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

 If you’ve read “our story” on our website you know just a little bit about a pivotal event in our lives. We revealed a little about a ‘mystical moment’ we shared in 1976 that sparked a romance, a vision and a ‘relationship experiment’ that is still going on today, 33 years later.

But, as you might guess, that’s not the whole story.

Now, we feel compelled to share with you experiences and events that only those closest to us have known anything about.

You see, there have been five distinct passages in our life together and we are now on the threshold of our sixth passage. But, for this imminent passage to make any sense it needs to be threaded to the prior five.

Even though we were both relatively young when we met (Paul 29 & Layne 24), we were already pretty well bruised, battered and discouraged from our separate experiences of hopeful relationships gone bad. We had both experienced the pain of loss and disappointment over and over and over, again.

Was it chance or serendipity or fate or a soul agreement that brought us together in such a dramatic fashion? Who knows? What we do know is that we were blessed to have come into contact with some extraordinary people, a loving and supportive community and some amazing opportunities – and we took good advantage of them!

One of those opportunities was a program called The Loving Relationships Training created by Sondra Ray and Marshall Summers. At the time it was the only weekend workshop in the Bay Area, maybe even the whole country, solely about relationships.

We each attended the training as participants separately before we met. Then, after we knew each other we helped produce the training by being on the logistics and production team. With the popularity of Sondra’s new book, Loving Relationships, there was suddenly a demand for her training all around the country.

Paul and Layne Teaching Their First Seminar Together in 1977

By this time, we each had spent more time in The Loving Relationships Training (LRT) than anyone else, along with our friend, Michael.

Sondra and Marshall had broken up and gone their separate ways and Sondra needed people to lead the training to meet the growing demand nationwide. That was a huge opportunity for the two of us and Michael.

Less than a year after meeting and ‘falling in love’ we were teaching about relationships in front of seminar rooms of up to 100+ participants all over the US.

One of the great things about the LRT was that it was always taught in tandem by two people in front of the room. As trainers, we were supposed to be modeling and demonstrating the teachings in our own relationships with one another.

The three of us would teach together in different combinations – Paul and Layne, Layne and Michael, Michael and Paul. It was an emotionally and psychologically rigorous training for us leading that workshop because it demanded openness, authenticity and congruence simply by virtue of the material.

The participants would see through any kind of act or falsehood. This wasn’t something that could be faked and it definitely wasn’t about ‘looking good’.

If any of us got ‘plugged in’, that is, if any unresolved, historical emotional pain got triggered, there was no hiding it! The space was such that we had to reveal what was happening with us. We had to be real and deal with whatever came up, right there in the training, in front of the entire room full of participants and assistants.

That was a very big part of what created the emotional and psychic safety for the participants to heal and grow in the workshop. Sometimes the atmosphere would become so charged with emotional healing energy that practically everyone in the training would literally fall out of their chairs onto the floor in wailing paroxysms of emotional and relational healing.

This is not an exaggeration or hyperbole. Imagine a room full of 50 to 75 or so composed adults sitting in their chairs in rows facing the front of the room where two trainers are sitting in directors chairs, their training manuals secure on music stands in front of them with a vase of flowers on a round table behind them, simply talking about content so psychically and emotionally potent, that those adults begin to tremble and cry and  and wail. And, yes, fall out of their chairs onto the floor, literally, helpless to do anything but surrender and go through the experience – a life changing transformational experience.

We did not hypnotize them or put them into any kind of trance with some secret voodoo. It was, in fact, a dramatic example of people COMING OUT of a lifelong trance that had held them in its grip.

But, after a couple of years of experiencing this over and over again, weekend after weekend, with different groups of people, this level of cathartic healing and personal transformation was becoming common place.

Most of those people we never saw again after the weekend. We wondered what happened to them and their relationships. We wondered if such dramatic change lasted for them.

We felt incredibly fortunate to have been given this profound experience and opportunity to facilitate such healing for others so early in our own transformational process. We had definitely grabbed hold of a bullet train and we weren’t letting go!

Yet, we found ourselves yearning for something more . . .

Whether this blog post is your first time hearing of us or if you have been following us for awhile, perhaps your being here right now reading this is no accident. Regardless, you may want to stay tuned for the rest of the story – there is much more to come!

Of course, we welcome your comments. And, if you are someone who happened to be in one of those trainings or knew us way back then, we would especially like to hear from you.

Please click the  ‘Add Comments’ link just to the right above this post to leave your comments here on the blog. Also, if you have a Twitter account please consider “retweeting” this by clicking the retweet button below or the “share” button next to it for posting on Facebook or other sites.

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: emotional healing, love, Loving Relationships Training, LRT, Marshall Summers, Paul and Layne, relationship healing, Relationships, seminar, Sondra Ray, transformation, workshop

Layne - My Beloved Angel Who Watches Over Me

This is one of my favorite pictures of Layne. I made this image of her during our first year together when we were in New York City to lead The Loving Relationships Training in 1977.

We were starting a grand adventure full of hope and promise. Who could have known how it would all unfold, even as it is still unfolding?

written by Paul Cutright \\ tags: Layne Cutright, love, Relationships

If you are anything like we are, you may have the feeling that the world is moving faster and faster. It may feel like more is being required of you than you than ever before. Perhaps you feel challenged in your capacity to pay attention to what is going on in front of you.

In this kind of dynamic, patience and simple kindness are often in short supply as we find ourselves speaking to and treating others, especially those we love most, in ways we don’t really intend.

We share with you here a short, profound little film (5:31) that touched us deeply. We believe, we hope, it will touch your heart, as well. It is entitled What Is That? by Constantin Pilavios. It reminded us of one of the most poetic passages in the Bible from which we took the title for this post. We have included the entire verse below the film.

See what kinds of thoughts and feelings it elicits in you. We would love to read your comments.

What Is That? by Constantin Pilavios

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

“Love never fails. . . And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

1 Corinthians 13:1-8 and 13

written by Paul Cutright \\ tags: 1 corinthians 13, faith hope, film 5, gift of prophecy, Inspiration, inspire, kindness, love, patience, Paul and Layne, resounding gong, thoughts and feelings