Thursday, April 10, 2025
Top Ten Tips for Healing your Love
Recognizing that our relationships are our most
gentle teachers in life is a great way to approach the work involved in staying
with them. We too often don't value and trust the huge amounts of resources
that we have invested into them and are too willing to dispose of them before
really digging into the work before us. While some relationships were a bad
idea from the day they started, the majority are actually perfectly designed to
help us grow into the best people we can be. I have been sharing these love
tips for years and consistently hear back from our friends and customers that
doing the work of love rewards them in ways they couldn't have imagined.
Remember that often the feeling of hitting the wall in love lives in us only
moments before a breakthrough that gives meaning to our promises. Make this New
Year full of love.
1. The truth is that intimacy begets intimacy.
Studies support the strong correlation between a happy relationship and the
frequency of sex. Sexual intimacy acts the glue in long-term relationships,
like pouring cement into a foundation inspiring a deep union that paves the way
for more emotional closeness and richer communication.
2. Communication issues are often at the heart of a
relationship impasse. This is because we all mistakenly believe that we can
tell someone how things are. Truly successful communication actually takes
place in listening. Listening is such a powerful form of communication that
most people cannot tell it apart from feeling loved.
3. It is easy for couples to confuse co-existing with
truly showing up for each other. They appear the same when we grow accustomed
to not allowing ourselves to need and be needed. Co-existing doesn’t have any
of the stickiness factors that showing up does because it happens out of habit,
not choice. Truly showing up translates into the safety that you bring to every
other part of your relationship.
4. You are what you love, not what loves you back.
This is a profoundly freeing recognition that allows you to experience the
depth and breadth of your capacity for love. It is a literal revolution for
your heart to open up to the most instructive emotional experience we are
capable of. Emotional intelligence develops in us with our capacity to love. No
one can take that from any of us and love teaches without the need for
reciprocity.
5. Relationships can only move forward when both
people have two feet in. You don’t ever really get to see what your
relationship can become if you or your partner keep one foot out the door. It
is an entirely different relationship when both partners are engaged and really
committed to making their promises work, one that you can’t even imagine when
you are holding the door ajar with one foot.
6. Take responsibility for your erotic
self. No one else can heal it or make it work. Begin with getting to know your
pleasure anatomy. Freud once famously commented, “The only thing about
masturbation to be ashamed of is doing it badly.” Learning about your own
pleasure response and charting a map to your own orgasm is empowering and will
open you to couples pleasure like nothing else.
7. Your feelings should not be allowed to
define your story. Feelings are like weather systems that provide fertile
information for your life, but they are too changeable and impermanent to trust
as a compass for what you are doing in your relationships. Sometimes the most
challenging work in a relationship is the very thing needed to strengthen the
resolve in your capacity to love.
8. Your attention is the most powerful
change agent you can bring to your relationships. Consider how you attend to
the details of your financial life, or your career path- your intimate
relationships deserve at least that much of your daily attention. They will not
thrive without the consistency and patience that all growth requires.
9. Introduce the required physical
conversation into your relationship. Stop talking about it and let your body’s
wisdom lead you into a language of touch that often has the power to
communicate what is behind the words. A physical, but not necessarily sexual
conversation is the open door to a more emotionally connected relationship.
10. Your thoughts are the blueprint for
your relationship. Your partner knows what you are thinking, even when you
don’t say it. We often take ourselves and our relationships too seriously or
worse still, hold them hostage to our unspoken doubts. Try for a little levity
and lean more heavily on our innate capacity for kindness. Cultivate thoughts
that bring you closer to the relationship you envision and vigilantly weed out
the ones that don’t.
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