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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 people to untangle their lives.
A Yoga of Love
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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. This article on relationship yoga is to help people explore
their emotional maturity and
their relationship entanglements. |
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Relationships can be the greatest source of happiness in life - and the greatest source of stress. Do you want to heal your wounds,
reclaim your wholeness and share your love? See
attentive presence.
Relationship concepts are implicit within yoga. Many Hindu men
considered themselves superior to women, and to men of a lower caste,
based on beliefs about reincarnation and karma,
in which it may be appropriate to abuse people who may have sinned in some
past life. Hence references to relationships in yoga may reflect very different
models of the world to those used 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
- our 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 and 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 maturity. |
You are haunted - and 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 clarify your relationships
with people - including people who are dead or missing.
In our relationship yoga,
you can build a deep and lasting happiness that may transcend death.
Relationship Abuse
Some people are skilled at distracting you. Instead of
considering how you may increase your long-term happiness - you may be
tempted into 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 of marketing, your expressions of love may be reduced
to what products you purchase.
In this technological age, many people learn how to create
computer connections, but technical knowledge may not help you building human
connections. Although sometimes you
may get lost as the blind follow the greedy; you can stop and reorient
to happiness.
Sometimes, in our desire to be loved, we may play 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. These 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 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 paths to this goal.
You limit your life by your imagination. You are unlikely
to seek or 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 -
for example, 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 explore what you do not acknowledge.
Your beliefs and emotions influence whether you can see what is under
your nose and what is in your heart. Or do you prefer theories that you
cannot test with your senses?
Your inner rules were derived from your parents - friends -
colleagues - partners - communities - your culture. And if you challenge your internal rules - you cease to be
normal. You accepted many of these
rules unconsciously, and you use them to participate in a collective experience
of interlinked beliefs, values and judgments. A mythos of shared normality
that includes important interlinked experiences such as religion and
culture.
If you step out of your shared 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 the 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. In a yoga of love,
each offers you steps towards fulfillment.
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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 from acting 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. 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 some people 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) and solar plexus (which
may correspond with ulcers).
Based on these observations, I created a simple table of
chakras and relationships:
|
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
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.
- Observe people relating; watch their dynamics and
behavior,
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.
Online Coaching, Training & Mentorship
Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 2005-2012 All rights reserved.
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