I am in a relationship right now for which I had no model growing up. I am in a Spiritual Relationship. "A Spiritual Relationship is formed when two (or more) people come together, as equals for the purpose of spiritual growth."

In growing up, I was raised partially by my grandparents and partially by my parents. My parents divorced when I was two, so I also had yet another family to model...my mother and stepfather, my maternal grandparents and my father and stepmother.

I spent my early years with my grandparents and I never got the impression they considered themselves equals. My grandmother waited on my grandfather hand and foot.

My mother waited on my stepfather much the same way. It didn't matter how hard she worked and the fact that she had a job outside the home. She worked just as hard or harder than he did, but there was a disparate sense of inequality in how evenly the responsibilities were split up. My stepfather had it much easier.

My father and stepmother were probably the closest model I had of any equality, but I didn't spend that much time with them, so I can't say for sure.

I can say that in none of those relationships was there any conscious idea of being together for the purpose of spiritual growth.

I have heard that this is the difference between an "Old World" Relationship and a Spiritual Relationship.

Old World Relationships were entered into for the primary purpose of security, procreation, sex, companionship, etc.

Spiritual Relationships are entered into by people who intend to consciously use the relationship for spiritual growth. Now it isn't  that security, sex, procreation and companionship aren't also aspects of this relationship. It's just that spiritual growth is the most important aspect.

The biggest hurdle for me in finding a spiritual partner was to first believe that she even existed. I was raised in a very conservative Christian household and most of my family is still very conservative in their religious beliefs. My maternal grandfather was a Primitive Baptist preacher for about 50 years and he had both a direct and indirect influence on my beliefs growing up.

But after growing up and finding myself on a much different spiritual path than most of my family...and really just about everyone I knew, I just didn't know if there was someone out there who would share my views of spirituality.

And so as I've noted in my previous posts, I just started imagining that this person did exist. In realizing that I was probably not going to find my match in someone that had the sort of background growing up that I did, I had to open my mind to the possibility that my spiritual partner would have a different religious background than I did.

I feel it was this realization, this opening of my mind to this possibility that accelerated the arrival of the woman into my life who has become my wife, my equal and my spiritual partner.

My wife's family is from India and she was the first in her family to be born in the United States. Being raised in the Hindu religion, she had a very different religious and cultural upbringing than I did. But what I found was that the essence of the beliefs I had been studying for the previous 15 years very closely resembled what she had been taught all of her life.

She also had been dreaming of a spiritual relationship. She wanted to meet someone who would share her beliefs and who could grow with her.

Together we have a commitment to help each other to grow, to understand that this is why we are together and to help others as well.

Now...just because we know we are in a Spiritual Relationship does not mean that our relationship is always easy. In fact, we fought pretty often the first year we were together. We grew stronger and more bonded after each one though.

By the time we got together, I had already been through the Spiritual Relationships part of the Self-Mastery course. We had been engaged almost a year before she went through it. She had been delaying our marriage date for months and I knew she would eventually get to the point where she was ready.

She went through the Spiritual Relationships exercises in September and as soon as she finished, she announced that she was now ready to get married. We wanted to get married that year, so we pulled our wedding together in six weeks. It was a busy time and we both worked together on it.

We married right on time six weeks later and we have been together ever since.

We rarely fight or argue any more. We understand that one of the basic aspects of our spiritual partnership is that the other person mirrors back to us what we ourselves most need to heal.

This mirroring aspect is very important to understand for both of us. Because if I look out at what she is doing and believe that I cannot be happy unless she changes whatever it is that she's doing, then I am lost in my illusion. I may get her to change it and that may make me temporarily happy. But if I am holding on to unhappiness somewhere within me, she will just reflect it back to me again and again.

If I stay lost in my illusion, then I get a never-ending series of things I want her to change in order for me to feel better.

So there's a saying that has to do with that.

"There is no way to happiness...happiness is the way."

This means that as long as I am focused on what she is or is not doing that I am unhappy about, I will continue to see more of that. If I feel that I need to tell her that with the intent of her changing it, I am not taking responsibility for my life and the fact that I am creating my life.

When I recognize that I am creating my life and I do take responsibility for it, then I also take responsibility for whatever I am feeling. I recognize that my beautiful wife is reflecting back to me what I most need to heal...no matter what my mind tells me.

My mind's job is to protect me. So my mind will tell me that I need to get her to change what she's doing...or that I need to avoid her...or that I need to withdraw my love from her...anything but just simply admit that what I am experiencing is my creation.

Once I do take responsibility for it, then I simply feel those feelings. I allow them to process within me and to remind me why they're there. Sometimes, in doing that I get a memory flash of something that happened to me long ago. I have a forgiveness practice that I use to process those emotions and let them go. In doing so, my heart opens again and I am able to perceive the situation differently than before.

I am now able to understand that the Goddess within my wife has simply been at work showing me what I need to heal.

I can't say that I'm always just jumping up and down excited and thrilled, but I can say that my life gets easier and more enjoyable whenever I release one of these limitations.

We often joke that it's not much fun being the "trigger man." When I trigger her or she triggers me, our minds are still somewhat conditioned to believe that it's the other person who needs to change or it's the other person who is at fault for how we are feeling. And there can be a few moments as anyone who is in a relationship can attest, that being the person on which all of that emotion comes out onto...is not the most enjoyable aspect of my relationship.

The more I understand though about the childhood my wife had growing up, the more I understand why she gets triggered about certain things. I know that when she does get triggered that most of the pain she is experiencing has little to do with me. I am simply the person that has triggered her unconscious pain. It has helped me to understand that this is the place she is coming from when she responds to me sometimes.

We both have situations where we may say or do something unconsciously and the other person unloads on them. Our minds want to rationalize all the things that the person has done for us to feel the intensity of the emotion, but typically the vast majority of the emotion has nothing to do with what our partner has done. It has much more to do with what pain has long been buried within us.

It is important to understand that we cannot just refuse to feel our emotions. Men do this more than women. Men bottle their emotions up because they were never taught to feel them. And then when they get triggered, they explode...if they've been carrying too much pain and anger.

Emotions are energy and they have to go somewhere. So if we repress them, deny them or avoid them, they go unprocessed and they stay within us...waiting for an opportunity to show up in our lives. They attract situations to show us that they are still there.

And this is the role of our unfortunate spouse when they trigger us. We lose it and they are left wondering what the heck just happened.

The more we become conscious that this is what is happening, the easier it is for us to look within for answers.

I practice this in my spiritual relationship and it has dramatically improved the possibilities I can imagine for our partnership and given me something exciting that I want to teach to our children.

I hope the concept of mirroring helps you to understand your relationships differently as it has for me.

The next few posts will be on different aspects of Spiritual Relationships, how this knowledge has helped and what tools we are practicing.

Namaste

Jeff
www.learningtoflow.com

I learned of a concept a few years ago called "Magical Relationship Beliefs." Now to a certain degree, I knew that I had dreamed about what I wanted in a romantic partner, but I had underestimated the depth to which my beliefs had been created.

The first thing I had to understand is that Magical beliefs are "positively charged beliefs" which meant that I had attached positive emotions or expectations to these beliefs.

Women are no more susceptible to this phenomena than men are...however many women I have worked with do tend to recount the "Prince Charming" ideals or at least wistfully fantasize about their "knight in shining armor."

Many of these women did not feel safe and secure as a child and the fantasy they are seeking is for a man to come along and help them to feel that. They establish this belief early on before their mind is mature enough to understand how they can maturely establish safety and security for themselves.

And so they go about their lives unconsciously seeking a mate who can fill the need that they have inside. At some point in their lives, they may meet a man who temporarily fills this need...but it never lasts. Unless the woman understands that it is not her mate's responsibility to fill this need, she may decide that since he does not fill that need, she picked the wrong man.

It is important to understand that our mates are always reflecting back to us what we most need to heal within us. It is not our fault that we developed these beliefs. It is not our fault because if those needs were being met or if we had been taught how to create this for ourselves, then we would not feel this in the first place.

So while it isn't our fault, it is also not our partner's fault. We cannot project out our unmet needs and expect our partner to meet those needs for us. We must learn to meet our own needs. When we feel safe and secure, our partner will reflect that back to us.

In my practice, I teach women who don't feel safe how to develop that feeling within themselves. They find that once they have healed this belief, their partners appear to change. They become more understanding and more supportive. But they are not doing it because the women need that safety and security any more. They are unconsciously responding to a new vibrational reality created by the women themselves.

Most men that I have worked with developed beliefs that they had to be perfect in order to be appreciated. They seek women who will appreciate them and in some cases, they seek women that they can rescue so that they can be assured that they will be appreciated.

So it's not uncommon that a man who needs to feel appreciated and a woman who is seeking security will find themselves in a relationship.

This is not an example of a healthy, conscious relationship though. This is an example of how our unconscious negative beliefs draw us to a person who will mirror those aspects back to us.

The first few months or maybe even the first couple of years of a relationship can go relatively smoothly. The man has someone who will appreciate him and the woman feels secure.

But at some point, the relationship will break down...primarily because the egoic mind is relentlessly looking for all the ways in which this relationship doesn't work. Even though the relationship is fulfilling each party, the unconscious belief is still there and having the same destructive effect on both parties. It is a time bomb.

At some point, the egoic mind collects enough evidence to convince his conscious mind that this person does not really appreciate what he is doing. If she did, then she would do this and that.

And her egoic mind is also collecting evidence of why she isn't safe in their relationship or isn't safe in life. Since her unconscious belief she formed as a small girl was that her husband would take care of this for her, she projects out her fears and frustrations onto him which is further proof to him of how she doesn't appreciate all that he does.

This can become a vicious cycle and can also turn into a vicious divorce. I have seen it happen to many of my colleagues when I was working in the corporate world.

No one is conscious to what is really happening and their egoic minds have collected SO much pain that they simply are not willing to find a way to work it out.

In their minds, the other person is the one who MUST change and they have built up so much righteous indignation that there is no way they are willing to even consider what they might change.

How much easier would it be if before we got to the point where our minds had collected too much evidence to consider working it out, especially when there are children involved?

How much easier would it be to simply learn that we may have unconscious beliefs that color our perception of the world and our relationships?

And one last thing. Is it easier to change someone else...or is it easier to make changes within ourselves?

The problem is that this solution runs contrary to what most of us have been taught most of our lives.

We have not been taught that our beliefs create our reality and that both our conscious and unconscious beliefs are always creating it.

We have not been taught that we are Godlike beings who can create anything we can imagine and believe. Actually we are taught that in some areas of our lives...just not our relationships. For some reason, we still believe that we have to pick the right person and that if we don't pick that right person, well then we just keep trying until we find them.

But wouldn't it be easier to heal the unconscious beliefs we have within us rather than to keep attracting the same people over and over again? Because all that's happening here is that we attract people who continue to reflect back to us what we most need to heal.

I did this in my own relationship. I healed much of this and because of that, I attracted a woman who was as completely different as she could be from my first wife.

I didn't feel the need to rescue anyone anymore and this was not a woman who needed to be rescued.

I remember an argument that we were having once early on in our relationship. I don't remember what it was about, but I remember her stating flatly, "do you believe this would be different with anyone else?"

She doesn't remember telling me that, but it was the point in our relationship when I consciously realized that I was re-creating the same situation again and while she didn't realize it, she was right.

It wouldn't be different with anyone else, because it was my belief being reflected back to me. It was my unconscious pain that I was continuing to feel again. It was my responsibility to heal this belief for me to be able to experience something different.

My wife and I are still working on our magical relationship beliefs...but we are conscious that we have them. We understand that when one of these come up that the other person may be projecting out something that belongs to them and that makes it easier to be supportive of them instead of defensive.

I can feel it when my mind is telling me that I am being abandoned, ignored or misunderstood. I am conscious to the fact that my reality is reflecting back to me something within me to be healed and instead of blaming my wife or expecting that she change in order for me to feel better, I work on myself.

I work on feeling appreciated. She works on feeling safe. And we support each other in our work and our growth.

Namaste
Jeff

www.learningtoflow.com

I first started learning about how to communicate differently to the opposite sex in John Gray's "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus." Just reading some of that information helped me to become more aware when I was putting on my "Mr. Fix-it Hat" or when I woman had unconsciously decided that I was her "Home Improvement project."

Knowing that information helped me to start becoming a better listener. When I studied Spiritual Relationships in more detail in "Self-Mastery: A Journey Home to Your Self," I came across much more information on this topic and how to apply that information in my life.

Actually, one of the most profound aspects was a poem by an unknown author titled "Listen to Me." I will republish it here in the hope that it provides you the same kind of insight it gave me into improving my communication skills.

Listen To Me

"When I ask you to LISTEN TO ME and you start giving me advice, you HAVE NOT done what I have asked. When I ask you to LISTEN TO ME and you begin to tell me why I shouldn't feel the way I'm feeling, you are trampling on my feelings.

"When I ask you to LISTEN TO ME, please don't feel that you have to do something to save me or solve my problems. When you try to MAKE me FEEL better, you have failed me as strange as this may seem to you. I'm asking you to LISTEN TO ME, not talk or do something, but just LISTEN TO ME.

"When you do something for me that I need to do for myself, you contribute to my feelings of inadequacy. When you accept as a simple fact that I'm feeling what I'm feeling, no matter how irrational I sound, I can quit trying to convince you and I can go back to understanding why I'm FEELING what I'm FEELING! Please LISTEN TO ME and just duplicate what I said so that I know that you are LISTENING TO ME!"

This was an eye opener for me. Because I had just gone through a divorce before finding this course and in this simple poem, I could remember how many conversations went awry simply because I did not understand why when I listened and tried to help my ex-wife, that things got worse. It defied logic and reason for her to get more upset with my responses. Because I felt like I was really listening to her. I felt like the fact that I knew exactly what was upsetting her was proof that I was listening.

As a man, I can tell you that when I listen to someone vent to me about something I've done, I feel that there is something I am supposed to do about that. I naturally and unconsciously do put on my "Mr. Fix-It Hat."

If it's not me, then my past experience taught me to analyze what the problem is and look for a solution.

And what was frustrating to me was that she didn't want ANY of that. But she also didn't know how to communicate to me what she did want.

Now flash forward to my current relationship, things are much easier because my wife is learning how to use this skill and knows when she just wants me to LISTEN TO HER to just tell me that. Because I am still practicing this skill and have not yet mastered it for myself I still need a reminder once in awhile that she just wants me to listen and not solve her problems.

When she says, "I just need you to LISTEN TO ME, that has become a keyword for me to remember what she wants. I remember how it does not help her for me to do anything other than listen to her and duplicate back to her what she is saying and then just as importantly to validate what she is feeling. So that means that if she says she's angry or frustrated about something, I listen to what she is saying and then say back to her, "It's normal that you would feel frustrated about that. Anyone would feel that way. It's okay to feel that way."

When I have worked with couples, this is something that the wives turn to their husbands and say, "YES! That's what I've been telling you. That's exactly what I want you to do."

But what the wives typically don't understand is that they have never been able to explain it to their husbands quite this way. They resonate with it when they hear it, but their husbands just say, "Oh...well I can do that. I just didn't understand."

And that is one of the biggest misunderstandings in relationships. On some level, many of us believe that the other person can give us what we want...but they simply don't want to do it. And this isn't really true.

We may not know how. We may be embarrassed that we don't know how. We may be afraid of trying for various reasons. We may be frustrated because we have not been able to get our own needs met...and we may be projecting that into the relationship in a variety of ways that appears to the other person that we don't want to do it.

But every person I have ever worked with or talked to wants to give and receive love freely. They simply don't know how because they have never been taught how to do that. I will cover this in more detail in a later post on "Emotional Dependency Needs." For now, just realize that we can only give away that which we have. And if we do not have a feeling of security in the relationship, it is hard for us to give it to another.

And so there are skills we can learn to help each other feel safe in the relationship.

One of these skills that I learned and am now practicing in my own relationships is called, "Responsibility Communication." As noted in "Self-Mastery: A Journey Home to Your Self, this "technique was originally developed by Dr. Michael Ryce for people who realize that they are responsible for their own feelings. Responsibility communication can be used by anyone who wants to create a positive, loving environment where the spiritual and emotional wellbeing of its members comes first."

"When you communicate with someone and that communication triggers pain, this situation creates an ideal opportunity to heal what is being emotionally triggered."

Now this is where what I have talked about in this post (Listen To Me) and in my first post (Mirroring) on Spiritual Relationships come together. If we realize that our partners are simply mirroring back to us what we most need to heal, then when we feel triggered by something our partner does or says this is an opportunity to use our Responsibility Communication skills.

This process only works if both parties are committed to using it. We must accept that our feelings are our own and since they are, they are our sole responsibility to heal. We must accept that when something happens and we get very upset, most often we are reacting to where we already hurt on the inside. We may have forgotten what is really there and being triggered.

We must learn to "Heal First and Problem Solve Last." We must realize that what is happening in the moment is merely a reflection of the pain we already carry and the reason it is coming up is so we can heal it. If we blame our partners for what they did to cause these feelings to arise within us, we are missing the point.

If we try to solve the problem first, then we will lapse into our rationalizations and justifications for why we're feeling what we're feeling...instead of focusing on what we're feeling and where it may come from.

We have to remember that no matter how it may seem to our ego mind, that our feelings are entirely our own and when we communicate what it is that we are feeling, it is much more helpful to communicate things like, "I feel hurt when you say _____" rather than "You're a jerk."

If we are attacking each other, then both parties stay on the defensive and nothing ever gets healed. So it's important to give ourselves permission to express what it is that we're feeling.

It is important to understand that even though your partner's words or behavior may be triggering your pain, most likely most of your pain is being reflected from your past into the present moment. You may feel really frustrated that this same thing keep happening to you, so it's important to stay in the present moment and only talk about what your partner did this time...not what they did six months ago that you're still upset about.

However, if you can talk it out and trace your feelings back to the first time you felt this way, it may be helpful to do that. Just remember, this process isn't about blame. It's about healing. It's about feeling what you need to feel and release in order to release this vibration that is continuing to bring this experience into your life.

If you use blame and judgment, if you are keeping "score" or arguing over details, this process won't work for you. What is most important is to be absolutely honest about your feelings and to stay with specific, behavioral detail.

Remember, there is a reason a person doesn't feel safe, or appreciated, or loved. Focus on the details of why that is and how you feel about it.

Another aspect to keep in mind about improving communications in a relationship is the use of "third party communication." This is something that can really have a detrimental impact on a relationship.

So what this means is that if you are sharing your frustrations about your partner with a third party, but not sharing them with your partner, you are essentially avoiding taking responsibility for your feelings. Most people that do this feel that their partner won't listen to them and this is a belief that simply must be changed. As long as a person believes their partner won't listen, they won't.

It's just a reflection however and with most clients I've worked with, this belief was developed when they were a child and they had a parent that didn't listen to them...or they were the youngest child and from their perspective no one listened to them.

The key here is to change the belief and the reflection will change as well.

Couples that use Responsibility Communication find that they create a deeper bond of emotional intimacy in their relationships. They create a bond of trust that they have never experienced with anyone before and they feel safer to be who they really are.

Namaste

Jeff

http://www.learningtoflow.com/

Why is knowing about Emotional Dependency Needs important and how does it impact me if I have unmet EDN's?

To answer that, let's look at our childhoods for a moment. It is important to acknowledge that none of us had perfect parents. Some of us even experienced abuse as a child. For those of us who did, it is somewhat easier to validate that perhaps we were never able to develop a feeling of being safe in the world if we were hit, yelled at, sexually abused or abandoned on a regular basis.

And if any of those things happened or some of them happened, in an effort to protect us, our minds developed a set of ego defenses. Some of us acted out and developed confrontational ways of dealing with real or perceived threats. Some of us went in the opposite direction and withdrew inwards in an effort not to disturb the delicate balance of the living environment we grew up in.

In either case, there were basic emotional dependency needs that we had and which did not get met. Every person born into this world has emotional dependency needs. These differ from physical dependency needs.

Physical dependency needs are essentially the need to be fed, clothed, tended to when we're sick and sheltered. These are very important and without them, we would either die or have our physical health compromised in some way.

Emotional dependency needs are just as important and if they are not met, they can have the same impacts. A person can die if their emotional dependency needs are not met...or their health can be severely limited or altered.

An example would be if as a baby, we were perhaps fed every few hours, but never held...never nurtured, never rocked to sleep with a big warm blanket wrapped around us so that we felt safe and comforted.

In growing older, this could be if we were left alone a lot to fend for ourselves, if we were expected to grow up faster and assume adult responsibilities at a time when we still needed to be taken care of or if we did not have both a male and female role model on which to balance the masculine and feminine energies within all of us.

Perhaps we had to take care of our parents in some form...or as the oldest take care of our siblings. It could be something as simple as getting good grades and just not receiving much support or encouragement for working to get that. This can sometimes set up a pattern of either giving up since we develop a belief that there are not sufficient rewards for our efforts...to the other extreme of becoming a neurotic overachiever in an unconscious effort to finally get the acceptance and approval we seek, but never adequately received from our parents...or even a combination of the two where we give up in some areas of our lives and work like crazy in others.

It can be said that to the degree we grow up to be successful and happy in all major areas of our lives is directly proportionate to how well our parents fulfilled our emotional dependency needs. And since people can generally only give away that which they themselves have, if our parents did not get their emotional dependency needs met as a child, how could they meet ours?

In this generation, we have an opportunity to make a radical shift forward in how much of our unmet EDN's get passed down to our children. Passing these down from generation to generation is not a new phenomenon. It has been happening since the beginning and is what is meant by "the sins of the father being passed on to the son."

If we take a look around at our society from the perspective of how well our EDN's were met, we can easily see examples scattered throughout our communities. Here are just a few examples:

- the millions of people who wind up in our judicial system every year. Do any research at all on this and you will find that the vast majority of these people had very traumatic childhoods.

- the celebrities or athletes that seem to have everything they could want at their fingertips and yet still continue to create emotional upheavals in their lives

- people who are obviously talented in whatever field they find themselves in...but cannot seem to rise to the level of their physical or creative talents because they consistently self-sabotage themselves. This can happen through procrastination or even injury / dis-ease.

- each one of us who lives in an unsatisfactory relationship, goes to work every day in an unsatisfactory job and lives an unfulfilling life

If our EDN's are not met, that need doesn't just go away.

Ask the little boy or girl who grew up without their father or mother in their life if the need to have that parent went away.

The need stays with us and it colors our perceptions of what we believe is possible in the world.

The sadness, disappointment, anger or fear stays within us if we have never been taught to release it...and the Law of Attraction says that whatever I hold onto...even if I do not hold onto it consciously, I continue to attract people and experiences into my life to remind me that I need to heal this.

Look out at your world.

What areas of your life are being limited by unmet emotional dependency needs?

How well were your EDN's met when you were a child?

Have you been able to heal these within you or have you simply found band-aids such as food, drugs, alcohol, shopping, sex, etc to numb out those feelings?

Are you passing your unmet EDN's down to your children and if so, how can you see them reflecting that back to you in your life?

What can you do today to start meeting your own EDN's?

There are many books out there which can help you. There are many coaches and counselors who are trained to teach you how to meet your EDN's.

There is help available. Sometimes you simply have to ask.

In that vein, if anyone knows of a Literary agent that would be interested in working with the type of information that I write about, please contact me through my website. I am about 2 weeks away from finishing my book.

I need a good agent who can help me find the right publisher for my work.

My blog is not my book though. :-).

Thanks and Namaste

Jeff

http://www.learningtoflow.com/

So one of the first steps in admitting that I had unmet Emotional Dependency Needs was for me to actually realize that it wasn't my fault that these needs weren't met and that my mind had created ego defenses.

My mind created ego defenses in an attempt to keep my safe, sane and secure in a world where as a child, very little of what was going on around me or that which I was experiencing helped me to feel safe, sane or secure.

But in order to ever be able to deal with what I felt about what happened to me as a child, I first had to acknowledge that most of what happened to me was not really legitimate parenting. It was abuse.

I didn't think it was abuse when I was a child. I didn't know it was abuse and my parents didn't know it was abuse. After all, they had been abused in one form or another as children and they did the best they could with the tools they had.

Time changes perspective. Things that we viewed as normal 100 years ago are now viewed as abuse.

One example of this would be child labor. Another example would be corporal punishment. Beatings as a way of disciplining a person or punishment have been handed down from generation to generation for millennia and no beating ever helped another person feel safe, sane and secure in this world.

A parent beats a child because they are at a loss for how else to handle the child. Many do it because they still have unmet emotional dependency needs and they use it as an unconscious outlet for the pain they feel and don't know how to release constructively. Their parents modeled this same behavior for them and this is all they know. Most parents I've talked to feel horrible that they've spanked their children. Some consider it a last resort, but the fact that it is a consideration at all shows how little many people really understand about why children act out in the first place.

Children act out because of their unmet physical or emotional dependency needs. Children rebel when they feel they have no other choice...just like their parents did when they were children...or perhaps they didn't do, but buried all of their pain at not having a choice within them. Many parents spank because they feel they have no other choice.

Beatings do not generate respect for a parent. They result in fear and distrust. The child may respond to the parent, but the child does not do it because they trust and respect the parent. The child does it because they don't want to get hit again and they don't have other options from which to get any of their needs met.

On a community scale, we treat our prisoners much like our children. We beat them, isolate them and make them fear ever going back to this place again...but we do not give them that which they need. We do not do it because for the most part, most people do not know how. They cannot give something away that they don't have.

On a global scale, we create war as a means of controlling others. What we don't recognize is that war will never create peace. War only creates more war. When we create a war-based society, we pass down the model of war from one generation to the next as a means of solving our problems.

All of these have one aspect in common. They are a fear-based solution. We beat our children because we fear. The fear may be of being embarrassed, of being shamed, of being offended. We may even use the excuse that we beat our children for their own good...for their safety...but this is simply a rationalization...a rational lie...to justify our actions in our mind.

We attack another nation because we fear what they might do or because of the weapons they might have or be developing.

Now I know it appears that I'm a bit off topic here, but this is by design. Because my point is this.

It's not our fault that we have the beliefs that we do to solve our disputes. And because we were all given such barbaric traditions for resolving problems that have been passed down from generation to generation, that anger and fear that resulted needed to go somewhere.

Those of us who carry this fear and pain within us unconsciously use it in a variety of ways.

We use it against ourselves and create dis-ease and injury to our bodies, ensuring that our suffering continues...the suffering we already feel inside.

We project the pain and fear we carry out into our worlds and we blame anyone who has ever disappointed us and think that our lives have turned out the way they have because of them.

We project our pain out onto corporations and governments. If we are in corporations and governments, we project our unmet needs out by making decisions that do not benefit all who are involved...but primarily benefit ourselves. We rationalize these behaviors, but even we know deep down, we are lying to ourselves.

There are an infinite number of ways we project our pain out onto the world...and it is insanity. We live in an insane world where the vast majority of our population is projecting their pain outwards or inwards every day and somehow we have come to believe that this is normal. The scary thing is that it is.

Since most of us are doing it, it is normal. But it is not what any of us desire.

We do not want to live in suffering. We don't want to live in fear and pain and hold onto that rage we feel inside. We don't want to feel unsafe in our world or feel that we live in an unjust world.

And we don't have to...we can choose to give it all up, right now in this moment.

We can start by telling ourselves, "It's not my fault."

Because it's not my fault that my parents divorced when I was two. It's not my fault that we moved so that I went to nine different schools. It's not my fault that my mind learned not to get too close to people because they would be leaving soon...or I would be leaving soon. It's not my fault that my parents both had perfectionist tendencies that they projected out onto me. It's not my fault that my parents beat me and I learned not to feel safe in the world.

It's not my fault...but it IS my responsibility to heal it...if I want to create a different world for my children than the one I was given.

I must learn to forgive my parents...because they only gave me what they had. I must learn to let go of the pain, fear and anger; I have carried within me. I must learn to look at my life and create my world the way I intend to experience it...not just react to what is happening. I must learn to love myself as I am because deep down I know that I am truly a Divine child of God.

I must learn to love others as they are...because I know that they too are Divine children of God. I must learn how to handle "problems" because I will always have them and if I want to create the heaven on earth that I dream of....I must learn how to create peaceful solutions and solutions in which everyone benefits.

I must learn to create abundance...to allow abundance to come into my and to believe that I can do what I love for a living.  

I must learn that evil only exists within the mind and if I judge someone else as being evil, I am inviting that judgment into my life. I must learn that this person is in my reality to teach me more about Love and my ability to choose either Love or Fear.

I must learn that my parents were in my life and provided the ultimate model for me to choose Love or Fear and that I have the power to choose differently than they did.

For much of my life, I was waiting on someone to give me permission to live the life of my dreams. Once I was willing to just say, "It's not my fault, " I was empowered to give that permission to myself and start changing my life.

If you want to change your life, your community and our world, join me in saying"

 "It's not my fault, but I now take responsibility to change it!"

Namaste

Jeff

www.learningtoflow.com

A question that I get quite often from clients is "what is karma?"

My karma is what is being reflected back to me as my reality. My karma is typically made up of the collective energies I carry with me in this world and what I see as my reality is much like a holographic image. The image I see and experience is a composite of all of the energies I carry...both positive and negative.

These collective energies are stored in what some theologies have termed the emotional body...which also contains what Eckhart Tolle has termed, "the pain body."

So let's take a step back just for a moment and discuss these different "bodies."

Imagine a column of pure light that is the center of every being. It is the essence of who we are and it is constantly projecting its energy out into the world as long as we are alive on this earth. Just like a movie, it forms the light of our projection out into the world.

We also carry within us the mental body...also called the intellect...or the ego. It is the part of us that is constantly analyzing our world, evaluating the evidence, comparing it to how we feel and telling us through our thoughts if we are safe.

Surrounding all of this is our emotional body...the part of us where we feel our emotions. Our emotions were designed to be processed through our body much the same way as we process food. Emotions were designed to be taken in, felt, expressed and released.

Many of us have been taught generation after generation not to feel our emotions...especially the emotions deemed negative and so these emotions...these energies get trapped in our emotional body...in the pain body. These emotions are anger, fear, worry, frustration, sadness, rage, embarrassment, shame, etc.

If we were not taught as very young children (and very few of us were) how to feel and release these feelings, then we carry many of these emotions around with us in our pain body.

All of this is contained within the physical body and the aura that some people can see is the projection of our light through the emotional/pain body. The amount of light we are able to project out into our world is directly related to the amount of pain we carry within us.

So if we carry a lot of pain and anger within us, we will see that reflected out into our world.

And since the Law of Attraction states that: like attracts like...then we will continue to attract the people and situations into our lives to show us what we most need to heal.

If we do not understand the Law of Karma and the Law of Attraction, then we stay lost in the illusion and we blame the people who are doing this to us...instead of recognizing that these people are not our enemies. They are our teachers.

It is difficult to recognize this in most cases because these people are quite often unconscious to their own actions or motives. And because they are, because our minds can rationalize that they could do something different, we blame them.

If we realize that the rest of the world is our reflection...and that if I want to change my reflection, the change that must be made...is to change my projection.

Most of the time, one of our biggest challenges is that we have identified ourselves with our intellect...our ego and this is normal because it is our ego that is constantly talking to us and has been all of our lives. It is our ego that has interpreted all of the information we have both consciously and unconsciously gathered and created beliefs that form the fabric of our emotional and pain bodies.

If all of our lives, we felt safe and secure...loved and accepted, we would not have collected much pain and fear...and the light of our being would be shining brightly out into the world. And we would be experiencing a life filled with love, peace, abundance and joy.

But the vast majority of us did not have this kind of life...we did not choose it. We chose a more challenging and difficult path. We chose to have an opportunity to transcend our karma and live our heaven on earth.

Forgiveness releases trapped energy and changes our karma. As I have posted before, forgiveness is not about saying that what happened was okay. It means that I no longer want to carry this pain within me. I choose to protect myself and release it. I choose to identify myself more with the loving being that I truly am.

Feeling our feelings...learning to process them through our bodies and let go of these energies changes our karma.

Surrendering our fears and worries in prayer and accepting the peace and love that God has for us...frees us from our karma.

Visualizing a more joyous life, practicing gratitude and appreciation infuses more love into the fabric of our emotional body and allows more of our light to be reflected back to us.

We can transcend our karma. We can create our heaven on earth. It starts with our personal lives, by healing our personal pain. The more we do this, the more our vision expands to how to heal our communities, our economy, our nation and our world.

We can also learn how to help others transcend their karma and pain. I will write more about this later.

There is no one path to learning how to heal our lives. There are many paths. I have sampled many and chosen to be a Spiritual Life Coach and Mentor to those who are seeking to transcend or transform their karma.

Whether you want to work the process I teach...or simply would like someone to talk to for ideas on what next steps you could take on your spiritual path, I am here to help.

Namaste

Jeff

http://www.learningtoflow.com/