style="font-size:15px;"> Love, real love, is a grace, unattainable through effort. It is a gift of the spirit, not a consequence of endeavor. It is not an outcome to be worked toward, but a treasure to be received. So when love magically, spontaneously appears, don't try; just let it in. And when your relationship whimsically, unexpectedly, grandly, offers you beautiful moments, don't try to analyze or repeat them, just open your heart and allow them to burst into bloom.
CAST OFF YOUR PRIDE
Pride is a spurious, dangerous emotion that can stand in the way of deep love. It's what you feel when your truer feelings are too hard to feel—that you have been (or may be) abandoned, that you're not enough, that your looks, achievements, wealth, social status, clothes, children, houses, jobs, professions, won't in some way (or in some important context that you're measuring by) measure up.
Pride is what we have, do, feel, preserve, instead of all of the above. It gets us through the rough times, allows us, in difficult circumstances, in spite of our feared inadequacies, to carry on. But pride, embedded, taken on as a personality trait, is a dangerous attribute. It stands between you and what is or might be: love, a new friend, the healing of an old wound, a better job, a kiss, a miracle.
When you get too involved with your pride—the way you think you ought to be treated, how important you are, how insulted you feel because “they” overlooked you—you miss what's right in front of your eyes—this beautiful, unrepeatable moment, to say nothing of the chance to step forward exactly as yourself.
Pride in relationships creates distance. If you want to be treated like a proud, kingly, lion, you can be; but you'll be all alone in the jungle. Instead of coming to your beloved in vulnerability, revealing yourself, asking for what you need and allowing her beautiful love to flow in, you'll stand like the Wizard of Oz in her presence, all puffed up with your pride, insisting she be your accomplice in shoring up your illusions.
We often use the phrase “pride and joy” to speak of who or what makes us proud, gives us joy. In that sense, pride is a heart-swelling joy. But pride as a private emotional stance is the antithesis of joy. Far from bringing you joy, it will stand in joy's way. Joy thrives on freedom; joy flows. If the place in your heart that is longing for joy is already jammed full of pride, joy, the unwelcome guest, may just slip away.
So give up your pride. It may preserve your dignity, protect you from all the judgments you fear, but, in the end, all it will do for you, really, is leave you alone…with your pride.
DISCOVER SEX AS SACRED REUNION
Our sexuality is one of the loveliest, most complex, and satisfying aspects of our intimate relationships. It is where we gather in the flesh to be joined, connected, and bonded. It can bring us joy or disappointment. It can be the source of our most painful betrayals, or of the highest moments of our ecstatic love.
Just as bringing our bodies together in the sexual encounter reminds us that we are bodies, essentially physical beings, so orgasm, the moment of blossoming ecstasy, connects us to the spiritual essence within us. Taken in total, making love is the movement of the mystic, electric current that bears eloquent witness to the fact that we are not just physical beings but temples where the spirit resides.
To apprehend your lovemaking in this way is to move toward the sacred in your sexual relationship. It is to ask more of it, give more to it, and receive more, far more, from it than you can ever expect from the how-to-improve-your-sex-life articles in popular magazines. Although handy-dandy advice columns and erotic manuals may indeed solve some of your sexual machinery problems, they will drop you off at the doorway of sex as a gymnasium, romance novel, or power trip, leaving you with only a sensate thrill. Thus you are denied the magnificent opportunity of experiencing your sexual encounters as a spiritual reunion of the highest order.
In making love, it is not only our bodies that are happily and deliciously engaged; but, because of the irresistible magnetism that sexual attraction is, we are also invited to contemplate in the mind and actually experience in the body the spirit which lives and moves within us.
Through sex we enter the timeless, boundary-less moment. We partake of the one experience above all others in life which allows us the bliss of true union. Here ego and all its concerns are erased, and the self is dissolved in utter surrender. To know, feel, and discover this in the presence of another human being, as we are invited to do in making love, is to be brought face-to-face with one of the greatest mysteries of human existence—that we are spirit, embodied; and that, as human beings, we are partaking in this miracle.
To experience your sexual relationship in this way is to elevate it to the sacred encounter it is. In so doing, you will experience your body as a vessel of the divine, your orgasm as a gift of the spirit, and your beloved as he or she with whom you are gifted to share a taste of eternal bliss.
BE EXTRAVAGANT WITH YOUR PRAISE
Everybody has hundreds of attributes to be praised—even a total stranger. If you stopped for a moment and looked at the person beside you on the bus, ahead of you at the check-out stand, pumping gas at the service station, you could see, sense, hear, feel something so fine, or beautiful, or true about that human being that you would realize how worthy it is of being remarked upon. And if you uttered that praise, that mini-celebration of this person's specialness, you just might see a stranger suddenly burst into bloom.
How much more, then, does your beloved, the one special being you've chosen to honor, cherish, enjoy, and merit the celebrating words of praise, admiration, and acknowledgment that will make his or her heart sing? All too often, proximity breeds, if not contempt, then blindness and amnesia. We forget to acknowledge those sterling attributes, whimsical quirks, and singular passions that caused us to fall in love in the first place. Once we've “captured” a mate (precisely because of all the attributes we so cherish and admire—her beautiful eyes, his wonderful wit, the amazing softness of her skin, his big bear rug of a chest), we often get lazy, stingy even, with the warm bath of praise that could wash away hurts and deepen our bonds of connection.
It's as if we use praise as a lure, to snag somebody to love, but then seem to forget that praise—the out-loud, out-spoken, uproarious celebration of all the things that are good, great, special, and rare about that one very fine person—is really the life's breath of love.
Praise opens the heart and refreshes the soul of the one who is praised. It sculpts and enhances the very behaviors it honors, encourages them to multiply. Praise creates change. It refashions the soul. By quietly showing forth the magnificence already there, it inspires the ongoing creation of an ever finer human being.
So if you want joy in your relationship, an enduring sense of its specialness, the feeling that you are loved by (and are loving) a most extraordinary human being, be accurate, consistent, generous, and extravagant with your praise.
ACCEPT THE GLORIOUS COMPROMISES OF LOVE
There is a component of sacrifice to every intimate relationship, no matter how blissful or harmonious it may be. When you choose to love one person in a special, committed way, you are unchoosing—or giving up—your option to choose all others, for a time at least, in that same particular way.
Love—the feeling—and “being in love”—the ravishing experience—make us willing, even daredevilishly eager, to make these sacrifices. It's a joy to choose one above all others, a delight to feel graced and blessed by your beloved's uniquely delicious and heartwarming presence.
But this choosing, grand as it is and willing as we are to make it, is also symbolic of the many choices, little renunciations and revisions of priority that,
