On Saturday, March 19th, I hopped into the truck, drove to the interesting Naples, Florida, and got ready to have some epic fun with Bliss Revealed at the Naples Mystic Faire. Having never been to a Mystic Faire before, I knew the day was going to be one of learning, sharing, and more learning.
I was the first person to arrive that morning, having built in way too much drive time and get-lost time (I don’t have a mobile phone), so ended up having plenty of time to meet, greet, heft, and help out others whose businesses’ had more arduous supplies, furniture, and set up. It was a pleasure to get to see both the windswept, “off-hours” version of folks and then their finished, public face. For some they’re almost exactly the same, for others, it’s like watching a phoenix rise from the flames.
The relaxing unfolding of my morning left me with plenty of time to start a project for you, Loved Ones, that has been on my mind for a few weeks: Talking about how to respond, how to digest, how to embrace, how to accept when someone you love doesn’t love you back. Or love you as much as you love them. Or love you the way you want to be loved. Every single person, at some time or another in their life, will feel pain from harboring a deep wish that someone would be different for us. That someone would want to intertwine their lives with ours. Be nicer, love us back, be more affectionate. Whatever it is that we want from someone that they do not deliver.
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With everything for Bliss Revealed in place to meet her people that day at the Faire, and plenty of time before the doors opened to the public, I sat down and made this Part One video on the subject: What To Do When Someone Doesn’t You Back. Click on the image, below, and it will play.
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To put the theoretical ideas in the video above in context, let’s keep in mind that all people need to be taught to lead happy, healthy lives is: 1) how to shelter from the elements, 2) how to grow food, 3) how to find clean water, 4) how to use food and lifestyle habits to facilitate their body healing itself, and 5) how to love.
Yes, one of the top five, of what we need to learn to lead a fulfilling life in community is how to love. Have you ever wondered why we aren’t taught what love is in school? Why we aren’t taught how to love? Why we aren’t taught how to relate to ourselves and each other with love in our hearts? Personally, I have spent time wondering about that.
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Realizing that in modern culture we’re not taught what love is and how to love—as most of us aren’t taught how to understand ourselves, who we are, and how to live in community with others in holistic ways—I invite you to embrace the fact that almost all of us make a right mess of love once in a while. Especially when we’re experiencing romantic love, we get lost in the thickets of the intense energy of physical attraction and the delving into the deep, intuitive parts of ourselves which surface in that dynamic. There is nothing more challenging, exposing, penetrating than the rush of passion, raging waters, and age-old patterns and tendencies that are unearthed in some romantic love moments in our lives.
Please note that this video is a Part One of a series. To do even mild justice to such a complex subject we need to look at it from various vantage points. One of the best ways to start to truly change our lives for the better, like change our way of relating to others, is to pulse back and forth between considering theoretical and practical information. When trying to learn new concepts, if we put too much emphasis on theoretical information, we risk all those new, fancy thoughts flying out the window when we’re in the “heat” of heavy, intense experiences. If we get too mired in practical information, we risk losing the path our heart needs to take to learn new relation skills, to learn wisdom.
In Part One, we look at how we can narrate, or conceptualize, what’s going on when someone doesn’t love us back in a way which helps us come to terms with the situation in as positive a way as possible. The view I share in this video is one designed to inspire all of us to bring our widest, softest view to our lives and the people who grace it. Admittedly, seeing the world the way I’m sharing with you is easier if you’ve take the My Bliss Path™ program course: BlissLIfe™. In that course, we spend hours delving deeply into both theoretical and practical ways to grow that widest, softest view. Working on increasing the scope of our individual view of reality, to start embodying a moment to moment experience of life as one of basic sanity and primordial pleasure, ideally, we expose ourselves over and over to different ways to explain, describe, and learn what is simply described in eastern philosophy as: view.
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So if this video feels heavy on unrealistic attitude and behavior and light on the practical, take a deep breath and think about watching again, when you have the time. Think of the ideas I’m talking about as inspiration. Remember, before I started studying with my first spiritual teacher twenty years ago, I too would go into crisis when someone didn’t love me back, but over time I just kept working, just kept meditating, just kept studying eastern philosophy; I just kept applying myself, applying my freedom to choose to do things differently while all the while holding the belief that I could change, I could grow; to believe that I could find happiness and contentment in life itself. Therefore, please keep in mind, if I have been able to change my view of life to remain essentially joyful despite someone I love not loving me back, so can you. Yes, this means that you too can experience life in a way that if someone doesn’t love you back, you can feel it as the painful experience that it always is, feel it deeply, while also feeling it in a balanced, present way that leaves you better off from all that transpired. We all have the capacity to learn to love. We’re all in this together. With joy.
Part Two of this video series will focus on the practical things we can do when someone doesn’t love us back and we are feeling sad about it. Powerful emotions deserve attention and powerful medicine. I look forward to us looking at some ways we can help ourselves heal when the world doesn’t turn out like we’d wished it would.
Homework: Sit or lie down comfortably. Close your eyes. Invoke the memory of a person who doesn’t/didn’t love you like you want/wanted. Spend time in quiet, peaceful reflection reviewing moments of joy with them and moments of pain with them. Realize that you can still invoke the actual feeling-responses you had to those experiences, even without the person sitting right there beside you. Remember that they are, through your memories, still a part of the fabric of your Life. Have the last memory be one of love and enjoyment that you treasure and see if you can relax that memory into a general experience of forgiveness and love that has no object. This homework task might be easier if you do Yoga Nidra prior to starting it.
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Thank you so much for gifting me with your time in allowing me to share these thoughts with you. In love!
Unmani Saraswati, JD, LLM became the Chief Happiness Mentor of Bliss Revealed after a successful eighteen year career as a divorce mediator-attorney and law professor. A lifelong student of how to how to have a vibrant experience of life, she earned her credential as a Certified Massage Therapist from the Institute of Conscious Bodywork in 1997 and graduated from Trika Institute’s Seven-Year Tantrik Yoga Study Group Program in 2010. As a Chief Happiness Mentor, Unmani draws on her ongoing study of ancient wisdom concepts and life-skills, twenty years of daily mediation practice, and her work supporting thousands of clients to bring out their best selves in the midst of crisis through mindfulness and education. She teaches the self-paced online program My Bliss Path™ and live streams with subscribing members of the Blissverse Locals community. Also, check out her free videos and blogs. To find out more about Unmani’s mission for everyone to have a Healthy Body, Strong Mind, and Happy Heart go to: https://linktr.ee/blissrevealed
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