The Energies of Love

by Donna Eden

  A Brief Overview of The Energies of Love

  The Energies of Love shows how your energies play a palpable role in your psyche and your relationships, and it offers clear, practical guidance for working with these energies to enhance your partnership.

  Three Aspects of Love

  The book is organized around three broad themes:

  The inherited aspects of love

  The learned aspects of love

  The mutually created aspects of love

  Each of these has a different dynamic, has specific requirements for effectively engaging its challenges, and has an energetic counterpart. The inherited aspects of love, for example, are fixed. While you cannot change them, you can influence how they express themselves and develop ways of fielding them more skillfully. The learned aspects of love were first acquired early in life and can be modified to enhance your ability to love more fully and relate more effectively. The mutually created aspects of love are an ongoing masterwork between you and your partner. This book shows you how to better understand and journey your way through each.

  Part 1, “The Inherited Aspects of Love,” teaches you new navigational skills for your relationship without particularly trying to change either of you. The inherited aspects of your partnership dictate that any relationship involves a coming together of the distinct energies carried by two different bodies and souls. This energetic meeting is the foundation of everything else that will unfold. From it emerges the way two people will perceive, experience, and behave toward one another. The energies that influence the way you and your partner process information and handle disagreements get special attention in Part 1. Powerful tools from energy medicine are provided for bridging your energies with your partner’s and finding your way through territory where they mesh, as well as where they do not mesh.

  Whereas Part 1 shows you how to flow with each other as you are, Part 2, “The Learned Aspects of Love,” shows you how to make changes in learned emotional responses. Your experiences with your parents and other early intimates left imprints that impact your subsequent relationships, and since no one’s childhood or parents were perfect, these imprints can be limiting and self-defeating. While the imprints that shape our relationships tend to evolve as we mature, they can become quite set in our brains, our energies, and our behavior patterns. In fact, for many people, these fundamental patterns never change. Drawing from the field of energy psychology, Part 2 shows you how to identify and transform deep learnings that no longer serve. You will be introduced to powerful self-help procedures that can heal old emotional wounds, literally rewiring the neural pathways driving outdated patterns and opening the way to more fulfilling relationships.

  Part 3, “The Mutually Created Aspects of Love,” is about the couple’s voyage in forward motion. You take what you’ve inherited and what you have learned, then come together, and the rest is up to the two of you. Part 3 opens by showing how sex is “nature’s energy medicine for couples” (chapter 8). Sex comes naturally, but sexual fulfillment in a long-term relationship is neither a biological imperative nor even a guaranteed outcome of deep and lasting love. The actions that keep your sexual energies engaged over the span of a lasting partnership occur outside as well as within the bedroom, and they are entwined with nature’s beckoning that you keep growing as individuals and as a couple. In fact, as a relationship matures, you increasingly become “conscious partners” (chapter 9) cultivating the shared “spiritual journey” you find yourselves traversing (chapter 10).

  The individuals portrayed in the case histories have granted permission to have their stories told, or their identities have been thoroughly disguised, or, in some instances, they are composites. Although we use the language of male and female partnerships throughout the book, the basic principles apply to all committed, loving relationships.

  How to Use This Book

  Our goal with The Energies of Love is to offer maps you can use to improve your partnership in relation to the inherited, learned, and mutually created aspects of love just discussed. From the explosion of scientific breakthroughs about the nature of attachment, brain development, and interpersonal dynamics, we have attempted to (1) synthesize the “best of” from all these significant developments, (2) integrate them with our own personal and professional experiences and perspectives, and (3) present them laced with our insights about the fundamental influences of the energies of love. Each chapter includes boxes labeled “The Energy Dimension” describing how Donna sees the energies underlying the principles being described. Meanwhile, the book invites you to use it as no less than a “surrogate couples coach.”

  You can approach the book in a number of ways. You can read it alone, read it simultaneously but separately, or read it aloud to one another and discuss as you go along. While the chapters are designed to be read from the first to the last, if you are particularly drawn to one of the sections, you can start there. After reviewing a draft of the manuscript, one of our colleagues suggested that we publish this as three books. Though we feel the three sections are too intertwined to separate, we recognize that, like the territory it explores, this is a more complex read than many self-help books. The good news is that new understanding about the invisible choreographies of the energies, hormones, and brain chemistries of love are synthesized here in a way that makes it possible to create a stronger foundation for taking your partnership to new heights of intimacy. Your parents and all the generations before them were, on the other hand, required to rely primarily on intuitive acumen or blind luck when deviating from the dictates of tradition.

  Any book about couples written by a couple reflects their relationship as well as whatever it intends to present. Ours has not been a particularly easy partnership. A couples therapist we once worked with, trying to reassure us in a discouraging moment, told us that she thinks our relationship is a crucible in which the interpersonal challenges of the “collective” are being played out so we can address them ourselves and teach others what we have learned. Whether or not that is the case, we have certainly experienced some large challenges. We developed, or adapted from others, many of the techniques we present here partially because we have needed them. We have been our own laboratory. And we have been gratified when ideas and techniques that have helped us have also been valuable for our clients and students.

  The twenty-first century has ushered in a brave new world for couples. Just as the challenges are unprecedented, unimagined tools for meeting those challenges are emerging. This book presents, in our experience, many of the best of those tools. We close our writing of this introduction by facing one another and, with hands clasped and eyes meeting, affirm our intention that every person reading this book be empowered on a path toward greater love and a more fulfilling partnership.

  PART

  1

  The Inherited Aspects of Love

  1

  You and Your Partner See through Different Eyes

  Unfamiliar Energies Attract

  Although it is nice to discover that we are liked by a person who holds views similar to ours, it is much more exciting to discover that we are liked by a person whose views are different.

  —AYALA PINES, PH.D.1

  Early in our relationship, Donna attended, as David’s guest, a hypnosis class he was teaching. The evening’s session focused on the various ways people code experience. A good hypnotist works one way with individuals who organize their inner world in a manner that corresponds with how they see and will work another way with those who organize their inner world in a manner that corresponds with how they feel. Four distinct types trace to basic ways of processing information: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and abstract reasoning.2 At the break, David stole a private moment with Donna, hoping to hear how impressed his new sweetie was with how well he had kept the interest of this group of professional psychotherapists who were generally older and more seasoned than himself. Donna instead sa
id, “Well, that was interesting, to learn the characteristics of each of the four types, but I can see a way to determine a person’s style using a simple physical test. After all, each of the types carries a different kind of energy.”

  Besides the little ego twinge that she had not been dazzled enough to even comment on his teaching prowess, David was incredulous. How could a physical test pick up on these psychological differences? This was preposterous, and he was happy to share that revelation with her. Undaunted, Donna immediately turned her idea into an experiment, using the class members during the break. Sure enough, those whom David had identified as visuals tested differently from those who had been identified as kinesthetics (feelings), tonals (auditory), or digitals (abstract reasoning). By the time the class reconvened, this had become the buzz and was the only thing people wanted to talk about. So Donna wound up taking the rest of the evening, teaching a technique she calls energy testing and showing how it can be applied to determining people’s style of processing information. It was an exciting evening for all involved, though the remainder of the planned agenda had to be put on the shelf. If David could have heard his guardian angels at this early point in our relationship, they would have been saying, “Get used to it, David.”

  That evening was our first experience in the bridging of our disciplines, and Donna’s insight has held up through the decades. Identifying a person’s fundamental way of internally representing the world has proven enormously useful for helping people understand themselves and for helping couples understand one another. While everyone combines all four modalities, only one of the four will dominate during the kinds of stress that evoke a survival response. And this hardly requires that a life-threatening situation has been encountered. Because humans have so strongly depended on the support of one another throughout evolution, any disturbance in our closest relationships is biologically coded as a threat to our survival. Such moments of threat are almost always found in a relationship’s history, and they occur frequently in many relationships. While we each use all four modalities, it is our primary style that we viscerally trust and rely on when an intimate bond is disrupted.

  Your primary way of processing information during threat is more than a mere psychological difference between you and others. It is built into your energy structure—a physical, measurable form—and our impression is that it is coded in your genes. Many times Donna has been present when one of her clients was giving birth, or shortly thereafter, in order to provide an energy balancing to mother and baby following the trials of childbirth. Donna, who has literally been able to “see” energy since her own childhood, can tell the parents, based on the way the infant’s energy looks to her, whether they have a visual, a tonal, a kinesthetic, or a digital on their hands. This has been going on long enough now that she has substantial confirmation that by the time the newborn has reached the teen years, the primary style has not changed from the initial assessment. So a person’s core way of processing information—one of the most significant differences among people and critical for partners to understand about one another—is either built in genetically or determined by prenatal experiences.

  You can imagine how this might happen. Prenatal life is initially a kinesthetic journey. Everything that occurs is experienced in the moment with no sense of past or future, no sense of near or far, inner or outer, and no sensations such as sight or sound to inform the moment. All of life is a unified, undifferentiated now. If Mom is happy and the supporting chemistry is good, it could not be better. If Mom is sad or scared or if the nutrients are in short supply, the entire universe is a bad trip. Then Mom laughs, and it is a good trip again. The eternal moment is all there is.

  By the sixteenth week of gestation, the ear has become functional and the fetus can hear and will respond to a sound pulse. Active listening begins by the twenty-fourth week. The mother’s heartbeat, respiration, and intestinal gurgling form a “sound carpet.”3 The mother’s voice is given special attention in relation to the “carpet” because it is so different from the amniotic sounds, and her voice establishes the first patterns of communication and bonding. No longer is the experience of the moment the sole source of information. This is a gargantuan shift in consciousness! The moment is now informed by a second way of knowing. Mom can be having indigestion. The world is a bad place. But Mom can also be singing a lullaby. The world is a good place. Which one do you trust? How do you reconcile these two sources of opposing information? Welcome to the world of interpersonal relationships, little one.

  The next major shift in the sensory coding of the world occurs after birth. A responsiveness to light shining through the mother’s abdomen has been developing during the last trimester of pregnancy. The newborn can see eight to fourteen inches, though at first everything is quite blurry. But vision rapidly improves and becomes a third and distinctly different way of directly experiencing the environment. While they are not the only physical senses that tell us about the world, these three—feeling, hearing, and seeing—are the ones most developed and emphasized in modern Western societies.

  A fourth way of knowing your environment soon began to take form, and that was to know it by the symbols and then the words that could allow you to mentally represent your sensory experiences, form abstractions, and manipulate ideas so you could make plans and envision possibilities. For some people, this abstract reasoning becomes a more trusted way of understanding the world than their sensations. So four fundamental ways of representing experience are based on feeling (kinesthetic), sound (tonal), sight (visual), and logic (digital). Vision and logical thought are not in place at birth, yet the energies Donna sees at birth predict whether the infant will, when under relationship distress, grow up wired to rely on a kinesthetic, tonal, visual, or digital representational style. This suggests that a person’s primal way of processing information is determined by genetics rather than even prenatal experiences.

  We use the term Energetic Stress Style to describe the sensory mode you instinctively trust and favor when experiencing threat or stress, particularly when it involves your partner. This favored sensory mode is patterned after one of the primary ways you experience the world (seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking), and it determines how you process information when under stress. Besides influencing how you make sense of things during stressful moments, your Energetic Stress Style is an energetic state that your body enters when distressed. Donna sees each style as corresponding with a distinct type of palpable living energies.

  Corresponding with our energy perspective are findings from modern neuroscience. As described by Dan Siegel, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who is among the leading voices today in the application to psychotherapy of new breakthroughs in brain science:

  Brain imaging studies examine the metabolic, energy-consuming processes in specific neural regions . . . These assessments of “energy flow” are not popularized, unscientific views of the flow of some mysterious energy through the universe. Neuroscience studies the way in which the brain functions through the energy-consuming activation of neurons. The degree and localization of this arousal and activation within the brain—this flow of energy—directly shape our mental processes. . . .4

  Within the circuits linked directly to the outside world and to the body, sensory representations are created [the “kinesthetic” mode in our system]. Perceptual representations established by these sensory inputs are then processed and transformed into more complex representations [our “tonal” and “visual” styles]. . . . More complex and abstract symbols are thought to emanate from the activity of the neocortex [our “digital” style].5

  Of the distinct modes of processing information (kinesthetic, tonal, visual, digital), you instinctively count on one more than the others when distress enters your relationship.

  • THE ENERGY DIMENSION •

  Your Biofield Determines Your Energetic Stress Style

  Here is what Donna sees when she focuses
on a person’s energies, including those of a newborn. Surrounding the person is a region of energy referred to in many traditions as the aura. Scientists who have detected it using electrical instruments call it the biofield.6 Along with many other intuitive healers, Donna sees it as having several layers, each with distinct colors, textures, and other properties.

  The Emotional/Mental Layer of Your Biofield

  One of the layers is referred to as the emotional/mental layer. This layer is distinguished by four distinct “bands” of energy: a feeling band, an emotional band (emotions are defined as feelings interacting with thoughts), and two mental bands, one that is outward-focused and one that is inward-focused. The feeling band corresponds with the kinesthetic style of processing information; the emotional band with the tonal style; the outward-focused mental band with the visual style; and the inward-focused mental band with the digital style.

  The Order of the Bands in the Emotional/Mental Layer of Your Biofield

  The order of these four bands (from closest to farthest from the body) varies from one individual to the next. The band that is closest to the body determines the sensory representational mode the person will viscerally trust and rely on during times of distress. So, if the feeling band is closest to your body, you will instinctively rely on the kinesthetic mode under stress; if the emotional band is closest, then the tonal mode will dominate under stress; if the outward-focused mental band is closest, then the visual mode will dominate; if the inward-focused mental band is closest, then the digital mode will dominate.