 This article, the fourth in a brilliant series by Stephen and Lynda Kane, looks at the ways of beckoning your real relationships through awakening your life energies. Real relationships are those which are nourishing, successful – and change both of your lives in unpredictable ways! What do you want?Most people want to be loved, to be appreciated and cherished. But although people want love, giving it isn't so easy after the initial buzz. Over time, it costs too much energy. Specifically, the energies of attention, service and acceptance.
We all "grow up" on a diet of fairytales and Hollywood. The Prince on the white horse – bulging with testosterone in every possible way – money, sex, rock and roll; the Princess (preferably in bed) – drop dead gorgeous, a cordon bleu cook, a dutiful wife and a perfect mother; a sublime intelligence and wit. And, of course, a great lay.
Storyspinners know their audience. They simply feed back to us contrived embellishments on our most basic drives, incrementally amplifying our desires over years to a subliminal frenzy of lust for the "perfect" partner.
Of course, we're doomed to disappointment. We've been set up for it through being raised in a culture that values image over substance, medium to message, fashion promising more than it ever can deliver. We are constantly encouraged to always want more of the fantasy – and, for some, you can have it. Just don't stop until you drop. If you slow down, reality might catch up.
Unlike Hollywood, real life relationships tend to subscribe more to the tough-love school of drama. Blood, sweat, tears. It can be like wrestling in mud – but with you as participant rather than audience, and neither referee nor shower in sight.
It's a hard sell. Starry nights and romance with a merry-go-round of titillating lovers or cellulite, bad attitude, warts and all? No wonder Hollywood does so well. Better to move right along and not hang around long enough to find out what "happily ever after" really entails. More to LifeBut then, on the other hand, we're running out of steam, hormones or whatever keeps us up at night. You may start to feel that there must be more to life than just keeping your nerve-endings twitching while having yet another same old good time. Maybe there's more. But what is it? And where can you find it?
Sex, wealth, beauty, power, charisma are some of the other universal desires that are plugged relentlessly by the media. Ironically they often have little to do with love and, frequently, oppose it altogether. We want every crumb of the cake. More is better. Success is measured by how much you're getting...
Of course, there's nothing wrong with any of these forms of success – they just don't count for much when the issue is the quality of your relationship. If you want a partner who is able to take you to places of being you otherwise can't reach, who enables you to grow beyond yourself – and grows along with you – you can't afford to be led too much by a lover's most obvious assets.
Perhaps, before thinking about a relationship, it makes more sense to consider yourself... what do you want to be? Or, more obviously, what do you not want to continue being? The "problem" with a real relationship is that it confronts you with the need to change. But supposing you don't want to change? Maybe you're happy the way you are? If so, don't rock the boat. Go for what you like. And drop it when it makes you edgy.
I don't mean by this that a real relationship is some kind of masochists' picnic, but it will bring up your stuff in ways for which you are unprepared and, initially, unable to recognize. A real relationship is an evolutionary process that forces change for its own survival. It can be a lot of fun but it isn't necessarily comfortable.
So, are you happy being who you are? Or are there bits of you you aren't too impressed by and would like to change? The true answers to these questions determine what kind of relationship you can tolerate. Relationship bootcamp can be a tough ride... and you never know what's waiting at the other end.
A real relationship changes your life in unpredictable ways. Does that sound good... or just a pain in the ass? Being in a Real Relationship
"Relationships" aren't just people who choose to be together. They're real. Or they're not. Or they're partially real and can become more so. So what does this mean?
Well, when you have sex with someone you exchange energy with them. In other words, you walk away with some of their energy inside you, and vice versa. Their energy then starts to affect you – your feelings, thoughts and one, more or many areas of your life and awareness.
Sex is not the only means by which people exchange energy but it is one of the most powerful. Others include your a priori energetic connections with your parents, sudden shocks, repeated contact with others (eg. at work), highly-charged group activities and so on.
When someone else's energy enters your body it can:
- Flow down and out
- Stay where it is
- Flow back to the other person
- Flow up through your body
And, just to confuse matters, it always does two or more of these...!
So, to avoid this confusion, let's just concentrate on what makes a relationship real, which is one in which the energy of the other person flows up through your body. The reason we call this a "real" relationship is that it induces your own energy to ascend as well – which causes your consciousness to grow. Any other kind of relationship eats your energy or, in plain English, damages you and your future in multiple ways – even if you're having a great time for a while, or a comfortable time for the rest of your life.
Experience Life and Awareness
The more energy you have higher up in your body, the higher the quality of your experience of being alive. A real relationship increases your quality of life and awareness. Relationships that don't cause your energy to ascend are a recipe for trouble – including troubles that may not obviously have anything to do with the relationship itself (eg. like developing a problem with your health, work, creativity or children).
So how many relationships are "real" when viewed from this point of view? Not a lot. We tend to base our choices on others' most obvious qualities along with mutual beliefs, backgrounds, intelligence, prejudices or natures. Most of us prefer relationships that aren't uncomfortably challenging.
When a relationship causes your energy to ascend, it causes you to:
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See areas of your life and yourself in new, empowering ways
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Perceive how to deal with problems more effectively
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Recognize possibilities and opportunities that hadn't occurred to you before
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Discover abilities you haven't previously experienced
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Become free of previous limitations, conditions or difficulties
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Grow increasingly aware of the spirit of your beloved
A real relationship is challenging, frustrating, annoying, intriguing and ultimately rewarding. It confronts you with your weaknesses, calls on all your strengths and empowers you to change and grow beyond your current self. It never gets boring – not because you're getting laid in yet another position but because it's constantly moving you forward into a new way of life and a new awareness of who you are capable of becoming.
A real relationship is a form of personal development that cannot be emulated by any other means. You choose it and re-choose it every day – or you may choose to avoid it and keep re-avoiding it every day. You are forced, by the fact of being alive, to constantly make the choice to be in a real relationship or not. Your life – like everyone else's life – keeps presenting you with the opportunity. And you, like everyone else, choose to recognize it or ignore it because, deep down inside, you know it's going to take you where you don't want to go, which is to confront the behaviors, beliefs and attachments that keep you stuck with yourself as you currently are.
Realizing Your Real Relationships
Everyone, without exception, is periodically presented with the opportunity to enter into a real relationship. Most people turn it down, repeatedly.
Recognizing and developing a real relationship in your life requires three ongoing life practices or disciplines:
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Acceptance means to accept others as they are, neither reacting negatively to differences nor trying to make them more like you
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Attention means to make space for others' point of view, neither attached to your own nor to yours being accepted by them
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Service means to respect and respond to others' needs and requests in preference to your own.
If you develop these three life practices as habits with respect to others you will come to:
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Recognize the current and future real and unreal relationships in your life
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Attract a primary real relationship
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Cultivate your primary real relationship
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Develop a way of life in which all your ongoing relationships become real
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Beckon opportunities for happiness and fulfilment you cannot otherwise receive
These benefits result from daily acceptance of others plus attention and service to others. They occur because these life practices change or purify the energies of your body and mind. They aren't easy. They challenge what you want, think you want, know, think you know and every other good reason for maintaining your position and thus avoiding developing a real relationship.
Attention, acceptance and service as constant disciplines are simple in concept, difficult in practice and completely life-transforming in effect. They are the only way to wholly realize the possibility and power of a real relationship in your life.
Learning these new behaviors is a long-term inner struggle. The urge to not accept another, to not attend to them, to not be of service to them arises again and again. And every time it arises – with all its accompanying good reasons – you make the choice to succumb to it or overcome it. Every time you re-choose to accept, to attend, to be of service, your energy slightly changes. And this change repeated a thousand times then ten thousand times and more brings you a life you never knew before.
Your energies make your life the way it is. The good things, the bad things and the lack of things. How is each area of your life today? What's working or not working? What feels good or maybe not so good? The life practices for real relationships generate the energies you need to make your life work in the ways you most need it to work – which are often ways you never even noticed until they start going right for a change...
BodyEnergy for Real Relationships
Another way of examining if an intimate relationship is right for you is described on page 198 of Hidden Secrets
of Real Health. This energy test requires a basic knowledge of bioenergetic testing as described in Hidden Secrets
of Real Health or the BodyTuning Pendulum for Hidden Secrets
of Real Health.
The advantage of a BodyEnergy (previously "BodyTuning") test is that it gives you an on-the-spot answer to your question by determining how your energy is being affected by the subject of the test – such as another person. The disadvantage is that it can give you a false sense of confidence in your ability to understand what's "going on," energetically-speaking.
No amount of testing substitutes for the real awareness generated through constantly practicing the three life practices for real relationships. BodyEnergy tests are a perfect accompaniment to these practices, but should not be seen as a substitute for them. Only through acceptance, attention and service can you upgrade your own energy sufficiently to attract, recognize and increasingly realize the most profound and positively challenging form of relationship in your life.
 Now read the follow-up theme to Beckoning Your Real Relationships: The Powers of Acceptance, Attention and Service
© Stephen & Lynda Kane – All rights reserved
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