Hello!
I had a lovely day at home working with my Zero Force Coaching (ZFC) client, Nola yesterday. We did an energy balance session, discussed the nature of the human mind and how it tends to project it’s wants and “don’t wants”, did mandala therapy, hiked the hills and celebrated our day with a rock stack together.
Today, I’d like to touch briefly on how love and relationships can be exemplified in our day-to-day creations, be they for work, play, or the experiences we create out of our own ignorance of what we are creating.
In the first image, you can see the rock stack my ZFC client Nola and I built as part of her coaching. There are eight rocks in this stack and I will symbolize the key elements of healthy, effective love relationships with each stone; you will see that each stone (element of relationships) is co-dependent on each other stone or element and that none of them can effectively reach their potential without the others.
1. Safety and Security: The bottom stone represents the foundation; we all know the importance of a well-built foundation. There is an inverse relationship between the height any relationship can reach and the dept and stability of the foundation. If the foundation (bottom stone) is not secure, the insecurity is both reflected – and magnified with the addition of each relationship (stone). To fall in love exemplifies falling; If we are not careful, we will bring the insecurities of past relationships into each new relationship; those that didn’t learn to take the time necessary to build a foundation in past relationships often leave them looking for a better one.
We inevitably find that no relationship can reach any significant height or growth potential without both building a solid foundation, and shoring it up as the relationship grows from love-struck simplicity into the complexity that reality inevitably brings; once the initial love-drunkenness wears off, we come to recognize what our partner(s) have concealed and they realize what we have concealed, consciously or unconsciously (being unaware of yourself reflects the shadow in each relationship). As I teach in PPS Lesson 1. How To Find and Live Your Legacy, establishing healthy core values is the bedrock of any relationship with yourself, which is all we can ultimately bring to a relationship. If we don’t have core values, we don’t know when to say “no” in any relationship to persons, places and things, which often leads to addiction.
2. Sexuality, Rhythm and Flow: The addition of any “other” (second stone) immediately brings us into relationship. If the second stone is bigger (more masculine) than the foundation, the relationship takes on a level of dynamism that is often initially exciting, yet greatly increases the chances of a fall. Whenever we bring ourselves into relationship with any other, there is a sexed relationship; one will represent the foundation and the other will represent dynamism. For example, if you have children, there will be times that Dad is the disciplinarian (holding the values in check), while Mom is more forgiving – flowing, and at other times, the roles will reverse. For any relationship to be healthy enough to build upon, there has to be an understanding of the values exemplified by the foundation (values) of the relationship. One will always find themselves holding values, the other will always find themselves stretching them to the degree that their love-needs aren’t being met in the relationship. Danger in relationship emerges when either person stretches the agreed values before being intimate enough with their partner to share their heart-felt needs.
3. Self-identity: The third stone represents coming into your own. Without a solid sense of who you are, what your values are (which determines your personal boundaries), nothing can go further without clashes and crashes. Meeting another and basking in passion is great, but requires little to no responsibility. If what we create as individuals in relationships is outside the base of support gained from our significant others (which may be lovers or family members), we have not been open, honest, or clear in the building of the foundation and floor of the relationship. The reality we often face is that we are so in love with our own creations that we often don’t realize how they affect others around us. Without a healthy individuality (which can only be created by sharing our core values with our significant other (bottom two stones), any additional relationships increase the risk of toppling!
4. Giving and Receiving Love: Here, you can see that Nola and I have a love-stone that is larger than our third stone (individuality). This requires that we love ourselves enough to be honest enough to truly work together. Whenever our love outweighs our individuality, the support of the foundation must be greater! The three previous stones could not hold big-love if they were not built upon deep trust and commitment. Big Love must be well placed. If not, we run the risk of over or under-loving self and others, both of which debilitate everyone involved. To under-love often exemplifies our lack of self-responsibility; we gain a sense of safety and security through what we “do for others.” Yet, because we haven’t been honest with our needs, that kind of love almost always has invisible “I’ve loved you now you owe me” hooks! If we over-love, we are almost always masking our personal under-loving. Though over-loving is a common symptom of the misunderstandings of Abrahamic religious teachings, it is potentially very debilitating to others. This can easily be seen when parents smother their children in love, leaving them completely unprepared for the realities of life; also creating children that will be co-dependent on their parents as adults, which means that they are not yet adults. When we have children having and parenting children, the world looks exactly like it does on the news hour every night!
5. Effective Creation Through Communication: When we come to know the power of love used effectively and the danger of using love ineffectively, we also come to know how to communicate our love such that it empowers others. This is a very evolved stage of creative self-expression. If we have not learned the lessons in the previous stages, our love-stack is not only very likely to fall, but our creations are now metaphorically quite high; we have a lot of responsibility to others by now. When our creations fall from this height, we see many possibilities for injury and insult. This kind of catastrophe can be seen in exploits like the Enron scandal, people getting all the way to the end of a major educational endeavor only to fail to meet the demands of examination and potentially waste an entire career, or the creation of extra-marital affairs that fall outside the necessary truths exemplified by all four previous steps. Here, clear communication is the only way to protect what you’ve built in relationships thus far!
6. Super-consciousness (maximizing your creative potential): Only by honest, open development of all prior stages of development, can we relax enough to access our intuition for the betterment of self and others. Love is always the basis of effective development of, and use of intuition. The individual that has not come to truly know themselves is usually overly invested in their ego-mind. The ego-mind is a cutter; it must cut-out, exclude all other aspects of reality in order to give life to only one aspect of reality. This kind of mind is one that cuts down a forest looking for a tree! They are so proud of the beautiful table they have built, yet, are confused as to why there is no air to breath and nothing to eat now that the forest has been invested in one dinner table! Here, you can see the beautiful complexity of the stages exemplified in the stack below the sixth stone, which is a cube, representing the marriage of elements.
7. Self-Realization: The seventh stone can only come and stay if all previous stages have been authentic. Now, with an open mind and a healthy intuition, one sees that they are the forest! Empathy and compassion reach their peak here. One who has reached this level of self-mastery now gains access to the Self-Mystery. There is no longer fear of death, but a deep desire to explore the rest of themselves (The Universe).
8. The End~The Beginning: Like the soul, the eighth stone is so tiny you can barely see it, yet, like our stone, it is full of reflection. If you look now at the second photo, you will see a beautiful energy pattern being expressed, which wouldn’t have the beauty it does if the eighth stone wasn’t causing the light to dance so beautifully. With the completion of this stack, or the seven prior stages, we now have the wisdom to rest, celebrate, and begin creating our next, new life. This process goes on forever, or until we decide that we are ready to enter fully into the Divine Reality, at which time we loose all individuality – Nirvana. Nirvana means, to blow out – to extinguish. Now, we’ve become brave enough to “be gone” if we choose Nirvana. We become the silent lover and silent teacher that does All without doing. But, you may wake up as a cockroach tomorrow and not remember how you got there, because obviously, God does that out of a willingness to create perfection again and again.
Enjoy the journey. It is the only one there is. I’m certainly enjoying the process and will look forward to Nirvana because I love all the bugs and can see the beauty in all the ugliness. I will meet you there, at the Kosmic camp fire where we all emerged from as one Big Family.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
