The Energies of Love

by Donna Eden

  This routine has become fairly standard for Donna, though the order may vary and she may request, or David may be inspired to use, other techniques. At some point, however, David will ask, “What else does this body need?” This morning Donna asked David to “bounce” her. She was feeling some tension in her back, and a technique that got the energies moving through her whole back area involved David putting his hands under Donna’s back, one hand around each side, placing his middle fingers under paired points right next to the spine, and pushing up and down so that Donna was literally being bounced on the table. He did this on three or four different points, looking to her for feedback about the points that felt best. Finally, less than ten minutes into this little energy treatment, we ended it, as we typically do, by David doing a Zip-Up (here) on Donna followed by a Hook-Up (here). During the Hook-Up, we bring a more verbal element into our little daily ritual. David directed Donna to address three topics we touch into each morning:

  “Say some appreciations” [statements of gratitude about what is right and good about your life, your partner, or your lives together].

  “Bless your day” [find words to wrap your highest intentions around the coming day and specific elements about it that might be challenging or might have rich potential].

  “Tune into your guidance” [listen for your internal wisdom about the day that is about to unfold and put what is there into words].

  While all three points are usually addressed within a minute or two, they set the day for each of us. Not only do we come out of our ritual with our energies flowing and balanced, we are connected and aligned as we separate to go off into whatever the day is to bring. This ritual has become habitual. We rarely skip it, because when we do, we miss it. Daily activities that foster meeting one another at a higher plane, when cultivated, will be longed for. As you saw in our intimate glimpses into the lives of Ann and Paul and of Marcela and Alberto, rituals for bringing one another into shared sacred space can take many forms, but couples who devote the time and discipline to create and perform them are rewarded. We encourage you to design a daily ritual that will uplift your relationship and to carve out the time to enrich yourselves with it.

  Connecting with Your Partner is a Model for Connecting with Spirit

  Ann Mortifee (here) is known for writing songs and theatrical productions that take her audiences deep into the world of spiritual imagination. When we asked her for some techniques that might help those reading this chapter to more readily enter sacred space, she put the question into a larger context:

  The more we identify with the Spirit world, the more the Spirit world can speak to us. It’s like any relationship. If you love somebody, the more you tell them you love them, the more time you spend with them, the more you think about them, the more you communicate with them, the more they notice that you are there. I think it’s the same with your relationship with Spirit. The more you state expressions of love for Spirit, for the unseen world, for the spiritual essence that gives you life, the more you communicate with it, the more it seems to notice you. So my daily life is a back-and-forth conversation with myself and what I cannot see.

  Just as maintaining rich and active conversation with your partner is vital for your relationship, maintaining a conversation with the natural forces that are behind the design of all you can see makes your relationship with those forces more conscious and palpable. This spiritual attunement can be more basic and less highfalutin than you might think. It is as much an attitude as an action. Ann finds the natural world to be a powerful portal into the Spirit world, and she stays alert for opportunities to step into that portal. She might, for instance, be passing a tree and literally stop and say, with full and sincere appreciation: “I see you there. Look at how beautiful you are! Look at what Spirit has created!” Does Ann really say things like that out loud? Yes, we have heard her. And her utterances have invited our consciousness into the realm of Spirit as well.

  Your relationship can be another portal into Spirit. For instance, some of the actions required to nourish your relationship with your partner can serve as metaphors for staying connected with Spirit as well. Three practices we have explored in previous chapters for keeping your relationship vital:

  Attuning yourself so you notice what pleases you about your partner and your relationship and regularly putting this into words (gratitudes and appreciations, here)

  Searching out the higher bands of energy that justify the most noble and empowering interpretations possible for whatever life presents (high-banding it, here)

  Staying emotionally and meaningfully connected throughout the day (here).

  Strengthening your relationship by using these practices with a focus on your partner gives you training for using them to strengthen your relationship with the invisible forces that embrace all of life. Adding shared prayers and invocations to these practices elevates them.

  Shared Prayers and Invocations

  By building upon the above three principles for cultivating conscious love with your partner—instilling gratitude for the life you have been given, attuning yourselves to the “higher bands” of possibility, and keeping yourselves meaningfully connected with the universe’s majestic forces—your relationship is elevated. For this third principle, keeping yourself partnered with majestic spiritual forces, language, and imagination offer powerful bridges. In the form of prayer and invocation, they can align your energies to connect with the spiritual realm. While often melded with religious practices and tenets, no special beliefs or traditions are necessary for prayer and invocation to be meaningful and potent in bringing spirit into daily life.

  In her book Illuminata: A Return to Prayer, Marianne Williamson speaks of prayer as a way of “focusing our eyes,” dramatically changing our orientation, releasing us “from the snares of lower energies,” and aligning “our internal energies with truth.”23 Her book presents prayers for every aspect of life, from loneliness to love to healing to encountering loss and death. Saying a simple prayer before a meal or delivering an inspiring invocation as part of a wedding ceremony envelops the event that is about to occur in a higher energy. It alerts your sensibilities to dimensions that your senses do not perceive. Invocations we have used in recent months and later transcribed for the purposes of this chapter include the following. As you read them slowly and deliberately, notice how the energies in your body shift.

  FOR A NEW DAY:

  New morning, I greet you with my eyes open and my heart eager.

  I ask this day for opportunities to love, to flourish, and to heal that which thirsts for healing.

  I ask for support so that which is purest within me can shine through.

  May this day be kind to me and to all other creatures on this magnificent planet.

  FOR YOUR LIFE PARTNER:

  You are the one I choose to walk with and share my life.

  May my love for you glow in my heart so I am always resonating with your Spirit.

  May my love for you glow in your heart, bringing you pleasure and strength.

  May my love serve in healing your wounds and uncertainties.

  As we behold one another’s sacredness, may we walk our love with a joy that radiates to all others on this planet.

  FOR A BIRTH:

  This child who comes into the world this day

  Is surrounded by love, by awe, by hope.

  May you grow in the bosom of peace and with the radiance of health

  And blossom into a being of love, strength, and good deeds in the world.

  While we prefer to make up our own invocations in the moment,24 numerous books such as Illuminata are also available. John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space between Us (the poem “For Love in a Time of Conflict” is taken from that volume) has beautiful invocations for virtually every aspect of a shared life, and Rumi and Gibran are time-honored favorites for many. For us, our daily ritual, described a
bove, ends with appreciations and consciously wraps our blessings around one another’s coming day. Beyond that, we are not particularly consistent in our use of invocations, but when we do create them, they are meaningful. Meals are a natural occasion for invocations that avow our gratitudes and our intentions for how we might use the nourishment we are about to receive. Times when we are about to embark on a creative activity are another. Dozens of mini-prayers have infused the writing of this book, sometimes asking for wisdom, clarity, focus, and humor; other times asking that you, dear reader, receive guidance that gives your relationship greater ease, depth, healing, and joy. Often before a presentation we will ask that we touch people deeply and in ways that enhance their spirits, well-being, and mastery of their energies. More recently, we have begun to include our teaching assistants so the invocation takes on the quality of a group ritual. Combining an invocation with tapping on the energy psychology points is sometimes fitting and can give greater power to the words.

  Finally, we close this section on the use of words to evoke each other’s spirit by intimately sharing, from Donna’s vows during our wedding in 1984:

  I join with you, David, to do our highest in our own unique way to help lift the vibration of the planet, to help restore the broken connections, and be a part of the healing of the earth. I surrender with you into this magnificent love space, and I know that the incredible strength of our bond, David, is equal only to its incredible fragility. I therefore give my word to do my best to speak my truth lovingly. I will love you well, and I align with you in the intention of joy and love for evermore. I pledge to sing, feast, dance, grow, and love with you, in sickness or in health, for better or for worse . . . By all that is holy, David, by this holy earth on which we are standing, in the name of ecstasy of the spirit and the joy of the earth, I take thee to my hand, my heart, my soul, and my home.

  Mindfulness Practices

  As discussed in the previous chapter, regularly focusing your attention on the present moment has been shown to have numerous potent psychological and health benefits. It also shifts your perspective in ways that are distinctly spiritual. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who has been bringing mindfulness practices to the attention of Western science and medicine since the 1970s, reflects: “Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous. If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense.”25 With its health, psychological, and spiritual benefits to recommend it, you might wonder why mindfulness practice has not become the “universal elixir” of our culture; but as advocates of the method admit, it has not.26 Uncounted numbers of would-be meditators have been wrestling with this dilemma for centuries. It is simply difficult to interrupt the inertia of daily life to introduce practices that take time and effort and whose payoffs may be subtle and less than immediate. Faith in the value of meditation is, however, now supported by science to the extent that increasing numbers are finding ways to incorporate the discipline into their lives.

  David has found two tricks that make a difference for him. He set up his computer so it chimes every hour. With that chime, he raises his eyes to the window at the left of his work space, rests them on a magnificent eucalyptus tree, takes two very deep breaths (with a pause between each full exhalation and the next inhalation), and becomes absorbed in the eucalyptus or its surroundings. He then returns to the drivel he was composing when the chime sounded. Simple as it seems, and is, it brings him for a brief but influential moment into a state of mindfulness that punctuates his work.

  A second practice builds on the fact that David swims almost daily. We have access to a nearby pool where we live and, when feasible during our travels, we stay in hotels that have pools. Each day, a component of David’s swim is attending mindfully to the physical experience of swimming (he uses a snorkel and mask so he can stay in a meditative space), followed by more structured invocations silently but mindfully stated. Mindfulness does not necessarily mean sitting still in a lotus posture. It can be that, but mindfulness practice can involve a range of activities, from walking meditations to tea ceremonies. Combining it with something you already do makes you more likely to regularly incorporate mindfulness into your life.

  For Donna, mindfulness is a different issue. Her default position is to be fully immersed in the here and now. Leaving that space so she can get something done is her challenge. Spirituality, rather than being a frame of mind she seeks, is where she lives. Her most natural state is appreciation and a sense of oneness with all of life. Mindfulness practices feel redundant to her. She is instead summoned to get out of the here and now, wresting herself away from bliss and into her head so she can respond to the practical demands of daily life. Helping to found and run an organization has been a great support to her for staying out of bliss.

  Guides, Muses, and Sacred Medicine

  When Donna heard on first glimpsing David’s profile that he was going to spend the rest of his life with her, it was not an unfamiliar voice. She has received guidance from forces that seem external to her since childhood. In addition to hearing them, she would also sometimes see figures she has come to think of as her guides. They appear very tall, somewhat human, and somewhat otherworldly. Beyond the guidance they offer, she feels deeply loved and supported by them. Usually their guidance came unbidden, but it has proven to be remarkably accurate. On occasion, when faced with a difficult dilemma, she would ask them for help and often receive it. From the time we first got together, stories of these “guides” have been of great interest to David. He had read about such things, had even consulted a psychic once, but he had never felt he had direct access to information from the other side. Being the more structured of the two of us, he began to have us set time aside for Donna to enter into the altered states from which she could more reliably hear her guides, and we have spent many hours blessed by their presence and wisdom. For decades, these sessions were David’s closest encounters with what he thought of as the world of Spirit.

  David longed for more direct access to these other dimensions. His father had introduced him to mystical traditions that gave him a basis for understanding the plausibility of spiritual realms, but his first direct encounter was, dare we say it, with drugs. Too conservative to experiment with uppers, downers, and psychedelics like normal kids in the 1960s, David saved his drug virginity for when he was teaching at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. A research team had been awarded an NIMH grant to administer LSD to mental health professionals, providing them with training in experiencing altered states of consciousness. David volunteered. He met God along with the forces of evil in such overwhelming doses that he spent the next several years trying to put the genie back into the bottle. Donna’s more balanced approach had much greater appeal. However, David’s proximity to Donna wasn’t wearing off on him in ways that gave him greater access to the world of Spirit. A second opportunity for a surprising mind-altering experience came his way a few years after meeting Donna.

  David’s first book, Personal Mythology, was coauthored by Stanley Krippner, one of the country’s most colorful psychologists. In addition to a prestigious academic career that has included dozens of impressive honors, such as the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Contribution Award for helping to advance psychology on an international scale, Stanley was friends with and sometimes the informal counselor to the band members of the Grateful Dead. He had a standing invitation to get backstage passes any time he could get himself to a concert. We were doing a presentation at a conference at the University of California in Los Angeles, and the Dead were performing in nearby Long Beach the night before.

  David continues:

  Stanley invited me to join him. As we were sitting backstage with one of the band members, I was given a little sliver of mushroom just before the concert was to begin. I was not very sophisticated a
bout mushrooms, but the piece seemed so small. What could it really do? Nor had I particularly appreciated the music of the Grateful Dead. An hour later, the Grateful Dead were, in my estimation at that moment, the wisest sages in the culture, showing us where we had gotten off the path as individuals and as a society, and they were there on that very stage instructing all of us about how to get back on the path toward love, peace, and fulfillment. Oh my God! These were the shamans of the modern era!

  Profoundly stimulated and perhaps a bit crazed by this experience, the next day, at UCLA, I asked Stanley if I could open the two-hour presentation. Instead of my usual staid and academic introduction to the topic, I stood up on a table in front of the crowded room and said with my voice aflame: “For these next two hours, let me be your shaman! Come with us on this journey and your life will be changed forever!” I then set out with newfound passion to help people delve into their mythic depths. Stanley did not miss a beat. He was with me all the way, setting our usual design aside and going full throttle to create a breakthrough experience for everyone in the room. It was just one of those moments. That night Stanley received a call in his hotel room from Jeremy Tarcher, at the time the most visionary publisher in the country of leading-edge science and personal development books. He and his wife had attended our presentation and felt transformed by it. He asked if we could meet with him while we were still in L.A. When we did, he said, “You guys don’t know what you have! This is profound! I want to publish your book!” He did, and the book became an immediate best seller for its genre and eventually earned us the USA Book News Best Psychology/Mental Health Book of the Year Award, along with innumerable speaking and teaching invitations.