Soul Kadee

The popular notion of love is that it’s a feeling, an emotion. But is that really true? While being in love does generate powerful feelings and emotions, those are just the symptoms or effect of love.

In a spiritual sense, love is a way of life, a way of being. We do not fall in love or feel love. We practice love. Love is about DOING, not feeling.

When you spend time with the people you care about, perform acts of service for them, speak to them in a loving manner, touch or hug them them lovingly, or present them with a token of your appreciation for what they bring to your life, you’re practising the Art of Love.

I’ve been reading a beautiful book called “The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate” by Gary Chapman. It’s an excellent resource to learn how to express your love in a way that your mate will understand.

Why is that important, you ask? Well, according to Chapman, each of us has a primary preference for the way we understand love.

The art of effectively communicating love to your mate requires that you gain an understanding of his/her primary love language. Without that understanding, you may be expressing love in a way that YOU understand, but your mate doesn’t.

This gap in communication and understanding is often what causes lovers to feel unappreciated. It’s not a man-woman thing, but a preference created by the way our parents and caregivers expressed love when we were children.

So what are the Five Love Languages? According to Chapman, they are

• Words of Affirmation
• Quality Time
• Receiving Gifts
• Acts of Service
• Physical Touch

My primary love language is Quality Time, followed by Acts of Service. So if someone were to buy me flowers or gifts, I would appreciate them, but not as much as if they spent time with me, or showed me that they cared by doing little things for me.

Though we have a primary love language, we can learn a second language so that our spouse’s needs are met. It’s all about giving a little here and there, and accepting that our spouse’s preferred channel may be different from ours.

There’s a nice little test you can take here to find out what your primary love language is. This is what my results on the test looked like.

#1 Quality Time: This can be expressed either through those intimate tete-a-tete discussions or via doing things together. It’s possible to get a low score in this category because you have a strong preference for one form of Quality Time over another.

#2 Acts of Service: You prefer to show your love through favors and chores and doing things for others. You feel put-upon and unappreciated when your efforts are taken for granted.

#3 Touch: You want to give and/or receive affection physically. This may or may not center around sex.

#4 Words of Affirmation: You need to hear praise to know you are loved and you may also prefer to express your affection verbally. Negative comments cut right to the bone. You want to hear that you’re loved and how much and why.

#5 Gifts: You are moved by presents and physical tokens of affection. It’s the fact that someone is thinking about you enough to give you something that moves you. The objects are of secondary importance to the relationship and sentiment with which they were intended.

To transform our relationships, we need to stop getting caught up in feelings and emotions, and start practicing acts of love. When we learn the love languages of each of the people in our lives, we can express our love in more meaningful ways.

Love manuals on my reading list:

How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

Buddhist teacher and writer David Richo gives practical and spiritual exercises for couples and singles who want to have mature and lasting relationships. Emphasizing paying attention and letting go, Richo gently and compassionately coaches readers on what he calls the five A’s: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection and allowing. His book, which proposes “letting go of ego,” will help those seeking personal transformation in their relationships.

The Feel the Fear Guide to Lasting Love

The Feel the Fear Guide to Lasting Love shows us how to push through the fear and negativity that erode relationships, and embrace a life-affirming approach to love.

The Path to Love: Spiritual Strategies for Healing

Philosophical, inspiring, and ultimately very practical, Deepak Chopra’s The Path to Love is a book that can change lives as it invites the spirit to work its wonders on the most complex and richly rewarding terrain of all: the human heart.

How to Make Love All the Time: Make Love Last a Lifetime

Renowned relationship and self-improvement expert, Barbara DeAngelis, teaches you the secret ingredients for building a successful and exciting relationship — and making love last a lifetime.

Popularity: 7% [?]

The secret to happiness is really very simple. It’s learning to be in the present, in the now. All unhappiness and discontent is the result of living in the past or worrying about the future.

This moment, this second, is the only reality we have. The past is gone. The future doesn’t exist.

The importance of living in the moment is an ancient message, and one that’s been receiving much attention in recent times, thanks to the popularity of authors like Eckhart Tolle.

As the review of his book, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, notes:

Living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. Our true identity is in our moment-to-moment experiences rather than in our past or future.

Concern about anything but the present is an unhealthy identification with the mind that can only cause pain and an illusion of control. Being totally aware of ourselves in each moment actually requires little effort or direction if we stop our thoughts long enough to find the pure consciousness that exists in the gaps between them.

Living in the moment is called mindfulness - a Buddhist practice whereby a person is intentionally aware of his or her thoughts and actions in the present moment, non-judgmentally. In Buddhism, mindfulness is considered a prerequisite for developing insight and wisdom.

Mindfulness is being aware of your present moment. You are not judging, reflecting or thinking. You are simply observing the moment in which you find yourself. Moments are like a breath. Each breath is replaced by the next breath.

You’re there with no other purpose than being awake and aware of that moment. As John Kabit Zinn says reflecting on a Japanese mindfulness puzzle: “Wherever you go, there you are.”

Most of our unhappiness arises because we view the challenges in our lives as “problems.” But, as Dr. Brenda Shoshanna notes in her ebook, Living By Zen:

Zen practice is the way of no problem, of being fully with each step we take, not looking backwards or forward, just being present fully, one hundred percent. This is the way of not second guessing ourselves, or torturing ourselves with the conflict and remorse that accompanies every choice we make.

In Zen practice we do not make life into a problem, but into a wonderful adventure in which we learn, love, grow and thoroughly enjoy. This is the way of releasing ourselves and others from demands, images and expectations that have little to do with who we truly are now or what is going on in our lives. All experiences are welcomed and fully digested, not judged good or bad.

Mindfulness can be practiced anytime. In fact, you can start right now. By fully experiencing the words you are now reading, the thoughts you are thinking, the feelings you are experiencing.

It can be practised at the dinner table, by fully enjoying, in silence, every bite of food, every sip of water. It can be practised while talking a walk, as in walking meditation, which teaches one to fully experience every step you take.

As an intuitive person, I was unaccustomed to living in the moment. Intuitives have a tendency to live in the past or the future. So, for me, being mindful requires an effort. Traditional mindfulness exercises, like meditation, work well for me because I love quiet, introspective ways of learning.

But meditation is only one way to learn mindfulness and it’s not suitable for everyone. The Real-World Mindfulness Trainingâ„¢ program, developed by Maya Talisman Frost, includes a simple series of activities that anyone can do in order to both broaden and sharpen attention while engaging in daily activities.

If you could train your mind to let go of other desires,
you would be able to experience peace of mind.
The road to peace of mind is through a practice called mindfulness.”
- Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., author, Minding the Body, Mending the Mind

Tags: mindfulness, Buddhism, Zen, Meditation, Spirituality, happiness, Personal Development

Popularity: 8% [?]

I’m not a religious person. Born and raised Catholic, I was lucky to have a Dad who encouraged me to think for myself. I always found myself unable to relate to the dogma preached by the padres. So I left the tribe when I turned sixteen.

Since that time, I found I related well with Buddhist philosophy and practices, and instinctively gravitated towards the Eightfold Path. In my quest to understand myself and the world around me, I came across what I thought was a contradiction between psychology (cognitive science) and Buddhist philosophy.

While cognitive science or psychology stresses a healthy sense of self (something I’ve been writing about a lot lately), Buddhist philosophy tells us that the self is an illusion, that our ultimate aim is to transcend our narrow definitions of self.

It wasn’t until I started reading a beautiful book, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving by David Richo, that I realised there was no contradiction. As he notes in his book,

Western psychology places major importance on building a sense of self or ego. Buddhism, in contrast, places major importance on letting go of the illusion of a freestanding, fixed, solid self. These views seem contradictory until we realize that Buddhism presupposes a healthy sense of self. Indeed, first we have to establish a self before we can let go of one.

It all makes complete sense when you consider Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and his contention that self-transcendence (letting go of the self) is the highest on the hierarchy of needs.

Maslow’s modified hierarchy of needs can be further broken down into eight levels.

1. Biological and Physiological needs - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc.
2. Safety needs - protection from elements, security, order, law, limits, stability, etc.
3. Belongingness and Love needs - work group, family, affection, relationships, etc.
4. Esteem needs - self-esteem, achievement, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige, managerial responsibility, etc.
5. Cognitive needs - knowledge, meaning, etc.
6. Aesthetic needs - appreciation and search for beauty, balance, form, etc.
7. Self-Actualization needs - realising personal potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences.
8. Transcendence needs - helping others to achieve self-actualization.

Self-transcendence actually means going beyond a prior form or state of oneself. Mystical experience is thought of as a particularly advanced state of self-transcendence, in which the sense of a separate self is abandoned.

But self-transcendence is not just for mystics. It has some very real-world benefits, according to the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) tests:

Self-Transcendence quantifies the extent to which individuals conceive themselves as integral parts of the universe as a whole. Self-transcendent individuals are spiritual, unpretentious, humble, and fulfilled.

These traits are adaptively advantageous when people are confronted with suffering, illness, or death, which is inevitable with advancing age. They are disadvantageous in most modern societies where idealism, modesty, and meditative search for meaning might interfere with the acquisition of wealth and power.

People who are low in Self-Transcendence are described as practical, self-conscious, materialistic, and controlling. Such individuals are expected to be well adapted in most Western societies because of their rational objectivity and materialistic success.

However, they consistently have difficulty accepting suffering, loss of control, personal and material losses, and death, which lead to adjustment problems particularly with advancing age.

Just as you can’t expect a starving man to care about global warming and the environment, you can’t build your higher self on a shaky foundation of low self-esteem. Before you can achieve self-transcendence, you must first meet your basic needs - for self-esteem and self-actualization.

It is not possible to love another person unconditionally, without first learning to love YOURSELF unconditionally. Many so-called spiritual people or mystics simply fail to get this. I’ve seen many of them trying to achieve self-transcendence without establishing a healthy sense of self.

I believe that many so-called mystics are actually gentle, but troubled souls, who use meditation and mysticism as a way to bliss out rather than face reality. In doing this, they’re using meditation as an addiction and just deluding themselves that they’re going to reach a higher plane of existence.

Only when their world comes crashing down do they realise that mysticism and spirituality (or religion) can never substitute for healthy self-love and self-esteem.

Recommended Reading:

How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving by David Richo

Drawing on the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, How to Be an Adult in Relationships explores five hallmarks of mindful loving and how they play a key role in our relationships throughout life:

• Attention to the present moment; observing, listening, and noticing all the feelings at play in our relationships.
• Acceptance of ourselves and others just as we are.
• Appreciation of all our gifts, our limits, our longings, and our poignant human predicament.
• Affection shown through holding and touching in respectful ways.
• Allowing life and love to be just as they are, with all their ecstasy and ache, without trying to take control.

When deeply understood and applied, these five simple concepts€what Richo calls the five A’s€form the basis of mature love. They help us to move away from judgment, fear, and blame to a position of openness, compassion, and realism about life and relationships. By giving and receiving these five A’s, relationships become deeper and more meaningful, and they become a ground for personal transformation.

Ten Steps to Self-Respect by Dr. Wayne Dyer

Popularity: 23% [?]

A lot of women (and men), myself included, have a very hard time letting go of a relationship that’s not meant to be.

We hold on to the illusion that this person is the One for us, and that if we don’t have him or her, we’ll never find somebody new.

Holding on to disappointment, hurt, blame, anger, resentment, and bitterness, we convince ourselves that all men are jerks or all women are bitches.

If you’ve just got out of a relationship and are harbouring a lot of resentment against your partner or against the opposite sex, now is NOT the time to start dating again.

Anger and bitterness will poison even the most loving relationship. When we hang on to baggage from past relationships, we end up projecting our pain on to others in our lives €œ our families, children and, eventually, our new partners.

Our emotional baggage is usually rooted in our relationships with our own parents, or in bad relationships we’ve had in the past. We have to lighten our load and heal our pain before we can love again.

Some of the practices you need to cultivate in order to heal yourself are:

· Radical Personal Responsibility: Take responsibility for the role you played in your relationship, either by taking inappropriate action, not acting altogether or expecting too much. Stop blaming your partner. Own your feelings, so you can change them.

· Self-Awareness: Are there patterns that keep repeating in your relationships? Do you have a tendency to get into relationships with abusive people, or become abusive yourself? Become mindful of your reactions to people and situations. Learn to identify your patterns, and the unhealthy beliefs that are causing them.

· Acceptance: Accept yourself and your partner the way you are. Accept the fact that the relationship was not meant to be, that it didn’t work because it was not your highest and best.

· Forgiveness: Learn to forgive yourself for all the damage that your anger and pain may have caused, and forgive others for being human and acting out their own anger and pain.

· Gratitude: Be grateful that you’re out of a bad relationship, so you can be with someone better suited to your needs. Be grateful for all the lessons you’ve learned from your partner.

· Compassion: Learn to look at all people as human beings dealing with their own pain. Spend some time seeing the world through their eyes and you’ll become less judgmental.

· Detachment: Learn to let go of unhealthy attachments to people, things and situations.

· Independence: Stop expecting other people to give you the love and acceptance you should be giving yourself. Learn to meet your own needs, let go of expectations, and enter a healthy, inter-dependent relationship.

· Optimism: Optimism is not essential, but it makes life so much easier. It was my optimistic outlook, positive attitude and belief that everything happens for the best, that helped me bounce back from tragedy. Have faith that the best is yet to come.

It’s been over a year since my husband passed away and I’ve spent the better part of the last year dealing with my own pain and grief. I realised that until I took responsibility for my own feelings, I was never going to be able to have a healthy partnership with a man.

It took a lot of tears, hard work, introspection, and spiritual practice to break the chains of the past. What made it harder was that I chose to do it on my own, instead of taking help.

But it was worth every moment! And the feeling of freedom and contentment that I experienced was just awesome.

Getting rid of my anger and hurt helped me stop blaming others for my pain, and allowed me to see men as they really are €œ wonderful, sensitive human beings who have the capacity to love, to care, and to hurt just as deeply as women.

It also allowed me to love life again, to see the beauty in every experience, to be non-judgmental and open to new relationships. I’m in no hurry to start dating again, but I know that I have the maturity to separate my own issues from those that arise in a relationship between two people.

I’ve also learned that if something is not working, it’s probably not meant to be. You can’t force someone to love you, just as you can’t force commitment or marriage. These are stages that should happen naturally, when it feels right for both people.

Contrary to popular opinion (and the myths propagated by sad love songs) love is not meant to hurt. If you’re in pain, what you’re experiencing is not love, but attachment or codependence. Too often we fall in love, not with our partner, but with the IDEA of being in love.

It’s best to let go of a relationship that’s causing too much pain. Instead of wallowing in the past and writing your own sad love song, do your inner work, get rid of the anger and disappointment and get on with your life. Let go of your partner with love, so you can move past your hurt and learn to love again.

Here’s a list of some books that helped me in my own quest to let go of the past.

Recommended Reading:

Mars and Venus Starting Over: A Practical Guide for Finding Love Again After a Painful Breakup, Divorce, or the Loss of a Loved One
This book by relationship expert, John Gray, probably helped me more than any other book I read in the last year. It has practical exercises for working out your anger, pain and resentment. I credit these exercises with helping me clear my old baggage and get free.

Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner Child
This amazing book by Margaret Paul helped me identify my own patterns of codependence and learn to meet my emotional needs without turning to another person. Get it if you have emotional dependence issues.

It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken: The Smart Girl’s Break-Up Buddy
Extremely funny and enjoyable, this book is a hilarious look at break-ups and shows you how to deal with your break-up in a healthy and dignified (read, non-psychotic) manner.

He’s Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys
If you’re in denial about whether the man in your life is really the One, you gotta read this funny take on the sorry excuses men make to avoid telling you the truth €œ that they’d much rather be somewhere else than with you.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Dr. Cherie Carter-Scott’s rules for life - also known as ‘Ten Rules for Being Human‘ are a map for understanding and pursuing personal development, and for helping others to understand and develop too.

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it’s yours to keep for the entire period.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, “life.”

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately “work.”

4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons does not end. There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.

6. “There” is no better a place than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”

7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life’s questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

10. You will forget all this at birth.

Cherie Carter-Scott’s Books:

If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules

If Love Is a Game, These Are the Rules: 10 Rules for Finding Love and Creating Long-Lasting, Authentic Relationships

Popularity: 8% [?]

Last night, I had a few insights involving my relationships with people I’ve attracted in this lifetime.

As I tossed and turned in my bed, trying vainly to get some shut eye, I realised the reason I was attracted to certain people was that I was able to see them at the level of their soul - their higher self.

When we’re in a non-judgmental, or empathic, frame of mind (and when I’m not beating myself up, I usually am) we see a person for who they truly are, rather than the persona they present to the outside world.

The ability to be non-judgmental had a downside for me. It often made me blind to personality flaws and dysfunctional behaviour in the people I attracted. I remember telling myself to give them the benefit of the doubt, even when I noticed something amiss.

My naive, gullible nature often frustrated my husband, especially on the occasions I ended up hurt and disillusioned when people didn’t behave the way I expected them to. It was one of the many flaws I had to take responsibility for resolving in this lifetime.

It also made me realise the value of trusting my intuition, instead of explaining away dysfunctional behaviour with logic and rational thinking. I learned to listen to that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and sense of fatigue - signals that warn me when something or someone is not right for me.

Some of my relationships ended well. Some didn’t. I think of them as “collateral damage” (an overused term among those seeking to justify their wrongdoings). When my relationships ended badly, it was usually because I was acting from ego and fear at the time.

It would be ideal if everyone acted from their higher selves all the time. But that’s only possible in an ideal world. Most of the time we let our fears - of inadequacy, of failure, of being unlovable - overcome the ability to act from our Higher self, to act from love.

We encounter many soulmates in each life, as friends, acquaintances or lovers. Many of them come to us with personality flaws or dysfunctional behaviour that makes them incompatible as mates.

These flaws have a purpose. They’re meant to trigger those very fears that we decided to overcome before we made our earthly sojourn.

If we overcome our fears, we reach a higher level of existence. If we don’t, we keep attracting the same sort of people into our lives, living out the same patterns of abuse, until we’re ready to face our fears and learn our lessons.

Note: If this past life stuff is all ancient hocus pocus to you, I suggest you amble on over to the Heal Past Lives site and subscribe to the free Clear Your Karma course. Even if you don’t believe in reincarnation, it’ll make for some interesting reading.

It’s up to us to attract the soulmate that we’re most compatible with on the personality level. We can only do that by aligning with our Higher selves.

And that’s exactly what I plan to do - go “back to school” to get in touch with my higher self and align with my life purpose. It doesn’t matter that the “school” is a search engine and my assignments involve incessant reading and ruminating over my personality defects.

As for my past loves, I’d like to keep my rose-coloured glasses on and remember them the way I first saw them - as shining, pure souls with an immense capacity to give and receive love. The way they were before their earthly experiences made them disconnect from their higher selves.

These insights didn’t come to me out of nowhere. Some are courtesy Love By Design, an ebook that shows you how to align yourself to attract the soulmate you are most compatible with in this lifetime, or to fit better with the one you are with.

As relationship books go, Love By Design is a breath of fresh air, because it has none of those stupid tricks and (yawn!) seduction techniques that other books in this genre tend to focus on.

Of course, the aligning part takes time and effort, but no one said it was easy. And the results should be more than worth it, don’t you think?

Recommended Reading:

Cherie Carter-Scott’s Rules Of Life
Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood, said Helen Keller. Dr. Cherie Carter-Scott’s Rules of Life, also known as ‘The Ten Rules For Being Human’, are a map for understanding and pursuing personal development, and for helping others to understand and develop too.

Popularity: 9% [?]

If, like me, you’re an empath, INFJ, Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) or Type 4 Personality, you know how difficult it can be to create and maintain healthy boundaries in our closest relationships.

The inability to maintain boundaries often results in problems with assertiveness and saying “no” when we need to.

Our instinctive tendency is to withdraw in situations where we feel our boundaries are being violated. It’s often caused me to go, Greta Garbo-like, into my own shell, feeling strongly that “I want to be alone.”

Elaine La Joie has an excellent article on the Intuitive Introverted Withdrawal Pattern that creates the unconscious tendency of sensitive people to withdraw instead of communicate.

In my life, this tendency created a fear of intimacy. Everytime I got too close to a person, it triggered this fear and I ended up sabotaging my relationships by withdrawing. In her article on Fear Of Intimacy, Margaret Paul notes that

When we learn how to speak up for ourselves and not allow others to invade, smother, dominate and control us, we will no longer fear losing ourselves in a relationship.

Elaine also notes that sometimes the best energetic boundary is speaking up for ourselves and our needs.

Empaths know they have a different set of needs than most people, and so we can get the idea that our needs don’t count as much because they seem unreasonable or too different from the rest of the world.

Learning how to speak our needs unapologetically is a basic step in proper self-care. Yes, we take the first scary step in admitting who we are, but how else are people to truly know us?

Assertiveness Training is an essential skill for Empaths who need to learn how to create and maintain healthy boundaries. Assertiveness is about finding a middle way between aggression and passivity that best respects the personal boundaries of all relationship partners.

Creating boundaries can topple the balance of our relationships. But for the sake of our self-worth and self-respect, we may have to end relationships that cannot adjust to these new dynamics, or recreate a balance in relationships that we can’t end, like those with our family.

In her article on Rebalancing Relationships, Elaine writes that,

Many empaths know what is likely to happen if they insist on new behaviors, and so choose not to set new boundaries that would rebalance the relationship, all in order to avoid unpleasantness.

This only leads to resentment and more pretense for the empath, and eventually loss of self worth and self respect. They wonder if they are uncompassionate and selfish, completely ignoring the cost to themselves. Our souls and our subconscious are paying attention to this lack of self-care and self-respect.

If we consciously choose to stay in these relationships, we will be up against a permanent block to the unfolding of our spiritual gifts, and we will not mature into fully individuated and conscious human beings.

Type 4 Personalities sometimes exhibit unhealthy behaviour by giving too much. It often ends up making us feel drained and unappreciated.

When we learn to question our unconscious motives, we realise that we often give because we’ve grown up with the belief that to get love we have to give love, and that the needs of others are more important than our own.

But giving with expectation taints the very act of giving. To give in a healthy manner, our hearts must be pure and free of expectations. To do this, we need to take care of our own needs and to give to ourselves first, before we can give to others in a healthy, loving manner.

Elaine’s article on The Giving Persona has some useful advice on dealing with this problem.

Many empaths and beginning intuitives have fallen into the trap of giving too much of themselves away. We believe subconsciously that the way to receive love is to earn it by doing loving things. As children we may have been taught that doing loving things and making others happy is what it means to be a good boy or good girl.

If we believe this, we may ignore our own needs, or we may come to believe that we have no personal needs, that the only need we really have is to make others in our lives happy with us. When we have taken on this Giving Persona, we are hypervigilant to the needs of others, and always ready to please.

When healthy, people with this personality type can be very generous and loving, but they have figured out how to access their own inner needs and honor those needs before and sometimes instead of the needs of others.

When empaths move toward maturity and awareness, the first thing they must do is learn to set boundaries with the very people to whom they have been giving their emotional energy away.

In the end, people with a Giving Persona can become very loving human beings. But, the whole key is to go down to that subconscious level and realize that their worth does not depend on how much they please others, how much they give to others, or how much joy they bring to others.

Once they start valuing themselves and their individual needs, they become a whole person. Once they are whole, they are truly able to support the others around them.

For empaths and Type 4s, emotional literacy is the first step in creating healthy boundaries. Becoming mindful of our emotions and reactions in the moment can help us make better choices for ourselves and others.

Mindfulness or present moment awareness is a spiritual practice whereby a person is intentionally aware of his or her thoughts and actions in the present moment, non-judgmentally. In Buddhism, mindfulness is considered a prerequisite for developing insight and wisdom.

Incorporating a spiritual practice that teaches mindfulness (I use meditation and tai chi), is an essential step to personal growth. Especially for empaths and intuitives, spiritual growth goes hand in hand with psychological growth. As this article on Personality, Essence, & Spirituality notes:

Psychology without spirituality is arid and ultimately meaningless, while spirituality without grounding in psychological work leads to vanity and illusions. Either way, disappointment and deception result. To be most effective, spirituality and psychology need to go hand in hand to reinforce the best in each other.

Radical Personal Responsibility is another practice I recommend to empaths. We often tend to take on another person’s emotions or project our own emotions on to others.

An empath ignorant of her emotions and unaware of her emotional boundaries can end up blaming another person for her distress. Taking responsibility for our feelings and the role we play in situations is the first step towards acceptance and change.

Paul and Layne Cutright have an excellent ebook (see reading list below) that teaches how to assume personal responsibility and deal with upsets. They write that,

When you assume radical personal responsibility, you live in a truth that proclaims:

I am responsible for how I allow others to affect me.

In a world of forces beyond my control, I can learn to be the keeper of my own heart and mind.

Even when things appear not to be going my way, and I am upon an emotional sea of crossing and diverging currents, I can still navigate my way to my ultimate good fortune.

I proclaim that I am not a victim of the world I see. I am a co-creator of it. Let love and wisdom be my moral compass, and let clarity be the wind in my sails.

Recommended Reading:

Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No: Making Life Right When It Feels All Wrong by Herbert Phd Fensterheim, Jean Baer

This book is like the bible on Assertiveness Training and shows through case studies and examples how learning to say no and set boundaries with others can help anyone overcome their problems with assertiveness. Essential reading for empaths.

Assertiveness Training Download

Say what you mean, calmly and clearly, right when you need to. Assertiveness training often misses a vital ingredient - the ability to stay calm while stating your case, which often causes people to stop trying - they think being more assertive is beyond them.

Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner Child by Margaret Paul

Because empaths live in the world of their emotions, they often feel so overwhelmed by their own painful emotions, that they tend to deny them and dissociate, even from themselves. But suppressing painful emotions creates pathological conditions that can take years to resolve. Getting in touch with your intuition or inner child and learning to nurture your own feelings is essential for empaths who want to achieve emotional maturity.

The Highly Sensitive Person in Love: Understanding and Managing Relationships When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine Aron

As a reader notes, HSP’s have difficulty making a relationship to their healthy creative selves; they have often learned to pathologize their gifts of intuition and introspection, depth and empathy. Separated from self, it should be no surprise that they also often become alienated from their partners, when they are in sync with themselves, they can be warm, compassionate, spontaneous and profoundly present in love relationships.

Mindfulness by Ellen J. Langer

To be mindful, stressing process over outcome, allows free rein to intuition and creativity, and opens us to new information and perspectives, says the author.

You’re Never Upset For The Reason You Think by Paul and Layne Cutright

Learn a powerful, effective and easy to use tool for resolving any upset in record time. The CURE is a 13 step process for enlightened conflict resolution that can be done alone or with another to quickly get over anything.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Are you truly alive? Do you feel that you’re living the life you’ve always wanted to lead? How many of us really feel fulfilled in every aspect of our lives?

If we have a happy family life, our careers are not what we hoped they would be. If our careers are soaring, we’re often busy getting a divorce or stuck in a dead-end relationship.

Most of us live lives of quiet desperation, knowing that we’re more than we have become. That we can do so much more than we’re doing.

We become dead shells of ourselves, eking out an existence, giving up on the dreams that we had for ourselves, allowing our creativity and potential to languish in the process we call life.

To live fully takes courage. The courage to change. The courage to hurt. The courage to fail. Courage is defined as, “the quality of character which shows itself in facing danger undaunted or in acting despite fear or lack of confidence.”

The fear of change keeps us from living our lives to the fullest. Fear is what prevents us from dumping that lousy job, starting a new venture, breaking off a failing relationship, making a commitment to a new life, a new love.

Change is scary, but if you’re willing to take the step, you’ll find yourself living your best life, playing your best game.

I used to have a fear of being alone that came from childhood fears of abandonment. Being on my own in the world was a very scary option for me. My fears often caused me to settle for relationships that did not serve me.

Ever since I decided that I preferred to be alone and happy than be in a relationship and miserable, I’ve discovered that there’s so much more to life.

I now have time to do the things I’ve always wanted to do, learn things I’ve always wanted to learn, develop myself in ways I never thought possible.

I’ve also opened myself to the possibility of new ventures and new relationships that allow me to express myself fully.

I’ve never felt as alive as I do today. And the best part is that I don’t need anyone else to make me feel that way.

The way to overcome fear is to face it squarely, and do the thing you fear most. If you’re not happy with your life, you only have yourself to blame.

You always have a choice. To change. To grow. To follow your dreams. To be totally alive.

It takes courage to be the best you can be. And it won’t be easy. Change never is.

But it could mean the difference between remaining trapped in the prison of your fears, and living the life of your dreams.

So find your courage, face your fears and take the first step towards becoming the fully alive person you were meant to be.

Recommended Reading:

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers

Embracing Fear: and Finding the Courage to Live Your Life by Thom Rutledge

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz

The Top 10 Steps for Tapping into Courage

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Continuing with my series on the Stupid Mistakes Women Make In Relationships, one issue I feel very strongly about is that women should be completely independent of their man.

Healthy, secure men are more attracted to independent, confident women. If you’re looking for a healthy relationship with a mature, confident man, you’d better be able to take care of your own needs.

Only insecure men like a woman who’s clingy and dependent, and that’s not the sort of man you want to attract. If you’re comfortable being the “damsel in distress” looking for a man to “rescue” you, you’d also better get comfortable with being the doormat or the “discard”, when he trades you in for another model.

Independence promotes self-worth and self-esteem, and gives you the confidence to walk away from a bad or abusive relationship. There are five main forms of independence worth discussing here:

1. Physical Independence:

This includes the ability to take care of your own physical needs. Unless you suffer from a serious illness or disability, buying groceries, managing your bank accounts, and paying bills are things you should be able to manage, even if you live with someone else.

I’ve seen a lot of co-dependent women fake illness (or choose to believe that they’re ill) to get attention and get taken care of by their family. Really, how empowering can it be to have someone else take care of all your needs?

If you’re a codependent, you need to start taking responsibility for your health and your own physical needs. As a burden to your family or spouse, you’re always vulnerable to abuse.

2. Sexual Independence:

Learning to pleasure yourself without needing another man (or woman) to do it for you can be the most empowering thing you can do for yourself. If you can learn to pleasure yourself and fulfil your own sexual needs, you’ll never have to settle for a relationship that doesn’t serve you.

Because of conditioning by family and society, too many Indian women are sexually repressed and not even comfortable with exploring their own bodies. Sexual repression and false beliefs about sex and our own bodies often lead to sexual incompatibility and unhappiness in marriage.

For the sake of your marriage and relationships, learn to get comfortable with your own body. If you know how to pleasure yourself, you can help your partner pleasure you better.

Fortunately, things are changing even in India, and the younger generation seem to be more comfortable with their sexuality. Sometimes it leads to sexual excesses, which again are not good for healthy self-esteem, but I guess it comes with the territory.

3. Financial Independence:

A lot of women still look to a man as a provider and a source of security. Marriage proposals show this tendency very clearly. A man who has a home and car is seen as a better match than one who does’nt.

If you depend on a man financially, you’ll always be at his mercy, willing to tolerate any crap he gives you. Relationships built on a foundation of need are doomed to fail, or be unhappy for one or both people.

I personally believe that, unless she is taking care of kids and home (which is a job in itself) no woman should be financially dependent on a man. At the very least, she should be educated or capable of using her skills and talents to stand on her own two feet, should the man walk out of the relationship.

Being financially independent not only enhances your own self-worth, but gives you the freedom to make better choices in relationships. You’re less likely to tolerate disrespectful or abusive behaviour if you know you can fend for yourself.

4. Emotional Independence:

This is the ability to deal with emotional issues and problems on your own. If you act clingy, you’ll attract insecure men who are more likely to abuse you when things get rough.

Being clingy and dependent on a man for your emotional needs will not only promote abuse, it will also drive away a great many good men looking for a strong, independent woman.

If you’re having trouble understanding your own emotions and needs, I recommend you read Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner Child by Margaret Paul.

5. Spiritual Independence:

This includes the courage to think for yourself, have your own ideas, and follow the spiritual path that feels right for you.

Most healthy men respect a women who is an independent thinker. Independent thinking women are less likely to attract controlling, abusive men who try to control what you think, read or believe in.

Becoming independent in all these ways gives you the freedom to enter into a healthy, authentic, inter-dependent relationship on your own terms.

Recommended Reading:

I’ve included some resources here that have helped me understand the issues of codependence in relationships.

Codependence: Painful Adult Behaviors Learned in Childhood

An excellent article that explores the origins of codependence, and why women are more prone to codependent behaviour.

What Men Wish Women Knew

Talks about the kinds of relationships men desire with a woman at different stages in their growth.

The Real Rules: How to Find the Right Man for the Real You by Barbra De Angelis

I highly recommend this book if you want to learn what it takes to stop playing manipulative games (that only attract unhealthy, manipulative men) and build healthy, authentic relationships with a good man.

Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl-A Woman’s Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship by Sherry Argov

I didn’t like the title of this book at first, and I still think it’s misleading, because what Sherry Argov means by the word “bitch” is a confident, self-assured, independent woman who knows how to get her own needs met. There’s nothing even remotely “bitchy” about that. But I do recommend this book if you need to understand what it takes to overcome codependence, stop acting clingy and get the respect you deserve in a relationship.

Additional Reading:

Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself by Melody Beattie

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A couple of days ago, I took off to watch Pirates of The Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest. Awesome, fun, must-see movie! I so love pirate stories, Capn. Jack Sparrow and Johnny Depp’s amazing ability to constantly reinvent himself.

Having some time to kill before the movie, I decided to drop in at one of my favourite places to hang out, the Oxford Bookstore at Churchgate. They have a pretty good self-help section with all my favourite authors - Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Louise Hay, Cherie Huber and more.

I picked up a great little book called Loving Yourself: Four Steps to a Happier You by Daphne Rose Kingma for just Rs 150. Money well spent - it’s one of the best books I’ve read on the topic of learning to enhance your sense of self-worth and self-esteem.

Louise Hay said it best when she wrote that the lack of self love is at the root of ALL human problems. Her book, You Can Heal Your Life, is required reading for those who’ve experienced childhood trauma or had their self-esteem decimated because of painful life circumstances.

Having experienced both, her advice helped me look at my life from a completely new perspective. In the last few years, I came to realise that “loving myself was the greatest work I would do in this life.”

I found and used techniques to help me remove limiting beliefs that were preventing me from accepting and loving myself unconditionally. In the process, I healed a lot of my scars, and found a new self-assurance and confidence in my abilities.

I learned to value myself more, and know that I deserve the best life has to offer. I learned that I can give of myself without having to tolerate disrespectful behaviour in any relationship or situation. I learned to be my own best friend, to stop criticising myself for my mistakes and take good care of my own feelings first.

Healthy self love is not narcissism, which is really a lack of self-esteem masquerading as over-confidence. Narcissists are unable to love anyone else - they are in love with an image of themselves. If you were really a narcissist, you wouldn’t lack self love, because what they really lack is empathy and remorse.

As Kingma notes in Loving Yourself: Four Steps to a Happier You, healthy self-love not only contributes to better relationships and personal achievements, but enhances the ability to be compassionate and generous toward others. Her four recommendations for overcoming patterns of self-criticism and moving toward self-acceptance include:

• Mastering the ability to speak out honestly
• Taking actions that lead to growth
• Carving out one’s own emotional space without others’ interference, and
• Focusing on a path beyond the self, via spiritual or other pursuits.

To that list, I’d also add learning to -

• Forgive yourself and others
• Exercise self-discipline
• Become self-aware, and
• Achieve personal mastery

I found spiritual practices like meditation, yoga, and Tai Chi very helpful to me personally, but joining a gym, going to church, community service, or any other spiritual and physical practice may work just as well for you.

Learning how others have done it before can help, but you have to find what works for you personally. The key is to work towards your goals consistently, and with determination. Don’t expect quick results. Any process of change takes time and effort.

I wish you well on your own journey of self-love. Do share your own experiences and what has worked for you.

Popularity: 4% [?]