Have you ever wondered why we humans seek a soulmate?

What is it about us that craves this deep connection to another?

Where does our yearning come from?

Are we genetically designed to be mated?

One fascinating and possible answer comes from Aristophanes, the acclaimed playwright and philosopher of ancient Athens.

He offers a wild tale that he shared at Plato’s Symposium about how the deep desire for Oneness came about.

Long, long ago in primal times people had doubled bodies: four arms, four legs, two heads and they were big and round….

These roly-poly creatures wheeled around earth like clowns doing cartwheels & were very powerful.

There were three sexes: the all-male, the all-female, and those who were half male, half female.

I've Been Thinking...

A couple of years ago, I did a story for TODAY on author Lisa Taddeo and her best-selling book Three Women. The book was an instant best-seller and launched a nationwide conversation about women and desire. In fact, it’s fair to say that it blew the lid off a topic that was once taboo.

Now Lisa is back with a new book called Animal. This time she is writing about another taboo subject: women and anger. I, for one, couldn’t be happier to be jumping into this conversation because it’s one that needs to be had! That’s right. Women and anger deserve their own conversation, and we need permission to have it out in the open without fear of judgment or outrage.

Just like women want and need to talk about desire, we also want and need to talk about anger (or at least I do). I don’t say that just because there is a lot to be angry about these days (an assault on voting rights, a continued debate on who gets to decide what we can or cannot do with women’s bodies, gun reform, and a lack of support for child care, elder care, and family leave—to name a few). There is a lot to be angry about that’s never really been spoken about: a woman’s role in the church, women’s fight for equal pay, and the status (or lack thereof) of women around the world.

What do you need?

The Practice:
Kindness to you is kindness to me; kindness to me is kindness to you.

Why?

I usually describe a practice as something to do: get on your own side, see the being behind the eyes, take in the good, etc. This practice is different: it’s something to recognize. From this recognition, appropriate action will follow. Let me explain.

Some years ago, I was invited to give a keynote at a conference with the largest audience I’d ever faced. It was a big step up for me. Legendary psychologists were giving the other talks, and I feared I wouldn’t measure up. I was nervous. Real nervous.

I sat in the back waiting my turn, worrying about how people would see me. I thought about how to look impressive and get approval. My mind fixed on me, me, me. I was miserable.

Through all the tyranny and injustice which plague the earth on this day and in these times, one Thing, one Fact, one Truth remains and that is: There Is Only One Reality, The Original Creation of the Divine Mother’s Love in full manifestation and expression on this Earth and on all Earths and Star Systems throughout Eternia.  

Love is, was and Will Always Be the only true and absolute Ruler of this Earth, as Love is the creator of Earth and the Ruler Of All Creation by Divine Edict. Love is the Infinite wanting to Gift us Life. Love Is and will always be, the only, the ALL, the ONE. 

The Master told us, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” His promise is a statement of fact now being realized by those with eyes to see. Through the rubble and clouds of misinformation and intentional trickery, the Divine Light of God’s Eternal Truth, emerges triumphantly, shines brightly, and speaks loudly in the Heart as a Still Small Voice yearning to be heard. 

For in each and every situation we encounter, like water rising to seek its own level, so Love, and the Light of that Love becomes a beacon shining out as the highest point in any given occurrence, and all the forces surrounding that Love are Awakened and Empowered and Up Lifted and Transformed by that Love. 

We are suffering more than we are meant to. Chronic stress. Loneliness. Isolation. Anxiety. Depression. We are overwhelmed by pain because we’re alienated from the basic understanding of who we truly are. What if we recognized that we are made of infinite energy emanating from a source of unimaginable creative power? Suffering wouldn’t linger as much as we allow it to now.

Here are three suggestions on how to become a positive thought warrior. 

Mindset Shifts to Summon Self-Compassion 

1. Become aware of your self-talk.

We must remember that we all deserve love and joy, and all that is good and beautiful. If we keep this thought in mind, life will naturally tend to be beautiful.

Most of us deep down within, could be feeling they don't deserve a lot they are gifted with, also our socio-cultural environment has taught us this spirit of sacrifice and we are inevitably taught to deal with a lot of guilt regarding our personal belongings.

This is most specially relevant if you come from a wealthy and affluent family. You are given the message time and again that you do not deserve this abundance and you need to give it up or give it away as you have no right on what you have not worked for. Of course sharing is a very noble part of the human existence,  but sharing from a space of guilt is incorrect. We need to share from a space of love.

Vera sought out counseling with me because her doctor advised her to discover the emotional causes of her chronic fatigue. Vera, a successful stockbroker, was in a loving 18-year marriage. On the surface, everything in her life was fine. She had enough money, friends and a good relationship with her husband. Yet Vera awoke each morning battling fatigue and depression. She didn’t want to get out of bed because nothing felt meaningful to her.

David sought my help because of chronic feelings of inner emptiness. David is very successful in his manufacturing business, has a good marriage and two adult children. Like Vera, everything seemed fine. Yet the feelings of inner emptiness drove David to overeat, overspend and indulge in porn on the Internet. Like Vera, nothing felt meaningful to him.

Where you’re stuck, believe it or not, you’re blessed. Because here is where you can meet the alchemy of self-love and a whole new level of progress. 

When I’m frustrated, an inner dark knight moans, “You are broken and there are a thousand armies to hold you back.” This ancient foe covers the sun, chills the air. You will always feel this way. You will always be stuck. And yet this dark knight crumples immediately before the magic of willingness. 

Here is the willingness I have used to change my life:

I am willing to walk past my resistance. 

I am willing to believe that something will shift or give way. 

I am willing to stay true to my love.  

Our relationships with one another are often a source of distress. One major form of conflict we experience with others involves their failure to give us the consideration we feel they owe us. We often suffer from thoughts like these: "She is not being respectful enough." "He is not as kind as I want him to be." "They just don't care as deeply as I do." 

However, if we will be courageous enough to see the truth of the next insight, and then admit it into our heart and mind, we can change the real root of this underlying sense of our dissatisfaction with others along with the conflict it generates: Many times the very thing we want from the person we are with -- for example, respect, patience, kindness, love -- is the very thing that we ourselves either lack at the moment or otherwise somehow are withholding from them. The "catch" here is that we are mostly unconscious to our actual inner condition in these encounters with others, and here's a major reason why this happens: 

Hidden in each of us are certain clever "self-concealing devices" whose sole reason for being is to protect our self-image and keep us asleep to ourselves. One of the ways they work is to show us ourselves as blameless while pointing the arrow of insufficiency at someone else.

What is unworthiness? Of course, it is the awareness of a part of your personality that says to itself, “I am unworthy,” for example, I am unworthy of the love that I have in my life, or the wealth that I have, and more commonly, I am unworthy of the happiness that I feel. Thoughts such as “It’s too good to be true, and “This can’t last forever because it is too good” are experiences of unworthiness. You feel unworthy of what the Universe has given you, that you do not deserve it, that the other shoe will fall, and it is only a matter of time before you will get what you really deserve, which will be painful.

Unworthiness is all these things and more. It is the inmost frightening thought that you do not belong, no matter how much you want to belong. That you are an outsider and will always be an outsider. It is the idea that you are flawed and cannot be fixed. It is wanting to be loved and feeling unlovable, or wanting to love and feeling that you are not capable of loving. It is the feeling that no matter what you do, it is not enough, that you are incurably inadequate, intrinsically and permanently flawed. It is the fear of people seeing you as you really are, the belief that if they did, they would not want anything to do with you. All this is the experience of unworthiness, and beneath all of this is the experience of powerlessness – of feeling powerless to be a real part of Life, to love, to be loved, to affect the world, to be heard, to be worth hearing or to have something worthy saying. It is self-loathing, self-hatred, and no matter how difficult this idea is to even consider, it will not leave you somewhere deep inside, and it is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the Earth school, and everyone shares it. This is the pain of powerlessness.

What do you do when your partner shuts you out?

Do you know that being shut out and stonewalled is even more hurtful than being yelled at? Children would rather get yelled at or even hit than ignored. This is why the worst punishment for prisoners is solitary confinement.

Yet, along with overt anger, withdrawal is the most common form of controlling behavior in relationships. Just as the fear of anger keeps partners from addressing issues, so does the fear of a partner’s withdrawal.

Loretta is struggling with this issue.

“I’m in a two year relationship. My main problem is how can I raise an issue without him turning his back on me and walking away? I have to follow him to get my feeling across only to have him ignore me. He says I am never happy with what he does and feels frustrated that he can’t make me happy. The ignoring makes me feel unloved and rejected. I have told him how it makes me feel but he still does it.”

Traditionally the word feminine has been defined as having qualities traditionally ascribed to women, such as sensitivity, gentleness, being demure, modest, or delicate.

This seems so limited and last mid-Century to me.

In my coaching I often come across women who don’t believe they have the right to ask for what they most want, need, and desire, feeling that if they do ask, they will either be rejected or seen as too aggressive.

This happens in both their business life and romantic relationships.

Oy.

I believe that part of the problem comes from being raised on a diet of books and movies with the theme “let’s all become princesses” as we hope that someday Prince Charming will magically arrive and kiss us out of our comas.

Ugh.

Ladies, don’t you think it’s time to embrace your “Inner Queen” and step into your power and fierceness?

Our most fruitful field for self-discovery and life-enhancement is also the one we least understand or know how to use. And yet, virtually every moment offers abundant chances to benefit from it. What is this highly valuable field of opportunity? Our relationships.

Consider these truths: It is within relationships that we grow as individuals in everything valuable, because it is through them that we become stronger and wiser, allowing us to realize a love that transcends our unseen self-limiting self-interests. Yet, even though we may acknowledge the existence of this path to self-perfection, the essential mystery of exactly how to use this endless resource remains obscured.

How do we use our relationships to change the balance sheet of our lives so that for every measure of impatience and intolerance there may be at least an equivalent sum of compassion and consideration? And how do we learn to use our relationships with others to realize a new kind of relationship with ourselves so that we can discover the beautiful fact that who we really are is all we need to be?

Our willingness to work our way through the following twelve special practices -- to strive to use these higher ideals in our relationships with others -- will reward us with the Real Life our hearts longs for. 

The main purpose of these special practices is to show us how to use each developing moment in our relationships with family, friends, and coworkers to consciously change our relationship with them, and more importantly, with ourselves. 

If we are honest we will admit that, with few exceptions, the usual focus of our attention and interactions with others is centered on our selves and the fulfillment of our desires. "How do I feel about you?" "What do I want from him?" or "When will she realize that I know best?" In other words, the mindset of this largely unconscious self, under most circumstances, is: "Me first."

By forever placing its own considerations before considering any other, this self-serving nature remains the master of its own universe, even if all that revolves through it is its own imagined importance.

Resilience, our ability to bounce back from difficult times, is linked with self-love. Yet half of women worldwide feel more self-doubt than self-love, and 60% wish they had more respect for themselves, a new survey finds.

Learning to develop self-love is an important skill in a happy, healthy life. You deserve love just as much as everyone else in your life does. So how can you increase the love you feel for yourself?

A good place to start is by taking care of yourself. By taking time to care for yourself and prioritizing your health and happiness, you’ll also have more love to share with the people around you.

Loving yourself can include focusing on self-care, giving yourself positive encouragement, and taking time to yourself. It may look different for each person! Here are a few suggestions for ways you can practice self-love each day:

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: