The Energies of Love
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For the scientist, one of the fundamental principles of the universe is the proclivity to bond. Within moments after the Big Bang, elementary particles began forming stable relationships of increasing complexity.2 Brian Swimme and Mary Tucker note that “[a]ttraction between a proton and an electron is a way in which the universe gives rise to ever greater levels of complexity which, after some fourteen billion years, includes us.”3 Bonding at the subatomic level is necessary for your body to exist, and nature extended the principle so you must jump the spatial gap between you and another to create the next generation. A magnetic energy compels you to take the leap; love at its many levels, from earthly to heavenly, makes that biological leap distinctly human. Writing as a research scientist whose lab at the University of North Carolina investigates positive human emotion, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson reports that love literally changes the cell structures that affect physical health, vitality, and ultimately, “whether you’ll thrive or just get by.”4 She provocatively suggests that while love is composed of many moments of biochemical, emotional, and behavioral connection, from the body’s perspective, these are, “fleeting,” “not lasting,” just “forever renewable.”5
The energies of love are a dynamic force between two people that transcend their personalities, their beliefs, and their backgrounds. These energies are channeled from deep in your being, meet, and merge into an alchemical fuel that transforms you. You are their container, yet you cannot contain them. As you evolve, as you expand the container, the energies of love expand along with you. This is a book about the energies of love as well as the human containers through which they flow.
The Energies within Us; the Energies between Us
Just as each of us is born with a completely unique physical structure, we are also born with a completely unique “energy structure.” Electrical impulses move through our bodies. Electrical fields surround our organs. These impulses and fields control our physical growth. This was first demonstrated scientifically in the 1930s when Harold Burr, a neuroanatomist at Yale, designed equipment that could measure the electromagnetic field around an unfertilized salamander egg.6 Burr stumbled on the extraordinary finding that the electromagnetic field of the egg was shaped like a mature salamander. The electrical axis that would later align with the brain and spinal cord was already present, as if the blueprint for the adult were there in the egg’s energy field. The embryo would grow to take the shape of the electromagnetic field. The physiology patterned itself after the field! Burr went on to find electromagnetic fields surrounding all manner of organisms, from molds to plants to frogs to humans, and he was able to distinguish electrical patterns that corresponded with health and with illness.
Energy fields not only govern our health and biological growth but also impact our relationships. The heart and brain are each surrounded by an electromagnetic field, with the heart’s field, you may be surprised to hear, having some sixty times the amplitude of the brain’s field.7 The electromagnetic field produced by your heart can be detected anywhere on the surface of your body using an electrocardiogram, and it also extends a number of feet beyond you, radiating in all directions, which can be detected by other instruments. The electromagnetic signals produced by your heart are registered by the brains of people around you. If two people are within conversational distance, fluctuations in the heart signal of one correspond with fluctuations in the brain waves of the other.8
Not only do your physiological responses sync up energetically with your partner’s during intimate interactions, but also the field radiated by your heart can transmit emotions. Researchers at the HeartMath Institute in California have described this in measurable terms: “The rhythmic beating patterns of the heart change significantly as we experience different emotions. Difficult emotions, such as anger or frustration, are associated with an erratic, disordered, incoherent pattern in the heart’s rhythms. In contrast, pleasurable emotions, such as love or appreciation, are associated with a smooth, ordered, coherent pattern in the heart’s rhythmic activity. [These changes] create corresponding changes in the structure of the electromagnetic field radiated by the heart.”9 Your heart carries emotional information that physically impacts your partner.
Meanwhile, even with its smaller electromagnetic field, the brain contains some one hundred billion neurons that each connects electrochemically with up to ten thousand other neurons. The brain’s electrical impulses constitute an incomprehensibly complex energy system that maintains your habits of perceiving, thinking, and responding to your world. Beyond these measurable electrical energies are more subtle energies carried by your body’s meridians, chakras, and aura—concepts familiar in healing traditions across time and cultures, even if not acknowledged by Western science because they have (until recently10) eluded its ability to detect them. Change the energies that travel through your body and you can change your mood, your mind, and your relationships.
When David went into meltdown, the changes in his electrical system occurred in his heart as well as his brain, and measurable electrical changes in Donna’s heart and brain occurred in response. Altering this electrical dissonance was our first focus in beginning to make things better. Not empathy, not analysis, not insight, not love. We turned to simple energy techniques.
We have often been painfully moved as we’ve watched clients and friends, as well as ourselves, ineffectually struggle to improve their relationships, using every ounce of smarts and goodwill at their disposal. Sometimes the way the energy is moving through your body keeps you trapped in a particular pattern of thought and behavior. Often the quickest way to free yourself from the pattern is to shift the underlying energy rather than to target the feelings, thoughts, or behavior.
The Tools: Something Old, Something New
Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and other pioneers of psychodynamic approaches to emotional healing showed how our childhood experiences—echoes from the recesses of our past—can still be affecting us today. Many of the therapies that arose from their revolutionary work have given us maps to help free ourselves from the effects of emotional injury or trauma in childhood. This resulted in a quantum leap in humanity’s self-concept: Deeply embedded psychological patterns can be transformed, and tools for initiating that transformation are available.
We are now standing at another momentous threshold, one that translates these insights into practices that are more rapid and effective than ever before. Methods are available that can shift the energies that are not only at the core of your thoughts, mood, and behavior, but also of your health and happiness. The disciplines of energy medicine and energy psychology, new to Western culture yet drawing on ancient healing and spiritual traditions, are rapidly ascending in the popular as well as professional eye. We have borrowed heavily from both disciplines in writing this book.
Our own personal and professional lives have been deeply committed to advancing these methods. That commitment and the experiences that have emerged from it are our primary credentials for offering this volume. Other background about us that you may find relevant for framing our ideas:
Donna has since childhood seen energies, surrounding and moving through the body, as clearly as you see the print on this page, and she has learned that, like the print, these energies have distinct meanings and can be informative about health and healing. She is, in fact, internationally known for her clairvoyant abilities to perceive and work with the body’s energies. The way people like Donna can see energies that other people can’t see has been compared to the way dogs can hear frequencies that humans can’t hear. The energies are there and operating, but beyond most people’s awareness. More significant, Donna has taught tens of thousands of people around the world who don’t see energy to nonetheless assess and shift energy flows in ways that enhance their health and vitality.
David has been a clinical psychologist for nearly four decades. In recent years his focus has, with Donna’s influence, turned to the applicatio
n of energy methods for working with psychological issues. Our combined six books and numerous papers and articles on these topics have attempted to bring energy medicine and energy psychology to both professional and popular audiences. With these backgrounds, we come together to present you with this practical guide for optimizing the energies that affect your relationships.
The Context: A New Age for Partnerships
While your relationship is a unique creation between you and your partner, it is not only between you and your partner. It builds on the customs and relationship patterns established by your parents and their parents and the generations before them, and it is being shaped by changes in your culture that are unfolding at a pace that could not have been imagined just a few decades ago. These changes penetrate to the ways we think of ourselves as men and women and are reflected in how we relate to one another.
Coming into Balance
In most societies, extending back to the dawn of recorded history, men have controlled property, held the central positions of political power, and retained the primary authority within the family and the community. Within this patriarchal structure, men have dominated women not only through force but more covertly through mass indoctrination into what was officially depicted as the natural order of things. Modern Western societies, for instance, assign worth to people, to a large extent, by their ability to produce wealth. Women, saddled with the tasks of child-rearing and tending the home, were, by these terms, second-class citizens. They were less valued and many of their natural ways of operating in the world were curtailed, ridiculed, or even condemned. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wryly observed, “well-behaved women seldom make history.”11 These constraints have, however, been imploding in recent decades.
A new valuing and empowering of women is emerging in modern societies, reflected in part by the rapid changes in women’s economic status. In 1970, less than 6 percent of a U.S. family’s income was brought in by women. Now it is more than 40 percent and increasing.12 More than half of all managerial and professional jobs are also held by women, up from 26 percent in 1980.13 Of the fifteen job categories projected to have the greatest growth in the next decade, thirteen are occupied primarily by women.14
Hanna Rosin explains that the inherent advantages of a man’s biology no longer matter: “thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success.” Since “cultural and economic changes always reinforce each other . . . the global economy is evolving in a way that is eroding the historical preference for male children, worldwide.”15 In the 1980s, as sperm banks were making it possible for couples seeking artificial insemination to choose the gender of their child, it was widely assumed that there would be a universal preference for sons. Now the preference is for daughters, by as much as 2 to 1 in some clinics.16
While fierce backlash is still tearing at the rights and progress of women, Rosin reflects that “given the power of the forces pushing at the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age.”17 Women have greater power, are creating new social forms and management styles, and are exercising their capacity to challenge an old order that has brought us to the brink of extinction. While that old order is characterized by patriarchal, “masculine” beliefs and values, this does not mean that masculine is wrong while “feminine” is right. What is so wrong is that we are in many ways veering even further out of balance.
Humanity’s survival may depend on personal and cultural forces that have been rising to counter this trend toward the masculine principle run amok: increased domination of nature, inequitable distribution of wealth, runaway corporate power, hijacking of democratic processes, use of violence to settle disputes, and other destructive arrangements. Meanwhile, the feminine reveres nature, trusts emotion, listens to intuition, nurtures relationships, cares for every child, is embracing rather than divisive, and affirms the often messy spontaneous expressions of the soul. However much bringing balance to these qualities might lead to a better world, established orders do not yield easily. This struggle is playing out within a world where the quickening pace is dizzying, cultural beliefs and traditions are leaping social and national boundaries in an orgy of creative as well as strained cross-fertilization, and our sense of where we are collectively headed is a tapestry of unprecedented possibilities and life-threatening hazards.
The Changing Landscape of Marriage
How do these shifts in society, behavior, and consciousness impact your relationship? In a word, profoundly. Historians and sociologists have identified three eras in American history in relation to marriage. From the country’s founding until about 1850, affection and emotional intimacy were secondary to the basics of physical survival such as food, shelter, and protection. From around 1850 through the mid-1960s, love, intimacy, and a fulfilling sex life rose in importance within the dominant model of marriage. In the current era, while love and a practical partnership are of course still vital considerations, the ability of a marriage to support each partner’s personal evolution has emerged as a pivotal dimension of marital satisfaction.18
When women were asked, back in 1939, to rank eighteen qualities they want in a future husband, love was ranked fifth.19 Economic support was still considered more important than love. By the 1950s, surveys revealed love to be climbing up the list until a U.S. poll in 2001 showed that “80 percent of women in their twenties said that having a man who could talk about his feelings was more important than having one who could make a good living.”20 At the heart of this new era of relationship, explains sociologist Robert Bellah, is that love has, to a great degree, become “the mutual exploration of infinitely rich, complex and exciting selves.”21
Gallant as this may sound, the pressure has grown intense for marriage partners to be all things for one another—lovers, parents, family, friends, business partners, and now évocateurs of one another’s “infinitely rich and exciting selves.” Expectations about the needs a marriage should fulfill are at an unprecedented high, and many marriages do not come close to meeting them.22 Studies of marital satisfaction present an inescapable fact: The gap between marriages that are disappointing (the larger grouping) and marriages that are gratifying (the smaller grouping) is increasing. On the one side, the average marriage today is weaker, in terms of both satisfaction and greater likelihood of divorce than ever before. Increased demands make us vulnerable to greater disappointment. Dissatisfaction, even in marriages that last, has become endemic.23 On the other side, the best marriages today are stronger than perhaps at any previous time in history.24
As marriages are required to meet more of our needs, these “best” partnerships are realistic about dedicating the time and energy that is required for the new vision of marriage to flourish, and they find ways to do so.25 You will learn in these pages some of the most effective ways for using the time and energy you do commit to your partnership. For instance, findings about the happiest marriages do not mean you are required to dote on one another during all your waking hours. Spouses who reported intense positive engagement with one another at least once each week were three and a half times more likely to be “very happy” in their marriage than those who rarely engaged one another deeply.26
For most of history, the models for love and family provided by the parents’ generation were rarely questioned. Today they are increasingly irrelevant. Within our personal memories, and before that, throughout the history of Western civilization, the husband was ultimately responsible for the family, expected to be strong and dominant, treating his wife and children as his possessions. The hero’s quest was the domain of the male. The woman’s role was to set him on that quest, inspire him, support him, and be there to shower him with love when he returned.27
So it was for thousands of years. But within one generation, all of this has turned on its side for much of Western culture. Even the most basic function of marriage—producing offspring—meets the opposing force of overpop
ulation, opening the way for a cultural valuing of LGBT marriages and other intimate partnerships where birthing children is not a cardinal purpose. Marriages are no longer forged within a clear guiding image of how they should unfold. The roles and relative power of men and women in relationship are no longer predefined. Social arrangements that embrace characteristically female ways of being are appearing. Rising forces revaluing intuition, emotion, relationship, nature, and human welfare over the status quo shake up society as well as intimate partnerships.
Disruptive as any other fundamental change, these shifts may nonetheless be essential for cultural survival. A marriage today is more than ever a creative arrangement harboring extreme challenges and unanticipated possibilities as the maps from the past have lost their currency and the terrain itself is in continual flux. This book is designed to help you navigate your way through these perils and opportunities. 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!