Archive for the ‘Behavior’ Category

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     Joe Biden presents a stunning opportunity to speak to the question of
whether a politician’s private life matters in relation to his or her
public service. In recent history, the likes of John Kennedy, Lyndon
Johnson, Gary Hart, Barney Frank, Bill Clinton, Jim McGreevy and most
recently, John Edwards have all been the object of scrutiny and
analysis for behavior in their private lives.  In fact, if time and
space permitted it, we could compile a list back to and including
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
    So the question is:
When electing a person to public office, how much does it matter who
they are privately vs. how well they perform their public service?
Personally I am conflicted on this issue and my conflict was renewed
yesterday by an e-mail I received which was then followed by Joe
Biden’s introduction at the Democratic National Convention by his son,
Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden.
    As a parent, it was
incredibly moving and heart-warming to see the obvious love and respect
that this young man has for, as he put it, “my hero, my father.”
Biden’s exemplary parenting and dedication to his two sons who survived
the auto accident that killed Biden’s wife and daughter is remarkable.
His priorities seem to be on very straight.  Commencing at age 29, he
made his boys his mission, all the while diligently tending to the
duties of his job as a United States Senator. And because I had the
privilege of working with him briefly in the 1980’s, I have some
personal knowledge of his character and commitment. And he’s got that
down-to-earth charisma going for him as well.  So it was exhilarating
to see him chosen as Obama’s running mate.
    Then came the e-mail.
    It was from a friend who is a strong advocate of U.S. support for
Israel and a hawk in relation to Iran and other Islamic fundamentalist
nations.  The content of the e-mail were actual cites to legislation
that Biden did not sign onto that were either pro-Israel or
anti-terrorism or anti-Iranian.  There were also links to articles that
address Biden’s voting record vs. his rhetoric, that raise the question
of how realistic he has been, or how effective his approach has been,
to dealing with the threat of Iran and it’s leaders.
    So here’s the dilemma.
    I was very outspoken on the shame that Bill Clinton brought to the
White House by his adulterous and adolescent behavior. I believed then,
and still do, that he set an appalling example and lowered the moral
bar for many.  And the contrast with the Bush’s marital relationship
and their apparent values is undeniable. But here’s the thing. Both men
were elected to lead and manage the nation.  And it’s indisputable that
in almost every analysis, Clinton did it better both domestically and
internationally. So while I prefer the public image of the Bush
relationship and both the dignity and mutual respect they project, in
the end I’m voting for an effective public servant who positively
impacts, and ideally improves, national and foreign policies. With that
criteria, Clinton trumps Bush hands down.
    Now, back to Joe Biden.
    He’s a decent man. An admirable father. A dedicated public servant.
And his choice and nomination as presented on television was stirring.
But governing isn’t about image or made-for-TV-character videos or
theatrical productions. Governing is about moving the county on a
continued trajectory toward it’s highest good while protecting it from
external harm. It’s about policies, not patinas, that get those two
missions accomplished.
    Next week, the Republicans will have
their turn (along with their media experts) to dazzle us with glitz and
glamor and similarly tug at our heartstrings. My suggestion is that
when all the hype is over, and all the candidates in place, we actually
investigate and read their public service records…their congressional
voting records…determine their real stance…on the issues that
matter to us before we vote.
    As a former divorce lawyer
who marketed a video for people going through divorce, I used to tell
women that generally, unless they are educated in advance,
they tend to pick a divorce lawyer on personality. Without knowledge of
the process and their needs, on what other basis could they possibly
choose one? And I would always follow-up that observation and say to
them “that’s how you pick a date. Not a lawyer.” 
    The same hold true for a President or Vice President.
    It’s not how they play on TV, it’s not how their personal story
moves us, it’s what issues have they championed? When have they stood
up and been counted? And for what have they stood? Its not who they
tell us they are but what, in fact, they have done about what they
believe in…and how long have they done it with consistency.
    I really like Joe Biden.
    Now I’m really going to read the record.

REMEMBER to click here to download by FREE e-book, “Too Many Secrets.”
   

>   There are plenty of examples about famous, creative and influencial people who, although inspiring millions through their teachings, had difficulty in their own personal lives in “walking” their talk.” I can deeply empathize and, perhaps, this entry is my own mea culpa for failing to do so.
    Just two days ago I wrote an entry entitled “Presence, Patience and Trust” that extolled the benefits of accepting Life as It shows up and trusting in the goodness of not only all that is but also all that will be as a result. So, in the past 24 hours, as the threads on my emotional rope wore thin and I repeatedly lost my temper…not to mention my presence, patience and trust…I feel somewhat hypocritical.
    Hence, this mea culpa.
    But when I look up the meaning and origin of the phrase “mea culpa” (I’m Jewish so I needed some clarification here) I find that it refers to an action wherein “the individual recognizes his or her flaws before God.” So I’m not quite certain this is, in fact a mea culpa. First, I’m not owning up before God, just my readers. And secondly, I don’t really see my behavior as a “flaw” but more as another opportunity to grow towards my highest good as a spiritual being along the path of having a human experience. If I accept myself as “flawed” then I imply that I, and ultimately others, are somehow “bad.” That’s a slilppery slope I’d rather not go down since, historically, it seems to end at “original sin”…a concept I do not sanction.
    So in order to not get stuck in feeling badly about myself for not having chosen my highest good, I think there’s an analogy that helps me approach the moment in a more positive way.
    It’s the principal that we give charity in order to make room for more abundance to flow into us which, in turn, allows us to give even more charity. Without “making room” so to speak for “more… it’s impossible to fill up a vessel already full.
    In the case of my losing my temper, since all matter is just energy of varying frequencies, there may just be some “stored” or “negative’ energy in me that needed to be discharged, or emptied, in order to make room for more positive energy that would serve me better in achieving my highest good. Therefore I look at that “discharge” of stored up energy I exhibited as a necessary clearing in order to be open to receiving that which I need.  Once cleared of the debilitating, stored-up energy, I am helping myself get clearer and clearer about Who I Want To Be and what types of experiences do not support that vision.  After all, now that it’s “out of me” I can clearly see that neither it, not the circumstances that prompted it, are consistent with my vision of myself.
    Now, like the vessel that has room for abundance to flow into it…I am cleared to refill the vessel that is Me with energy that is more supportive of Who I Am.
    Some of you may say this has all been an exercise in justification for inappropriate behavior. But I would respond to such a charge by saying that all behavior labeled “inappropriate” is performed by someone who has not yet embraced their inherent divinity and is struggling to find the means to so.
    Since at one time or another we’ve each been there…let’s slide one another, and especially ourselves, a little compassion and understanding.
    Now that would be the highest good for all concerned.

REMEMBER to click here to download my FREE e-book, ‘Too Many Secrets.”
   
   

>   It’s our most difficult challenges that present us with the greatest opportunities for personal growth.  I’d say divorce ranks really high on that list. So, since I’m going through one as I write, I thought I’d share an insight or two.

    Insight #1: It’s never about them. It’s always about you.
   

        It’s so easy to find fault with the Other and make them the reason for the break-up of a relationship. In fact, it’s too easy. Focusing or blaming another is simply a convenient technique to absolve yourself from personal responsibility for 1) choosing to align with that person to begin with and/or 2) acknowledging that you’ve changed… grown…. and the alliance no longer supports your highest good (or usually theirs as well, for that matter, but that’s their issue to deal with not yours).
    If you  choose a partner for the wrong reason(s)…out of need and dependence rather than out of a maturation process wherein you’ve actualized yourself and seek out another fully actualized person…then you can almost certainly anticipate a future point in time when the “jig” will be up and you will find yourself faced with an increasingly deteriorating relationship, as well as an ally turned adversary.
    The solution to this situation gone awry is to take stock of where you are in your own life and how you see yourself going forward. If that assessment and vision is inconsistent with who the Other is, well, then, you’ve got two choices. Abandon your own desires and goals or relinquish the illusion that they are attainable while aligned with incompatible energy in the form of a partner who does not enhance, or cannot even help support, that vision you have for yourself.
    It’s my experience that no matter how difficult the latter, it is not only do-able but it’s also the only road to self-respect and self-actualization.  Abandonment creates deep emotional wounds…whether someone does it to you or you do it to yourself.

    Insight #2:  Accepting responsibility brings inner peace and facilitates forgiveness.

    Refusing to accept responsibility for your choices, but instead placing blame on events and persons beyond yourself, fuels feelings of resentment, anger and victimization. If you believe that what you are experiencing is the result of someone else’s choice or events beyond your control, then it is impossible to feel at peace with what is happening in your life.  More importantly, if your suffering is someone else’s fault then how can you forgive them for your plight? Without forgiveness, you’re going to stay stuck in negative feelings that will only serve to impede your own growth and prevent you from actualizing your highest good.
    Once you accept that your choices have created every experience you are having in your life, as well as all the people who are showing up in it, only then can you begin to make deliberate and conscious choices that fully support you in achieving the life you truly intend. Fully conscious choice that originates from a place of heart-felt passion within you is the road to inner peace and personal satisfaction.
    Accepting personal responsibility for your circumstances allows you to see others in a different light going forward and to forgive both them and yourself for past circumstances. 

    So as I traverse this rocky divorce terrain, filled with opportunities to stumble, I am reminded of the adage that it’s not falling down that matters but how quickly you are able to get back up.

REMEMBER to click here to download my FREE e-book, “Too Many Secrets.”

>   Aren’t there days when you can actually feel the flow of Life as well as your place in it and, in the alternative, days when Life seems to be all up hill? But what about the days when it’s neither of those two? Days when there seems to be no movement at all and you wonder what Its all about? What’s the point? What’s your real purpose? Don’t there seem to be more of those days than the other two?
    Well, I think they’re the days when you’re actually gifted the greatest opportunity to exercise three vital qualities to living your best Life: Presence, Patience and Trust.
    An apparent lack of movement in your life (apparent because everything is continuously in motion whether we perceive it so or not) creates a window of opportunity wherein you can become fully present. Absent the hustle and bustle of the way things are when so much is happening that you can barely keep up, a period of calm and seeming stagnation you time to reign in your thoughts and focus on the quality of your actions rather than the quantity of them. More present and more focused… you become perfectly positioned to elevate not only your thoughts and actions but, ultimately, your Life as well.
    This perception of lack of movement is also the perfect testing ground for developing patience. Learning to be with what Is and accept the circumstances you find yourself in is a major contributor to decreasing and eliminating the adverse effects of stress. After all, isn’t it our refusal to allow Life to unfold in Its own time but instead impose our own Will to effect, manipulate and control outcomes that cause us to wind up worrying about that “90% that never happens” while simultaneously missing what it is Life has brought us? And in the end, we get a double reward. Patience nurtures Presence.
    Finally, the apparent lack of movement gives you the chance to exercise Trust in an outcome that is in the highest good for all concerned…whether or not you get the outcome you want. Trusting Life and Its inherent goodness is a pre-requisite for trusting the inherent goodness in ourselves and others.
    So, the next time you are experiencing a day when “nothing seems to be going right”… or going anywhere at all for that matter… try and remember Presence, Patience and Trust.
    You may be surprised to discover that being fully in them turns out to create all the movement you were looking for anyway.

Remember to click here to download my FREE e-book “Too Many Secrets.”

>   First, the disclosure: I have not seen “Dark Knight.” That’s not to say I don’t know what it’s about or what the message is. My daughter has seen it and the media is replete with reviews so I feel sufficiently informed to write this entry. What I have seen is Christine Amanpour’s CNN special “Buddha’s Warriors.”  These two media presentations pose a stark and illuminating contrast in how we get to choose the way in which we view the world and the way in which we respond to that choice.
    In “Buddha’s Warriors” Amanpour traces the history of Tibet (and it’s peoples devotion to the Dalai Lama) through the present occupation of Tibet by the Chinese and the non-violent effort by thousands of exiled Buddhist monks to return to their homeland with full religious autonomy. In the face of violent military crackdowns in Tibet and Burma (Myanmar) that have resulted in the beating, torture and killing of civilians and monks alike, the Tibetan people, their monks and the Dalai Lama himself continue to both preach and practice the highest principles of Buddhism…compassion, joy and non-violent civil disobedience.
    Not so, Batman Bruce Wayne. Here, in “Dark Knight” we enter the reality of George Bush and others who view the world as a place of terror to be dealt with by affecting vigilante justice to meet evil with evil. While this approach momentarily satisfies our basest instincts for revenge and getting the outcome we want at any price…several thousand years of historical patterns bear witness to the fact that all war and hatred get us are more war and hatred. War doesn’t end war. Peace does.
    Which brings us back to the Dalai Lama, his monks and the Tibetan people.  They too, like the people of Gotham City, are in the fight of their lives. For the Tibetans it’s not cinema, it’s real. And yet, faced with a potentially devastating and irreversible outcome, the annihilation of their culture, they remain heart-centered and mindful even, on occasion, praying for their captors while yet imprisoned and beaten. As one young Tibetan “activist” said, “it is our silence that will change the hearts and minds of the Chinese.” He refers not to the silence born of fear but a silence born of Love and Certainty. It is the silence of Jesus, Mahatmas Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks…messengers whose message is eternal.
     Batman or The Dalai Lama? A vision based upon terror and war or one of compassion and peace? More time wasted on hatred and separation or a future built upon Love and Unity?
    We each get to choose and as we do, the power of our choice and our thinking gets added to the collective consciousness. When enough of us choose Love and Unity I believe that young Tibetan activist will experience the “victory of silence” he envisions.
    So may we all.

REMEMBER to click here to download my FREE e-book, “Too Many Secrets.”
    
    

>When traveling to a foreign country, it’s not uncommon to discover that your electrical appliances don’t work. Generally the problem is that certain countries use 110v-120v and others use 220v-240v. The resolution is quite simple. You simply need an adapter.
    Which got me to thinking about how we humans are basically made up of energy and how difficult it is for us to get along…basically to “work” right together. Like those different electrical currents from country to country. If there is any transferable or logical thought that can get us from appliances to relationships (and you have to allow that there is to keep reading) then it seems to me that what we humans need, especially in male-female relationships, is the equivalent of an adapter.
    Which got me to thinking further about what that would be and how it would work. And I concluded that we already have such a mechanism. It’s called change.
    Change is the vehicle that allows individuals who are inherently diverse and dissimilar to adapt to their differences and thereby stay in relationship to one another. Without change, it is inevitable that those diverse energies will eventually “short out” each other. When that happens in marriage it’s called divorce.
    We all tend to be so proprietary and defensive about our view of life, our way of doing things, and our opinions that instead of allowing that others feel similarly and are entitled to do so, we instead dig in deeper to our position> on things rather than allowing change to happen by exhibiting flexibility. Why we are so resistant to change is easy to understand yet simultaneously offers us a paradox.
    Change means letting go of preconceived ideas. It means embarking upon an unknown. It means not responding based upon past experience but rather upon only what is occurring in the moment. It means vulnerability as we traverse untrod territory. It  requires trust…of Self, the Other and the Universe.
    >The paradox is that Life is change. Nothing stays the same. Even our cells are dying off with new ones being created, literally, every moment. So if the one unfailing characteristic of Life is change, and we remain unwilling to change, to adapt, where does that leave us? Well, I think that in regard to personal relationships, it leaves us pretty much like the world traveler who sets off with necessary items that, without an adapter, he or she will never get to use…and so winds up having an unpleasant experience that was unintended, and unnecessary, but for poor planning and lack of preparedness.
    Perhaps instead of financial, religious, or child-rearing advice, we should require premarital lessons in how to adapt to the inevitable changes that will occur within ourselves and our partners.
    Perhaps instead of something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…we may want to be certain that in whatever ‘baggage” we come to relationships with we have carefully packed the ability to change and adapt to the inevitable ebb and flow of human interactions so that not only is neither partner “shorted out” but that each is able to function at his or her respective peak level of efficiency.
    If this all sounds just a little too mechanistic for you…just remember that fundamentally we’re all just energy vibrating at a certain frequency and perhaps what you need to do is change how you look at things.
    You know, plug in your “adapter.”
 
>
REMEMBER to click here to download my FREE e-book, “Too Many Secrets.”

face=”Tahoma” size=”2″>     Hopefully, “absence makes the heart grow fonder”…as the saying goes. You see, I’ve just returned from two weeks in the Costa Rican rain forest and have been AWOL from my blog. But I’ m back with lots to share so let’s get to it.
    First of all, while I was deep in the rain forest, I was also staying at the beautiful and secluded home of friends so I don’t want to mislead you into thinking that I was cutting my way through the jungle with a machete and sleeping in a tent. Definitely not my style. However, it was two weeks of being in a meditative (not vegetative) state communing with some of the most remarkable and beautiful plant, animal and insect life I have ever encountered.
    It gives one pause for thought.
    At home, if we have a spider in our bathroom or an uninvited fly at our outdoor barbecue we tend to make much of it. But I spent two weeks in a beautiful, open-air home, with frogs in my shower and pesotes (wild pigs) walking past the outdoor dining area while I ate breakfast and never even flinched. Not to mention the troop of monkeys swinging past me on my walk or the hawk flying less than six feet over my head as I swam laps in the pool. (It was so close I saw it’s face!).  And then there were all those little flying insects that were forever going in and out of the house or the “sugar ants” that seemed to be on every counter top and which the local residents simply consider “another form of protein” should they wind up in your salad or on your toast. So why all the calm and acceptance around the abundance of strange and  plentiful wildlife?
    I think I was acutely aware that I was a guest in their natural environment, not the other way around. They seemed definitely unconcerned with me and much more involved in whatever constitutes survival for them. For them, I was a “live and let live” blip on their radar screen. So long as I was respectful of peaceful co-existence, so too were they.
    And I guess that was one of the lessons I brought home to share.
    For two weeks I saw no TV, heard no radio, had no access to world news. All of the fear and terror and corruption and killing that seem so much of our daily lives, thanks to various forms of media, were absent.  From that distance, and with that perspective, I looked around me at all the peace then looked back at the way we live and I knew for certain  that we are literally killing ourselves by failing to understand the connectedness of all things and the necessity, in fact the imperative, that to live in peace is the natural (not to mention sane) way to live.
    Of course having been home for a few days now, I can feel some of the peacefulness receding and the stress of my life slipping back. But truly, I am incapable of ever forgetting the feeling of living so close to nature with so few unnatural, artificial and human-made intrusions upon my life and I am the better for it, now and always.
    I hope just hearing about it gives you pause for thought.
    And while you’re pausing, take a deep breath and know that you have the power, in this moment, to change how you’re living your life by simply changing how you see yourself in relation to everyone and everything else.

REMEMBER to click here to download my FREE e–book, “Too Many Secrets.”

>   It’s been two weeks since my last blog entry.
    There’s a cute joke about a boy who never spoke a word in his life. Resigned that their son was mute, the parents raised him accordingly. One day at age 11, while eating oatmeal for breakfast, the boy looked up at his parents and said, “The oatmeal’s too cold.”  Astonished, his mother and father embraced him while asking, “Bobby, you can speak! Why haven’t you ever said anything before.” The boy looked at them nonplussed and replied, “Up until now, everything was OK.”
    I wish that my absence from writing these past two weeks was that simple. Or just plain true. But, to the contrary, it was a very challenging two weeks and I simply was too busy living life to write about it. Now that things have fallen into place I can share some perspective about what chaos is and why we need it.
    While most people tend to think of chaos as a bad thing that needs to be addressed, there are actually two types: the Chaos of Change and the Chaos of Stagnation. One is highly desirable while the other just gets in the way of living life. The road to living in the positive state of the Chaos of Change runs smack through the Chaos of Stagnation. Such is the paradox of Life.
    While some of us may spend an hour or a day in the Chaos of Stagnation, most of us spend years…and some of us even an entire lifetime before we realize that the Chaos of Stagnation is a necessary condition created in order to fully move into and appreciate the Chaos of Change.
    It’s the movement out of the former into the latter that’s key.
    The Chaos of Stagnation is what happens when we choose complacency over conviction. When we abdicate responsibility for our own life path and instead of seizing our personal power, relinquish it to external forces..be they events or simply other people. This type of chaos ultimately leads to restlessness, unhappiness, frustration, sadness and, if not addressed, anger.
    To the contrary, the Chaos of Change is a feeling of almost unlimited potentiality. It generates an awareness of movement, engagement and exhilaration that nourishes both inspired thinking and focused action.
    Such was the awareness born of the past two weeks of my Life.
    In Neale Donald Walsh’s most recent book, “Happier Than God” he posits that before we get what it is we ask of the Universe, we always get it’s opposite in order to have gained perspective from which to fully appreciate what it is we had asked for when it finally arrives. Problem is, most of us give up while waiting…complaining that we didn’t ask for what it is we got. Walsh suggests that when you get what it is you don’t want… know that what you do want is surely on it’s way. In the meantime, be grateful for it’s absence, for it’s absence is creating the backdrop for appreciation.
    I can now see that the Chaos of Stagnation in my life was the necessary backdrop for the Chaos of Change now upon me. I have come through the “fire swamp” so to speak (for those of you who are “Princess Bride” aficionados) and now bask in the light of unlimited potentiality known as The Chaos of Change.
    I wish you chaos in your life…yes, even the Chaos of Stagnation…as long as you use it to lead you to that pot of gold at the end of the trail… known as the Chaos of Change.

REMEMBER to click here to download my FREE e-book, “Too Many Secrets.”

>   I hate to be an “I told you so” but I did. As a matter of fact, I have been saying so for the past 10 years, at least. What it is that I have been saying is that the technology has outpaced our social development and that what we have created runs us..instead of the other way around. So it was no surprise to me that there it was, yesterday, on CNN’s home page. >TimeBanks USA, a nonprofit group
that treats time as money, was created by Edgar S. Cahn, a retired 73-year-old attorney “to put the brakes on people’s high-velocity
lifestyles.”
    It seems there’s a growing awareness that all the technology has so sped up our lifestyles that we are sick of it. More accurately stated, the accelerated  (and I would argue unnatural) pace of things has literally, made us sick.
    In fact, Cahn, the CEO of TimeBanks, says he “came up with the idea in 1980 after suffering a massive heart attack from a frenzied lifestyle that included being a speech writer and founder of a national legal services program and a law school.” And he’s not alone.  The American Medical Association has shown the
negative effects of stress on health. They say stress is a factor
in more than 75 percent of all illness and disease today. And, stress accounts for two-thirds of family doctor visits and half
the deaths to Americans under the age of 65, according to the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
    So, why do we resist making the connection between how we live our lives and how healthy we are?
    Just today I was with a friend who has had a chronic cough for two years. The only time she was able to get relief from it, without taking three different prescription drugs, was when she restricted her sugar and wheat intake on the recommendation of a holistic practitioner. But she got bored with the diet and went back to her old eating habits and the drugs. Just recently she saw a new alternative medicine physician and he recommended a vegan diet and told her that in less than a year she would be rid of the cough and off the drugs. Now she’s debating whether or not to follow the diet, knowing the drugs are bad for her liver. When I asked her what she would do if instead, the doctor had told her she had 6 months to live unless she went on a vegan diet and she said, “I’d be on it right away.”  Further, she went on to tell me of a female friend who recently went through a devastating financial crisis as her husband had personally pledged their home as collateral for a business expansion he was certain would pay off and instead collapsed.  The young wife spent a year fighting to save her family home and finally did. Yet she remains in dire financial straights and  has now come down with a muscular disease that prevents her from the most routine tasks. Countless medical doctors and as many tests have provided no clue to an origin or a cure. I wonder if any of them considered stress?
    We live at a frantic pace…out of alignment with Nature and our own bodily rhythms…pretending we don’t know the cause of so much illness and disease. This is not a complicated mystery to solve.  But the solution necessitates that we take a serious look at how we live our lives and how we prioritize our wants and needs.     Further, that we actually do something about what we discover.
    Books and personal accounts abound of people who have cured themselves of allegedly incurable illnesses with such means as laughter, laying down upon the earth, prayer, visualization, “energy” medicine, holistic healers…and a list that goes on and on.
    There are Laws of Nature that, when defied, wreak havoc not as punishment, but rather as an arrow pointing to a sign that says,”Your way isn’t working. Try Mine.” The staggering statistics of stress related illness from we humans trying to live at the pace of the technology we created is exactly that arrow pointing at that very sign.
     I am hopeful, and optimistic, that once awakened form our lethargy, we will seek out our internal rhythms and follow them back to health.
    In the meantime, back off of the technology for awhile. And if you don’t want to read my blog, or anyone else’s, for a week or so, well, that’s just fine with me.
    Here’s to your health.

REMEMBER to click here to download my FREE e-book, “Too Many Secrets.”

>   Going through divorce is usually a private matter. I can attest to that as a former divorce lawyer. But when you write an inspirational blog, as I do, everything is “grist for the blog mill” so to speak. Having been in Court just days ago for a hearing in my divorce, I thought it important to share my insight with you.
    First, a little background.
    Much of what I have come to know, spiritually, is the result of a lifelong search to find an ever-deepening meaning to existence. Where I find myself at this point in my life along that quest is in the role of “silent witness” to all that happens to me and around me. As a silent witness, I participate in what happens while simultaneously “watching it” as well. Watching it means observing it without judgment, something a participant lacks the objectivity to do.
    So it was that yesterday I found myself both participant in a heated exchange between my husband, myself, our respective lawyers and the Court as well as a silent observer. It was really a remarkable experience for I saw, in that one moment, the irony and paradox of relationships and what gets in the way of their success.
    You see, my husband and I are getting divorced and we still love each other. The struggle for control that we are now engaged in is just a continuation of the struggle we were engaged during the marriage. The realization I had sitting in that Courtroom was that both the struggle and the love are necessary components of oneness…of unity. Where so many relationships go awry is seeing these components as separate. And it’s the perception of separateness that actually creates the separateness and estrangement that leads to divorce.
    Anything that grows creates stress points that are the inevitable result of expansion.  Relationships are no different. As they change, stress points are created that arise in the form of conflict.
    The key to understanding and navigating the paradox of relationships is to know that both the struggle and the love are natural and necessary components of the same process and to also know that you cannot have one without the other. To not get so caught up in winning the battle or trying to control the outcome that you lose sight of the ever-present love. And, of course, to allow them both to flourish.
    It may be too late for my husband and me but perhaps not for you.

REMEMBER to click hereto download my FREE e-book, “Too Many Secrets.”