Relationship Savvy Dialogues

Fiery Fall Flowers

This is Thanksgiving Week here in the United States, always the last Thursday of November. It’s a time when families and loved ones gather to enjoy one of the biggest meals of the year; turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes, candied yams, peas and corn and salad.

For dessert there could be pumpkin pie or pecan pie or, preferably, both  with whipped cream!

All of that is simply tradition and it’s great, as far as it goes.

The essence of Thanksgiving, though, is to express our sincere feelings of gratitude for all the good that is in our lives. This is especially important during hard times when it may be more difficult to find the good.

Yet, the good is always there, even if we have to look a little more diligently to find it.

Once found, however, there is a very simple and powerful exercise we have used and taught for years that will help you multiply the good you have found, and multiply the feelings of blessing and being blessed that must always accompany true gratitude.

We have done this exercise more times than we can count and it has gotten us through some pretty hard times in the past.

Here it is:

** Gratitude Blessing Exercise **

First, sit quietly for a few minutes and put your attention on your heart center, or heart chakra, in the center of your chest. Breathe deeply and slowly in and out of your heart center until you feel your body and your mind relax a little.

Then, rub your palms together until they get nice and warm and place them over your heart center. Let yourself feel the energy exchange between your hands and your heart.

Now comes the really cool part!

In silence walk around your home and place your hands on the objects in your home; your sofa and chairs, tables, lamps, kitchen counters, walls, doors and windows. Anything you can see that you can touch, lay your hands on them one after the other. Go slow and allow the words of gratitude, blessing and love to arise spontaneously in your mind.

Avoid  trying too hard (or trying at all). This isn’t a race or a contest and there is no hurry to get it done. Let the present moment consume you and the words will come, or not. If no words come, that’s ok, the feeling of it is the most important thing.

As you do so, in your mind’s eye, imagine you can see the energy of love, flowing from your activated heart center, up your chest, across your shoulders, down your arms and out the palms of your hands into whatever you lay your hands upon.

You may also imagine sparkling particles of light flowing out of your hands. It’s okay to pretend it’s happening even if it’s hard for you to  imagine.

Confer your conscious blessing of love and gratitude on them and give thanks for the function they perform in your life. The chairs and sofa for providing a comfortable place to sit and be with friends and family. The walls forholding up the roof and providing shelter from the elements. The lamps for filling your home with light. The kitchen counters and appliances for providing the means for preparing nurturing food.

If you have pets, you can do this with them, too  – they really like it. It also works really well on humans! If it seems a little weird to do with humans you can always do it secretly in the privacy of your own mind when no one is watching — or even if they are!

You always have the power to express your love and gratitude in this way. And when you do, you ignite a highly refined vibration that fills your physical, emotional and mental bodies. This high, refined energy also fills the physical space of your home and is projected into the very matter of whatever you put your attention on and lay your hands on and elevates the very atmosphere you breathe.

When doing this consider the scientific truth that everything you touch is ultimately made of photons, particles of light. All matter is in a quantum state of light and information at its deepest level. It is more than the material we see with our eyes and by engaging in this blessing and gratitude exercise you make yourself available to BE TOUCHED at the deepest, quantum level, as well.

If you can do this in a slow, meditative, patient manner and truly enjoy the experience we predict you will feel differently afterwards.

And you just may set up a powerful vibration that will cause all that you have blessed and given thanks for to expand not only in the quantum realm, but in your own personal world of time and space and relationships, as well.

It’s never too late to give thanks or forgive and there’s no time like the present . . .

No matter where you live, we wish you the blessings of love and gratitude now and always.

If you choose to try this, please leave us a comment below and let us know what your experience was like.

written by Paul Cutright \\ tags: blessing, family, gratitude, love, Paul and Layne, Thanksgiving, tradition, turkey

(The following is an excerpt from our most recent paper entitled, Building BIG Dreams Together – The Seven C’s of Conscious Co-Creation)

“The path of the co-creator is to be awakened spiritually within, which then turns into your own deeper life purpose, which then makes you want to reach out and touch others in a way that expresses self and really evolves our communities and our world.”
~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

Whether we realize it or not, we all play a vital part in helping the world to be a better place. Bringing out the best in others is a learning curve for some of us. And being supported by others to bring out the best in ourselves can be challenging for many, as well.

We believe that each person has a unique contribution to bring into this world and discovering our own part is an important aspect of that adventure. We usually find our part in the human jigsaw puzzle through asking powerful sincere questions, reaching beyond what we already know by exploring new ideas and by allowing ourselves to be supported by competent coaches or mentors.

We hope that using the 7 C’s will help you build your dreams more harmoniously with others so you can succeed with greater ease, joy and fulfillment.

COMMITMENT . . . . . . . . Clarify your common intention.

COMMUNICATION . . . .  Foster an environment that supports creativity and respect.

COOPERATION . . . . . . . .  The necessary attitude. Share power for the common interest.

COLLABORATION . . . . . Synergize ideas. Honor unique competencies.

COORDINATION . . . . . . . Synchronize action. Make sure everyone is headed in the same direction.

COMMUNITY . . . . . . . . . . Create and nurture a Network of Support.

COACHING . . . . . . . . . . . . .Seek expert help where and when needed. Don’t try to do it all on your own. Great  achievers in any field have always had coaches and mentors.

We welcome your comments and questions. Click on the comment link to the upper right of this post.

This paper is available in its entirety only to those people who have joined the Relationship Savvy Circle of Support Membership Program. COMING SOON!

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: Barbara Marx Hubbard, co-creation, collaboration, commitment, community, conscious co-creation, cooperation, Paul and Layne Cutright

Twilight with Tiny Crescent Moon

The wide open spaces of the high desert in New Mexico. The air is perfectly still and there is a slight chill. Time to go in for dinner.

written by Paul Cutright \\ tags: crescent moon, Paul Cutright, photo, twilight

Layne & Paul in Namale, Fiji

While we were safely tucked inside our chrysalis we found access to a spiritual presence of wisdom, knowledge and peace that guides us to this day. As we communed with this presence we learned many new things.

We can share a few here now. For one, without our knowing it our egos had extended themselves to include our students, and we unconsciously had been attaching a meaning about ourselves, relative to how quickly or deftly our students responded to our work. In other words, we had been unconsciously “proving our value” with our students. It’s hard to be unattached to the results when that link is there.

 Now, we strive to remember that our value as teachers and contributors to life is not something we need to prove to ourselves. We are free to allow our students to learn from their own choices without any attachment. Well, maybe a little attachment – - some of the time. Remember, we’re not perfect. We still like it best when we can facilitate those one minute miracles.

We learned that we can’t use our own will to push a student’s process. If we do, the changes are temporary and what we had thought was integrated transformation was not. We now believe that this kind of false responsibility is at the root of many spiritual teachers’ abuse of power. Hopefully as teachers, we can invite or inspire, but we can’t force the change.

We learned one of the shadow sides of community is peer pressure and a desire to be close to the people in power. These aspects were unintentionally brought to the mix of our success and we didn’t want to bring them into our future. In a way, they had become an accelerant that temporarily moved people, but didn’t truly illuminate their Being. “Let the teachings do their work and allow each student to grow at the pace they set,” was our new standard.

We learned to temper the ambition of our youth with more patience and compassion for ourselves and others.

We learned the skill set required to observe one’s own projections is essential to a wisdom culture.  Projection is when we see in others what we don’t want to see in ourselves. Teachers do it. Students do it. Groups do it.  People we think should be nominated for sainthood do it.

As far as we can tell, no one is immune from the insidious delusions of the ego, because the ego is so clever at masking itself in spiritual garb. We can learn to observe how our ego brings its own personal needs to various relationships, but when we think we are beyond all that – we are most likely being seduced by our “spiritualized ego.”

We learned we had underestimated the transforming power of our relationship itself. As much as we feel we are ordinary people, doing the best we can to learn and understand how life works, our relationship itself is quite extraordinary.

Without any false modesty, our relationship is a carrier wave of a new frequency of romantic love, a love that doesn’t compete for power, or needs to make oneself less so the other can be more, but a romantic relationship that shares power equally.

We think it is part of what explains a peculiar phenomena in our lives. It would appear that cupid lives at our house. At least, he spends so much time here he should have his own toothbrush in the medicine cabinet! We can’t count the number of couples who have met and fallen in love in our living room.

For example, we had gone to a financial planner for a consultation and she asked us some tough questions.  We (Paul and Layne) had a disagreement right there in her office because we had different priorities. We discussed things as we normally would, asking deep questions and listening to one another with quiet minds and worked the whole thing out in a couple of minutes.

We turned again to face the consultant, who sat there with her jaw dropped, “I have never seen any couple do what you just did. I am used to couples arguing in my consultations, but I have never seen the magic you just did with one another.” Later, when we started teaching again she was one of the first to enroll. She met her future life partner in our living room and they are still together.

The same thing happened with Paul’s boss at an international outplacement firm. Paul had been hired to help open an office in San Diego. As it happened Jan, the VP for the project, had heard of us before, because she had been through The Loving Relationships Training some years prior. As Paul’s role with the project drew to completion, she asked us if we would consider creating a new relationships course.

When we asked her why, she said she wanted to know how to create a relationship like ours! She wanted to be in a loving, caring relationship with a man whom she might marry.

After having been through trials that could have devastated our relationship, it was not only intact; it was flourishing and stronger than ever. We may not have been as certain about how “the great divine” worked, but we certainly had grown in our understanding about how love worked.

Through our difficult undoing, our attunement to Love made it possible for us to understand, forgive and care for one another. There were times, even when we were being evicted because we couldn’t pay the rent, or our house was robbed the month after we failed to make our insurance payment, or whatever allowed us to hold our heads up high was lost to us for awhile, that the pink corridor of light that gave birth to our relationship would visit us again. (pink corridor of light)

Even when we were in the green slime stage, the cradle of Love that held us in our chrysalis still knew who we were becoming. And she would visit to remind us, “All this shall pass, but your love will be eternal.”

And in that moment, we could feel Love and the cares of the world would evaporate like mists in the sunlight. The great elixir of life was poured out and we were renewed and made strong for the rest of our journey.

After Jan’s request, we got busy writing a course that we taught in the living room of our little tract house in Rancho Bernardo, CA one evening a week over eight weeks. Jan and about seven or eight others were in the course, including the man who eventually became Jan’s husband! Cupid was at it again.

Little did we know that these were the seeds from which would grow the next era of our work, the Heart to Heart Community in San Diego and The Secrets for Successful Relationships teaching.

We had emerged from our chamber of transformation as relationship educators. Though our work with people has a spiritual tenor to it, our spiritual understandings are more in the background than the foreground of our work.

We continue to be students of Love and to share whatever we learn is one of our greatest delights.

Your comments, thoughts, feelings and questions about anything we share here is important to us. Just click on the Comments link to the top right of this post to participate. We have very much appreciated all the comments many of you have been kind enough to share in previous posts.

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: extraordinary relationships, lessons learned, Paul and Layne, teachers