The Energies of Love
Page 1
ALSO BY DONNA EDEN AND DAVID FEINSTEIN:
Energy Medicine
Energy Medicine for Women
Ethics Handbook for Energy Healing Practitioners
The Promise of Energy Psychology (with Gary Craig)
BY DONNA EDEN:
The Little Book of Energy Medicine (with Dondi Dahlin)
BY DAVID FEINSTEIN:
Energy Psychology Interactive
Rituals for Living and Dying (with Peg Elliott Mayo)
Personal Mythology (with Stanley Krippner)
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Copyright © 2014 by Donna Eden and David Feinstein
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“Blessing: For Love in a Time of Conflict” from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings by John O’Donohue, copyright © 2008 by John O’Donohue. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eden, Donna.
The energies of love : using energy medicine to keep your relationship thriving / Donna Eden, David Feinstein; foreword by Jean Houston; illustrations by Annamaria Paciulli Volpicella
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-17621-8
1. Energy medicine. 2. Couples. 3. Interpersonal relations. 4. Love. I. Feinstein, David. II. Title.
RZ999.E3267 2014 2014021654
615.8'9—dc23
Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for psychotherapy, couple counseling, or consulting with your physician. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.
Version_1
For our grandson, Tiernan Ray Devenyns.
May the energies of love be the hallmark of his generation.
One day after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.
—PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
Contents
Also by Donna Eden and David Feinstein
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Jean Houston, Ph.D.
Introduction
PART 1 • The Inherited Aspects of Love
Chapter 1 You and Your Partner See through Different Eyes: Unfamiliar Energies Attract
Chapter 2 Aligning Your Energetic Processing Styles: Turning Your Differences into Strengths
Chapter 3 When Your Energies Collide: A Pact for Setting Things Straight
Chapter 4 Different Brains—Different Energies: Structures, Stages, and Styles of Love and Romance
PART 2 • The Learned Aspects of Love
Chapter 5 The Energies of Attachment: The Nitty-Gritty of Intimacy
Chapter 6 Changing Your Future by Not Repeating Your Past: Tapping Your Way to a New Brain Chemistry
Chapter 7 Recurring Patterns, Triggers, and Other Inconveniences: Reprogramming Responses That Hurt Your Relationship
PART 3 • The Mutually Created Aspects of Love
Chapter 8 Sex Is Nature’s Energy Medicine for Couples: Invoking the Passion
Chapter 9 Conscious Partnership: Staying Awake through the Highs and the Lows
Chapter 10 The Beckoning of the Possible: Your Evolving Relationship Is a Spiritual Journey
References
Index
Acknowledgments
While teaching our Energies of Love classes in recent years, Donna has become fond of saying, “Thank God I didn’t leave David when I should have!” In thinking about our gratitudes and acknowledgments for this book, David’s first and foremost appreciation is that Donna didn’t leave him when she should have and Donna’s is that David came around so it was worth the wait. Given the uncertainties and struggles we have gone through, we are as amazed as we are gratified by how many people who have watched us teach or work together in recent years have told us that our relationship is an inspiration that gives them hope. Their comments have helped push us over the line into being bold enough to write this book.
The Energies of Love, which in a true sense has been in gestation for the entire thirty-seven years of our relationship, is indebted to so many people that we aren’t even going to risk naming names. Not only would that fill many pages, we would still inevitably leave out too many who have lent a guiding hand along the way. Instead, we will list categories. Guilty parties will know where they fit. First are our parents and families of origin, who inaugurated us into all that was to follow. Next, our daughters and extended family provide the foundation on which we stand. Then our closest friends, from childhood to present day. Our lovers and intimates from the past provided us with the most personal and profound instruction about what works . . . and what doesn’t. Our teachers, our many magnificent teachers, formal and informal, helped shape who we are. And our therapists—we know we were tough cookies, and we thank you for giving your all to meet the challenges. Our clients and students have taught us so much by allowing us to participate in their journeys.
The actual writing, putting words on paper, was facilitated in so many ways by the support of our magnificent staff at Innersource and the hundreds of energy medicine and energy psychology practitioners who orbit around them. Our editor at Tarcher/Penguin as well as the publisher’s founder, its current chief, and its staff have been gifts that few authors today can even hope for. Finally, we have sought counsel for specific sections of the book from friends and colleagues, and they have contributed generously and masterfully.
We are deeply grateful to every one of you.
Foreword
When you first meet them, they seem an unlikely couple. Donna is exuberant, spontaneous, intuitive. David is quietly reflective, studious, and always looking for deeper meanings. She is champagne; he is still water. She is of a tropical nature; he is most definitely northern. And yet, with all their contrasts, they have, through dint of unstinting effort and rich affection, cultivated a loving, creative, and exemplary marriage. He puts her feelings and intuition into words. She sees and orchestrates energies that enable him to
enter a different universe of understanding. Together, they have done the hard work of relationship, and we are their beneficiaries.
Which is to say that The Energies of Love heralds a revolution in our understanding of relationships. I believe it to be one of the most important books of our time, the “Open Sesame” to new ways of being. Drawing upon their many years of work in energy medicine and energy psychology, the authors have given us a deeply original and eminently practical art and science for crossing the great divide of otherness. Theirs is the state-of-the-art understanding and utilization of the emerging science of consciously orchestrating the energies of brain and heart, body, mind, and spirit, a technology of human transformation and social evolution. They offer tools and techniques, stories, and examples that enhance ways of lifting relationships to higher bands of energy and harmony. They explore the reality of how different brains come with different energies and how to understand the structures, stages, and styles of love and romance. And their take on the traditional battle of the sexes is both unique and startling. They have found the way to end the ancient war! As they say:
You are living in perhaps the most exciting yet challenging time in history for being on a journey inspired by love. Never before have people been beckoned so strongly to create relationships where the forces that have been traditionally thought of as masculine and the forces that have been traditionally thought of as feminine can join within each person and between two partners to form the richest relationships since the dawn of time!
The implications here are enormous. Shifting the ways we relate to one another, male and female, is an indispensable step toward the discovery of new styles of interpersonal connection, new ways of being in community, and the emergence of a global society. The movement seems to be from the egocentric to the ethnocentric to the worldcentric—a fundamental change in the nature of civilization, compelling a passage beyond the mind-set and institutions of millennia.
Critical to this reformation is a true partnership society in which women join men in the full social agenda. Since women tend to emphasize process over product, to understand the power of being as well as doing, deepening rather than end-goaling, it is inevitable that as a result of this partnership, linear, sequential solutions will evolve to the knowing that comes from seeing things in whole constellations rather than as discrete facts. The consciousness engendered by this comprehensive vision raises hope for forgiveness and healing among individuals, ethnic groups, and nations. Essential to this matured consciousness is moral and ethical growth toward the golden rule of human interchange, about which Donna Eden and David Feinstein know so much and give so rich a palette of information and training.
Ultimately it is about a new kind of education, of which this book is a primary text. In the places where our world truly operates interdependently and with this kind of education, old barriers can dissolve, along with the ancient fears that sustained them. What Donna and David offer in their work are the necessary tools and practices, the empathic understandings and the science that can support so great a whole-system transition. We have to learn the dynamics of getting along with each other, of coming to love and appreciate each other. They remind us that when the world is trying to coalesce into a new and higher unity for which we are seemingly unprepared, the only preparatory force that is emotionally powerful enough to prompt us to fully heed this call is found in the energies of love.
Love transforms the way we see, think, dream, act, engage the world, serve others, and even transcend our local selves. It is the source of much creative endeavor—songs, poetry, writing, dreaming, human folly, and human glory. It awakens us and keeps us going. As we love more, we honor more. We see and accept more. We honor pain, beauty, and one another’s path. With love we become more intelligent and creative, for we are open to the patterns of intelligence from the whole network of life. We come to glimpse the wonder of life in its infinite forms, and the wonder that is within us. Quite simply, with love we are able to exceed our local conditions and to evolve.
The teaching of this book is to bring ourselves to a loving resonance, discovering strategies and practices of loving that then can become daily practice, constant application. This may be the most important learning of them all, the one that may hold the greatest good for life on this planet—learning how to commit to the choice of loving. As you do, you will discover that the universe is also alive and loving: as you move toward it, it moves toward you. The universe grows by its connections and its attractions: atoms to atoms, molecules to molecules, bodies to bodies, groups to groups, nations to nations, and finally the world as lover.
We are asked, in this epoch of cultural rebirth, to grow into the people willing and able to face, solve, and succeed in the enormous challenges that have arisen. In so huge a transitional moment of history, we require new skills and capacities as well as nurturing relationships in which our evolving selves are supported and given training that dissolves the barriers between our ordinary and our extraordinary selves.
This is all here in this remarkable work. The transformative power of the energies of love can and does evoke in us a Divine response: deep acceptance and forgiveness, profound spoken and unspoken communion and communication, the ecstasies of eros and the fires of union, a wave-tide of giving and receiving so abundant that it seems drawn from the very ocean of abundance itself, weaving together in love all of life’s dramas.
—Jean Houston, Ph.D.
Ashland, Oregon
May 2014
Introduction
The Energies of Love
Love is the pinnacle of evolution, the most compelling survival mechanism of the human species.
—SUE JOHNSON, PH.D.1
We often joke, or half joke, that if we can make it, any couple can make it. While our basic values, mercifully, complement one another’s effortlessly, our personalities, temperaments, and lifestyle inclinations don’t. David thrives in dry hot weather, Donna withers. Donna’s interests and attention jump like fire in a dozen different directions; David can become irritated when his plodding, intense focus is jerked from its course by one of her eruptions of enthusiasm. David organizes his life around endeavors that make him feel well utilized and worthy; Donna functions best moment by moment. Donna works most effectively within an unhurried, unscheduled, organic pace; David has been compared to a freight train when he is engaged in a project. Donna’s disposition is to yield to the other person’s ways, so even though David is attracted to her for her joyful nature, his more somber style sets their tone. She then feels invisible and discounted; he wonders why her friends bring out the person he wants to be with while he so often doesn’t.
Having experimented with the basics of this program for more than thirty years, we went to Alex’s, a restaurant in our hometown of Ashland, Oregon, with the commitment that we were not going to leave the lounge until we had completed the first sentence of this book. We finished our tempura shrimp and many refills of club soda; considered a dozen ways to begin the book; settled on the highly personal; wrote the “if we can make it” sentence; watched a young couple kissing on the restaurant’s balcony overlooking Ashland’s famous plaza; thanked them later for adding to the spirit of our project; joked with the restaurant’s manager, who told us that she had announced to her husband that they were expecting their first child at the same table where we were birthing this project; and, finally satisfied with our sixteen-word writing spree, went on our way.
The next morning, David filled in the remainder of the first paragraph, writing as he often does in the early hours. When Donna awoke, he read it to her. She liked it very well until the last line. She said, “Do you mean to tell me you still feel that way? I thought you were over that twenty years ago.” Her tone had hurt and shock. David felt discounted and unfairly attacked. Donna couldn’t believe that he was accusing her of attacking him, when it was she whose feelings had been hurt. We were off to the who-was-wronged-w
orse races, both also feeling, “What an inauspicious beginning for a book on the energies of love!”
As our discouragement escalated, and after a brief period of separation as Donna bathed and David stewed, Donna said, “If we are really going to do this book and present these techniques, let’s see if they can get us out of this one.” David used a technique for countering the energies that can trigger his defensiveness when Donna is hurt by something he has done. Donna used a technique to counter her energetic freeze and inability to think when David reacts defensively. Why we’d never tackled this particular long-standing pattern before using these tools, we cannot say; perhaps we were saving it for demonstration purposes. The ten minutes of retrieval work not only “got us out of this one,” it helped shift the pattern.
This book shows you how to work your way out of such entanglements with your partner, along with ways to turn your differences into strengths and areas of stagnation into renewal. What is most unusual in our approach is that it does not focus only on psychological differences, communication styles, and positive intentions. It also shows you how to focus directly and effectively on your energies, your partner’s energies, and how they interact.
What Is This Thing Called Love?
You are reading a book whose title includes two terms—love and energies—that have baffled scientists, philosophers, and theologians for as long as their disciplines have existed. We are not arrogant enough to promise to resolve the historical ambiguities, contradictions, and mysteries surrounding either term (much as we’d like to), but we will try to give you a working feel for each that will be useful in reading this book.
Ancient Greek philosophers described four types of love: agape (spiritual, selfless, unconditional love), eros (passionate love, with sensual desire and longing), philia (affectionate regard or friendship), and storge (the natural affection of kinship, such as that felt by parents for their children). The Old Testament enumerates love’s qualities: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. . . . It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (1 Corinthians 13:4–8). The New Testament identifies three sources of human love (heart, soul, and mind) and suggests that we can willfully direct our love: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength” (Luke 10:27). It also goes beyond the human dimension of love, equating love with God: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). The idea of two loves—one earthly, one heavenly—can be found throughout recorded history.