Forget "Working" On Your Relationships -- There's An Easier Way
When we first met 32 years ago, there were no books about how to create a loving relationship and navigate through the inevitable challenges. We couldn't find any mentors to show us the way, either. Ultimately, this turned out to be a blessing, because we had to figure it out for ourselves. It took us years, though, to figure out things that now we can tell you in an hour of mentoring -- concepts and skills that would have really saved us a lot of pain and suffering. In this series of blogs, we want to share what we learned with you. We hope it will save you time and trouble, but more importantly we hope it will open up a new possibility for you, a way to enjoy the love you've always wanted without have to "work" on your relationships.
The Cost Of No Mentoring
Without good mentoring, even something simple, like driving a car, is complicated, confusing and dangerous. Even with driver training, plenty of people still get hurt. But how costly is our lack of mentoring in relationships, a much more complicated area of living? Most of us get a great deal more training in how to drive a car than we do in learning how to create and sustain lasting love. Speaking personally, we went all the way through the educational system, from kindergarten to our Ph.D.s, without ever being offered 10 minutes of training in how to develop and sustain a close relationship. Without the right kind of mentoring, most of us just keep repeating the same patterns and problems over and over. The divorce rate for second marriages is even higher than the famous 50 percent statistic for first marriages. The divorce rate for third marriages is higher than that for second marriages. It's clear the learning curve is going the wrong way.
Let's change all that. Planet Earth is ripe for a relationship revolution, and if you agree, let's get it going now. We'll start by sharing a few incredibly important things nobody ever told us when we were just starting out.
Does Love Have To Be Hard?
Almost everybody agrees that love is difficult and relationships take a lot of work. We found that to be completely wrong -- love is remarkably easy, and relationships don't take work in order to thrive. Thinking love has to be hard is a paradigm, a collection of thoughts, feelings and intentions that produces a certain result. We'll show you how to make the transition from hard to easy later on, and we'll definitely show you how to do it much more quickly than it took us. With no mentoring, we had to figure everything out the "hard way." It took us years of making love hard to figure out how to make it easy. With a little bit of mentoring, though, you can make rapid changes in circumstances that have felt stuck for long time.
For example, we had the opportunity to do a mentoring session with a 56-year-old single woman who told us she had tried without success for years to manifest a lasting relationship with a man. A brilliant mathematician, she had even calculated the odds of single women of 56 finding a mate. She said they were about the same odds as being kidnapped by terrorists. In other words, she had a paradigm that required it to be hard to find a mate. The gist of the mentoring we gave her boiled down to one big question: Are you willing to suspend your old paradigm -- finding a mate has to be hard -- in favor of a new paradigm that finding a mate can be easy? After a brief wrestling match with her old paradigm, she was able to embody the idea that it could actually be easy to draw an ideal mate into her life. Two weeks later she went to a convention and met the man she eventually married.
Here are three life-changing questions about love and ease. We know because they really changed our lives, long before we began sharing them with clients and workshop participants. They are all good questions for assessing how willing you are for your love-life to be easeful instead of stressful. Let the following questions resonate in your mind; also, listen to how your body and your feelings react to each of them:
The First Question: Am I willing to move past my prior experiences of love, to wonder open-heartedly about what's possible for me in love right now?
After you contemplate that question, move on to the second one:
The Second Question: Am I willing to shift out of the state of consciousness that generates my limiting patterns, into a new state of consciousness in which I feel more love than I ever imagined possible?
As before, run the question through your mind a few times, until you can feel an answer to it emerge from your own consciousness.
Then, move on to the final question:
The Third Question: Am I willing to open up to more love than I ever imagined possible, and to have it be easy?
There are no right or wrong answers to questions like these; they are simply designed to open up a sincere wondering inside yourself about what's possible for you right now.
Here's a link to a video that shows some of our own adventures in making love easy. The video gives you an experiential process the features the three questions above. We hope you'll use them to open a pathway to more ease in your relationships.
In Part 2, we'll describe the real issue that's underneath relationship problems from sex to money to chores.
Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks are the co-authors of relationship classics such as "Conscious Loving" and "The Conscious Heart." Learn more about their work at www.hendricks.com.