory generates negative emotions. Because emotions are so powerfully contagious, if someone talks to you in the way that a parent used to talk to you, it can trigger a reaction in you as though what happened back then is actually happening now.

An example can be shared using capable, intelligent, educated adults that were victims of abuse in childhood. It is well-documented in literature that adult victims of childhood abuse that have not made a coherent story of what happened to them, when depending on another, will have a difficult time regulating their negative emotions and without much cognitive awareness will employ deactivating strategies to take away the felt internal turmoil. That means that even if we are lucky enough to meet a person who has proven their loyalty to us and has done enough to earn our trust, debilitating fears from the past can drive our behavior in the present, in order to sabotage our relationship with them. If we want a healthy relationship, we must be ready to face and understand how our past still keeps us hostage and acts as an insidious culprit to our ability to relate to another in a healthy way.

  1. If we want to have a healthy relationship with another, we must first choose to have a healthy relationship with ourselves.

We all want to profess how healthy we are, and we have a hard time recognizing any parts of us that are actually unhealthy. We want to avoid feeling pain, and it is understandable that we have developed certain patterns of behavior to maintain a sense of internal safety, including being in denial about the things we do that are unhealthy.

But when we are finally motivated to make positive change based on the unhappy results we are getting from our current behavior, we can clearly see what it is that we do that is a true obstacle to all we ever want in life and love.

One great area of fertile ground is our own incongruences—when our words and behavior conflict. This can show up in subtle ways, like when we declare one person is the most important one in our microcosm and then we choose to not connect with them when the opportunity shows up. But it can also show up in more direct ways, for example, in the form of actual, conflicting messages we give to the people we love and who love us, like telling them how important the relationship is to us and that they are our ideal partner, but when they are willing to commit to us, we bolt!

Our own contradictions that stand out like bad weeds cause a lot of unnecessary suffering for us and the few people that truly love us. FMRI scans of people that are promised something sweet and instead get something sour reflect a tremendous energy drain in the person’s brain who is burdened with having to close the gap of the palpable contradictions presented to them. Not to mention that these contradictions are an incredible obstacle to what it is that we truly want.

A healthy relationship is not something that happens organically to a select, lucky few. It is a principled way of being that we agree to cultivate with another that is based on goodwill, sensitivity, and trust, as the ultimate way to reinforce our sense of safety and weather the ups and downs of life. It is a commitment we make that provides a safety net that keeps our nervous system calm and gives us access to the executive functioning part of our brain, allowing us to focus on both our everyday and our higher purpose in life.

There are well-substantiated, evidenced-based methods to realizing the noble and powerful universal goal of healthy love, which is hardwired into our DNA. I have two that are my personal favorites.

  • The Gottman Institute’s simple seven step formula on how to make relationships work is backed up with three decades of research and can predict divorce with over 90% accuracy. The art and science of love workshops the Gottman institute offers, is a powerful weekend workshop to practice the seven steps in real life.
  • Sue Johnson’s model of emotionally-focused therapy (EFT), which defines a secure attachment as simply when each partner is accessible, responsive, and

emotionally attentive, is also backed up with substantial research. Completing the seven steps of EFT (with a certified EFT clinician), has been proven to yield a staggering 75% positive result in overcoming past injuries in relationships and 95% improvement rates.

So, yes, we can take practical approaches to fill the emotional bank of the person we love by turning toward them with acts of caring and goodwill in every opportunity we have, or we can even commit and complete powerful, Emotionally-Focused Therapy couples sessions to repair past indiscretions in our current relationship.

But in all fairness, nothing will ever truly reverse the trajectory of our relational health until we win the battle with the most inconspicuous culprit of all—ourselves.

We are all capable of mastery in every area of our lives, including love relationships. The most significant decision we will ever make in our lives is to choose to invest in work on ourselves that allows our own mastery and our best self to resurface.

At that point, and only at that point, will we be able to truly understand how to support a healthy relationship and how we can accomplish the noble outcome of a healthy love relationship which is within our control.