One of the basic tenets of Inner Bonding is that our feelings are our inner guidance system. Our wounded feelings such as anxiety, depression, fear, guilt, shame, anger, aloneness, emptiness and jealousy – the feelings that we cause with our false beliefs and resulting behavior – inform us that we are being unloving to ourselves, that we are abandoning ourselves in some way.

Our deeper existential core painful feelings – the feelings that are caused by others and events – are also informing us. Our loneliness, heartache, heartbreak, grief, helplessness over others, outrage, and fear of real and present danger offer us an enormous amount of information about what is happening externally.

The struggle to love and forgive is a heroic struggle. It will affect every other relationship in your life. And guess what? For me, all movement comes from forgiving and loving myself. Go figure. 

I wrote some of this piece years ago, while visiting my mother in upstate New York. I wanted to be the perfect daughter. But there’s something about dealing with our families that’s like taking acid. You go on a trip. Things come out of the blue. People sprout extra heads. Then you come back and you think-- what was that all about?

“Those who see themselves as whole make no demands,” teaches A Course in Miracles. Well, clearly, those who seem themselves as threatened wildebeests act accordingly. 

Being with my mother, I can’t believe how quickly I am triggered. I teach workshops in A Course in Miracles , a form of spirituality which emphasizes choosing love instead of “being right.” But as I hide away upstairs in the cutesy, cluttered guest bedroom of my mother’s townhouse, despising every artificial flower I see, I consider a different line of work. Maybe I could be the anti-Gandhi. Because my blood pressure is definitely higher than my consciousness.

Clutter. It blocks the flow of energy and gets in the way of manifesting our deepest desires.

We know how to unclutter the physical items in our lives and now, thanks to my friend Peggy Fitzsimmons, she is sharing with us today her views on letting go of relationship clutter. Enjoy!

“Our souls are inherently free and our true nature is love. And we also have ego minds that orient us towards self-preservation, lack, and scarcity. When the ego is in the driver’s seat, we relate from fear and separation. If conflict, competing, or power struggles are the norm in your relationships, your ego likely has a tight grip on the wheel. When you fail to treat yourself or someone else as a human being, your ego is present in that moment of relationship. In contrast, when the soul is in the driver’s seat, we relate from safety and connection. If your relationships are characterized by harmony, collaboration, and compassion, your soul is at the wheel. When you treat yourself or someone else with kindness, acceptance, and neutrality, your soul is present for that relationship moment.

The ego drives us to accumulate relationship clutter. Here are some examples:

In Disney’s rendition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the dwarves whistled while they worked. They had a magical way of bringing lightness and joy to their workday.

We live in stressful times. For many people, work is serious and stressful. What if we made it more fun? What if we added joy and pleasure?

What is Pleasure?

According to the dictionary, pleasure is “a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment.” Imagine bringing happy satisfaction and enjoyment to your work. How much more energized, happy, and healthy would you feel?

There are 3 types of pleasure: everyday pleasure (like enjoying a beautiful sunset or a funny video), sensual pleasure (like enjoying a relaxing massage), and sexual pleasure. 

Pleasure Increases Productivity 

Our society values productivity over pleasure. However, pleasure leads to improved productivity! 

Pleasure is just as important as hard work, because it raises your vibration, boosts your energy, relieves stress, improves your health and happiness, boosts your creativity, and opens your intuition. When your intuition is flowing with creative ideas, you can accomplish more in less time with less effort. 

Pleasure also brings you into the present moment and away from your stressful worries about the future or regrets of the past.

Have you ever noticed after going on a pleasurable vacation how much more refreshed and energized you feel the first day back at work? This is called the Pleasure Effect. Building pleasure into your workday allows you to experience the Pleasure Effect every day.

If you are overworked and under-pleasured, you will love these 11 tips to add pleasure and joy to your workday, whether you work from home, in an office, or anywhere else.

11 Pleasure Practices to Add Joy to Your Workday

It may feel to us as though life comes at us from the outside in, but in fact, it doesn’t. We meet life from the inside out. Once we understand this, we’ll see the mistake we’ve been making all along about the true meaning of strength – and how this has compromised our relationships. As we are now, we each have a list of things we want to overcome: our past; our failure to acquire what we believe we need; difficult people. We’ve identified these as challenges that come at us from outside. Naturally enough, our behavior is based on what our mind identifies as the cause of the problem. We keep fighting the exterior challenge as a means of healing ourselves, but we keep getting hurt. A wound that is covered over too soon fails to heal from the inside. In the same way, as we try to fix the psychological wound by changing things on the outside, we interfere with the natural healing process, which must be an internal one. Because we don’t understand the nature of the wound, we rend it again.

An argument between two people (lovers, spouses, family members) is a kind of psychological battle often filled with personal attacks, accusations, and dredging up past mistakes.

When both parties are exhausted, or one grudgingly concedes, the fight ends – for the moment. But nothing has changed; resentment has just gone underground until it’s dug up again, and hostilities soon resume.

But it needn’t be this way. There’s a little known “magic” that can stop any fight in the moment, and helps prevent the next one from getting starting. It’s the result of what we can call “relationship jiu-jitsu.” 

Jiu-jitsu is an ancient Japanese martial art based in “the art of yielding.” The combatants use special “moves” to turn an opponent’s energy back on them.

But here, I’m using the term psychologically, where the opponent isn’t a person we’re fighting. The true “opponent” to be overcome is a negative, lower level of consciousness in each of us that blames the other for the punishing pattern we’re both caught up in. 

To apply “relationship jiu-jitsu,” at least one of us must see we’re about to mindlessly repeat some old pattern that has no winner. So, instead of acting from the negative energy we feel – having seen the futility of throwing it at the other person who will only throw it back at us – we do something completely new: rather than try to “prove” we’re right, we use the moment to discover something about ourselves that will not only help transform us, but maybe the other person as well! 

How did we evolve the most loving brain on the planet?

Humans are the most sociable species on earth – for better and for worse.

On the one hand, we have the greatest capacities for empathy, communication, friendship, romance, complex social structures, and altruism. On the other, we have the greatest capacities for shaming, emotional cruelty, sadism, envy, jealousy, discrimination and other forms of dehumanization, and wholesale slaughter of our fellow humans.

In other words, to paraphrase a teaching story, a wolf of love and a wolf of hate live in the heart of every person.

Many factors shape each of these two wolves, including biological evolution, culture, economics, and personal history. Here, I’d like to comment on key elements of the neural substrate of bonding and love; in next week’s blog, I’ll write about the evolution of aggression and hate; then, in the next several posts, we’ll explore the crucial skill of empathy, perhaps the premier way to feed the wolf of love.

I was at a social gathering speaking with Robyn, a woman I had just met. At first, it sounded like she was a very interesting person and a good storyteller, but after a few minutes I noticed that we were not speaking WITH each other – she was speaking AT me.

I also noticed that I was unable to connect with her, and I started to feel very bored. Being used to noticing and acknowledging my feelings, I thanked my inner child for the information she was giving me – my boredom – which was telling me that Robyn was likely addicted to story telling.

Robyn was using story telling as a form of control to capture my attention and drain my energy. She was counting on the fact that she thought I would be too polite to walk away in the middle of her story. She was wrong about my being too polite!

I do try to be polite, but…

No matter how much love you get from others it will never be enough if you aren’t loving yourself.

Seeking love, validation, approval outside of yourself is a recipe for misery.

You are a love addict when you NEED the love, approval of those in your life in order to feel ok. When your sense of self worth is dependent on other’s loving you, you end up needing other people’s love like a drug.

When you think that you are lacking something inside or that you aren’t whole and complete, you end up seeking it outside thinking that person will somehow complete you.

This creates dependency since you have made the other person responsible for your sense of freedom and inner security. You will never feel free living this way.

The love you get outside yourself temporarily fulfills that unmet need deep within you. But ultimately it isn’t lasting. The more you need the love from outside, the less free you are to authentically be yourself.

A million likes on Facebook will never be enough if you don’t like yourself.

The whole world thinking you are amazing will never be enough if you don’t appreciate yourself.

So what do you love about yourself?

Integrity, love, and authentic power are inseparable. Integrity is much more than doing the right thing. From the perspective of your soul, there is no “right” and “wrong” thing. There are causes and there are effects of causes. When the cause is love, the effect is love. When the cause is fear, the effect is fear. When you are torn between love and fear, or between fear and love, your personality is splintered. It is not whole, not integral. You are out of integrity. Your wholeness is not present.

Allyson and Jonathan are sitting in front of me at a 5-Day Intensive. Married for 2 years, they have lost the passion and fun they once had, and they cannot understand why.

As I sit with them and experience what I call their relationship system, I see that what Jonathan does when he feels lonely around Allyson is to abandon himself by getting hard and judgmental or by shutting down. I see that what Allyson does when she feels lonely around Jonathan is to abandon herself by disconnecting from herself, leaving her heart and going up into her head. I see that Allyson’s disconnection makes Jonathan feel lonely, and Jonathan’s judgment and withdrawal crush Allyson.

Every moment is the right moment to start seeing ourselves as we are... regardless of whoever may be our “partner” of the moment.

Maybe it’s the person in that long line with us, complaining about how slowly things are moving. There’s no better time to practice seeing yourself than when some part of you can’t wait to “pounce” on the impatience of someone else. How about being stuck behind a driver on the freeway who won’t speed up or get out of the way?