Deepak Chopra on Keys to Healthy Relationships

Healthy Relationships:
Becoming aware of our emotions and how we manage them influences every aspect of our lives. Our emotions indicate our connection with other people and the world around us.As humans, we share a common set of emotions—we all can relate to feelings of anger, sorrow, pride and joy. Our ability to feel these emotions and empathize with others as they experience them is what keeps us connected.This month, international mind-body health authorities and renowned medical doctors Deepak Chopra and David Simon, cofounders of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing, share some practical steps to create and maintain emotional balance and freedom in our relationships.

Three Components of Healthy Relationships
As we embrace relationships, along with the energy we share with our family, friends, co-workers, and our self, we see how critically significant these interpersonal interactions are to our own emotional development. These evolving relationships are the most obvious barometers of our emotional well-being. At their heart, all relationships are spiritual experiences. They nurture us, teach us and connect us to the soul of others, and most significantly, to the depth of our very own souls. Through the growth of these various relationships, and our continued journey on the path of emotional freedom, we discover extended states of awareness, which stretch out from our soul. This aspect of our humanity is the mirror of relationships. Each relationship is a reflection of our own soul and therefore a mechanism to take us to higher states of consciousness.

Emotions are released to restore balance in our psyches. The limits we impose on our emotions originated with the discomfort of our parents. We formed our boundaries by reacting to theirs. They also were taught as children to recognize when an emotion was too much. Their sense of appropriateness was inherited, and they had little choice but to pass it on. What this means is that our emotional life isn’t completely ours. It comes to us secondhand. Every tear we shed, every angry outburst and every peal of laughter reflects the emotional comfort range of parents and grandparents—people other than us. The emotional intelligence that is unique to each of us can be recaptured, rekindled and more highly developed if we acknowledge its potential and significance and incorporate three components into our daily activities:

Place attention on your emotions
Each day, from the moment you awaken to the moment you go to sleep, place your attention on your emotions. This critical first step will allow you to truly experience love and emotional compassion.

Practice empathy
After the first step has been forged, you are able to look beyond yourself to others. This leads you to the second component of emotional intelligence: empathy. Noticing another’s emotions is the essence of communication. Can you feel what another person is feeling? By this I do not mean simply to understand what another person is feeling, but to actually feel it as if it permeates every cell in your body.

Manage relationships
The third component of emotional intelligence is the ability to manage relationships. This is a sensitive combination of being true to oneself, being generous of heart and being fully present. This is often easier said than done, but reaching out to another with love, compassion, understanding, defenselessness, empathy and spontaneity takes you to higher planes of spiritual existence.
Managing relationships requires honesty, willingness and an open heart. This sometimes more difficult for individuals who are unwilling to make themselves vulnerable. Yet for those willing to take the chance, emotional intelligence is a lifelong gift that provides the gateway to spiritual intelligence—the interdependent co-arising of events: synchronicity, magic, alchemy, miracles. We all have the capacity to reach that plane of existence if we start with a foundation of emotional intelligence.

How do we communicate our needs?

Uncovering Our True Needs
An emotion is the fundamental mind-body experience. We call emotions “feelings” because we feel them in our bodies. An emotion is a sensation in the body associated with a thought in the mind. Emotions are designed to ensure that we are paying attention so we can respond to what is happening around us. All emotions can be reduced to two primary feelings—those of comfort and those of discomfort. Whether or not we are aware of it, every choice we make is based upon the expectation that the choice will lead to greater comfort. The anticipated feeling drives all our choices.There is a simple but seldom-recognized principle that can help us achieve emotional freedom: the recognition that all emotions derive from needs. When we feel that our needs are being met, we experience feelings of comfort. The better we are at getting our needs met, the more peaceful and comfortable our lives will be.
The key question to achieving emotional freedom is, “How do we communicate our needs in such a way that we are more likely to have them met?”Drawing on the work of psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, there are skills of conscious communication that can be learned. Focusing your attention on these four steps can lead the way to emotional freedom:

1.Identify the event that triggered your emotional upset.
Being an astute observer can help you move out of reactive modes into more conscious communication of your feelings and needs. Saying to your friend, “You are never on time,” will be less useful than saying, “We agreed to meet at the theater at 7 p.m., and you did not show up until 7:30 after the show began.” Be as accurate and precise with what has happened so you do not waste precious emotional resources arguing about how a specific event fits into a pattern of behavior.

2. Take responsibility for your feelings.
When describing your feelings, choose words that express the sensation you are experiencing, as in “I feel…sad, lonely, frustrated, jealous.” Try not to use labels, such as “I feel that you are…self centered, rude, arrogant.” Also, avoid words that reinforce your sense of victimization, such as “I feel…neglected, rejected, betrayed.” When you take responsibility for your emotions, you are informing rather than blaming the people in your life.

3. Identify what you want that you are not getting.
As infants, we had caregivers continuously trying to figure out what we needed. As adults, identifying your own needs increases the chances that you will get them fulfilled.
4. Ask for what you want.
Ask for specific words or actions that will fulfill your desires. For example, if you are seeking more attention from your partner, do not ask him or her just to spend more time with you. Ask your partner to take a walk after dinner or go to a movie on Saturday night. Express your need in the form of a request rather than a demand. We all have an inherent impulse to resist demands, whereas our self-esteem is raised when we are able to fulfill requests. Practicing this simple process can be remarkably effective in transforming turbulent relationships into harmonious ones. As we feel increasingly confident that we can get our emotional needs met in a relationship, we can spend more time celebrating, rather than lamenting, our lives and our loves. David Simon, MD, is the CEO, cofounder and medical director of The Chopra Center and the author of groundbreaking books on health, balance and complementary healing. He’s lauded for his real-world practical applications of his message.Deepak Chopra, MD, is acknowledged as one of the world’s great leaders in the field of mind-body medicine. Through his books, lectures, radio show and The Chopra Center for Wellbeing in
Carlsbad, California, he is transforming our understanding of the meaning of health. To attend an Emotional Freedom or Perfect Health workshop through The Chopra Center for Wellbeing visit www.Chopra.com.

Seven Steps to Emotional Release
Use this technique when you find yourself in emotional turmoil, as well as when you’re feeling depressed, “flat” or empty. It can help set you on the path to a new sense of self, a fresh perspective on life, even a childlike calm.
1. Identify the emotion. Find a quiet place and ask, “What am I feeling?” The one-word answer may be anger, sadness, fear, guilt, frustration, anxiety, etc. Define and describe the feeling as clearly as possible.

2. Witness the feeling in the body. Notice where you feel it. Is it located in the stomach, heart, throat, genitals or the base of the spine? Observe closely and allow your attention to stay on the sensation. Breathe into the feeling. Fully experiencing the physical sensations allows the emotional charge to dissipate.

3. Take responsibility for what you are feeling. Understanding that you have a choice in how you respond to and interpret your experience is the key to healing the emotional body.

4. Express the emotion. Write about the emotion. Speak it out loud in private. Describe the situation and the effect it’s having on your heart and soul. This step offers clarity and insight while releasing emotional toxins.

5. Release the emotion through a physical ritual. Experiment to discover what works best. Dance with abandon, exercise deep breathing, go for a run, get a massage. Such activities help release the tension stored with the emotion.

6. Share the emotion. Once you’ve released it and calmed down, share what you felt and experienced with the person involved. Having completed steps 1 through 5, this may be done without blame and without intent to manipulate the other person toward approval or pity.

7. Celebrate! It’s time to reward yourself for identifying and releasing the painful emotion. Treat yourself to favorite music, a wonderful present or a delicious meal.
Source: by Dr. Deepak Chopra & Dr. David Simon

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Love and Relationships

Love and Relationships Quotes

If you are going to fall in love, try to make your relationship one that generates great spiritual creativity, one that is mutually enriching.

Even married people were once strangers. Therefore, without patience and the effort to understand one another, things are likely not to go well. We need patience in order to become happy.


There are many who dream about experiencing happiness without the patience. But that is a dream. And a dream is just that--a dream, a fairy tale. It is to wish for a childish, easy life. This illusion breaks up many marriages. The pursuit of such happiness can only make one miserable.

It is important to make the effort to calmly construct something together. From there, real love develops. Real marriage is when you have been married for twenty-five years and feel an even deeper love than you did when you first met. Love deepens. Love that does not is merely on the level of simple likes and dislikes.

True love should be transformative, a process that amplifies our capacity to cherish not just one person but all people. It can make us stronger, lift us higher and deepen us as individuals. Only to the extent that one polishes oneself now can one hope to develop wonderful bonds of the heart in the future.

Ideal love is fostered only between two sincere, mature and independent people. It is the inner struggle to polish these attributes that is the key. ... Real love is not two people clinging to each other; it can only be fostered between two strong people secure in their individuality.

To overcome the sorrow that accompanies any type of separation, such as death or divorce. The vital thing is to continue advancing. Do not look back. Just forge on. There are many reasons why people bid farewell to one another. People have their own thoughts and situations. The deep scars within your heart may not heal quickly. Yet brace yourself so you can look forward. You should strive to move on, cutting through the clouds in your heart. As long as you advance, new hope will be born. The sun will rise. Only when you continue to advance can you encounter an even better, more wonderful you.

We can lose ourselves in romantic attachment, but the truth is, the euphoria is unlikely to last for long. Indeed, the likelihood of undergoing suffering and sadness only grows over time. As long as we remain unable to redress our own weaknesses, we will be miserable no matter where or to whom we may take flight. We can never become truly happy unless we ourselves undergo a personal transformation.

Daily life can seem all too drab and unexciting. Living itself can sometimes seem a strain, and few of us realistically expect what joy we feel to last forever. But when we fall in love, life seems filled with drama and excitement. We feel like the leading character in a novel. But, if you get lost in love just because you are bored, and consequently veer from the path you should be following, then love is nothing more than escapism. What you are doing is retreating into a dream world, believing that what is only an illusion is actually real.

If you are neglecting things you should be doing, forgetting your purpose in life because of the relationship you're in, then you're on the wrong path. A healthy relationship is one in which two people encourage each other to reach their respective goals while sharing each other's hopes and dreams. A relationship should be a source of inspiration, invigoration and hope.
By: Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda

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Mastery Of Love

QUOTES FROM THE BOOK MASTERY OF LOVE
After reading "the 4 Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz I bought his book called "the Mastery of Love". Here are some quotes from this book.
"We are masters because we have the power to create and to rule our own lives"
"You are the way you are because that is what you believe about yourself"
"The real us is pure love; we are Life"
"What we call education is nothing but domestication of the human being"
"Humans pretend to be something very important, but at the same time we believe we are nothing"
"We learn to be right and to make everyone else wrong. The need to be "right" is the result of trying to protects the image we want to project to the outside. We have to impose our way of thinking, not just onto other humans, but even upon ourselves."
"Life brings you exactly what you need"
"Happiness never comes from outside of us"
"Your whole life is nothing but a dream. You live in a fantasy where everything you know about yourself is only true for you. Your truth is not the truth for anyone else."
"Love has no resistance. whatever we do is because we want to do it"
"Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant"
"Your reactions are the key to having a wonderful life"
"You are responsible for the consequences of whatever you do, think, say, and feel."
"Life doesn't need to be justified or judged"
"Life is not the body; it is not the mind; it is not the soul. It is a force"
"You are what you believe you are"
"Forgiveness is an act of self-love"
"You cannot be happy if you don't love yourself"
"You are alive because of the power of God, which is the power of Life"
"Whatever we believe rules our existence, rules our life"

The Four Agreements

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don't Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don't Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

Everything we do is based on agreements we have made - agreements with ourselves, with other people, with God, with life. But the most important agreements are the ones we make with ourselves. In these agreements we tell ourselves who we are, how to behave, what is possible, what is impossible. One single agreement is not such a problem, but we have many agreements that come from fear, deplete our energy, and diminish our self-worth."

In this powerful book that has remained on The New York Times Bestseller List for over eight years, don Miguel reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. When we are ready to change these agreements, there are four deceptively simple, yet powerful agreements that we can adopt as guiding principles. The Four Agreements® offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.