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Are you entangled in difficult relationships
or painful emotions? Do you suffer from abuse?
Do you suffer from your
parents' drama, your partner's demands, your boss's moods?
We coach motivated adults
to untangle their lives.
A Practical Yoga of Love In this article I refer to Rajah Yoga,
Kundalini Yoga and Tantra Yoga, not Hatha Yoga. I offer no
yoga postures nor sexual techniques; nor do I ask anyone to believe
anything. My relationship yoga helps people explore
emotional maturity and
change unwanted relationship entanglements.
Relationships can be the greatest sources of happiness in your
life - and the greatest source of stress. Do you want to heal your wounds,
reclaim your wholeness and share your love? Your relationships are systems just
as your mind/body comprises a system. I developed Soulwork systemic coaching to help
people change relationship habits and emotional patterns. See
Psychobiology of Soul
Implicit within yoga are relationship concepts. Hindu
men often considered themselves superior to women, and to men of a lower
caste, enshrined within a doctrine of reincarnation
and karma, in which it was appropriate to abuse people who
must have sinned in some past life. Hence references to relationships
in yoga may reflect different models of the world to those preferred by most Westerners.
Enlightenment usually refers to transcending
suffering and desire. In a yoga of relationships, fulfillment
may better describe the deep, multi-dimensional happiness available to you.
If your relationships are in a romantic stage, a power struggle or in crisis - this relationship yoga can help you
end your struggles and heal your
wounds. You can learn to express and receive the love you want to share.
Relationship Habits Your relationship habits can lead to deep and long-term
happiness - or deep and long-term suffering. Feeling love is not enough! You
probably need to express your love ... appropriately.
| Love |
A condition in which the happiness of another person
is essential to your own happiness. |
Your relationship habits can attract or repel people.
This relationship yoga can help you find happiness. It can
help you clean up your mess. It can help you fulfill your dreams.
You carry memories and projections of important people with you - like ghosts. Are you
haunted by ghosts of the dead ... and by ghosts of the living? Do you endlessly remember and
rehash conversations? Do you squander your time obsessing
about might-have-beens and if-onlys?
| Maturity |
The path, means and goal of relationship
yoga ... and perhaps of all spirituality ... is emotional maturity. |
You are haunted - yet you give your ghosts time, energy
and space in your life. Within your consciousness, nobody is missing and
nobody dies - only bodies. This can be a curse and a blessing. The curse is that you may
obsess about past or unpleasant relationships. The blessing is that you
can mature - you can clean up your relationships with dead and missing people.
In our relationship yoga,
you can build deep and lasting happiness that may transcend death.
Relationship Abuse
Some people are skilled at distracting you from your
life. Instead of considering how you may increase your long-term happiness
- you may turn to short term distractions. You may ponder products that hint at pleasure. Use this
toothpaste to improve your partnership. Make your family
happy with this furniture. Love your children
by buying this hamburger. Impress your
friends by drinking this beer. Within such toxic wastes, your love may be
reduced to what you buy.
In this technological age, many people learn how to create
computer connections, but technical knowledge
cannot relieve you of the responsibility of living your life. Although sometimes you
may get lost as the blind follow the greedy; you can stop and reorient to
happiness that is hidden in plain sight.
Sometimes, in our desire to be loved, we may play toxic games. We may
sometimes act like lost children or hurt victims. Such games have high stakes. We gamble with our
health, our integrity and our happiness - and although we cannot ever win, the games
can be so intense that we forget that we are playing. A desire for love can
decay into a desire for pity. When I hear an adult say, "I don't know what
love is", I wonder what happened to that person's intimacy, honor and integrity.
I wish to share with you what
I
have learned
- often painfully - about lasting happiness.
Yoga & Perception
Yoga affirms that certain disciplines can liberate you from the
limitations of sense and thought, and help you find true knowledge. Most practitioners of
yoga want to gain knowledge of a universal spirit, called Brahman
in India. Yoga physical and mental training offers spiritual paths to this goal.
You bind your life by your perceptions. You are unlikely to
seek what you cannot perceive, nor attempt what you cannot imagine.
Your perception has external limits and internal rules.
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When we are awake we see everything around us
limited by the power of our sense organs, while as we dream, we
gravitate between the awakened and the dream states, since we do
not dream when we are either in the awakened or in the ‘deep-sleep state’
which is the third state the mind passes through a state in which we are not
normally aware of anything that happens around us. Sri Swami Sivananda |
We humans are adept at overcoming external limits - since
Galileo's time we have struggled to overcome the limits of
our human vision. Overhead, the Hubble space telescope pushes
our limits of observation towards the beginning of space and time.
But even a space telescope cannot change your
rules of perception. You cannot examine what you will not acknowledge.
Your beliefs and emotions influence whether you can see what is
under your nose, and whether you can believe theories that you cannot test
with your senses.
But if you challenge your internal rules - you cease to be
normal. Your internal rules are from your parents - friends -
colleagues - partners - communities - cultures. You accepted many of these rules
unconsciously, and you use them to participate in a shared subjective experience
of interlinked beliefs, values and judgments. Two important interlinked
experiences are religion and
culture.
If you step out of your culture - if you deny or reject
shared normality - you are abnormal. Your conversations,
actions and reactions become evidence of difference. You are wise to
tread gently at your borders of normality. Although your sanity may be
questioned, there, outside your mythos, you can change your personality
and your karma.
(See Chaos & Identity).
..... Page 2 .....
Relationship Yoga
Whenever you choose to share your mind, heart
and perhaps your body with another human being, you will find
conflicts, expectations and fears. Yet, in a yoga of love,
each of these offers you a step towards fulfillment.
|
Somebody becomes closer and
dearer to you as you understand them better. If they understand you,
they enjoy the closeness of the relationship. If you understand them better,
then you enjoy the closeness ... With your understanding, you can create
situations where the other person would be able to understand
you better. If you’re expecting other person to understand and
comply with you all the time while you don’t understand the
limitations, the possibilities, the needs and capabilities of that
person, then conflict is all that will happen. Unfortunately, the
closest relationships in the world have more conflicts than between enemies.
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev |
Following the influence of (mostly male) mystics, the
goal of enlightenment is often sought through actions,
loneliness and thoughtlessness. In a relationship
yoga, the goal of fulfillment or shared happiness
is attained through reactions, shared love and thoughtfulness.
Every relationship includes the family karma of
each member. Unfulfilled parental expectations, family secrets, suppressed
emotions ... people reflect the drama of their ancestors and early family.
Although many people are damaged, as they act out their ancestral patterns -
they often seek to become whole.
Energy Fields & Emotions
Many yoga systems refer to invisible
energy fields that surround a human body. These energy fields
can only be seen by naturally sensitive or trained people. As the words energy
and energy work seem overused and underdefined in yoga, I find that the words emotion or feeling may be more accurate.
Confusion only arises if you enquire which emotion an experience of energy
refers to. Although many people can identify more tastes, colors and sounds than
they can identify feelings, most people can at least discriminate between
pleasant and unpleasant feelings.
If you experience an unpleasant feeling, and name it fear,
sadness or anger, you may call it a negative emotion,
and try to not feel it. In this way you lose access to huge information.
Your emotions exist in the context of your relationships - relationships
with people, animals or lifeless things, with further divisions to include
relationships with the living, dead, yet unborn and the imagined.
Within a yoga of love, emotions are neither stupid nor random.
Emotions help you communicate deeper truths than words. If you accept emotions
and nonverbal signals as communication, you can open yourself
to a sensitivity that approaches telepathy.
See Systemic Magic and
Psychobiology.
Duality
Deep intimate relationships are often heterosexual -
between a man and a woman - although most partnerships are male-female balanced,
with the partners each taking more dominant and more passive roles.
Within the duality of a partnership you can find unity - but if unity scares you, you may
sabotage intimacy to avoid unity.
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... Tantra yoga is
based on duality. Form is a union of Siva and Sakti, the positive and
the negative. The ancient Puranas, Manusmriti and Mahabharata state that
in the beginning, a universal Brahmanda, split into two, the Cosmic Man
and the Cosmic Woman - Siva and Sakti. ... According to the doctrine of
Tantra, sorrow is caused by a bipolar existence, a split of the one
into two, because the truth of things is oneness and not the dual existence
in any of its forms. ... To get back from duality to unity is the process of
Tantra Sadhana. Sri Swami Krishnananda |
Chakras & Relationships
When you discuss relationships, you probably
spontaneously use your hands to point at certain parts of your body.
I noticed that the body positions that people mark with their hands are similar to the chakras
of Eastern mystics.
Chakras are locations in a human body which many
people believe to have mystical properties. Chakras
are part of many Eastern philosophies that have been adopted in the West. Many
people feel emotions centered in chakras, and especially the heart chakra (which
may correspond with high blood pressure).
Based on my observations, I created a table of chakra-relationships ...
here is a simplified version:
|
Chakra |
Relationship |
Task |
| Crown |
Humanity |
Bring communities to harmony |
| Forehead |
Community |
Help families to cooperate |
| Neck |
Parenthood |
Nurture & support children |
| Heart |
Partnership |
Commit to partnership together |
| Solar Plexus |
Teamwork |
Cooperate towards shared goals |
| Abdomen |
Own Parents |
Accept support and guidance |
| Groin |
Infancy |
Accept & honor yourself |
Relationship Coaching and a Yoga of Love
|
Sometimes, you need a
relationship with somebody who can see the light of all
your possibilities and say, "You can ... I believe
you can", and you will move mountains. |
If you want to explore your relationships; here are a few tools:
- Identify and describe your underlying emotions.
- Share feedback calmly, not in denial or accusations.
- Recognize complaints, criticism, justifications and
blame.
- Check if you prefer to blame, punish or
win rather than communicate.
- Separate the content of your messages from how you
communicate them.
- Interpret what people communicate. Identify what
may be missing or inferred.
- Identify your underlying values and find how each
of you benefit from problems.
- Observe problems, watch their dynamics and emotions, without trying to
fix
them.
Loving relationships are the path and the goal of a yoga of
love; and lasting love requires clarity, commitment and maturity.
We help people build
bridges across forever - bridges to integrity.
Click HERE for Better Relationships
Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 2005-2010 All rights reserved.
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