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Remember the Love

When things go wrong, when you are in the midst of a bad fight, when seized by the desire to punish and blinded by your need to prove that you are right—stop! Just make yourself stop. It is not easy, but it is possible.

 

Stop. Take a breath. Don’t crush and destroy. Don’t say the things you will most certainly regret.

 

Instead, do something different.

 

In the midst of all this raw energy, make yourself remember something.

 

Remember the Love:

Yes. Remember the love. That person you are fighting with now is the one you love. If you are able to remember it while in another room breathing heavily in anger, it will shift the energy one hundred eighty degrees. Most fights are about nothing anyway. Often we can’t even remember what started it. What’s more important? The love you share or being right one more time? Who would you rather wake up with in the morning? The one you love or your precious rightness?

 

When we remember the love, so much can just fade away. What seemed so important a moment ago, now looks like a trifle. Anger dissipates and is replaced by remorse. Now it is easier to forgive, to let it go, to be able to talk, to work things out.

Breaking the Psychic Contract

Have you ever paused to consider how strongly we are connected to the people in our lives? They are in our energy field all the time, just like we are in theirs. Whether we love them or hate them, as long as we have intense feelings about them, the connection is always powerfully present. It never sleeps. It never takes a break. When something happens to that person, we are often aware of it instantly. And though it is mostly unconscious, the transmission is received. We know something happened because we feel it. A premonition, often confirmed when the news arrives.

 

How greatly do we underestimate the power of our communication with each other that has nothing to do with the words we say. Yet it is on this level, that we are heard most clearly and most precisely. The wordless communications, instant and concise, get to the one we are close to faster than the time it takes to formulate the thought in our minds. Whatever it is that we feel at a given moment —if it is felt intensely—reaches the ones we love at that very moment, sending them a message of what’s happening with us. Perhaps the best example of this are stories of mothers, miles away from their sons or daughters, knowing instantly that something horrible has just happened to their child.

 

In the same fashion, when one of us changes in a profound, fundamental way, the other one knows it right away. The energy field in which our relationship exists is suddenly different. The old patterns are dropped, and new ones come into being.

Trying To Change Other People: Excerpt I

“…At the root of all destructive behavior lies pain and our inability to deal with it.

Whether someone is hurting us, or themselves - it is important to understand that pain is the primary reason behind their actions. It doesn’t make their behavior OK. We don’t have to stick around and continue to suffer the consequences of their pain. Understanding “why” they act the way they do does not excuse it, but it makes accepting the facts and forgiving them more attainable.

 

If you are sincere in your desire to help the ones you love, stop talking to them about it. Stop “saving” them. Stop trying to convince them that they really need to change. They already know it. They cannot hear you. Not under these conditions. Not as long as you are “on the other side”.

 

Try seeing it through their eyes. What are you seeing? It’s a life of “me against them”, isn’t it? And the “them” is simply everyone. Including yourself. Because “you don’t understand”. That’s why insisting that someone changes does not work. You simply become one more person to rebel against. Remove your need to have the person be different.

 

Remove your resistance to the way they are. Remove that barrier. Stop trying to have them “get it”. Accept that they are exactly where they need to be, however detrimental it may look on the outside. Have the humility to trust that you don’t know or understand everything.

 

It doesn’t mean you have to stay with them. But if you want them to have a flicker of a chance - accept them. It doesn’t have to be perfect.It doesn’t have to be a hundred percent. Do the best you can. Accept them the way they are. Hold the hope, hold the light of your love for them, but do it from a neutral place. Honor them in this way. Respect their freedom of choice. Allow them to just ‘be’…”

Trying To Change Other People: Excerpt II

“…What is it going to take to finally learn the simple and obvious truth that has been staring us in the face all our conscious lives? Trying to change another person is a hopeless and pointless task. It doesn’t work. It can’t. And it never will.

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Yet even with the evidence stacked up against us, we don’t give up easily. So sure that we know “what’s best”, we make our displeasure known one way or another. Sometimes we don’t say anything at all. Just wish silently and desperately for the person to change, unaware that an energy field forms between us with each wishful thought and each hopeful feeling. An energy field that lets the other one know we disapprove. An energy field against which he or she will now bounce.

 

It is an energy field of resistance - to us and to our desire to change them.

 

Whichever way we go about trying to control their behavior – from verbal confrontations to silent sighs of unhappiness, to quiet expectation, to obvious disapproval, whether we talk about it constantly or never say a word – it really makes no difference.

 

The field is there. They know it. And they resist.

 

In fact, the more you push them, the harder they will push back. At some point it won’t even be about change any longer. It will be about fighting you. The field of resistance between the two of you will become the barrier to the very change you want to happen, keeping you both stuck on either side of it. Until you won’t even see each other any more. The colored prisms of your control will be distorting your view and blocking out everything that is real. As long as one of you insists, the other one will resist it. Some can go on like this forever. Sometimes - they actually do.

 

Insisting that someone changes, and resisting making that change, are the opposite sides of the same coin. Is it any surprise that nothing changes at all? If you remove your need for other people to change – the field of resistance between you collapses. The barrier is replaced by a mirror, leaving them face to face with themselves. With nothing to fight against, they are forced to make a choice.

 

They can choose to change or they can choose not to.

 

It is their right. Not yours, not mine, not anyone’s. Whether they are your lover or your spouse, your parent or your child, your friend, your colleague or anyone else – this right is not negotiable.

 

Freedom can mean different things to different people. But among the many things freedom is, and among the many choices it brings us - one choice stands out.

 

This choice is our right to choose for ourselves whether to improve or to diminish our lives.

 

This choice is our inalienable right as human beings. It means that at any given time every one of us is free to make a choice that to anyone else may look bad, wrong, ridiculous and crazy. And yet it is still ours to make it. Ours and ours alone...”

Trying To Change Other People: Excerpt III

“…When we accept the fact that a person is the way he or she is, and there is nothing we can do to change this, when we stop imposing our choices for them upon them - the energy field of resistance between us disappears. It does not mean we have to suddenly agree with the way they are. It simply means – we let go of trying to have them be different. We stop fighting it, hating it and resisting it, even though we may not know what will happen next. In this new state of emptiness, with no expectation and without the interference of our control – we have surrendered to the Power of the Possible, and with it - to limitless outcomes and endless options. We have been blocking this door for so long… Leaning on it with all the weight we could muster, insisting on getting our way, thus – holding off all other possibilities…

 

Now – we have swung this door open.

 

We’ve made space for magic to enter our reality.

 

Don’t plan for it, don’t expect it and don’t try to figure out what it might look like. Let go of trying to control anything. Free all this energy and turn it towards living your own life. By setting free the one you have been trying to change, you successfully free yourself…”

The Mystery of Choice

“…There is a mystical quality to choice. When it is made unequivocally and with absolute clarity of will, it will override all our conditioning, all our previous choices, and all the beliefs we hold. At that level, the choice we make can transform and change everything….”

 

“…It doesn’t have to take hours or weeks or months to make a powerful choice that will turn everything in your life a hundred eighty degrees. It can take but a second. What makes a difference is the intensity with which the choice is made.

Intensity is a word that is often misunderstood. Intensity is not loud, or frantic or “in your face.” On the contrary: the energy of intensity is often very quiet. It is condensed, focused and directed. Nothing exists, but that moment. You are alert, with all your senses – sharp, activated and alive. It is a state of consciousness where there is no room for anything else, but the present. The clarity you’ve been seeking is suddenly yours, and you know what you need to do. The choice becomes obvious, and you make it there and then, and with such power of will and spirit, you literally become a different person.

 

It is hard to fit this phenomenon into a linear explanation of things. It is not “A” leading to “B” leading to “C”…and so forth. Instead – it is more like: in one moment you are an “A” – and in the next moment – you are a letter from a different alphabet, or, if it is the same alphabet, then you are suddenly – a “Q”. Skipping all the letters in between. A caterpillar that becomes a butterfly. Not an improved, better version of a caterpillar, but a different species all together.

 

Our reality is not a result of endless causes leading to consequent endless effects. Scientists have known now for a hundred years that Newtonian physics is wrong. And it has been fifty years since they have proven that it is wrong. That in fact, Newton’s approach - causes creating effects, colliding, creating causes that are creating effects…is not how it works. And still it doesn’t seem to matter. Because it is easy to imagine a billiard ball hitting a billiard ball, hitting the next billiard ball and so on… That’s what we were taught at school, and it has become so deeply ingrained that most people never question it.

 

In truth, however, our reality is a product of our choices. There is no such thing as objective reality. We each have our own unique subjective realities and sometimes they overlap each other. Reality is not solid. It is mutable and pliable, and it changes as we change and to the degree that we change. Sometimes the change is subtle, sometimes – it is dramatic. Sometimes the change is fundamental and the entire reality “flips” and becomes something else.

 

It is choice that determines what happens and what does not happen in our lives. Choice is pivotal to the creation of every realty, without exception...”

When Love Is Not Enough: Excerpt I

“…Let me tell you one more story. A love story with an unhappy ending. Two lovers got into a fight over a small thing. Certain that they were right, they allowed the fight to escalate and to get out of control. One was attacking, and the other one - defending himself, and neither one of them heard the other. So caught up were they in their fight that they forgot about their love for each other in the midst of it, and so they dropped it and just kept on fighting and hurting each other, blinded by their need to prove their point. And the fight got worse, and the desire to punish took over, blocking all reason and shutting off the love, and things were said that should have never been said, not unless you really mean them…and just like that – in the midst of it all and in the heat of the moment, to their utter shock and disbelief – the relationship was over.

 

Perhaps you already know this story. Perhaps you have been a principle character in one just like it, or may be it happened to someone you know well, and just like them you could not believe it was over, that one “stupid” fight was all it took…One fight that went too far was all it took to kill the relationship…

 

It is a very old story, and most of us have heard it, and yet every time it happens people are shocked, refusing to believe it, certain that there must have been more to the story and that the fight that put an end to the relationship was simply the last straw. And they are usually right. There is always more to the story. And though the circumstances are different in each case, some things are common to all of them: an out of control ego, the pride that blinds and blocks all sense of adult responsibility, and the desire to punish that takes over, fueled by the insatiable need to be right one more time.

 

Thousands of similar fights are happening right now everywhere around the world: in the streets of New York, in the homes in Iowa, behind the closed doors of Paris apartments, in San Francisco and in Boulder, Colorado, in the flats of London and in the alleys of Tel Aviv… Everywhere you look, if you were allowed to watch it – people of various ages are desperately fighting each other for their “right” to be right. Consumed by anger, lost in their rage, they say terrible things, punishing and hurting each other, destroying their relationship, destroying the one thing that matters most and what has taken them a life time to build…

 

There is a “need” that most of us have developed. A need that has become insatiable. And it is driving us apart, creating the opposite of what we are after. It is at the root of most if not all of the problems in every arena of human life, and it has no chance of ever being satiated. Not as long as we go about it the way we have been. It is what causes our loneliness and isolation, it is behind our inability to be intimate and real with each other, it is what makes us feel cut off, separate and always alone. This need, simply put, is the need to prove our point and to get someone else to “see” that we are right.

 

We want to be understood. And we want “them” to change.

 

And yet - we are not here to be understood. We are here to be understanding.

 

I know I’ve said it before. Shocking as it may appear to some, it is the truth. We are not entitled to being understood, and we do not have a “right” to demand or insist or even expect it from others. It is neither our God given right nor our privilege as human beings. We are here to love, to learn how to love and to become good at it. This is our greatest challenge and also our greatest reward. To be loving to others, to be kind and to be understanding. To have compassion of the heart and generosity of spirit. Because when we are - the need to be understood simply does not exist. It belongs on another plane of reality all together.”

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