Aloha,
Is it just me or is the passage of time speeding up?

My husband, William, and I have been together for over 26 years and just celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary. (How can it be? It seems like only a moment ago that we got married.) We had a lovely evening together at one of Hawaii's most romantic restaurants, right on the beach of Waikiki.
(Please see photos at right.)

As we watched the soft colors of the beautiful, tropical sunset, we reflected on our relationship and the commitment we made, so long ago, to use our relationship as a vehicle for our healing. Together, supporting each other in releasing old patterns of thought, belief and behavior that were in the way of true intimacy, trust, surrender, happiness and inner-peace.

What a adventure it has been. We have laughed and cried together, practiced the principles of good communication and non-blame, of release and letting-go...... sometimes kicking and screaming with resistance but doing it anyway and it has paid off!

All of the time, energy, focus and determination to release the past, to improve our relationship skills and to open our hearts more and more has allowed us to experience a truly deep, trusting, empowering, loving and intimate relationship.

We had to work on it, no doubt about it. But, we now have a quality of relationship and life together that exceeds our wildest expectations.

It does take time, focus, being vigilant with your mind and uncovering and changing old attitudes and beliefs that do not support harmonious relationships. Doing this inner-work is so very rewarding and worth it! So, I encourage you to continue your journey of releasing the past and opening to a greater experience of joy, ease, and love in all your relationships.

I hope that you will find the information and resources below, both helpful and interesting.

Also, I would love your help with finding Movies and Books that you have found inspiring and uplifting. Please e-mail me your suggestions and finds. I love to have a resource to use during my Group Intensives, as well as, to recommend to others.

I look forward to hearing from you and I wish you happy, harmonious and satisfying relationships.

Blessings,

Date Sept. 20, 2004
Volume 1
Issue 2

In This Issue:

• Welcome from Pamela
• What's New!
• Recommendations
• Feature Article:
  "Safe Relationship Spaces"
• Quotes on Happiness

	"The thought manifests as the word; The word manifests as the deed; The deed develops into habit; And habit hardens into character; So watch the thought and its ways with care, and let it spring from love born out of concern for all beings.... As the shadow follows the body, as we think so we become." ~from the Dhammapada~ Life is what we make it, and the world is what we make it. The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation; but very different are the aspects which it bears to them." ~Albert Pike~ "Look within yourself. Within is a fountain of good, and it is always ready to bubble up, if you always delve." ~Marcus Aurelius~ "Be happy. Talk happiness. Happiness calls out responsive gladness in others. There is enough sadness in the world without yours.... never doubt the excellence and permanence of what is yet to be. Join the great company of those who make the barren places of life fruitful with kindness....Your success and happiness lie in you.... The great enduring realities are love and service.... Resolve to keep happy and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties." ~Helen Keller~ "Seek to do good, and you will find that happiness will run after you". ~James Freeman Clarke~ "Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them." ~Count Leo Tolstoy~ "In our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves an experience of our own suffering is less intense. What does this tell us? Firstly, because our every action has a universal dimension, a potential impact on others' happiness, ethics are necessary as a means to ensure that we do not harm others. Secondly, it tells us that genuine happiness consists in those spiritual qualities of love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness and so on. For it is these which provide both for our happiness and others' happiness." ~His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama~ The Value of Loving Ourselves: "As I listen in churches for what is said about love, I am troubled by how rarely we are encouraged to love ourselves............ ~Pat Youngdahl From the book: Subversive Devotions: A Journey into Divine Pleasure and Power~ "Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom." ~from the Tao Te Ching~

What's New

* New in the News: "Tap into success"
Check out the August 2004 copy of HERS Magazine, pages 14-17, in the NEWSFRONT section www.hersinfo.com Featured are some of the leading-edge techniques that Olympians are using to get more out of their training, to breakthrough barriers, to overcome fears and to experience more success. They talk briefly about the Energy Psychology Technique called "Tapping", that I teach and regularly use in my practice. Word is getting out on how powerful it is and how simple to use. They also mention practicing Positive Thinking and Affirmations, as well as, Creative Visualization--- ALL are effective techniques to improve the quality of your life.

* "Giggle Yoga"
A new type of yoga is spreading throughout the world, based on the research of Dr. Madan Kataria. It is knows as a "Thought -Free" laughter exercise that raises healthy cell activity, T-cells, B-cells, disease fighting protein and strengthens the bodies ability to fight off infection. It also decreases epinephrine and cortisol, which suppress the immune system.
So, in short, START LAUGHING! You will feel better and become healthier. Laughter is contagious--spread it around.

* "Fresh, Hip and Sophisticated Harp"
For those of you that enjoy the etheric and lovely sound of the Harp, experience Catrin Finch's new CD: "Crossing the Stone". She takes the harp in dynamic new directions. www.catrinfinch.com

Safe Relationship Spaces
By Dr. Margaret Paul

We all want to feel safe in our relationships, yet most people have deep fears of rejection and abandonment, as well as of domination and engulfment, that get triggered in relationships. We will be unable to create a safe relationship space share our love to the fullest extent until we heal these fears of loss of other and of loss of self.

In the depths of our souls we all yearn for love and connection with others. That yearning reflects a basic, even biological, human need. Infants, for example, thrive physically only when they feel deeply loved and cherished. As adults, we experience wrenching, soul-level loneliness when we don't have love and meaningful connection in our lives, yet all too frequently we don't have these things. Not with our parents or siblings, not with a mate, not even with a best friend.

We all intuitively know that the highest experience in life is the sharing of love. However, we often confuse the idea of sharing love with the idea of getting love. We try to get love when we feel empty inside and can share love only when we learn to first fill ourselves with love. We cannot share that which we do not have within. The wounded part of us seeks constantly to get love and avoid pain, resulting in an inability to share love. Until we each accept the full responsibility of becoming strong enough to love, we will not be able to share love. This means creating inner safety by learning how to love ourselves and take responsibility for our own feelings, so that we are not constantly trying to get love.

Most people have deep fears of rejection and abandonment, as well as of domination and engulfment. These fears stem from childhood experiences and from defining our worth externally through others' approval, rather than internally through spiritual eyes of truth. We will be unable to share our love to the fullest extent until we heal these fears of loss of other and of loss of self. We will be unable to create the safe relationship space in which to share love, and a safe world in which to live, until we learn how to create safety within. Inner Bonding is a profound process for healing our fears, creating safety within, and for creating safe relationship spaces, spaces where each person feels free to be fully themselves, to speak their truth and grow into their full potential.

It is possible in all relationships to create loving connection. Family, friends, coworkers, employers and employees, who are willing to learn the skills necessary to heal the blocks to connection can all create safe relationship spaces.

A relationship space is the environment in which the relationship is occurring. It is the energy created by the two people involved. I think of this environment, this relationship space, as an actual entity that both people are responsible for creating. It can be a safe relationship space, which is open, warm, light, and inviting, or it can be an unsafe relationship space, which is hard, dark, unforgiving, and full of fear. The kind of environment in which our relationship takes place is crucial to its success--or failure.

At the heart of all relationship issues is our intent. We are always choosing our intent, but most people are unconscious of the fact that they are making a choice each moment. At any given moment there are only two possible intents to choose from:

• The intent to avoid painful feelings and responsibility for them, through some form of controlling behavior.
• The intent to learn about loving ourselves and others and take full responsibility for our own feelings and behavior.

Every relationship has a system. The system may be open and loving, or controlling and unloving. Relationship systems start surprisingly early, sometimes within the first minutes or days of meeting.

A safe relationship space exists when two or more people intend to learn and are willing to take full personal responsibility for their own feelings, while accepting that their energy and behavior affects others. When both individuals fully accept that they are a part of an energy system, i.e., they recognize that each person's energy affects the other, and they are willing to take responsibility both for their own controlling behavior and for their responses to the controlling behavior of others, they create a safe relationship space. Such a space is a circle of loving energy that results from each person's deep desire to learn what is most loving to themselves and others. To create a safe relationship space, all persons involved need to be deeply committed to learning about their own controlling behavior,
rather than focusing on what another is doing. Rather than giving themselves up to avoid rejection or attempting to get others to give themselves up to feel safe, each person is devoted to their own and the other's highest good, supporting themselves and each other in becoming all they can be.

Many of us have spent a great deal of time in unsafe relationship spaces. In fact, some of us have never experienced a safe relationship space because many, if not most, of us have not learned to create a safe inner space by staying in a loving Adult frame of mind when our fears are activated. When our fears of being rejected, abandoned, engulfed and controlled are triggered, most of us immediately retreat into our learned controlling behaviors. We may move our focus into our minds to avoid our feelings; we may attack, blame, defend, demand, explain, deny, judge, criticize, shut down, withdraw, resist, give in and comply, placate, lie,
become overly nice, and so on. Of course, the moment we act out in controlling ways, our behavior may trigger another's fears of being rejected or controlled, and that person may then react in controlling ways as well, creating a vicious circle and an unsafe relationship space.

If, when these fears are activated, we focus on who is at fault or who started it, we perpetuate an unsafe relationship space. Blaming another for our fears (and for our own reactive, unloving behavior) makes the relationship space more unsafe than ever. Then both people in the relationship end up feeling bad, each of us believing that our pain is the result of the other person's behavior. We feel victimized, helpless, stuck, and disconnected from our partner. We desperately want the other person to see what they are doing that (we think) is causing our pain. We think that if the other person only understands this, they will change--and we exhaust ourselves trying to figure out how to make them understand.

Over time, being in an unsafe relationship space creates distance between the people involved. When we have not created a safe space in which to speak our complete, heartfelt truth about ourselves, the joy between us gradually dies. And the more we hold back our innermost feelings and experiences, the shallower our connection becomes. Our intimacy crumbles.

In friendships, marriages, and work relationships, our joy, electricity, and creativity get lost as we each give up parts of ourselves in an attempt to feel safe. In romantic relationships, passion dries up. Superficiality, boredom, fighting, and apathy take its place. We try valiantly to figure out what went wrong. But too often we ask, "What am I doing wrong?" or "What are you doing wrong?" rather than inquiring into the health of the relationship space itself.

Only when we look at the relationship space will we see what we are each doing to create the unsafe space. The dual fears of losing the other through rejection and losing ourselves through being swallowed up by the other are the underlying cause of our unloving, reactive behavior. These fears are deeply rooted. They cannot be healed or overcome by getting someone else's love. On the contrary, we must heal these fears before we can share love--give and receive love--with each other.

The key to doing this is learning how to create a safe inner space where we can work with and overcome our fears of rejection and engulfment. This is a process, not an event. Practicing the process of Inner Bonding gradually creates inner safety as we learn to take personal responsibility for our own feelings and behavior.

Inner Bonding guides us in defining ourselves internally through the eyes of our personal spiritual guidance, instead of externally through performance, looks, and others' approval. In addition, it provides us with a clear process for conflict resolution that can be used in any relationship difficulty. Instead of love eroding with time, love deepens daily, supporting each person in the sacred journey of the soul's evolution.

Any two people who are willing to learn to create their own inner sense of safety can also learn to create a safe relationship space where their intimacy and passion will flourish and their love will endure.