Introduction
For most of us, living without true love is not an option. What that true love looks like is ultimately up to us, but anyone can create a close, loving relationship, no matter what their past history or current situation is, if they understand certain key principles and learn a few skills. In fact, most people in the course of their day-to-day lives meet more than enough potential relationship candidates. The fact that they do not find that genuinely loving relationship indicates that there is another problem. Some blame it on the busy and fragmented lives they lead. Others point the finger at television, sports, and the image-obsessed institutions of society such as fashion and advertising. The wiser ones have grown weary of finger-pointing and know that the real problem resides within.
Whether you are single, divorced, or even currently in an intimate relationship, you are probably tired of making the same relationship mistakes over and over again. Kathlyn and I feel a great deal of empathy for anyone in this situation, because we have been there ourselves. Before we found each other, we had begun to sink into that same kind of despair. We were afraid we would never attract the kind of love we really wanted. Until we discovered the tools and insights you will learn in this book, we would get out of one painful entanglement only to find ourselves bogged down in a similar version of it a few days later.
Fortunately we found a way to make the changes necessary to move from the intense pain of unconscious relationships to twenty-nine years of the most blissful and creative relationship we could have imagined. In this program, we will show you exactly how to make those inner shifts yourself so that you can draw genuine, lasting love into your life. Kathlyn and I use everything you will learn in this book in our own relationship, and although we have been together for a long time now, every year has been richer and better than the one before because of what you will learn here.
What we discovered, in our own lives and through research with thousands of others, is that there are several principles and techniques that people must learn before they can create the kind of relationship that they truly desire. In fact, without realizing it at the time, Kathlyn and I used the very same principles to make important shifts in how we related to ourselves and others that became the foundation on which we created our own relationship. We had to learn those principles the hard way, by making a lot of relationship mistakes in our twenties and early thirties. Once we figured out these principles and techniques, it only took a month to meet each other. That was more than thirty years ago, and since then we have had the pleasure of teaching these skills to more than twenty thousand people around the world. It has been very satisfying, because almost every day of our lives we get letters and emails from people who have mastered these skills and gone out and created a brand-new conscious relationshipone that satisfies their deepest desires for genuine love.
After all is said and done, it is really genuine love that makes all the difference in the quality of our lives. Without genuine love, human beings feel constant longing. In Attracting Genuine Love, we have created a program that gives very specific answers to the question, How can I attract genuine love into my life? It is a program that has been carefully refined in working with thousands of people over the past decade. Our program includes eight guided practices on the referred audio link that are the most powerful techniques we have found for creating the kind of real change in your life that will erase even a lifetime of unsatisfying relationships. If you follow these steps, you will discover what has been holding you back from getting the kind of love you really want and need. You will know exactly how to bring genuine love into your lifeand how to keep it.
CHAPTER 1
The Power of Commitment
Here is the bottom-line truth about how to begin the process of creating a conscious relationship: nobody has the slightest chance of creating and sustaining a healthy relationship until he or she makes a conscious commitment to it. Up until the moment you consciously commit to attracting and keeping genuine love, your unconscious programming will run your love live (and usually ruin it). And once you make a conscious decision to change your unconscious programming, you have already taken the hardest step to attracting genuine love.
Whether you realize it or not, you are already demonstrating incredible power to create what you wantin fact, your current life is an example of the incredible power you possess to create, consciously or unconsciously. You might not like all that you have created. You might even refuse to accept that you have created your life through your choices and believe instead that it is something that has been done to you. It is true that you may not have consciously chosen many of the elements of your current life; nevertheless, it is your power that has manifested them. You were able to do this because of the power of commitment. The power of commitment has given you all the things that you now have.
TAKING FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF YOUR LIFE
In the late 1970s, during an argument with my lover of five years, I suddenly realized that it was not our several-hundredth argument. It was our several-hundredth run-through of the same argument. A light bulb came on and a moment of awareness shined down upon me, and I clearly saw that our arguments always followed the same pattern of misery-producing moves.
I stepped back from the process and wondered, Why would I engage in a pattern like this? Given all the experiences I could be having as a human being, why do I keep repeating the pattern of lying and being lied to, being criticized and criticizing, blaming and being blamed, thinking of myself as a victim?
Then, in a rush of eye-opening realization, I got the answer: These things kept happening because I was committed to being criticized, committed to being betrayed, committed to arguing and lying. I was more committed to them than I was to being close. If I was lonely, it was because I was more committed to being lonely than I was to being connected. The moment I realized what my commitment was, I felt a shift.
I did not like this idea very much when I first realized itin fact, it actually made me angrybut I soon discovered that I was surrounded by the results of my real commitments, and that the circumstances of my life were direct evidence of my real commitments.
It is important not to overestimate the level of your responsibility for the circumstances of your life. Although the present circumstances of your life are direct evidence of your real commitments, you certainly did not cause the situations of your birth, diseases such as cancer or heart disease, or the global conditions of war and poverty. Taking responsibility for the present circumstances of your life in the sense I am using it can never be assigned, it can only be claimed, and the reason it is claimed is that taking responsibility for the circumstances of your life is the key to creating what you really want. Once you take responsibility for the circumstances of your life, you also release the energy you have tied up in old commitments of blame and resentment to fuel your commitment to a new kind of relationship.