relationships

31 Jan 2012 No Comments

Kabbalah Love (Class Four)

Our last class took place in Brookline instead of Cambridge, and it was a video recording, as the instructor was away. He spoke to us from the screen:

How to connect to love? Major problem with love for many is: it doesn’t stay the same as in the beginning. After initial excitement, you do the same stuff, love is fading away, and things deteriorate.

“I think I love the person, but there is no spark?” Look at the job, there used to be a spark, but with time we lost excitement. But if we understand the essence of a relationship, it has to grow. We need to maintain and grow love. Think about your soul mate, a friend, a parent or someone close to you. Does it bother you that he/she doesn’t do something for you, that you don’t receive enough? We expect to receive from others. We start to take relationships for granted.

There is only one source of energy, joy, health, prosperity and pleasure. In the moment we think that something or someone belong to us, we take them for granted. We forget the original meaning of a relationship. It is not a tool to serve my needs, but to grow. Everything around us is a gift. When we take our health for granted, we disconnect from the source, from the light. Everything including our health, finances, etc. nourishes from the light. We use gifts and don’t get connected.

A person in the relationship becomes part of the furniture in the house. I don’t see how special he or she is, I forget. I am not there to invest the energy anymore. It is not existence. How do you remove this ownership? Consciousness is against our nature. Togetherness, bonding and unity are not natural. They require work.

The worst thing you can do to romance is to get married. “What am I doing with this person? I lost that magic power”. When you get married, you feel like you got there, achieved it. You don’t need to invest anymore. And you will lose it, there will be nothing there. There is never a vacation in a relationship. Relationship is a constant every day work. You need to see other person and communicate, it is not only about you. But people still ask: what have you done for me lately? It’s not comfort zone, but a tool to help each other grow. Push each other. And it is not supposed to be easy.

One of the biggest blockages in relationships: expectations. “Do dishes, make me dinner, give flowers”. Expectations and conditions destroy relationships. Only thing to expect is human dignity, respect and listening.

Communicate what you want but if it still doesn’t happen, let go. Or it will create a bigger space between two of you. Don’t judge the other person, do what you need to do. Help each other grow.

Love will work only when we give 100% to make it work. The right way is to confront, challenge and take responsibility in proactive way. “He is wrong, he needs to come to me”. Instead we need to make it happen. If the person is not a good partner, he will evaporate and the other person will come.

Another blockage is entitlement. “He needs to change his attitude”. The other person is a channel from another universe. I do and I care. When I’m going to change, he is going to change.

Be a giver without expectations and don’t constantly judge the other person. It is impossible to do without being conscious. We need a place to awake a power. Other people may be doing same old: “I want to do what I do, receive what I receive”. If you want love, do hard work inside, otherwise it will happen outside – divorce, issues, pain. You need spiritual home, support. It doesn’t stay the same because love constantly needs to be nourished.

What helps in love is higher cost or higher purpose. We have the power to make a difference. When we contribute to something that is bigger than me and you, we find higher purpose for our togetherness. The instructors’ parents came from different backgrounds, but together they brought the wisdom of Kabbalah to their students.

Love all with no calculation. Love is not to study but practice. Love yourself, make yourself better and connect to everything through love. It will impact love and positivity all around us and everywhere around the world.

Check out “The Power of Kabbalah” and “The Power to Change Everything” books.

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

28 Jan 2012 No Comments

Kabbalah Love (Class Three)

Love is work. Our responsibility is to create love in our relationship, to create it in everything we do. Love your neighbor like yourself. But how can you give it, if you don’t have it? If you don’t love yourself, fake it, extend to love thyself.

Accept yourself the way you are. Accept the package you come with. “I’m special but not perfect. I need to work on it. I have to be at peace with myself. Only then I’ll be able to love others”.

People ask: “Where can I get love, to cure my loneliness?” It comes from inside. Just love yourself and them first. Don’t wait for anything.

Everything is available for me to learn, to grow, to become better. I only need to ask a question and learn. There is not always a direct connection between what is happening around and self-improvement. Take notice of judgement. If it upsets us, there is a lesson for us (need to accept).

Do you want to have a soul mate? If yes, then you need to go deeper in your relationships.

The instructor told us a story about a man, who was ugly outside, but as soon as he started to speak  to the woman he liked, she noticed how beautiful he was from inside and she agreed to marry him. Don’t judge things with your 5 senses only, go deeper. There is no relationship until we are there 100%.

A soul mate will not usually be your type, but a vessel to help you grow. We need to see what is right for us, not think what is right.

Why do we have trust issues?

We don’t’ trust because we look at the person as a source of energy.

No human being is a reliable source of energy. There has to be something bigger. You need:

  1. To learn how it all works, what is God
  2. Learn tools to grow

Relationships are not the source of energy. Don’t count on the energy to come from another person. Come as a giver, not a taker. You can’t rely on people to react. You need to find your strength, energy. Be the creator.

Can you genuinely generate love for someone?

The Instructor gave us an exercise to find someone in the room that we don’t think we can ever love and talk to them. I personally didn’t move but some people switched places and moved around the room.  How crazy is that, to tell someone you can’t ever learn to love them?

At the end the instructor commented: “You broke embarrassment. You started talking, then you made connection. During that connection, you break barriers. Then there is light, judgment is curtains. Break your judgment”.

If there is someone you don’t like, there is potential for energy, for growth. The opposite happens if you are indifferent about someone. Relationship with your soul mate will have room for growth, if not, you can just be friends.

Then we were told to go and say something nice to three people in the room. Participants introduced themselves, exchanged compliments and engaged in small talk.

At the end the instructor corrected us saying that no one asked the most important question: “Can I do something for you?” It would mean that we really care about the person, but it is not our nature to do it yet. To learn something new, you need to directly learn it from the person, no matter what it is. Learn from the person; overcome the difficulties of the relationship.

Love is care. If you want a better connection, you need to give, to serve first. We all agreed that sometimes we can’t resist love. “She felt the love and she couldn’t not love him back”.

Love is the ultimate weapon. When we came to this life, we had everything, but were not able to be the creators of love. Now we know we can.

You can generate love for anyone on the planet.

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

25 Jan 2012 No Comments

Kabbalah Love (Class Two)

Last week was my second class. The instructor opened it with the following saying: “People believe in three rings – engagement, marriage and suffering. Instead what we are really doing is trying to be as close to the creator as possible.”

We all like falling in love, feeling oneness, but spark can be developed between 2 people. Battle means work. Kabbalists don’t believe in love from first sight, there could be some connection when you meet a person, but real love comes later, when you learn the other person more. You can create love.

Why were we created yearning for love? To make us feel complete?

All the qualities to be there for other people needed to work with light, all those qualities  are already within us. They were created within us.

Because this work is so out of reach all qualities within us will start develop through relationships with other people.

The Universe is created for me and by me. All work with people is a tool to get closer to God, to understand the Creator only through relationships.

It is hard to love those who we resent, but it is about giving and sharing.

We don’t get appreciation so we don’t like them.

In our opinion “Show appreciation and then I’ll like you”, but it is the other way around in Kabbalistic view: You can’t give what you don’t have. You have to appreciate first. You need to love yourself. How do I know that I love myself? You appreciate yourself?

Less I’m reactive the more I love myself. Less possessions, less emptiness within, less I want to determine whether I’m treated well from outside (criticism from other people). Then you will be able to be out there for other person, and not afraid of any losses.

I want to be perfect, to have an ability to know my true power, soul, to know my own baggage (my bad traits).

We are too focused on ourselves, so that we can’t be there for anybody.

What do you judge people for?

The answers were of full range, the majority was about mothers, selves, co-workers, relatives, or other people who judge us. Judgment is a reflection of something that I don’t’ accept within myself. I don’t recognize it.

To become more perfected, more aware, how do we start? Imagine I’m in my own movie, I’m the creator. Learn and improve through experiences every day.

The whole world was created for me. Everything is happening between me and other person – to help me become more powerful. To become more perfect, more loving. Allow me to meet someone who is honest. It is a tool to help me grow and become stronger.

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Flourish Book Summary

26 Sep 2011 2 Comments

Flourish Book Summary

Martin Seligman revised his authentic happiness theory, which was based on positive emotions, engagement and meaning. New theory of flourishing is built upon positive emotions, accomplishment, positive relationship, meaning and engagement, which all constitute the foundation of positive psychology. Each element contributes to well-being, but doesn’t not define well-being.

Aristotle thought that all human action was to achieve happiness, Nietxsche – get power, Freud – avoid anxiety, Thales -everything is water, Seligman – wellbeing.

The main reasons for revision are:

  1. The dominant popular connotation of happiness is related to cheerful mood, but not all people strive to be cheerful.
  2. Life satisfaction holds too privileged a place in measurement of happiness. It turns out that life satisfaction does not take into account how much meaning we have or how engaged we are with the people we love or how engaged we are in our work. Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful mood, so it is not entitled to a central place in wellbeing theory, that aims to be more than a happiology.
  3. Positive emotion, engagement and meaning do not exhaust the elements that people choose for their own sake. What you choose must serve no other master. Senia (Seligman’s student) asserted that many people live to achieve, just for achievement sake. 

Relationship, meaning and accomplishment have both objective and subjective components: not just how you feel about your relationship, but how these people feel about you, not just your sense of meaning (you could be deluded), but the degree to which you actually serve something larger than you are, not just your pride in what you have done, but whether you actually met your goals, and where this goals stand in their impact on the people you care about and on the world.

If people cared about not only their own happiness, but happiness of others, which would be part of their objective wellbeing, we would not have greedy financial executives, who are responsible for recent  financial downturn. It comes to ethics versus your own values. Seligman says that happiness, like GDP, is inadequate in measuring wellbeing. It is a subjective target.

The most interesting things I learned from the book:

Styles of responding: from active constructive, passive constructive,  passive destructive to active destructive.  Practice writing down your own response for the next time you have to interact with others and analyze it, create an active constructive one. Then use it. You just need to make it a habit.

Losada effect: you should have 3 times more positive thoughts than negative. To achieve it, use positive psychology techniques, including Love letter, gratitude journal, etc. Find your signature strengths and set goals, or invent activities to practice them, write about your experience.

Reasons why optimists are less vulnerable to disease: Optimists take action and have healthier lifestyles. Optimists believe that their actions matter, whereas pessimist believe they are helpless and nothing they do will matter. Optimists try while pessimist lapse into passive helplessness. Optimist use more social support. Optimists have a better response to repeated stress. Become an optimist!

Variety of programs are designed and already being used to help people balance their life with flow, meaning and pleasantries. Original Penn Resiliency program is one of them. It was later modified to work for school children (The Geelong Grammar School Project). It would be great if all schools offered it. Special program was created for US Army soldiers: Comprehensive soldier training/fitness; Global Assessment tool (GAT) has four sections: Emotional fitness module, Social fitness, Family fitness, Spiritual fitness, and the main component of the program is Turning trauma into growth.

Overview of Positive Psychology Training (14 sessions): Identify your strengths and illustrate how they are used in your life. You can complete VIA questionnaire online to identify character strengths. Start a blessing journal, in which you write, every night, three good things that happened that day. Understand the role of good and bad memories in maintaining depression/unhappiness. Write about feelings of anger and bitterness and how they feed your depression. Write a forgiveness letter describing a transgression and related emotions and pledges to forgive the transgressor (only if appropriate) but don’t not deliver the letter. Write a gratitude letter to someone you never properly thanked for and deliver it in person. Understand terms satisficers and maximizers, find ways to increase satisficing and devise a personal satisficing plan. Use optimistic style – to see bad events as temporary, changeable and local. Recognize character strengths of significant others, ask  family members take VIA questionnaire online and then draw a tree that includes the character strengths of all members of the family. Learn savoring as a technique to increase the intensity and duration of positive emotion. Give the gift of time by doing something that requires a fair amount of time and calls on your character strengths. Make sure you know how to have full life integrating pleasure, engagement and meaning.

Martin Seligman went to his 50th school reunion and gave two pieces of advice to his former classmates:

  1. Be future oriented, not dwell on the past, work for your ideals.
  2. Exercise.

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , ,

30 Jul 2011 No Comments

Movie Called Happy

The Greater Good – The Science of a Meaningful Life posted an interview with the director of movie Happy:

“When Roko Belic was 18 years old, he traveled to Africa, prepared to see unspeakable suffering.

He was delivering money and supplies to refugees of Mozambique’s civil war, a group that he knew had been “completely brutalized”; some had had their arms, lips, or noses cut off in the conflict.

Roko Belic, director of Happy, a documentary beginning its theatrical run today.

But when he arrived, he was astonished by what he found.

“I saw people who were happy,” he says. “They were happy to be alive, but they were also singing and dancing. They had a zest for life that I saw missing in some of my friends back home.”

The experience challenged some of Belic’s most basic assumptions about the world. How is it possible that people who’ve suffered so much can seem happier than people who’ve grown up enjoying the comforts of the West?

He has pondered that question since returning from his trip. Now, more than 20 years later, he has made a film that answer it.

 

JM: So, five years later, based on all the interviews you’ve conducted and research you’ve read and stories you’ve heard, what do you think is the answer to that question you’ve been asking for your adult life: What are the keys to happiness that would explain why some people can seem so much happier than others who are better off financially?

RB: Well, it seems to me that some of the strongest aspects of a person’s life that can help them be happy are their relationships. Strong personal relationships are what Ed Diener, one of the leading happiness researchers, told us is really the key to happiness. He said you don’t have to like everyone or have a million friends. But to have at least a few people you really care about and love, and who care about and love you and will be there for you when you need them—that is one of the key factors in a happy life.

Another one is gratitude or appreciation. Being able to appreciate what you have—it makes a lot of sense that that would lead to happiness. Because if you are poor but you have a piece of bread to eat, and you can appreciate that, that appreciation makes you feel good and fulfilled and happy.

At the same time, if you don’t appreciate things—even if you have a private jet or a few mansions around the world or you’re extremely good looking—that explains why those things may not lead you to a happier life.

Then there’s a lot of research about values. This to me was one of the most interesting findings: that people who have what scientists call “intrinsic values,” meaning they value compassion and cooperation and wanting to make the world a better place, are more likely to be happy than people who prioritize what they call “extrinsic values,” which value things like social status, good looks, power, fame.

The reason why that’s exciting is that what you care about is within your control. In fact, a very significant part of our happiness, according to research, is within our control. And that’s exciting to me, because it means that none of us are cut off from the prospects of the possibility of a genuinely happy life.”

Read complete interview http://bit.ly/pOWGUH

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , ,

29 Jul 2011 No Comments

We are Made for Love

As I mentioned in the previous post, the 2nd World Congress on Positive Psychology happened last weekend. I wasnt’ there, but that is what I found out: this year’s conference boasts 1,200 attendees from 62 countries, 50 symposiums and workshops, 400 posters, and 22 speakers from around the world. I’m very impressed with Kelly Erickson’s post on Greater Good about the presentation by Barbara Fredrickson on the opening day “Love: A New Lens on the Science of Thriving”:

 ” Fredrickson completely transformed how I think about love and connection. She first got my attention by: defining what love IS and is NOT. According to Fredrickson:

Love is NOT: sexual desire (there is love in sexual desire), special bonds (products of love), commitment (which is a decision), exclusive (love is not felt for just one person), and lasting (as with all other emotions, love is a reaction to changing circumstances). And, finally, love is not unconditional, in that it requires two preconditions: 1) safety felt when with another, and 2) connection in the form of co-presence, eye contact, touch, voice, etc.
Love IS: an investment in the well-being of others for others’ sake, and perceived responsibility for them and them for you (i.e., the feeling that others ‘get’ me/care about me, etc). Love, like other emotions, has a biological component.

Her resulting definition for love: an interpersonal, social situation with positive emotion marked by momentary increases in invested well-being in others, bio-behavioral synchrony, and mutual responsive action tendencies.

Taking a step back, Fredrickson gave an overview of the numerous positive aspects of positive emotions, especially the ways they make us feel connected to others emotionally and the way they make us better at taking others’ perspectives, which not only makes us more likely to help them but enables us to see past differences that may divide us, such as racial differences.

She then drew on several studies to highlight the behavioral and neurological effects when two people share positive emotions. The more connected two people feel—such as through sharing joy, gratitude, pride, laughter, inspiration, awe, etc.(!)—the more they will move their bodies in similar ways and the more their neurological activity will look the same.

So this sounds a lot like what she defines as “love,” doesn’t it?

In fact, Fredrickson proposed that when any positive emotion is shared between two people, the act of sharing that emotion changes it into one of love; in other words, love is any shared positive emotion.

Taking this a step further, she said that love is a single act performed by two bodies and brains. She concluded with a slide picturing two hikers on their journey to the top of a snow covered mountain: Love is the pinnacle of emotions, she argued. We are not “made to love,” she said, but “made for love.”

Read complete post http://bit.ly/oEVs47 .

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , , ,