The ideal partner can offer a safe place for you to reveal and heal your wounds; but he (or she) can’t do it for you. And even if he could, he wouldn’t! He trusts you too much to think he needs to; and he loves you too much not to let you fly. … More

If you don’t want to take a vacation, you can stay home; but if you don’t want to go anyplace in your relationship, you can’t just stay put. You will move to a lower place, a hell of sorts.

Life doesn’t stand still; it either grows or dies. The same is true for your relationship. If you are not moving closer as partners, you are moving apart. There is no pause button.
So, where do you want to go in your relationship?

Here’s the map to heaven. Heaven or hell, you choose!

You are within a few steps of peace, or oneness, with yourself and your partner (plus the planet); and that is heaven. If peace seems to elude you, it is because you are stuck enroute. When you see where you are, you can navigate in the right direction; and when you see how close you are to peace, you will want to press on.

Five Steps to Peace
1. P-retending to Be What You Are Not
2. E-goic Striving
3. A-dmitting Dissonance and Confusion
4. C-oming Clean
5. E-xperiencing Ecstasy and Oneness

You Are Here … if you

Step 1 — Pretending to Be What You Are Not
•Simply conform to what’s expected
•Are pre-occupied with meeting your needs for survival
•Have resorted to merely escaping the pain of rejection

Step 2 — Egoic Striving
•Strive for more to prove your worth
•Worry about how others judge you
•Find excuses to take care of others, rather than yourself

Step 3 — Admitting Dissonance and Confusion
•Are confused about who you are
•Realize you feel disconnected
•See the humor in sitting down with a carton of ice cream

Step 4 — Coming Clean
•Choose to be your true self, regardless of
consequences
•Let go of control and risk “failure”
•Stop trying to be right and make others wrong

Step 5 — Experiencing Ecstasy and Oneness
•Feel radiant instead of flawed; look radiant instead of
self-conscious
•Feel connected instead of isolated or used
•Are virtually free of fear, stress, and negative emotion

Pretending to Be What You Are Not: Fear and your survival instinct kicked in when Mommy and Daddy wanted you to be something you weren’t naturally — even if it was just quiet—and the charade to win approval began.… More

We want to be loved down to the core, by somebody who knows every chink in our armor; but it may not occur to us that we must REMOVE the armor! We must face our wounded nakedness before we can actually share it, to feel thoroughly known and loved. We must also tend the wounds, beneath those chinks, in order to heal them. If we conceal anything at all, we don’t feel unconditionally loved. Many assume that you can’t tell a partner everything; but unless you do, you undermine love. What you have (or seem to have) is a facade; because intimacy, a connection based on what you know, is the foundation for authentic love. The more naked the knowledge, the deeper the connection, the roots, the foundation.
We are accustom to the armor, though. When we realized we were separate from Mother, and that she wouldn’t always be there, we learned to survive independent of her. That meant latching on to what was within our reach and, unfortunately, we embraced some false beliefs and self-destructive habits! We still abide by coping mechanisms that kept us alive and presumably sane, but no longer serve us. We defend our beliefs and our behavior, plugging holes in our armor, with distorted-as-necessary evidence.… More