It’ been a minute since I last wrote. Over a month in fact. Did you notice? I’ve been traveling a bit again, all the while practicing radical rest and quality time to connect. Simultaneously. Both active engagement and energetic exchanges of excellence as well as juicy solitude, rejuvenation and time to assimilate all that is going on around me. Life gets lifey (as my beloved Mary would say). And life right now is particularly LIFEY.
Having time, energy, and ability to rest and connect are the fruits of my labor of cultivating the most extraordinary relationships possible with Self/Other/Spirit. I’m grateful. More blessings than I can say grace over. Rich beyond measure.
And I’m headed to the mainland again, this time all the way to Maine to take Everett for his freshman year at Bowdoin College. I will be back to my fall schedule on Sept. 7. If you are desirous of a relational health tune-up, you make sense to me. It’s time to re-evaluate what matters most: relationships. We get to figure out how to interact (more lovingly) with others (and ourselves) in this changing world.
I have a couple of openings for new clients and if you respond before September 7, I will offer you a special 3-hour deep dive initial session as part of our agreement ($1k value)!
In the meantime, I wanted to share with you a powerful interview that a beloved client just shared with me. It’s called “Reclaiming Aloha” and it speaks to me on so many levels and I hope it serves you as well. Please let me know what you get from it.
There is no more valuable work than developing relationships — and — no more difficult work than maintaining them.
Think of a relational health tune-up like going to the dentist. You know you need your teeth strong and healthy. You know you need your relationships with yourself and others strong and healthy. Let me know what support looks like.
Your matter. Your relationships matter. Warmly,Amy
Lest we fall further into the Realm of Despair, let’s come back to our senses with this powerful exercise. Let’s take a moment to connect with something bigger than us. Sure, worry, fear, and outrage are bigger than us. But what else is? For inspiration, click the whale image below to visit another realm entirely.
When things feel a bit swirly and outta control, come back to your senses. Turn off the news or the worries in your mind and instead, listen to a special moment in your life (perhaps from all those videos waiting in your phone for your attention). That’s what I did today and so I share this precious whale memory from earlier this year.
My body, my choice.
In the winter, I jumped in the mighty Pacific and allowed the songs of Humpbacks and the ocean to hold me. I reunite with this power greater than myself in this moment of euphoric recall. From this place, I’m rejuvenated to face the reality of current events, events of a personal, national, and/or global nature.
On this Aloha Friday, let’s pause, breathe, and reset and take a moment to reflect on what went well (in our personal lives) this week.
Let’s create BREATHING ROOM in our lives for personal joy to multiply and personal sorrow to divide.
JOY: My decisions around what goes into my body are mostly healthy and I have the great good fortune of being sober, sane, and serene.
SORROW: My body keeps the score of old traumas and transgressions and my hips ache and my skin itches as I continue to process and release the old stuff – the old haunts (mine and my ancestors).
Here’s a nudge: Help spread the light of high-vibe living, rather than contract in fear or rage and fuel the spew of negativity. This is not pollyanna thinking or spiritual-bypassing. This is about staying sober, sane and serene no matter what and coming back to your senses and trusting your Sovereignty is your true power.
This self-sovereignty is the power we share with each other in a regenerative world. We don’t need guns to feel safe or governments to protect us, we need to WAKE UP and take back our power. Does the media have the power to determine if we are heartbroken? I think not.
Ground in the gratitude of your own Sovereignty. From this place of empowerment, you can more readily promote healthier choices, loving relations, and help multiply joys.
[As a certified Imago Relationship Therapist, and as a wife of nearly 20 years, I vow to create conscious partnerships in my life and my work. I owe a debt of gratitude to Harville & Helen and invite you to check out their work below and find an Imago Professional near you. Reach out to me for in-person retreats in Hawaii and/or if you are comfortable doing Zoom sessions. Relational health is an extraordinarily wise investment. Aloha, Amy]
Guest blog: Harville & Helen Hendrix:
The Birth of Real Love
When we fall in love, suddenly we see life in technicolor. We nibble each other’s ears and tell each other everything; our limitations and rigidities melt away. We’re sexier, smarter, funnier, more giving. Now we feel whole, we feel like ourselves, we are connected.
But inevitably–whether we marry or move in together– things just start to go wrong. The veil of illusion falls away, and it seems that our partners are different than we thought they were. It turns out they have qualities that we can’t bear. Even qualities we once admired grate on us. Old hurts are reactivated as we realize that our partners cannot or will not love and care for us as they promised. Our dream shatters and we feel disconnected.
Disillusionment turns to anger.
Since our partner no longer willingly give us what we need, we change tactics, trying to coerce our partners into caring–through anger, crying, withdrawal, shame, intimidation, criticism–whatever works. The power struggle has begun, and may go on for many years, until we split, or we settle into an uneasy truce living often parallel lives, or until we seek help, desperate to feel alive again, to have our dream back and feel reconnected.
What we need to understand and accept is that conflict is supposed to happen. This is as nature intended it: everything in nature has a polarity and is in tension. The hard truth is that the grounds for marriage is really incompatibility; it is the norm for relationships. Conflict needs to be understood as a given, a sign that the psyche is trying to survive, to get its needs met, and paradoxically, to restore feeling connected. It’s only without this knowledge that conflict is destructive.
Romantic love is supposed to end.
It is the glue that initially bonds two incompatible people together to do what needs to be done to heal each other, and in the process, heal the rifts in nature caused by our earlier experiences. The good news is that the power struggle is also supposed to end. The emotional bond that is created by romantic love to keep partners together through the hard times evolves into a powerful organic bond through the process of resolving conflict. This is our opportunity to move from an Unconscious Relationship to a Conscious Relationship.
A Conscious Relationship is not for the faint-hearted, for it requires learning more effective coping mechanisms than the crying or anger or withdrawal which have become so habitual for us. It means reconnecting through Dialogue, stretching to give our partners what they need to heal.
This is not easy, but it works.
Regardless of what we may believe, relationships are not born of love, but of need; real love is born in relationships. You are already with your dream partner, but at the moment, he or she is in disguise. A Conscious Relationship itself is the therapy you need to restore your sense of aliveness and connectivity and set you on the path of real love.
[As a certified Imago Relationship Therapist, and as a wife of nearly 20 years, I vow to create conscious partnerships in my life and my work. I owe a debt of gratitude to Harville & Helen and invite you to check out their work below and find an Imago Professional near you. Reach out to me for in-person retreats in Hawaii and/or if you are comfortable doing Zoom sessions. Relational health is an extraordinarily wise investment. Aloha, Amy]
About Harville and Helen
Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. and Helen LaKelly Hunt, Ph. D are partners in life and work. Together, they have written over 10 books, including three New York Times bestsellers. Harville and Helen co-created Imago Relationship Therapy to promote the transformation of couples and families by creating relational cultures that support universal equality.
Imago Relationships Worldwide
Talk. Listen. Connect
Getting the love you want, keeping the love you find and connecting securely and deeply with your partner, these are the goals of Imago Relationship Therapy. We can help you to resolve conflict while staying connected. Deepening intimacy in a safe space invites vulnerability. Communicating effectively with your partner is key to maintaining a long and rewarding relationship. Sharing a life together means meeting and conquering obstacles as a couple while expressing uncertainties and frustrations constructively. Imago professionals offer therapy and educational workshops for individuals and couples throughout the world.
For more information on Imago therapists, workshops or trainings worldwide, please visit www.ImagoRelationships.org.
Feel gravity supporting you. Feeling yourself present in the moment with everything that’s going on swirling around you.
Take a moment to lower your gaze or close your eyes and just breathe in deeply, sweetly, allowing the belly to expand on the inhale.
Pausing… thinking of all that has already transpired today, just let it settle. On the exhale releasing what’s no longer needed.
Take a deep sweet inhale in through the nose, resetting the nervous system pausing, thinking about all that remains in the day and settling, releasing, exhaling completely. And finally, breathing in sweetly, this moment right here right now.
Pausing, being here, noticing your noticing and releasing as you take this moment to pause, to breathe, and to reset.
You are doing your future self a favor. You are doing everyone around you a favor. You are reconnecting to that place of stillness in the space between the thoughts. The gap between the actions and that moment of infinite possibility. This is the calm in the eye of the storm. The sweet spot in the middle of yesterday and tomorrow. That brings you into the eternal Now. Today, right here right now.
You sitting here, head over heart over hara: open-minded, open-hearted and willing to reset your own nervous system to pivot back toward calm and to shift the drift of all that swirling around. Even for a moment, even for a moment.
Right here. Right now.
Take a deep breath in And a deep breath out. Releasing the pinch within; Releasing the grip.
Finding the tender open heart
Sending big Aloha,
Amy
Relational health coaching guides you to access your tender heart. Together, we regenerate landscapes, both internally and externally. You matter. Your relationships matter.
Do you have a lot of ideas of how the world could be a better place?
Do you often wish others would behave differently?
Do you find this is a recipe for woe and a foundation for chronic disappointment?
One way to stop doing this, without lowering your standards, is to simplify to amplify. A coach taught me this years ago. And now I’m finally embracing it at a deeper level.
My simplified message is this: We get to dwell in a playful heart.
From this place, it’s natural to
Cherish connection.
Cultivate gratitude.
Count blessings.
When we reside here, relationships flourish, heal, and resource us. They also uplift the environment. We get to remember that relationships are the playground of the heart or the battleground of the ego.
We get to tend to what matters most and weed out the things we don’t want to grow, turn them into compost, and cultivate whole-hearted living.
The heart is the home of heaven or hell here on earth. Joy or misery lands here. Peaceful expansion or painful contraction create our realities.
Did you know that when we communicate there are actually up to 4 conversations going on — simultaneously?
1. The one you think in your head.
2. The one you actually say.
3. The one the other person(s) hear(s).
4. The one you wish you had said.
One thing I’m particularly grateful for is getting through my mom’s recent death and entering the holiday season strong with healthy communication with family of origin and my in-laws.
Sure, it’s work, but it’s so flippin’ rewarding. It’s freeing to feel the lack of energy drain. To feel resourced. To put my head to the pillow at night without rehashing what he said, what I should have said, and second guessing myself and/or judging others.
It’s truly liberating.
If you’d like some helpful tips (and lots of wonderful hyperlinks for resources), please check out this article by my fellow Imago colleague, Jeannie Ingram.
