Posts Tagged ‘blueprint’

What it takes

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

What does it really take to lean into life and reap the rewards of that?  How would you describe that quality?  Where is it from?

 

couple in love Alicia and I were blown away by how the participants of the September Pleasure Course totally leaned into their love and sex lives.  You could see people’s relationships expanding as if they were stretching their right in front of you. 

 

Each participant leaned into their life, bringing forth a quality of awakeness, of refreshing vital interest. 

  

It is so important to bring oneself forth this way in one’s life, especially your love life.
It can’t be work or you simply won’t keep doing it.  You are effortlessly uplifted. 

 

Opportunities are not missed.  Life is lived fully now.  You naturally go for it.

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Posted in Being Happy, Personal Growth | 3 Comments »

Your relationship future

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Now let’s look at your relationship future.  What is the quality of your future when you look at it? 

 

You can immediately sense if your future is given by your blueprint, i.e. that it is predictable.  Or perhaps your future blossoms from your being present now. In this case the future you imagine is more open, more organic.

 

relationship future If you are present your future has a quality of or softness and openness, if you are not present it has a repetitious dull and dark quality.   

 

Where you are now, or how you are now, determines your “now future”. This is where the future is created or lived from.  The present gives the future.

 

Your mind is always mapping out the future.  That is the activity of mind. If you are in your blueprint/playbook now, in the presnt, you are going to map out what is in that blueprint.  And that is what your future will look like.

 

If you are present then the map becomes very different and very secondary… and the future is bright.

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Posted in How to relationship, Personal Growth, Relationship, Romantic Blueprint | 6 Comments »

Your relationship life now

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Well, there’s your relationship life now, as it actually is… And there is your relationship life in your head, all the thoughts you have about your relationship life and all the patterns and activities you have from those thoughts.

 

Let’s look at your relationship life as it actually is.  

 

happy-couple Before you think anything, what is there? Before you think anything, what is present? Nothing that you thought in your head is actually there the way you thought it.  If you can get out of the relationship life as you think it is in your head, everything is somehow unified and together and there’s no opinion about anything. Things just are as they are, but there is a very distinct experience to it.

 

Your relationship life occurs very differently here, than in your head.  Fundamentally, there is no sense of a problem.

 

Now, what human beings ordinarily think up in regards to their relationship is from their past, as we distinguished last week. Mostly it’s given by our early parental and sibling relationships. This gives a limited ability in relationship, and can cause many relationship problems. The natural skills of relationship, such as the love, connection, paying attention, seeing what the other person wants, and so on, are largely blocked. To be more exact, these are not so much skills as natural capacities of reality that one has when one is present.

 

There are two ways of developing these relationship skills. One way is to develop and practice them; the second is to be fully present and let them arrive. The first is somewhat willful and keeps the identity pattern intact, but it can be helpful. By being present, they will come naturally.

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Posted in How to relationship, Personal Growth, Romantic Blueprint | 3 Comments »

Your relationship past

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

The biggest influence from your past on your current love life, whether you’re in a great relationship or having relationship problems, is your relationship with your family. The first 3-5 years of life are the most influential in terms of how we relate to other people, even sexually. This is in part because our current relationship blueprint is stored as memories of past relationships. Earlier memories carry more weight because experiences which come later are filtered through the earlier memories.

 

family-memories There are many challenges to looking at your relationship with your family and how that relates to your core relationship tendencies. The first is that our relationship with our parents, especially at such a young age when we are so open and undefended, is a very tender part of the blueprint. Another challenge is that sometimes, rather than mimic our parents, we do the exact opposite.

 

So take a moment to go back in your past and note, what are the critical influences that your family had on you when you’re young? This can be priceless information for your personal growth.

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Posted in Personal Growth, Romantic Blueprint | 2 Comments »

Effortless Change

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

We will further explore the challenges we confront when we attempt to change ourselves and discover the key to effortless change.

 

Imagine trying to change your internal reality and your external reality at the same time. By inner reality, I mean you’re head reality, how you felt, what you thought, and by external reality I mean your circumstances, your environment, the situation you’re in. Imagine trying to change both because somehow you knew that they were both false, or at least that your head reality was false, and that your external reality had been largely created or influenced by your head reality.

 

effortless change and personal growth So it wasn’t so much just trying to change your thought about something, but rather your thought had actually manifested in your environment so that the change you now wanted to create was much steeper. A good analogy would be, imagine feeling totally isolated, totally alone, and very separate (internal reality), and then at the same time living in an abandoned part of town, off the suburb of some very small city, rarely speaking to anyone.

The reason this is so much more difficult to change is not just because it’s twice as much to change, but once it’s gotten into your external environment, there is an enormous amount of evidence for the mind version, the isolated alone abandoned feeling, and it becomes much much harder to change the mind, and hence change the environment back. 

 

The way to deal with this is to go right to the center of your inner reality, the center of all your thoughts, to your first thought that holds all the others together.  It is “I”.  If that thought is transcended then not only are all of the issues of him or her transcended, but the very person who had them is gone.  You are left.

 

If you want to transcend the “I” sense, then inevitably you are going to have to confront major self doubt. If you don’t go for transcending that “I” sense then you can numb yourself to the self doubt to a certain degree. But, if you do go for transcending the “I” sense, commonly called Realization or Personal Growth, then inevitably you will have to confront the self doubt associated with that “I” sense. You’ll have to confront that portion of the blueprint of your mind.  It really is the center of the blueprint.

 

Effortless change simply comes from moving through the center of the blueprint, which is the “I” sense.  If you realize you are not that, you will merge with everything, and all desired changes are accomplished effortlessly.  Things are just right.

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Posted in Personal Growth | 17 Comments »

The biggest sexual hangups

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

Whether in a relationship or not, everyone has relationship problems and hangups. Sexual hangups may seem uncommon because people don’t talk about them as much, but they’re common as well. These hangups can be small or they can be huge.

 

In over 17 years of studying and teaching this work, I’ve found that the biggest sexual hangup for women is feeling frigid, a lack of sexual apetite or interest. The biggest sexual hangups for men are having trouble keeping an erection or, almost the opposite, ejaculating early.

 

A sexual hangup is really negative sexual material in what I call one’s “blueprint”. Ones blueprint is one’s ego. It is the identification system a person is looking though when relating with people and the world. This blueprint is made up of memories of oneself in relation to another, associated with an emotion (for example a small guilty self in fear of a punishing father).  It is these memories and emotions which can pull you out of your body and interfere with any sex act.

 A man and woman having relationship problems and sex problems

  

Fundamentally, the best way I’ve found to deal with these memories and emotions is to feel them fully as they come up. This can be particularly difficult to do when they come up during sex! But doing this will open you up to the unlimited pleasure and love available to all of us.

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Posted in Having better sex, Sex | 9 Comments »

Your relationship personality type?

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

We had an amazing live event last Wednesday where 50 people discovered their relationship personality type and it’s assets and liabilities.  It was a blast!

 

What’s yours?

 

Basically there are 3 or 5 types depending on how you slice it up.  This is based on nearly twenty years of giving relationship advice and supporting people in their love lives and I can tell  

you, although we are all unique, there are definitely general orientations that people fall into. These orientations depend on your preferred ways of responding to pain and difficulty when dealing with relationship problems.  As you know, we each have a relationship blueprint, a set of information we use to navigate relationships buried deep in our unconscious.  That blueprint instructs us to deal the pains of intimacy by avoiding them, challenging the other or surrendering.  These are the three basic types: the Avoider, the Softy and the Meany. The multiple personality types for romantic relationship

 

There are two other types which are really versions of the prior types but they show up often enough that we consider them types of their own.  One is the troublemaker, basically a Meany who is also an avoider.  It’s the rebel or black sheep type, on their own stirring things up.  And lastly, the Clueless, who comes in two varieties: the naïve and the arrogant.  Both don’t know much about relationship (i.e. they’re clueless, but the arrogant type thinks they know a ton.)

 

From these brief descriptions you probably have a sense for your primary type.  We all use all three (or 5 if you like) types, so having a combination is OK, but make sure you know your primary type.  It’s really helpful in relationship to know it. 

 

Then you can correct course!  Meanys should be nice!  Avoiders do well to show up; Softys benefit by asserting themselves; Troublemakers do well supporting something or someone; and the Clueless should learn!

 

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Posted in Personal Growth, Relationship, Romantic Blueprint | 2 Comments »

When to take a relationship to the next level

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Relationships have a natural path through stages.  In the Pleasure Course we focus on those stages in detail, but for now let’s just use their titles: the new and exciting stage, the best friends and lovers stage and the eternal date stage.

 

a woman with a marraige problem: should she say yes, or no, or maybe? People run into difficulty because they may be more comfortable at one stage and not another, or they may have skills in one stage and not another.  We have found this difficulty to be the case for most people.  You may have a tendency to try to rush ahead, say to the eternal date (a committed relationship), or a tendency to stay behind, say eternally dating (and never getting serious). The most common scenario that we have found over the last 17 years of teaching people to have successful romantic relationships is that of a woman wanting to rush ahead in the relationship, prematurely pushing toward commitment, and a man wanting to keep it in the dating stage, often way beyond when moving forward would create more depth and quality of romance.  This was the scenario that Alicia and I had to move through.

  

This is only the most common scenario. The roles can be reversed, the middle stage of relationship can come into play, and so on.  The possible permutations are infinite.  The point is that our individual relationship blueprints (our personal psychologies) can distort a natural progression through the stages at the appropriate time for maximum pleasure and romance.

 

How do you know when to take a relationship to the next level?  You have to get out of your head and simply be present to the relationship.  There will be a feeling, a sense that you can tap into, as to whether the relationship is due to upgrade.  If you aren’t inhibiting it, it will happen naturally.  If you are rushing it, and you get out of your head and simply be present to the relationship, there will be a natural tendency to slow down.

 

This is one of the beauties of life.  Things flow naturally if we get out the way.  That is a tall order, I must admit.  It really is a spiritual process that we have covered and will cover in other topics.  But, for now, know that you have to be present to the relationship not your relationship blueprint.  Have your attention on the relationship, not on yourself!

 

Life also provides hints! Your friends (who have good relationships) are pushing you in one direction or the other.  Or, you’ve been dating this person for a really long time, say years… probably time to cut bait or move forward.  Or, you just started dating a few weeks ago and you are trying to push it forward… probably good to slow down. 

 

You get the idea!

 

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Posted in How to relationship, Relationship | 1 Comment »

Why you avoid being intimate

Sunday, September 26th, 2010

People resist intimacy primarily because they are hurt and afraid.  To whatever degree you find yourself pulling away from your partner, resisting having one or buffering yourself from really being close with someone is the degree to which you are caught in a cycle of hurt and fear followed by all of the strange ways of being that we use as responses to that hurt and fear.

 

A heart locked up, resisting intimacy and vulnurability The hurt and fear, along with all the overlaid responses are what we call your relationship blueprint.  Hurt and fear underlie the relationship blueprint and are the source of many relationship problems.  They are the underbelly of the blueprint.  The blueprint is used to protect ourselves.   As children we felt hurt, quickly followed by fear.  Makes sense, right?  Then we quickly put together a system to handle that.  

 

The hurt comes from a variety of experiences: different versions of being abused or not being seen and acknowledged.  Basically, we are raised in a less than ideal environment.  This is inevitable, to some degree, because the environment can never be ideal.

 

The problem is that the blueprint, the distancing ourselves from others, ends up creating more hurt and fear.  We end up in the vicious circle caused by responding to our hurt and fear in ways that cause more hurt and fear, damaging our relationships and love life.

 

The most common relationship blueprint orientations, in response to the hurt and fear, are: attacking, avoiding, acquiescing and ignoring.

 

We’ll explore these relationship blueprint orientations in future topics.  For now, the most important point is to feel through the blueprint to it’s underbelly of hurt and fear.  This is where healing can happen.

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Posted in How to relationship, Relationship | 27 Comments »

How to rewrite your romantic fate, part 2

Friday, August 27th, 2010

Once you’ve uncovered you’re romantic blueprint (see part 1 of this topic), the second step is creating a new blueprint. This can be a very fun process. Start picking things from your blueprint that you’d like to change, and then practice acting out of the new way of being. Over time you can re-write your entire blueprint: how you’re interacting with the opposite sex, how you feel about flirting, a first date, boyfriend/girlfriend, commitment, , how you deal with relationship problems, your ability to be vulnerable or sweep a person off their feet, etc. And this can be an on-going process. Blueprints can be negative in two ways: They can be made of negative material, and they can be stagnant. The beauty of re-writing your blueprint is that you can do it all the time, informing your new blueprint with spirit rather than a fixed point of view.

 

Now that you’ve uncovered your blueprint and created a new one, step three is to motivate yourself. This involves bringing your heart and feeling into the new blueprint. If these aren’t there, the new blueprint is just going to be a good idea that falls by the wayside. There are two parts to motivating yourself. The first is to investigate it: Does this matter? How important is this to me? If you engage in this inquiry and bring your heart into it (not just your head), you’ll feel that your romantic fate is a really big deal. The Rewriting your romantic fate

key is to invest feeling into your new blueprint. Talking about your blueprint with people who are important in your life, or creating a collage, are two great ways of engaging with the new blueprint with your heart. The second part to motivating yourself is to take on your new blueprint in small chunks. Taking on a new blueprint can be overwhelming, and addressing small pieces of it at a time (e.g. setting a goal of going on an extra date every week, rather than going straight for a committed relationship with Mr. Right) is key.

 

Finally the fourth step is adapting your environment. Your environment is probably structured in such a way as to support your old blueprint. Identifying these structures, and altering them such that they support your new blueprint is key in having your new blueprint take hold. For example, if your new blueprint involves more sensual time with your partner, adding sensual items to your bedroom like candles, flowers, incense, and sexy décor can be a way of supporting this.

 

Re-writing your romantic fate is a large undertaking. With these steps, it can really happen, and the rewards are well worth it!

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Posted in Personal Growth, Romantic Blueprint | 2 Comments »

How to rewrite your romantic fate, part 1

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

We all have a romantic fate. If you look into your future, you’ve probably got a sense of how your romance is going to go. It may be great, it may not be so great, and it may be somewhere in the middle. That is your romantic fate.

Rewriting your romantic fate Where does this fate come from? It comes from something I call your “romantic blueprint.” This is the template, or set of principles or beliefs, that you’re using to guide yourself in your romance and love life. The problems with most people’s blueprint are first that it was designed between the ages of 0 and 15, and second it usually lives in a blind spot and operates unconsciously. In your love life, you may have noticed yourself acting out a repetitive pattern that leads to relationship problems. Despite seeing this pattern, you find yourself compelled to continue acting that way, and getting the same

results. The reason that this is going on is because the romantic blue print is guiding this action, and this blueprint is in a blind spot.

 

So, what are the steps to rewriting your romantic blueprint, and hence your romantic fate?

 

The first, and most important step, is to uncover your romantic blueprint. A great way to do this is sit down with a piece of paper and write out the patterns in your relationship history, your beliefs about relationship, what your relationship future looks like, etc. Getting it out concretely on paper is important (conversations about it can be very useful but miss the physical element).

 

I remember, before I got in relationship with Alicia, I noticed that my relationships had progressed only to a certain point. I was OK at dating, I was pretty good at boyfriend/girlfriend, but committed just wasn’t really happening for me. So one day I wrote down all the girlfriends I had had in my life (about 10 at that point) and then, because it was there in front of me, it hit me like a bolt of lightning…in my mind I created something wrong with each and every one of them. Part of my blueprint was a belief that there is something wrong with my romantic partner. (See the post titled Getting over my relationship hang-ups for more detail on this.)

 

Part 2 of this entry will tell you what to do with your blueprint once you’ve uncovered it!

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Posted in How to relationship, Personal Growth, Relationship, Romantic Blueprint | 4 Comments »

Getting over my relationship hang-ups

Saturday, July 17th, 2010

About 10 years ago, before I met Alicia, I remember having an intuitive hunch about myself. The hunch was that something was off. What gave me that hunch was that I had been in relationship with some incredible women, but none of the relationships had lasted. I realized that it had something to do with me, that it was a relationship problem, or hang-up, of mine.

 

Before this hunch I really thought the relationships ended because they weren’t right for some reason. I thought there was something wrong with each of the relationships, and even each of those women. When I actually listed the qualities of each woman, I saw that I had been so critical of each of them that I somehow found something that made her the wrong person, and justified to myself not being involved, and in some cases even being superior. I realized this hang-up was really costing me in my relationships and my love life. Erwan Davon and Alicia Davon throwing the Launching Erwan Davon Teachings Cocktail Party!

 

I also saw that this hang-up was defensive in nature. The women in my past really had been incredible. They were gorgeous, funny, lit-up, and I had been blocking them from coming into my life. I saw that this defensiveness was covering up an underlying sense of being unlovable. Underneath it all, I really feared that each of those women were unavailable for loving me. This complex thought pattern was really dominating my relationships and love life. It was part of my relationship blueprint which was not working for me.

 

Identifying this part of my blueprint, and the consequences (the lack of relationship), left me with a bit of a sick feeling. As I felt into this feeling, through a meditation practice we teach in the Pleasure Course called “corework,” I began to notice a deep sense of vulnerability. As I felt this vulnerability more and more fully, the sick feeling of worry began to lift. It felt like a weight rising off of my chest and shoulders. In that moment of feeling, I could see my future opening up. A quality of enjoyment and pleasure started to come into my experience.

 

It was this process of fully feeling through the emotions behind my hang-up, moment by moment, that really put me in a place to love and commit in my current relationship with Alicia. It is relationship advice that I would recommend to anyone with a relationship or sexual hangup.

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Posted in Personal Growth, Romantic Blueprint | 53 Comments »

What is your romantic blueprint?

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

Each of us has a template or blueprint we operate from in our romantic relationships or in our attempts to get into romantic relationship. The problem is that most of it we made up or inherited between the ages of 0 and 15. The other problem is that it lives in a blind spot and is rarely examined, updated or even seen! The good news is that it can be explored and updated. It’s like tennis or golf… you can always update your game, but first you’ve got to see what game you are currently playing (that is your romantic blueprint). Maybe it’s a great blueprint, maybe it isn’t, either way expansion and more fun is always possible, leading to a great healthy relationship!

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Posted in Personal Growth, Romantic Blueprint | 1 Comment »