Conscious Relating

Conscious Relating article continued from previous page

Eckhart Tolle's extraordinary book, The Power of Now, is an excellent resource for understanding the importance of surrendering to the present moment and letting go of any illusion that love, or salvation, can come from outside yourself. Becoming conscious of your own sense of fear, lack, neediness and incompleteness and coming to know on a deep level that union with another can never provide more than a glimmer of wholeness, is a crucial part of your inner journey. Realizing that as long as your sense of identity comes from the ego - from your appearance, your social position, your family, your career, or even your beliefs - you will always feel insecure and therefore vulnerable to pinning your hopes on that “special” relationship.

4. Harmonize the relationship between your own inner male and inner female. As a psychologist, I'd learned plenty about the significance of the parental triangle in molding personality. As a tantrika, I'd learned plenty about the internal balancing of the shiva/shakti or yin/yang energies. For years, I'd been acutely aware of how profoundly influenced we are by whether Mom and Dad affirmed or undermined our budding child sexuality. But until I experienced Dr. Jack Painter's work, understanding exactly how these essential aspects of the inner work fit together eluded me.

Dr. Painter's sophisticated blend of working simultaneously with breath, energy, body armor, personality patterns, and developmental issues creates a visceral experience of the inner work of liberation. It's one thing to know that our outer relationships are a reflection of the internal dynamic between our own masculine and feminine energies. It's quite another to have a felt sense of how this dynamic is modeled on the relationship between Mom and Dad which we experienced in childhood, or even in the womb, and better yet, how to shift it in a healthier direction.

Becoming conscious of how our parental imprints determine the ways we characteristically block the flow of our own masculine and feminine energies, and how this in turn impacts our sense of self and the relationships we create with others, sums up the core issues we have to deal with. Bringing the whole process inside yourself where, with the proper tools, dysfunctional patterns can be acknowledged, healed and released, instead of acting them with others, is the essence of the inner work.

Deborah Anapol, Ph.D. is the creator of the video, Erotic Spirituality.
For more info email info@lovewithoutlimits.com or phone 415/507-1739.