INTEGRATION EXERCISES
Exercises To Do Together
FLOATING LIGHTS
Candles are one of the most useful aids for creating your own romantic rituals and celebrations, for remembering loved ones you cannot be with right now, or for healing the separation between enemies.
Time for Exercise: 10 minutes
Properties Required: a number of small candles (birthday candles are about the right size), the same number of small flat-bottom paper bags, the same number of small paper plates, and one or more larger candles for dripping wax onto the inside bottoms of the bags to attach the smaller candles.
Steps:
1.Open the paper bags. Use the larger candles to drip wax into the paper bags. Secure one birthday candle upright inside of each paper bag. Place each bag onto one of the paper plates.
2.When all the bags and candles are ready, light the candles one at a time
3.Set the plate afloat in a tub, pool, lake or river, while saying a dedication to a friend or loved one, speaking aloud words of encouragement for a cause you are committed to, or offering amnesty to an enemy.
4.Silently watch the floating lights carry your message, wish, and energy out into the universe.
Variations:
Ceremony for integrating the 4 Freedoms: Body, Mind, Heart and Soul
Use four candles, bags, and plates. Prepare them by following the above instructions. As you light each one, read together the statements you have prepared in advance, dedicating a light to each of the 4 Freedoms. Here are examples of what you could say for each of the 4 Freedoms:
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Heart Freedom Exercises
Exercises To Do On Your Own
Freeing the Fool
Time for Exercise: five to 15 minutes
Properties Required: none
Steps:
When have you felt foolish, embarrassed, or humiliated? Recall the circumstances of those situations. What if these things had happened to someone you love instead of yourself? Would they seem as emotionally loaded and devastating as they were when they happened to you?
The King’s Fool
Imagine you lived at a time when there were kings, and you assumed the role of the king’s fool. What is the role of a professional fool? What is the emotional significance of foolish, outrageous, and silly behaviors when they are done consciously?
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"Heartbreak as Teacher"
In your quest for Heart Freedom, there is value in the pain of a broken heart. It gives you feedback to learn about changing and growing. Pain can be seen not simply as arbitrary suffering but as a teacher. Emotional discomfort and pain are inevitable parts of the human experience, but suffering is a dysfunctional over-reaction. It is a choice you make, albeit unknowingly, to extend and add to your pain. Ironically, suffering is usually brought on by behaviors designed to avoid feeling pain, behaviors that keep your heart locked tightly and lonely. If you wish to surpass suffering and instead use the pain of heartbreaks to grow into love, then dare to shift some of your misperceptions about affairs of the heart.
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"Keeping Your Heart Open"
As you proactively manifest Heart Freedom, in the context of a monogamous committed relationship, your burden of fear, pain, and insecurity declines continuously and sometimes dramatically. You can heal wounds from childhood to the present quite naturally without extensive analysis. Reclaiming your Heart Freedom as you integrate all 4 Freedoms brings about your healing. More on Keeping Your Heart Open – Heart Freedom (Part 7 of 8 )Tags:freedom heart Heart Freedom Relationship Happiness relationshipsPopularity: 2% [?]
"Men in Relationship: The Superhero - Heart Freedom"
Part 6 of 8
In popular culture such as the cinema, superheroes are rarely associated with mature, fulfilling, sexual relationships. However, they can and should be. Doing so would begin the process of popularizing a model worthy of emulation, the hero as warrior and lover, all rolled into one glorious human being. The contribution this shift in attitude could make toward the well-being of humanity in general, and for personal happiness in particular, is extremely significant. The heroic warrior-lover is a worthy replacement for the lonely Hollywood warrior-savior/destroyer.
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Men in Relationship – Heart Freedom
Part 5 of 8
"Men in Relationship: The Hero Who Admits He Is Afraid"
Many men are reluctant to embrace relationships but relationships are the marquee event in the Olympics of Life. Winning the gold medal in relationships is as good as it gets in this world. Ask yourself: Is a great relationship so rare because it is not worthy of my attention, or does my attention wander away from a relationship because of fear? Am I afraid of a relationship or do I simply not know how to be in one? Fear and ignorance are two reasons why men resist intimacy and commitment so strongly.
To help men whole-heartedly embrace relationships, it is time to join three archetypes that have traditionally been separate: the hero, the warrior, and the lover. As Joseph Campbell said, “What’s made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of [the heart] is a myth. These are totally different things altogether.”i What’s made up in the head is the Hollywood hero—a heroic warrior-savior/destroyer. What can come out of the heart is a heroic warrior-lover.
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The Keys To Heart Freedom – Heart Freedom
Part 4 of 8
"Twelve Keys to the Kingdom of Your Heart’s Desire"
Thought cannot heal a broken heart, and thinking will never open a heart that is closed. Only feeling can accomplish such miracles. As Blaise Pascal said long ago, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” The keys to healing and opening your heart can be found not in rationality but in the realms of emotion, energy, and spirit. You enter these mysterious domains through a relationship when you surrender fully to the joys and sorrows of giving and receiving love. In a truly committed relationship you dare to start breaking open locks and knocking down walls.
Here are the keys necessary and sufficient to open every lock upon your heart.
Self-love
Without self-love there can be no love for another. Loving yourself is the secure foundation for all enduring relationships. Loving yourself keeps you going as long as there is hope of a breakthrough in a troubled relationship. Loving yourself gives you the courage to leave a bad relationship. It is the fountain from which flow your love, compassion, and generosity toward the soul mate you adore.
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"The Essence of Heart Freedom: Emotion – Heart Freedom"
Part 2 of 8
The essence of heart is emotion. Heart Freedom enables you to experience a bountiful variety and complexity of feelings. The supreme emotion is love, which by its very nature implies a relationship, the lover and the beloved. In modern Western culture, couple relationships are often symbolized by the Valentine heart. If you both want to make your relationship work, pay attention to its heart, to the emotional, energetic, and spiritual connection between you. For relationship happiness, you must welcome, nourish, and cherish such deep connection.
The responsibility of Heart Freedom is to allow yourself to feel everything, both positive and negative and to act despite your emotional discomfort. A few yogisi claim they can voluntarily stop the heart from beating, and who among us has not tried to deliberately stop our hearts from feeling? When the yogi stops his heart from beating, it is a demonstration of physical and spiritual mastery, but when you or I try to stop our hearts from hurting it is only a pathetic kind of emotional suicide. If we try to turn our hearts off in order to be protected from feeling the pain of loss, abandonment, deceit, or betrayal, eventually we feel nothing at all and life becomes flat, dull, and boring. There is little pleasure, joy, or happiness because we can’t be fully human and only feel the good things. With the heart, it seems to be “all or nothing at all.”
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The Four Freedoms
The desire to love someone through and through and to be loved that way in return, for a lifetime, burns in almost every heart. Although we are all truly worthy of such love, it is not something that will usually happen by itself. A superb relationship, one that satisfies and stimulates to the core, is an extraordinary accomplishment, comparable to supreme achievement in realms of business, the arts, science, and sports. Such relationships are rare not because people lack the capacity for loving but because they don’t know how to make the shift from falling in love to sustaining that love over many years by creating and recreating it again and again.
You might believe that continuously creating love is an impossibly daunting task. Perhaps you’ve been through painful unions before, and your heart is battered and broken. Or your present relationship, although comfortable, has become just a little boring, stuck in a rut of mundane sameness. Then again, you might be at the outset of a wondrous romance and only slightly haunted by a niggling suspicion that your passion will eventually fade. Whatever your present circumstances, do not allow preconceptions and fears to impede your heart’s aspirations. Living a lifelong, passionate, and intimate union is not a complicated undertaking. On the contrary, it is quite simple and well within your abilities. The fundamental requirement? Rediscover and reunite your Four Freedoms: Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul. These Four Freedoms are the essence of human nature, yours and everyone else’s.
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