The Power of Relationship

Isn't it an amazing thought that you will NEVER
stop learning until the moment you hit the decks,
leave your body, die.....

Gary Zukav calls life 'Earth School'. Earth School
is the place where you come to learn to be YOU.
Earth School is the place where your 'soul'
comes to evolve... to grow.. and to..
offer the world the essence of YOU.

I don't know about you, but in my experience life continues to
present an endless streams of occasions to
experiment, explore and reap powerful lessons .

And sometimes they hurt and sometimes
that hurt is but an emotional and spiritual
growing pain.. which evolves into a lovely
gift...

The Gift of Relationship

2007 presented me with an opportunity to grow
through a short lived but deeply revealing
intimate relationship that 'began' just before my
55th birthday while I was in St Lucia...

It was a birthday present of a different
nature..and as I unwrapped it slowly I discovered
that whilst it was indeed a great present, it
wasn't the present I thought I wanted.

It was the one I needed.

And now it's January again and I'm not in St
Lucia, I'm here in Hampton, London getting ready
to assist on an amazing personal power weekend
for teenagers.

And in four weeks it's my birthday again... just
before I fly off to Atlanta for a month to stay
with my new business partner and her kids and do
some heavy duty creating..

And what prompted me to be sitting here now
writing this is something someone said to me in
an email I received this morning, sending me off
on a trail to write about relating and my
experiences.

Opening out..

2007 was the year I opened and closed; I was
vulnerable and shielded, and carried away and
dropped to and from a great height by a romantic
whirlwind

It triggered some immense shifts in me both
emotionally, spiritually and in my learnings
about the value of relationship (in whatever form
it appears to us) when we are able to unpick
the lessons.

My sense about any relationship is that it
always was in the flow and that it never ends

...no beginning ...no end...

I say it begun in St Lucia but did it really?

Relationship Healing and Empowerment holiday in St Lucia

September 19-28

for girls over forty
US PRESS welcome

click the picture below

I don't know when it began....but, if you
suspect, as I do, that the universe is a quantum
timeless continuum of experience... it
didn’t begin... it formed, emerged, appeared..

I could say that it was because I posted
something on an NLP discussion list that someone
suggested I go visit this man's site because he
had done some stuff that I might find interesting..

Maybe it began when I signed up for his newsletter or
when my autoresponder replied to an edition of
that newsletter - announcing I was in St Lucia
prompting a subsequent one line hello from him
- the first of a voluminous e-mail exchange..?

I was following my passion, writing to lists sharing
and reading about things that stirred, excited
and fascinated me...

Or was it that his current girlfriend was there
when my autoresponder mail arrived and encouraged
him to go check me out..for a potential business
partnership? In fact that was the way he
first approached me 'telling me he was planning
to come to England to do a workshop something
together on relating.

The Meaning Of The Law of Attraction....

Was it because I'd written out an attraction
plan for my 'perfect soulmate' that I had
synchronistically attracted what appeared to
match what I thought I wanted?

Was it that he had dreamed of meeting a peer
who understood what he was talking about
when he spoke of models and levels and with
whom he could travel the world giving workshops?

Or was it a combination of a zillion different
things... in both of us and in the people around
us.... that created it..?

I believe that, like any so called 'event', it isn't
so much a static time-able event as a collection
of actions, thoughts and energy vibrations
that collided and colluded to create
this experience...

Consider an intimate relationship you are or
have been in..

When did it begin? The day you met? No! I don't
believe it did. How did you both come to be at
that place at exactly the same moment that you
met? What triggered that?

As you explore by continuing to ask 'what
triggered that?' you will discover an endless
and timeless web of connections…

And now, even if you are no longer together, you
are still linked... like blood brothers who cut their
arms to intermingle their blood.... the very engaging in this
particular experience with that person has
affected your system and changed your life forever,
as you have theirs, maybe in major ways...

whether it lasted for years and years or a moment
or few

A healing relationship workshop/holiday/retreat for older women
in St Lucia September 19-28 2008

'Endings' - from two to one to two again..

When a relationship 'ends' .... and by that I
mean when one person tells the other, or both
agree that they no longer wish to continue the
intimacy of their relationship, when they are no
longer a ‘couple’, a twosome, an item
It appears as if that's it. We broke up, we
split, we separated...

During the time we are together it's like
we're weaving what I call 'energetic ties'
-little webs generated and hooked
on and from different parts of each of us... and
when we separate we dissolve some of the
ties... and sometimes this feels like
absolutely the right thing to do
and sometimes it doesn't..

We might choose to cut off at one level, because it's too painful
to stay around - we don't talk, we don't
see each other, we keep our distance. But
there are deeper ties that bind us, sometimes
we feel 'hooked' or 'addicted' to this person
and their not being there feels like we've had
part of our skin rubbed off or lost something that
we felt was part of us..

And sometimes we just can't let go...and we
create the illusion of reformed ties even as they are
dissolving, hoping to revive it.... and
sometimes we do...and sometimes we aren't meant
to...

What triggers the dissolution of ties in relationship?

Maybe this person found someone else, or maybe
you did..

Perhaps this person outgrew you or you
them?

Maybe this person changed considerably
from how they appeared to you through the
the first flush and subsequent rush of love ?

Or was it that you ‘changed’, evolved, shifted, wanted
different things……

And was it maybe that you never agreed what
you wanted living instead under the assumption that
because you are together they ‘should’ or ‘ought to’
live up to some Rules you have or had about
relating?

You know your own answer to this...and you may
have started to get a consciousness awareness of
it already...and maybe you're sensing that..

relationship is NOT a just a Happy Pill!

And that doesn't mean that being in relationship
doesn't bring moments of great bliss...

Of course it does...

AND such is the rhythm of life that every high
has a corresponding low ...and the keel and the
pulse of the rhythm may be regular or not...
it may peak and trough in excess or it
may gently lap, giving no great highs
but no great lows either... jogging along..

Each relationship has its own rhythm..

You've probably heard those couples who've been
together for a long time saying things like
'we've had our ups and downs' in a relatively
relaxed way. You can be certain that some of those
'ups or downs' felt, at the time, more like tsunamis,
hurricanes or earthquakes than minor blips.

Don't kid yourself that when intimate
relationship 'officially' ends... it is in fact
ended. It has and it hasn't. You will never be
the same again. The interaction has
added to and swirled the cauldron of
your experience and changed the course of your
life.

You cannot not be affected by everyone you
encounter including those that you have met in
virtuality and those who are connected to
everyone you know…

Relationship isn't a thing that you get or have
or are in.

It's a name given to an experience of
interaction between people..It's a 'thing'
word that tries to quantify an ongoing
'doing/being' activity.

Because of the work I do, I encounter a lot of
people who want to 'be in, have a relationship'.
And as I dig down deeper I see reflections of
my own beliefs about relating.. for I am not
fully immune to some of the deeper seated
thought viruses about 'relationship'
to the thought viruses of what relationship is.

And it's interesting to dig behind the scenes
and discover what deep seated beliefs
we hold about what relationship will
'give us' or what it is meant to be.

Fact is... intimate relationships don't come
with a goal, a reward or a medal.. they aren't
meant to save you or protect you or shore
you up, although they often appear to do just that.

And my suspicion is that many of us have been trained to believe
that this is exactly what ‘they’ are meant to do,
offer, provide.

What if instead of being in or having a relationship
we were just 'having the experience of relating'

IMO, intimate relating isn't MEAN'T to do anything other than
that be what it is …..the interaction between
two people which offers you a marvellous
opportunity to reveal, through intimacy, your
deepest self.

A friend wrote me this today... It echoes
something that I've found to be true of relationship

"... as people enter a sacred place in our
lives, they get more details. . . more
vulnerability. Hence, the people closest to us
can hurt us emotionally more than those who are
not so close. . ."

Relationship - the ultimate cleanse?

I think that intimate relating is the arena
where you soul gets to burn off the icky bits.

It's the place where, because of the frequency
and often proximity that often comes with
intimate long term relating, you will be
revealed even if you think you aren't!.

Icky bits are masks, pretences, fakery…aka…
the stuff that we ALL, including me, do every day
to present ourselves to the world...

We shore up, cover, disguise our deepest
truest self because we're all scared of getting
hurt. But what is getting hurt?

I think when we feel what we label as
emotional pain, we should see it as a signpost,
an indicator, a billboard flashing like the red
light that comes on when a battery that's is losing its power...
and screaming...

Alert! "This is a weak point in you.. go inside
and find out how to heal it.. "

And sometimes, instead of healing, we end up
sealing.

We seal up the entrance We close down. We erect
some barrier so that we can't be hurt again

And we retreat once more behind the
illusory safety of our mask...

The transparent mask

When I was 17 I was a ‘babe’. I used to go to
dances [aka clubbing] and sit on the side with what I thought
was a totally cool exterior. Now I recognise
it for what it was and still is occasionally -
a mask I use to protect my deepest
self.. the part of me that I am ashamed of, fear
being revealed, don’t want others to see…

All of which is the result of learning somewhere, through
time that certain of my behaviours , thoughts and dreams
weren’t 'appropriate' and would not be appreciated,
desired or approved of by that nameless mass
we call ‘other people’ or ‘people’.

So I’d sit here at this dance, dressed up, made up
and closed up.. and inside my head I’d be saying
‘no one is going to know that I want to be asked
to dance’.

And I was so cool to not be desperate that I turned from a desirable,
bubbly, funloving babe into the Ice Queen.

So it's no surprise now that no one asked me to dance.

It’s comical to realise now how in my attempts to
look cool I showed up on the outside as a cold bitch.

I understand now how a guy would have looked at me and
find any desire immediately erased by the terrifying
thought of approaching and, worse still, being rejected by the
'bitch'!!! Doh!

The green light I so wanted to show was overridden by
the red light I’d learned to turn on to hide me and
gain the approval of those who counted in my life at
that time..

When we retreat behind our masks... when we try
to create a false exterior to someone in the hope
that we’ll be more what they want...we deny
who we really are and offer the world a sample
of who we are not..

And like that we force ourselves to live our lives
constantly wary, being protective of ourselves
and the more we do that, the less we open out...
to reveal the deepest parts of ourselves.. the
'parts' we're ashamed of, fearful of, dislike in
ourselves..as well as the parts we love, adore
and cherish...

We try so damned hard NOT to be human
and here we are spirits in an animal body.

As my mentor once remarked..... "You have to
be able to burp, piss, fart and shit in front of them
with ease.. "

And if you find that offensive, then go inside
and notice what part of you isn't accepting
the stark reality of the animal nature that we all share...

AND it is only when we reveal what, in our opinion, is
our worst as well as our best that we are truly
at our best...

And we might as well get naked because
no matter what we think we're showing to the
world - as Freud so aptly said and I am wont to
repeat often ...

"You leak the truth from every pore"

And it's a very scary place to be ...as I
discovered.

How often do you wonder to yourself, as I know I
do, 'how I can ever reveal THAT to anyone because
if they know THAT about me they won't like or
love me'

I suspect everyone does it to varying degrees...

And all of that 'wondering' is just an illusion created
by you judging yourself according to someone
else's Rules and finding yourself wanting.

Who said so? Whose Rules are they anyway?

Everything we are ashamed of fear or dislike in
and about ourselves is categorised according to
the Rules.

Every one of us has had the Rules and Stories of
our culture, religion, family, race installed in
us like time release pills..

And we subscribe to and judge
ourselves and others according to these rules.

And so many of these 'rules' are just plain
bullsh*t.

I've done a lot of studying in my time not just
in books and courses, but as I go through my
life. People and what makes them tick are endless
fascinations for me.

And relationship is the ground where we
can begin the path to getting totally naked
in the presence of another.

And it's NOT easy....

And lately it's all started to come together and
I can see the patterns more clearly..

Patterns of Relating - a meaty feast of
exploration

It took a powerful intimate relating
experience to trigger a deeper inquiry into
myself...looking honestly at my patterns,
watching them run still, noticing my habits,
noticing what rules are running my life..
noticing what limits me..and drives me...

And that led me to studying the Enneagram. This is
a fascinating and powerful tool IMO that works on
many levels where you can go as deep as you
choose..And it is this model coupled with NLP patterned
behaviour models that will form the basic science
behind a new learning and relationship network that we're
creating.

www.eRelating.com

I think ...

"The Enneagram is the New Astrology"

IMO it's truer than Astrology and if you
think Myers Briggs is a good aid to relating
this offers much more...and it blends
so well with all the other systems..

The Enneagram is fascinating because it has
so many layers and differentiations..and
permutations... that everyone finds a unique place
for themselves... in the structure of the model..

On the surface, pop level it appears to be a
personality typing system that has been
scientifically proven to co relate to
psychological research into standard sets of
human behaviour patterns.

In other words, this stuff really mirrors you
so much so that you will recognise yourself in one or more of the
types.

It's the kind of information that makes
you go 'Oh this is sooooo me' or 'Omigod that explains
why Sara or Charlie are they way they are!

It gives you a framework within
which to become aware of your patterns and if things
aren’t working to begin to do something else..

It also shows you how within each type of
patterned behaviour there is a unique essence
that each type is capable of bringing to the world..

We're talking things like joy, serenity, peace...
bit picture things that we all want...and have
to offer in our own way..

More info on the Enneagram here..

Somehow when people get into this stuff they
start to feel the beginnings of compassion for
themselves... and that leads to feeling compassion
for others...

It has something to do with realising that it
isn't just you or they that run these patterns
They're universal...

And if you don't believe me 'suck it and see'
with our mini personality type assessment...

Take our free Enneagram assessment here

The 9 Enneagram Types represent different
collections of behaviours that people have
learned to do in response to what went on around
them as they were growing up.

We are at our most vulnerable at this time..
because our system is wide open to learning, with
little data to compare and judge what comes in.
So it all gets in.

Behavioural Rewarding System

The whole social system we live in is based
on an education system developed first
by the Prussians to train soldiers and then
adopted in the industrial revolution as a
model to churn out compliant people who
would willingly work in boring mundane
repetitive factory jobs.

We've all been subjected to this...

As a child we learned to do what rewarded us..
what gave us that good feeling [our system in
homeostasis, physical comfort].

We learn by call and response. We do something
they respond and we feel good or not.

We learn to distinguish which behaviours are
linked to generating that feel good sensation.

We developed strategies that result in feel good.

And these behaviours are pretty standard.

Depending on what we were rewarded for

We learn to be perfect, to give lots of love, to
succeed, to be different, to seek knowledge, to
question everything, to be bright and bubbly, to
take control or to keep the peace.

And then we spend our lives being like this..
which is what the Enneagram typing system defines..
and then opens for exploration...

So as I processed and felt through this
relationship in light of this information, all
kinds of awarenesses came up and I began
to make sense of it..

The Dance of the Enneagram

He was an Enneagram One and I a Seven. He's a
perfectionist and prone to self and other
criticism, big time He believes he's the only one
who can do it right. I'm an optimist and an
options merchant and have a hard time seeing
things through. I'm laid back and joke about the
most serious of things. and so much more.. and

His strongest driver is self preservation and
mine are social and intimate connection....

more ....after this short commercial break ;-)

PERSONAL EMPOWERMENT WEEKEND with PETA - London
Secrets of Attraction Weekend - Feb 1-3, Oct 18-19

ARTICLE ON THE ENNEAGRAM

You can read more about the
Enneagram and relationship here

INTERVIEWEES WANTED - by telephone

Do you know your type, and use the Enneagram
Would you like to be interviewed by me for
an educational series 'The Enneagram Interviews'
Please contact me here if you do.. and it helps to put
'Enneagram' in the subject box...

Mutual Attractions and Patterns

We were initially attracted by shared threads in our
work , teaching about relationship with a
fanciful mutual dream to travel the world and run
seminars... he taught workshops and did coaching
too... AND instead we brought out some very
interesting stuff in each other.

And anyone who teaches knows that we do it
because we want to learn...

We both projected romantically. He warned me
that he did this and I ignored it because I did
it too and anyway it felt sooooooooo good.

Like some deep riveted pattern, we started
to create our mutual fantasy life in our own
projections and in our shared ones...before
we'd even met.

There were things about me that annoyed him
and things about him that irritated me.. but they
pulsed out of obvious awareness behind the veil of desire..

We wrote and talked intensively and extensively
about ourselves relationship, our work, what we
felt about life and more..

We are both articulate, creative and have a
capacity to flow words endlessly... and we shared
common backgrounds in the things we'd studied..
AND also had many differences..

And somewhere quite early on we both slipped
into the rose coloured more alive than ever
experience of desire... for each other..

We even dared to write about it, before we met,
in a magazine where I write regularly on
'relationship in general'.

And we met and it was bliss....encapsulated in a
dream setting where it was as if the whole world
fell away. I think that's what honeymoons are
meant to be!! That's what we called it..

And then it wasn't...

It ended seemingly at his instigation…
and as I slowly began to process what had happened..
I found myself putting together the pieces with the help
of someone who had been in relationship with the
same man... and had fallen deeply...

In what I see as amazing synchronicity, he
connected us for the purpose of promoting his
workshops and instead we
developed a relationship that went beyond him...

We created a relatinship where we became great friends helping each other
heal and during our intensive connection, we
realised that we make a great team. And now we
are working together to develop the
relating/learning network she had dreamed up over
a year ago...

Patterns Rule!

I later explored him and his patterns and me and mine
and how the two clashed and what I did in
response to certain things... And for me it took
me deeper into the exploration of relationship
and left me with a desire to continue to see each
new relationship as an opportunity to get naked..
more than butt naked... to start to bare my
soul...

He told me recently that it was doomed because he
has this overriding pattern about much younger
women. He's 57 and was, until he met me always
attracted to women who were 15 - 20 years
younger. He was always open about himself
in this way.. and later he told me that I'd
always be too old for him and that this was a
deep seated pattern.

But in the same sentence he admitted that with me he broke the
pattern and he said later, when we were no longer
an 'item' that for a period of time when we were
together the pattern disappeared and it didn't
matter how old I was and it was a totally new
experience for him.

I put him on a pedestal... and compared myself
to him and tipped the balance.... I was curious
about his work and in an intensive seminar
he ran he took it upon himself to actively
dig into me.. and sometimes it felt like he
patronised me.. and I close down because
I didn't feel it was right to air personal
stuff between he and I in a seminar he
was running...

And later slowly as I faced my own stuff
as well as noticing his...

I knew that this was about two people coming
together for a moment of time to play out
something we needed to play out....and jar a few
of the deeply grooved patterns.

There's a piece of prose that passes regularly
around the net, about how we meet people and are
with them for a reason, a season, a lifetime...
and it always has some purpose of which we often
aren't aware that goes beyond making babies...

Healing v Sealing

So here we are desiring, wanting and seeking the
Happy pill that we’ve been sold…

We're led into fairytale relating illusions by
that 'surrender' into a physically heightend state of
arousal which is simply
a biologically driven hormone rush that makes us
feel so good in the presence of someone else that
our desires are stirred and we want sex.

It makes sense that nature would build in something
that makes us feel so good that we go ahead and run the
programme designed into our DNA with the purpose
of continuing the human race.

As Joseph Riggio said "Biology Rules!"

And it's that biological high, the rush, the thrill that
we're driven to pursue..leading us blindly into relationship...

And intimate relationship is much more than that...

It's a mighty powerful experience. It brings
highs and lows. It opens our wounds and it salves
them. As we rub up against another intimately we
reveal parts of ourselves not just to them, but
to ourselves and often it is the fire in which we get to
purge ourselves..

and we have to be prepared to enter the fire
again.. to take the leap into the adventure of
intimate relating... and reveal some more of who
you are...

if we choose..

I choose...

How about you?

with love
peta

www.findtheloveyouwant.com - Relationship Retreat, healing, exploring, enjoying.. with women of a certain age in St Lucia Sept 19-28 2008

www.attractionacademy.com - Flirting Weekends, Secrets of Attraction Weekend, Singles Relationship Coaching with Peta, Free life coaching e-course

www.erelating.com

You can contact me by email here...please do if you
have anything you want to share....