The Energies of Love

by Donna Eden

  However, writing the book from the consciousness that got us the contract during our performance at UCLA proved problematic. Jeremy was extraordinarily disappointed with the first draft, which he found to be dry, academic, and convoluted. He wanted us to streamline it to the heart of the way we had demonstrated in our presentation that lives can be transformed by working at the mythic level. As the primary author, many of the revision assignments landed on my plate, and I struggled unsuccessfully to do what was being suggested. Having had his editorial staff wade through five failed drafts, Jeremy finally assigned the book to Connie Zweig, his best editor. She offered excellent guidance, but I still couldn’t get the sixth draft to the level that satisfied her or Jeremy that the book touched the promise of our two-hour presentation at UCLA, two years earlier by this point. It finally dawned on me that the difference between my consciousness as I plugged away at the manuscript every day that my consciousness leading to the UCLA presentation could be summed up in a single word. Drugs. I had never before tried to write on pot, but it was an amazing experience. While it required tenacious discipline and a good deal of subsequent revision with my cognitive faculties unaffected, by the time Connie read the seventh and final draft, she said, “I am amazed! It is like this was written by a much more spiritually evolved person!” In the process, I also found that I could meet Donna’s spirituality more fully and deeply when assisted by the smoke of the cannabis plant.

  It would not be honest to write this chapter without admitting the above. I found that there was a place for the grounded use of psychoactive substances in my own spiritual opening. I came to fully understand why indigenous people across time and throughout the world have used sacred plants to access a deeper opening to spirit. The existence of guides or muses is not a particularly far-out concept among writers and artists, and the marijuana seemed to open me to them. Even more exciting to me is that over time I began to have access to these same muses, especially early in the morning, without the drug. In fact, it is much easier to write with my brain unaltered. While my experience is not like Donna’s, where my muses or guides seem like separate entities from myself, the subjective experience is that when they are there, I know it because my thinking seems so much clearer and more creative than when I am left to my own devices. Whether this access would have occurred as part of my natural development had sacred plants not served as a bridge, I cannot say. I can say that entering the realm of Spirit, and entering it with Donna, is one of the most precious recurring experiences in my life.

  Sharing Your Dreams

  An unexamined dream, goes a Talmudic saying, is like a letter from God left unopened. While not every dream is an excursion into the realms of Spirit, some have a distinct numinous quality. Dwelling on such dreams uplevels your consciousness, and sharing them with your partner uplevels your relationship. Dream interpretation is, however, tricky business. The tendency is to interpret dreams from the vantage of your conscious mind or according to the narrow agenda of your ego and personality. These lenses can obscure the dream’s deeper spiritual message. So rather than limiting your exploration to the dream’s surface meanings or consulting “dream dictionaries” or other superficial guides for dream interpretation, we suggest a more open-ended approach. Carl Jung said it simply: “If we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly, if we carry it around with us and turn it over and over, something almost always comes of it.”27

  A variety of techniques for turning a dream “over and over” are quite dynamic. Our favorite is to role-play various elements of the dream. Dreams include characters, activities, settings, objects, sensations, and emotions. Identify a few that stand out for you or that hold a charge for you or that puzzle you. Even dreams that seem totally meaningless may hold unexpected treasures when explored. Describe the dream for your partner from the vantage point of that dream element. “Okay, now I am the cougar and . . .” Then as another element. “Okay, now I am David’s sadness . . .” In describing the dream, you can also elaborate on the dream element you are exploring. Let it have words to express itself during various parts of the dream. Perhaps allow a dialogue to emerge between it and another element of the dream. You can do a full role-play by taking on physical postures that reflect the dream elements in the dialogue. When you play with your dreams in this manner, their deeper meanings begin to unfold. Energy tapping can also help you understand your dreams.28 For instance, if a dream was particularly disturbing and you replay it in your mind while tapping to neutralize the distress, hidden meanings are likely to appear.

  “Sharing your dreams” has another meaning beyond exploring your nighttime dreams together. How do you support one another in your dreams of the heart? Help your partner articulate his or her highest sense of calling and purpose and seek ways you can involve yourself so these deep and precious dreams may come true. Beyond all this, “sharing your dreams” has still another meaning. In what ways do the two of you create a force in the world that carries a shared purpose? Raising children together is the natural, archetypal shared purpose for couples, but you can ride this archetype for other purposes as well. Alberto and Marcela recognized that their commitment “to be in service to life, to the world” helped them touch into the realization of how much more they are as a couple than they are as their individual selves. This seemed to beckon larger spiritual forces “as if the universe colludes to support our service to the world.” Such has been our experience as well. Manifesting your dreams together is a blessing to be savored.

  Sabbaths

  The Fourth Commandment begins: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God” (Exodus 20). Whatever your religious orientation, the instruction to keep one day a week “holy” is worth contemplating. With the Sabbath, explains Rabbi Abraham Heschel, “we learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.”29 These sanctuaries exist in time, not place. Rather than building physical monuments, Heschel notes, “the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals.”30 The regular sanctification of a period of time is a core spiritual challenge. Not a mere “interlude” in the week, the Sabbath is, rather, considered “the climax of living.”31 Heschel likens the Sabbath to “a palace in time, a dimension in which the human is at home with the divine . . . a window in eternity.”32 What more worthy challenge than to create a sanctified period each week where time as measured in the workaday world ceases and life is infused with the sacred?

  The Sabbath also reminds us of the need to rest. “In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed” (Exodus 31:17). Wayne Muller, a minister and graduate of Harvard Divinity School, emphasizes the “rest and refresh” dimension of the Sabbath in his book Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest: “In our bodies, the heart perceptibly rests after each life-giving beat; the lungs rest between the exhale and the inhale. We have lost this essential rhythm. . . . Because we do not rest, we lose our way. . . . we bypass the nourishment that would give us succor. We miss the quiet that would give us wisdom. We miss the joy and love born of effortless delight.”33 The Sabbath’s rest is not merely to refresh yourself for the next round of labor. “To observe the Sabbath,” Heschel notes, “is to celebrate the coronation of a day in the spiritual wonderland of time.”34 With the Sabbath, emotions of joy and delight are evoked as gateways into the heavenly realm.

  If your religious or spiritual tradition offers you practices that bring you into periodic, passionate communion with the sacred dimensions of life, it is serving you well. Many people who are not buoyed by such practices feel a spiritual hunger but do not know how to satisfy it. Any of the practices described in this chapter may be used during times that you set aside for nurturing your higher nature and opening your consciousness to the realm of Spirit. To forge regular spans of time that are dedicated to this purpose—to create a Sabbath for yourself, your partne
r, and your relationship—takes the individual practices to a higher level. The Sabbath provides a context for using those practices for greater communion with your own spiritual essence and for better perceiving the god/goddess in your partner.

  Heschel reflects that the Sabbath “is not a date but an atmosphere.”35 This atmosphere is characterized by “tranquility, serenity, peace, and repose.”36 Repose is the freedom from work, strain, or responsibility. Explaining why the orthodox Jewish Sabbath may seem as much a list of prohibitions from worldly deeds as a pronouncement of the splendor of the day, Heschel draws an analogy. Just as the mystery of God can never be captured in words, our rituals and other human practices can never fully replicate the spirit of the Sabbath. What better way, he asks, to open us to “glory in the presence of eternity” than with “the silence of abstaining” from the “noisy acts” of our daily affairs?37 Our ordinary words and thoughts tend to obscure and distract us from the spiritual realm.

  As the traditions for observing the Sabbath developed, the laws for abstaining from one’s usual activities became prominent.38 Not only does work cease, one does not talk “in the same manner in which one talks on weekdays. Even thinking of business or labor should be avoided.”39 Heschel admits that as the Sabbath rules of observance developed, “law and love, discipline and delight, were not always fused,”40 and the strictest practices might seem oppressive. But as we (Donna and David) have learned (because we have so often failed), imposing a firm discipline for carving substantial portions of sacred time out of busy lives may be exactly what is required for regular self-initiated journeys into the higher realms that are always there if we but open the door.

  In Closing

  The Energies of Love has taken you on a journey through the biochemical, psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions of love, always with an eye on the vital role your body’s energies play in each. Chapter 1 opened by showing you how core differences in organizing information and managing conflict are based on Energetic Stress Styles that are inborn and underlie many of our psychological differences. We went on to explore energy techniques that can change the course of arguments that could be devastating to the energies of your partnership. We have learned energy techniques for healing old emotional wounds, defusing triggers, addressing resentments, bridging differences, and cultivating skills for successful bonding. We have seen how sex is nature’s energy medicine for couples and how, by staying attuned to your own and your partner’s energies, you can keep your sexual relationship vital. We have sensed into the multilayered energies connecting body and soul that allow a deeper love to grow out of conscious partnering and fostering your relationship as a spiritual journey. For the two of us, garnering these lessons has been an amazing ride, and we thank you for allowing us the privilege of sharing them with you. May the energies of love smile on all your days.

  • THE ENERGY DIMENSION •

  When a person is emotionally flooded, the energy within becomes compacted and crowded. It can feel thick, slow-moving, and even painful. Each of the energy exercises presented in this chapter impacts your energy field in ways that are beneficial for processing stress, calming your emotions, becoming centered, and thinking more clearly. Here is what the Blow-Out, Zip-Up, and Hook-Up do energetically:

  The Blow-Out moves toxic stressed energy out of your body, counters feelings of being overwhelmed, and allows the energies to flow more freely. Meanwhile, your aura expands, giving you more energetic “elbow room.”

  The Zip-Up moves your life force up through the energy fields within and surrounding your body. Having just emptied discordant energies with the Blow-Out, the Zip-Up also stabilizes you in that calmer state.

  The Hook-Up connects the energies going up the front of your body with the energies going up your spine and over your head, strengthening a force field that energetically surrounds and protects you, leaving you more resilient and confident.

  References

  Introduction

  1 Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (New York: Little, Brown, 2008), 15.

  2 Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

  3 Ibid., 13.

  4 Barbara L. Fredrickson, Love 2.0: Creating Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (New York: PLUME/Penguin, 2014), 4.

  5 Ibid., 6.

  6 Ronald E. Matthews, “Harold Burr’s Biofields: Measuring the Electromagnetics of Life,” Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine 18, no. 2 (2007): 55–61.

  7 Rollin McCraty, “The Energetic Heart: Bioelectromagnetic Communication within and between People,” in Paul J. Rosch and Marko S. Markov, eds., Clinical Applications of Bioelectromagnetic Medicine (New York: Dekker, 2004), 541–562.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Rollin McCraty, Raymond Trevor Bradley, and Dana Tomasino, “Our Heart Has a Consciousness of Its Own,” n.d., http://newearthdaily.com/our-heart-has-a-consciousness-of-its-own/.

  10 Claude Swanson, Life Force: The Scientific Basis, 2nd ed. (Tucson, AZ: Poseidia Press, 2009).

  11 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (New York: Knopf, 2007).

  12 Hanna Rosin, “The End of Men,” The Atlantic 306, no. 1 (2010): 70.

  13 Ibid., 64.

  14 Ibid., 60.

  15 Ibid., 58.

  16 Ibid.

  17 Ibid., 60.

  18 Andrew J. Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (New York: Vintage, 2010).

  19 Ibid.

  20 Ibid., 15.

  21 Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 108.

  22 Eli J. Finkel, Chin M. Hui, Kathleen L. Carswell, and Grace M. Larson, “The Suffocation of Marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow without Enough Oxygen,” Psychological Inquiry 25 (2014): 1–41.

  23 Ibid.

  24 Ibid.

  25 Ibid.

  26 W. Bradford Wilcox and Jeffrey Dew, The Date Night Opportunity: What Does Couple Time Tell Us about the Potential Value of Date Nights? (Charlottesville, VA: National Marriage Project, 2012).

  27 Stephen Larsen and Robin Larsen, The Fashioning of Angels: Partnership as Spiritual Practice (West Chester, PA: Chrysalis Books, 2000).

  Chapter 1

  1 Ayala M. Pines, Falling in Love: Why We Choose the Lovers We Choose, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 58.

  2 The system being taught that evening builds on the cognitive functions identified by Carl Jung (and popularized in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/) as thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting, which in varying combinations form basic psychological types. The terms we have adopted—visual, tonal, kinesthetic, and digital—are also used in Richard Bandler and John Grinder’s neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), although our use of these terms is somewhat different from Bandler and Grinder’s. We have also gained instruction and inspiration from Virginia Satir’s genius in working with stress-based communication styles (blaming, placating, distracting, and computing) as demonstrated in her workshops and recordings.

  3 For more information on the prenatal development of hearing, visit http://birthpsychology.com/free-article/importance-prenatal-sound-and-music.

  4 Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2012), 6.

  5 Ibid., 187.

  6 Beverly Rubik, “The Biofield Hypothesis: Its Biophysical Basis and Role in Medicine,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 8, no. 6 (2002): 703–717.

  7 The Energetic Stress Style Assessment is based on a questionnaire first developed by Dana How after she took one of our seminars. It has proven useful in its various evolutions over the years in our own wor
k with couples. We are grateful to Dana for generously allowing us to use and build on her work. Insights from Peg Elliott Mayo are also reflected in the questions and gratefully acknowledged.

  8 David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage: Love, Sex, and Intimacy in Emotionally Committed Relationships (New York: Holt, 1997).

  9 John M. Gottman, The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples (New York: Norton, 2011), 203.

  10 Kim T. Buehlman, John M. Gottman, and Lynn F. Katz, “How a Couple Views Their Past Predicts Their Future: Predicting Divorce from an Oral History Interview,” Journal of Family Psychology 5, no. 3–4 (1992): 295–318.

  11 John M. Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).

  12 Ibid., 40.

  13 Ibid., 46–47.

  Chapter 2

  1 Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2012), 75.

  2 This final part of the technique is adapted from Harville Hendrix’s Imago Dialogue, which is outlined in his book Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, rev. ed. (New York: Holt, 2008), 268–271.

  3 Roger Walsh and Shauna I. Shapiro, “The Meeting of Meditative Disciplines and Western Psychology: A Mutually Enriching Dialogue,” American Psychologist 61, no. 3 (2006): 227–239.

  4 Rollin McCraty, Raymond Trevor Bradley, and Dana Tomasino, “Our Heart Has a Consciousness of Its Own,” n.d., http://newearthdaily.com/our-heart-has-a-consciousness-of-its-own/.

  5 Doc Childre and Howard Martin, The HeartMath Solution (New York: HarperOne, 2000), 10.

  6 Taught to David by Stephen Levine in the early 1980s.