Sacred Relationship — Why Date Night Isn’t Enough
The best way to support the mothers, fathers and children of families is to have families that are filled with love.
Where there is love all the many stresses of life become more manageable. As parents we are the ones who set the foundation of a loving family and when we create a gentle, loving and mutually supportive relationship between us, then this creates the example for all family interactions.
Relationship is a shared energy between two people. From the ancient sages to the modern physics of Einstein and String Theory it is understood that everything is energy. Whenever I think a thought it sends out energy into the universe that has real effects on others in addition to shaping my own feelings and perceptions. In the end, my relationship with my spouse is the sum total of all of the thoughts and feelings (energy) that we have had towards each other.
To achieve a sacred relationship we must choose only positive thoughts and feelings towards our partner and they towards us. We must feed our relationships with pure, positive emotion, thought and attention and reduce negative thoughts and neglect. While simple to say, this is not easily done. Most of the thoughts and feelings that we have in a day are reactions created by set patterns and attitudes that live in our subconscious. These are habits and beliefs that we learned as young children from our parents, teachers and the culture in which we were raised. In the end, the work of our relationships comes back to our own personal development in nurturing the will, strength and skills needed to replace our learned “programming” with one that creates the life that we want.
The best way that I have found to change old habits involves three steps:
1 Become aware any time the old habitual way of thinking is activated
2 Stop and make a choice to respond in a different way and
3 Take the action or choose the thought that is consistent with the new desired habit.
There have been many approaches suggested to aid in understanding and changing your subconscious habits including meditation, mantra work and neural linguistic programming to name a few. One approach that I have found to work very well was to create simple exercises designed to strengthen the amount and quality of energy that I sent to my wife on a daily basis. When we made a decision to drastically improve the quality of our relationship I instituted three simple practices:
1 I would give her a hug and kiss each and every time we saw each other or left each other’s presence,
2 I would make sure that each day I would say at least one positive thing about her to another person and
3 I would do a small creative project for her each day.
What these practices did was to increase my focus on her as my beloved even when I was at work or doing other things that normally take my attention away from our relationship. These practices created a new habit of sending high quality loving energy towards her throughout each day. Within a matter of weeks, we saw a significant improvement in the quality and feeling of our relationship that resonated throughout our entire family. So while date night is a good start, to really create the highest quality loving relationships you must not only spend time connecting with your partner, but also ensure that your thought connections are only of the highest quality loving energy. Your relationship will always reflect whatever quality of energy you put into it.
Timothy Daulter, PhD is the author of Practicing Happy: A Spiritual Workout for Happiness and Fulfillment in Your Life. Tim and his wife Anni offer couples relationship retreats, for more information please click to http://www.sacredpregnancy.com/sacred-pregnancy-training/sacred-relationships/