The Energies of Love: Invisible Keys to a Fulfilling Partnership - Softcover

Eden, Donna; Feinstein, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0399174923 ISBN 13: 9780399174926

Publisher: TarcherPerigee, 2016

Synopsis

The bestselling authors of Energy Medicine and Energy Medicine for Women present a complete program for using energy medicine to heal and strengthen romantic relationships.

A relationship begins with the meeting of two unique energies. This union of energies, though invisible, determines the way you communicate, fight, love, and want to be loved. In this groundbreaking book, the bestselling authors of Energy Medicine draw on the real-life experiences of couples who have attended their popular “Energies of Love” workshops, as well as their own experience as husband and wife, to show how an understanding of your energy system and that of your partner can help you build a more harmonious and loving bond.

We all have different ways of making sense of the world around us, but when faced with conflict, especially with those we care most about, we tend to revert to one of four “Energetic Stress Styles”:

- Visuals are extremely passionate and inspire others to care about the things they care about, but in moments of conflict, their take on the situation can overshadow what is actually occurring, undermining their ability to empathize with their partner.
- Kinesthetics are generous, compassionate, and accepting of other people, but their caring nature pulls them in too many directions. They try to meet others’ needs at the expense of their own, which can cause mounting resentment.
- Digitals are rational and principled and have a gift for quickly understanding complex situations, but they can become closed to others’ perspectives and feelings.
- Tonals have a gift for understanding others and their dilemmas, but during moments of conflict, their ability to read between the lines can morph into hearing what was never said, felt, or thought.

According to the authors, the strongest relationships are those in which the two parties feel that they are partners on a shared spiritual journey. By helping you better understand your own unique energy system, as well as that of your partner, you will be able to recognize your strengths as a couple-¬and avoid the pitfalls. The Energies of Love serves as a powerful resource for anyone who wishes to build a rich partnership while maintaining  the spark that keeps a relationship exciting.

About this title

About the Author:

Donna Eden is among the world’s most sought-after, authoritative, and joyous spokespersons for energy medicine. Her abilities as a healer are legendary. She has taught some eighty thousand people worldwide how to understand the body as an energy system.

David Feinstein, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, has served on the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and has received nine national awards for his books on consciousness and healing. Donna and David's bestselling Energy Medicine has been translated into eighteen languages.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

—PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Acknowledgments

While teaching our Energies of Love classes in recent years, Donna has become fond of saying, “Thank God I didn’t leave David when I should have!” In thinking about our gratitudes and acknowledgments for this book, David’s first and foremost appreciation is that Donna didn’t leave him when she should have and Donna’s is that David came around so it was worth the wait. Given the uncertainties and struggles we have gone through, we are as amazed as we are gratified by how many people who have watched us teach or work together in recent years have told us that our relationship is an inspiration that gives them hope. Their comments have helped push us over the line into being bold enough to write this book.

The Energies of Love, which in a true sense has been in gestation for the entire thirty-seven years of our relationship, is indebted to so many people that we aren’t even going to risk naming names. Not only would that fill many pages, we would still inevitably leave out too many who have lent a guiding hand along the way. Instead, we will list categories. Guilty parties will know where they fit. First are our parents and families of origin, who inaugurated us into all that was to follow. Next, our daughters and extended family provide the foundation on which we stand. Then our closest friends, from childhood to present day. Our lovers and intimates from the past provided us with the most personal and profound instruction about what works . . . and what doesn’t. Our teachers, our many magnificent teachers, formal and informal, helped shape who we are. And our therapists—we know we were tough cookies, and we thank you for giving your all to meet the challenges. Our clients and students have taught us so much by allowing us to participate in their journeys.

The actual writing, putting words on paper, was facilitated in so many ways by the support of our magnificent staff at Innersource and the hundreds of energy medicine and energy psychology practitioners who orbit around them. Our editor at Tarcher/Penguin as well as the publisher’s founder, its current chief, and its staff have been gifts that few authors today can even hope for. Finally, we have sought counsel for specific sections of the book from friends and colleagues, and they have contributed generously and masterfully.

We are deeply grateful to every one of you.

Foreword

When you first meet them, they seem an unlikely couple. Donna is exuberant, spontaneous, intuitive. David is quietly reflective, studious, and always looking for deeper meanings. She is champagne; he is still water. She is of a tropical nature; he is most definitely northern. And yet, with all their contrasts, they have, through dint of unstinting effort and rich affection, cultivated a loving, creative, and exemplary marriage. He puts her feelings and intuition into words. She sees and orchestrates energies that enable him to enter a different universe of understanding. Together, they have done the hard work of relationship, and we are their beneficiaries.

Which is to say that The Energies of Love heralds a revolution in our understanding of relationships. I believe it to be one of the most important books of our time, the “Open Sesame” to new ways of being. Drawing upon their many years of work in energy medicine and energy psychology, the authors have given us a deeply original and eminently practical art and science for crossing the great divide of otherness. Theirs is the state-of-the-art understanding and utilization of the emerging science of consciously orchestrating the energies of brain and heart, body, mind, and spirit, a technology of human transformation and social evolution. They offer tools and techniques, stories, and examples that enhance ways of lifting relationships to higher bands of energy and harmony. They explore the reality of how different brains come with different energies and how to understand the structures, stages, and styles of love and romance. And their take on the traditional battle of the sexes is both unique and startling. They have found the way to end the ancient war! As they say:

You are living in perhaps the most exciting yet challenging time in history for being on a journey inspired by love. Never before have people been beckoned so strongly to create relationships where the forces that have been traditionally thought of as masculine and the forces that have been traditionally thought of as feminine can join within each person and between two partners to form the richest relationships since the dawn of time!

The implications here are enormous. Shifting the ways we relate to one another, male and female, is an indispensable step toward the discovery of new styles of interpersonal connection, new ways of being in community, and the emergence of a global society. The movement seems to be from the egocentric to the ethnocentric to the worldcentric—a fundamental change in the nature of civilization, compelling a passage beyond the mind-set and institutions of millennia.

Critical to this reformation is a true partnership society in which women join men in the full social agenda. Since women tend to emphasize process over product, to understand the power of being as well as doing, deepening rather than end-goaling, it is inevitable that as a result of this partnership, linear, sequential solutions will evolve to the knowing that comes from seeing things in whole constellations rather than as discrete facts. The consciousness engendered by this comprehensive vision raises hope for forgiveness and healing among individuals, ethnic groups, and nations. Essential to this matured consciousness is moral and ethical growth toward the golden rule of human interchange, about which Donna Eden and David Feinstein know so much and give so rich a palette of information and training.

Ultimately it is about a new kind of education, of which this book is a primary text. In the places where our world truly operates interdependently and with this kind of education, old barriers can dissolve, along with the ancient fears that sustained them. What Donna and David offer in their work are the necessary tools and practices, the empathic understandings and the science that can support so great a whole-system transition. We have to learn the dynamics of getting along with each other, of coming to love and appreciate each other. They remind us that when the world is trying to coalesce into a new and higher unity for which we are seemingly unprepared, the only preparatory force that is emotionally powerful enough to prompt us to fully heed this call is found in the energies of love.

Love transforms the way we see, think, dream, act, engage the world, serve others, and even transcend our local selves. It is the source of much creative endeavor—songs, poetry, writing, dreaming, human folly, and human glory. It awakens us and keeps us going. As we love more, we honor more. We see and accept more. We honor pain, beauty, and one another’s path. With love we become more intelligent and creative, for we are open to the patterns of intelligence from the whole network of life. We come to glimpse the wonder of life in its infinite forms, and the wonder that is within us. Quite simply, with love we are able to exceed our local conditions and to evolve.

The teaching of this book is to bring ourselves to a loving resonance, discovering strategies and practices of loving that then can become daily practice, constant application. This may be the most important learning of them all, the one that may hold the greatest good for life on this planet—learning how to commit to the choice of loving. As you do, you will discover that the universe is also alive and loving: as you move toward it, it moves toward you. The universe grows by its connections and its attractions: atoms to atoms, molecules to molecules, bodies to bodies, groups to groups, nations to nations, and finally the world as lover.

We are asked, in this epoch of cultural rebirth, to grow into the people willing and able to face, solve, and succeed in the enormous challenges that have arisen. In so huge a transitional moment of history, we require new skills and capacities as well as nurturing relationships in which our evolving selves are supported and given training that dissolves the barriers between our ordinary and our extraordinary selves.

This is all here in this remarkable work. The transformative power of the energies of love can and does evoke in us a Divine response: deep acceptance and forgiveness, profound spoken and unspoken communion and communication, the ecstasies of eros and the fires of union, a wave-tide of giving and receiving so abundant that it seems drawn from the very ocean of abundance itself, weaving together in love all of life’s dramas.

—Jean Houston, Ph.D.

Ashland, Oregon

May 2014

Introduction

Love is the pinnacle of evolution, the most compelling survival mechanism of the human species.

—SUE JOHNSON, PH.D.1

We often joke, or half joke, that if we can make it, any couple can make it. While our basic values, mercifully, complement one another’s effortlessly, our personalities, temperaments, and lifestyle inclinations don’t. David thrives in dry hot weather, Donna withers. Donna’s interests and attention jump like fire in a dozen different directions; David can become irritated when his plodding, intense focus is jerked from its course by one of her eruptions of enthusiasm. David organizes his life around endeavors that make him feel well utilized and worthy; Donna functions best moment by moment. Donna works most effectively within an unhurried, unscheduled, organic pace; David has been compared to a freight train when he is engaged in a project. Donna’s disposition is to yield to the other person’s ways, so even though David is attracted to her for her joyful nature, his more somber style sets their tone. She then feels invisible and discounted; he wonders why her friends bring out the person he wants to be with while he so often doesn’t.

Having experimented with the basics of this program for more than thirty years, we went to Alex’s, a restaurant in our hometown of Ashland, Oregon, with the commitment that we were not going to leave the lounge until we had completed the first sentence of this book. We finished our tempura shrimp and many refills of club soda; considered a dozen ways to begin the book; settled on the highly personal; wrote the “if we can make it” sentence; watched a young couple kissing on the restaurant’s balcony overlooking Ashland’s famous plaza; thanked them later for adding to the spirit of our project; joked with the restaurant’s manager, who told us that she had announced to her husband that they were expecting their first child at the same table where we were birthing this project; and, finally satisfied with our sixteen-word writing spree, went on our way.

The next morning, David filled in the remainder of the first paragraph, writing as he often does in the early hours. When Donna awoke, he read it to her. She liked it very well until the last line. She said, “Do you mean to tell me you still feel that way? I thought you were over that twenty years ago.” Her tone had hurt and shock. David felt discounted and unfairly attacked. Donna couldn’t believe that he was accusing her of attacking him, when it was she whose feelings had been hurt. We were off to the who-was-wronged-worse races, both also feeling, “What an inauspicious beginning for a book on the energies of love!”

As our discouragement escalated, and after a brief period of separation as Donna bathed and David stewed, Donna said, “If we are really going to do this book and present these techniques, let’s see if they can get us out of this one.” David used a technique for countering the energies that can trigger his defensiveness when Donna is hurt by something he has done. Donna used a technique to counter her energetic freeze and inability to think when David reacts defensively. Why we’d never tackled this particular long-standing pattern before using these tools, we cannot say; perhaps we were saving it for demonstration purposes. The ten minutes of retrieval work not only “got us out of this one,” it helped shift the pattern.

This book shows you how to work your way out of such entanglements with your partner, along with ways to turn your differences into strengths and areas of stagnation into renewal. What is most unusual in our approach is that it does not focus only on psychological differences, communication styles, and positive intentions. It also shows you how to focus directly and effectively on your energies, your partner’s energies, and how they interact.

What Is This Thing Called Love?

You are reading a book whose title includes two terms—love and energies—that have baffled scientists, philosophers, and theologians for as long as their disciplines have existed. We are not arrogant enough to promise to resolve the historical ambiguities, contradictions, and mysteries surrounding either term (much as we’d like to), but we will try to give you a working feel for each that will be useful in reading this book.

Ancient Greek philosophers described four types of love: agape (spiritual, selfless, unconditional love), eros (passionate love, with sensual desire and longing), philia (affectionate regard or friendship), and storge (the natural affection of kinship, such as that felt by parents for their children). The Old Testament enumerates love’s qualities: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. . . . It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (1 Corinthians 13:4–8). The New Testament identifies three sources of human love (heart, soul, and mind) and suggests that we can willfully direct our love: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength” (Luke 10:27). It also goes beyond the human dimension of love, equating love with God: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). The idea of two loves—one earthly, one heavenly—can be found throughout recorded history.

For the scientist, one of the fundamental principles of the universe is the proclivity to bond. Within moments after the Big Bang, elementary particles began forming stable relationships of increasing complexity.2 Brian Swimme and Mary Tucker note that “[a]ttraction between a proton and an electron is a way in which the universe gives rise to ever greater levels of complexity which, after some fourteen billion years, includes us.”3 Bonding at the subatomic level is necessary for your body to exist, and nature extended the principle so you must jump the spatial gap between you and another to create the next generation. A magnetic energy compels you to take the leap; love at its many levels, from earthly to heavenly, makes that biological leap distinctly human. Writing as a research scientist whose lab at the University of North Carolina inv...

About this edition

• Publisher: TarcherPerigee
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0399174923
• ISBN 13: 9780399174926
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400