Heart & Soul. Daphne Rose Kingma

that sense, pride is a heart-swelling joy. But pride as a private emotional stance is the antithesis of joy. Far from bringing you joy, it will stand in joy's way. Joy thrives on freedom; joy flows. If the place in your heart that is longing for joy is already jammed full of pride, joy, the unwelcome guest, may just slink away.

      So give up your pride. It may preserve your dignity, protect you from all the judgments you fear, but, in the end, all it will do for you, really, is leave you alone…with your pride.

DISCOVER SEX AS SACRED REUNION

       Our sexuality is one of the loveliest, most complex and satisfying aspects of our intimate relationships. It is where we gather in the flesh to be joined, connected, and bonded. It can bring us joy or disappointment. It can be the source of our most painful betrayals, or of the highest moments of our ecstatic love.

      Just as bringing our bodies together in the sexual encounter reminds us that we are bodies, essentially physical beings, so orgasm, the moment of blossoming ecstasy, connects us to the spiritual essence within us. Taken in total, making love is the movement of the mystic, electric current that bears eloquent witness to the fact that we are not just physical beings but temples where the spirit resides.

      To apprehend your lovemaking in this way is to move toward the sacred in your sexual relationship. It is to ask more of it, give more to it, and receive more, far more, from it than you can ever expect from the how-to-improve-your-sex-life articles in popular magazines. Although handy-dandy advice columns and erotic manuals may indeed solve some of your sexual machinery problems, they will drop you off at the doorway of sex as a gymnasium, romance novel, or power trip, leaving you with only a sensate thrill. Thus you are denied the magnificent opportunity of experiencing your sexual encounters as a spiritual reunion of the highest order.

      For in making love, it is not only our bodies that are happily and deliciously engaged; but, because of the irresistible magnetism that sexual attraction is, we are also invited to contemplate in the mind and actually experience in the body that spirit lives and moves within us.

      Through sex we enter the timeless, boundary-less moment. We partake of the one experience above all others in life which allows us the bliss of true union. Here ego and all its concerns are erased, and the self is dissolved in utter surrender. To know, feel, and discover this in the presence of another human being, as we are invited to do in making love, is to be brought face-to-face with one of the greatest mysteries of human existence–that we are spirit, embodied, and that as human beings, we are partaking in this miracle.

      To experience your sexual relationship in this way is to elevate it to the sacred encounter it is. In so doing, you will experience your body as a vessel of the divine, your orgasm as a gift of the spirit, and your beloved as. he or she with whom you are gifted to share a taste of eternal bliss.

BE EXTRAVAGANT WITH YOUR PRAISE

       Everybody has hundreds of things to be praised–even a total stranger. If you stopped for a moment and looked at the person beside you on the bus, ahead of you at the check-out stand, pumping gas at the service station, you could see, sense, hear, feel something so fine, or beautiful, or true about that human being that you would realize how worthy it is of being remarked upon. And if you uttered that praise, that mini-celebration of this person's specialness, you just might see a stranger suddenly burst into bloom.

      How much more, then, does your beloved, the one special being you've chosen to honor, enjoy, and cherish, merit the celebrating words of praise, admiration, and acknowledgment that will make his or her heart sing. All too often, proximity breeds, if not contempt, then blindness and amnesia. We forget to acknowledge those sterling attributes, whimsical quirks, and singular passions that caused us to fall in love in the first place. Once we've “captured” a mate (precisely because of all the attributes we so cherish and admire–her beautiful eyes, his wonderful wit, the amazing softness of her skin, his big bear rug of a chest), we often get lazy, stingy even, with the warm bath of praise that could wash away hurts and deepen our bonds of connection.

      It's as if we use praise as a lure, to snag somebody to love, but then seem to forget that praise, the out-loud, out-spoken, uproarious celebration of all the things that are good, great, special, and rare about that one very fine person, is really the life's breath of love.

      Praise opens the heart and refreshes the soul of the one who is praised. It sculpts and enhances the very behaviors it honors, encourages them to multiply. Praise creates change. It refashions the soul. By quietly showing forth the magnificence already there, it inspires the ongoing creation of an ever finer human being.

      So if you want joy in your relationship, an enduring sense of its specialness, the feeling that you are loved by (and are loving) a most extraordinary human being, be accurate, consistent, generous, and extravagant with your praise.

ACCEPT THE GLORIOUS COMPROMISES OF LOVE

       There is a component of sacrifice to every intimate relationship, no matter how blissful or harmonious it may be. When you choose to love one person in a special, committed way, you are unchoosing–or giving up—your option to choose all others, for a time at least, in that same particular way.

      Love–the feeling–and “being in love”–the ravishing experience–make us willing, even dare-devilishly eager, to make these sacrifices. It's a joy to choose one above all others, a delight to feel graced and blessed by your beloved's uniquely delicious, heartwarming presence.

      But this choosing, grand as it is, and willing as we are to make it, is also symbolic of the many choices, little renunciations and revisions of priority that, for love, we shall come to make as we walk the path of relationship. There's a great deal we do (or discontinue doing) precisely and only because we love. Jane postponed graduate school to mother Paul's two children, whose mother had died of cancer. Mark moved from the house he'd built for himself to live in the town where Rene, his new love, was a tenured professor.

      Such revisions are only the tip of the iceberg. Each day, in love, you will be faced with decisions and choices, invited to make compromises which represent a willingness to meet your beloved halfway on the playing field of love. Thus, you may find yourself adapting to uncomfortable schedules or meticulous (or sloppy) housekeeping habits (the proverbial toothpaste folded up wrong-or far too perfectly), taking vacations you never imagined (but ended up loving anyway), preparing foods you never even liked, or entering into financial arrangements that stretch your equanimity to the limit.

      A compromise–what you do for love–needs to be just that: a conscious revision of your own preferences. As such, it becomes a creative, imaginative act, an opportunity to expand, to experience life in a new and surprisingly beautiful frame. But above all, it shows you the depth of your love. For when we smooth off the corners of our own dogmatic priorities, we reach toward one another. In so doing we see that love, the deep recognition of the soul of our beloved—and not all the endless particulars of life–is truly the most important thing there is.

ATTEND TO THE UNFOLDING

       Your relationship is constantly in a state of evolution. Like the river, ever moving, you can never step into the same current twice. When you “fall in love,” there are certain things that draw you to a person, hook you in, connect you, and then, as time goes on, things change. You change. He or she changes. The way you were together is changed—through aging and illness, by external events (earthquakes, drops and gains in the stock market), and internal revisions (emotional and spiritual awakenings), or by the direction that, because of personal or economic necessity, you find your mutual life taking. (He had asthma; we moved to New Mexico. She lost her job; we joined the Peace Corps.)

      You may have had an idea of what you wanted your relationship to look like, the direction you hoped it would take; but life and its surprising little tricks will probably