Posts Tagged ‘emotions’

Avoid the most damaging romantic mistake

Monday, October 11th, 2010

The biggest mistake that people make in romantic relationship is bringing out the worst in their partner.  This applies to long standing relationships, the first date and everything in between.

 

A couple made the most damaging mistake they could. They have a relationship problem as a result. Relationships have tricky and often complex dynamics.  Sometimes what we perceive in someone else is actually what we are creating over there in them!  Projecting our fears and concerns onto the other person is how this all get’s started.

 

Let’s look at an example.  Let’s say you are afraid that your partner will reject you or be mad at you about something, so you are defensive, maybe even hostile.  Then they are mad.  Maybe they don’t know what is going on, but they feel put off, so they are distant and in a sense reject you. 

 

This is the biggest relationship mistake that people make: they act in ways with their partners that bring out the worst in the other person.  Disapproving of your partner is guaranteed to do this!

 

This creates a vicious circle.  What we feared has become the case.  Seldom do we realize our part in creating it.

 

Avoid the most damaging relationship mistake.  Always give your partner the benefit of the doubt!

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Posted in How to relationship, Relationship | Comments Off

Don’t look down!

Monday, October 4th, 2010

The fastest way to end up completely, totally miserable is to feel bad about feeling bad.  Everyone feels bad sometimes, sometimes really bad.  That’s life.  Things happen, everything from stubbing your toe to someone dear to us dying.  But if you decide that it is bad that you are feeling bad you are on a slippery slope downwards. 

 

relationship advice: look up for a happy love life and healthy relationship Why?  Because now you have twice as much bad: you have the bad you originally felt about whatever happened and the bad about feeling bad.  Twice as much bad!  Which quickly turns into three times as much bad because you feel bad about all that bad!! 

You see how this goes.  Feeling bad can snowball very quickly.  

 

So in my teaching work, where we are dealing with the very sensitive matter of intimacy, spiritual life and people’s love lives, my relationship advice is, “Look up”.  Where you put your attention is where you will go… in fact, it is more than that; it is what you will become!

 

This doesn’t mean don’t feel bad if you do feel bad about something.  Of course, it is good to confront emotions, to feel them and feel through them, to clarify and release them.  We call that “Corework.”  That is very different than “tripping” about them, over processing them and feeling bad about them.

 

That is a dramatic hobby that I don’t recommend.  One I mastered in high school and college listening to Pink Floyd in my dorm room, lights out, candles lit and a relentless focus on what was wrong.  I can tell you it didn’t help my dating, social life or spiritual life.

 

Being diligent about having a positive attitude in life is very different than suppressing emotions with some sort of false positivism.  False positivism leads to numbness and feeling bad about feeling bad is a quick ticket to hell.

 

Don’t look down!  Confront what is, and tilt your gaze skywards.

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Posted in Being Happy, Personal Growth | 2 Comments »

How to work with deep emotions

Friday, September 17th, 2010

The way to work with deem emotions is first to allow them and really feel them, and then use skillful means with them, vs indulging them. The first point is the most important, and it really means confronting the emotion, allowing it to be, whatever it happens to be. The practice that we use here at Erwan Davon Teachings for this is the practice of core work. Core work is going deeply into your emotions, especially how they are expressed and felt in the body, sometimes using the breath and sometimes using a 5-step process. What we’ve noticed over the years with hundreds of people is that this process tends to lift and open emotions, particularly negative ones.

The point of this is to have space for these intense emotions. In today’s world we spend a lot of time running around, distracted by TV and the internet, etc. This can cause an emotional deficit or a sense of distance from oneself or the whole emotional dimension of life. Part of working with deep emotions is in the design of your lifestyle, making sure there’s some time for you to just be, time to feel. A couple having relationship problems due to sexual blind spots

 

That can look a lot of different ways, like sitting mediation, walking on the beach or to work, and it can even be sports if it allows you to focus on your inner experience. It’s really important to actually have some space in one’s life to be, so things can percolate up and let go.

 

The second part of working with deep emotions is to be skillful with them, not to indulge or repress them. There are many ways you could do this – for example, you could journal, or you could discuss your emotions with somebody. What’s important is not to not act it out. If you act out on a negative, patterned emotion you end up reinforcing it. This doesn’t mean we should ignore them, but rather to use a more meditative or spiritual approach to be with them, to deal with them, liberate them, and let them go.

 

With deep emotions, there’s no magic bullet. There’s only the feeling through process and the releasing of negative emotions, and the expression of healthy, positive emotions.

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Posted in Personal Growth | 13 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 »

How to have a successful healthy relationship: Three essential ingredients

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

What makes the difference in any relationship is that each whole person is there and available for the relating. There are three aspects to this, and enhancing any one will really help any relationship succeed. This relationship advice really applies to any relationship, whether the first date, a brand new relationship, or a marriage.

 

The first essential ingredient is approval. This means being emotionally available to the other person. When we are emotionally available, we are loving. I mean something wider here than simply saying nice things, I really mean the loving, warm, caring that emanates towards the other when we are emotionally available to that person. For some, expressing emotions readily is easy. For others, it brings up a feeling of vulnerability and being unsafe. A healthy relationship symbolized by a heart is composed of three ingredients, fitting together like puzzle pieces

 

These feelings are generally rooted in a deep hurt experienced during childhood. When this hurt is felt, we emotionally bind up and harden because we don’t want to be hurt again. Noticing this hurt is the first step toward healing it, which allows us to become more emotionally open and vulnerable with another.

 

The second essential ingredient is turn-on or chemistry. For romantic love to be successful, there has to be the enjoyment, really the exploitation, of that sex energy. Unfortunately this energy can get dampened, by schedules or cultural norms or other beliefs. And fortunately, it can actually be turned back on. This starts with deliberate attention on the turn-on in the relationship, then learning the skills necessary to cultivate it (seduction, structure, flirting, and maximizing sexual pleasure, etc).

 

The third essential ingredient is “realness.” By this I mean, honesty, I mean being real with the person now, being present with the other person moment by moment. This is really can be the most challenging aspect of relationship, and there really is no easy way to do it. All we can do is be real NOW, no matter what the circumstances.

 

A nice aspect of all of this is that couples can support each other in the different areas, especially if one is strong where the other is weak. For example, someone strong in approval can approvingly request and help the other be more approving! Or if one is weak in realness, the stronger partner can point out when a situation isn’t feeling very real to them.

 

And finally, knowing that simply being more approving, turned-on, and real will improve a relationship is a relief! Whether looking for dating advice, wanting to improve a good relationship, or thinking about marriage counseling, this knowledge takes much of the mystery out of relationship problems!

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Posted in How to relationship, Relationship | 3 Comments »

Six steps to handle the intense emotions that arise in relationship

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Relationship is the most common place intense emotions come up. The emotions are usually very sensitive, and can be the source of many relationship problems. Here is the best way I’ve found to handle them, broken into six steps:

 

An angry woman, an example of an intense emotion one can learn how to deal with in relationship The first way to handle intense emotions is to create space for that emotion. Basically this means, don’t ignore the emotion. There is a tendency to turn away from and avoid the intensity of feeling that comes up for us when we relate to another person. Now, this also doesn’t mean address it immediately and irresponsibly with the other person as soon as it comes up. Really it means simply allow the experience you are having. Don’t run away, don’t obsess, just let the emotion be. 

  

 The second thing to do is admit what you’re feeling. This doesn’t mean you need to do anything about the emotion, rather it simply means face that you are feeling that way, acknowledge that you are experiencing this emotion. 

 

The third thing to do is to express the emotion constructively and artistically. For example, if you feel angry and do a collage about your anger, it allows you to get your hands around the emotion, to see it and taste it. By simply doing something with your emotion that is not avoidant, the experience will start to lift and open.

 

The fourth thing to do is Corework. This is a type of mediation we teach in the Pleasure Course in which one goes to the core of what one is feeling, one confronts one’s experience. Opening with a spiritual practice liberates negative emotions, sooths and calms excited emotions, and enhances positive and turned on emotions. Just as the third step deals with the emotion artistically, this step deals with it spiritually.

 

These first four steps have been getting into the emotion, really feeling it. Now one is ready for the fifth step: communicate. This step is fifth because one really wants to spend a lot of time being with one’s emotion, feeling it thoroughly, THEN you want to communicate. When we instantly rush to communicate what we’re feeling usually we end up dumping or projecting, and we end up dealing with the trigger of the emotion rather than dealing with the emotion at its root. Embracing and feeling the emotion thoroughly before communicating really makes communication possible.

 

Finally the emotion can be released. This step actually isn’t something you do actively, it is something that happens naturally if the above steps are taken. If one feels the emotion fully, then shares and communicates, the feeling will release.

 

To bottom line it, the best relationship advice I have is: do not shy away from the intensity of emotion. Intense emotions will always come up, whether on your first date, in a new relationship or you have the most established and healthy relationship. Go into them, embrace them. Even though this is the opposite of what we usually think to do, you’ll find your experience lift and open.

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Posted in Being Happy, How to relationship, Personal Growth, Relationship | 4 Comments »