Margie Ulbrick – Page 14

Where’s the Magic? Tips on How to Create a Magic Relationship

One of the greatest ways to keep a relationship fresh is to see your partner with new eyes every day. In fact, we are all changing constantly but so often relationships become stale as we take our partners for granted. But how good would it be to let go of expectations and wake up each day with a sense of gratitude for the person beside us and to connect then to them with that mindset?

Imagine for a moment what you could create in your relationship if you took responsibility for yourself, then moved towards your partner with a sense of curiosity asking where’s the magic today? How can we play today and how can I fully appreciate the person you are here with me right now?

There are a few mandatory attitudes you need before you can approach a relationship this way. You need to not expect your partner to make you happy. That’s up to you! It’s an incredibly demanding and unrealistic expectation to expect another person to fill you up or provide you with a reason for living or to give you constant approval. You need to honour and love yourself first before you can love another, so the old cliché goes.

Never try to change your partner or to fix them. Rather see everything they are as a gift to you. Listen deeply allowing them to express who they are without trying to take their problems away from them. Being a partner does not mean taking over their lives or rushing in to fix with solutions, rather it means staying open to the deepening connection between you and staying present to the moment at hand.

If you would like help in creating a magical relationship please contact me to see how I can be of assistance 0403 814 477 or email me.

Letting go or Loosening Your Grip

By Margie Ulbrick Leave a Comment

This is an issue very close to my own heart! Most of the work we do and most of what we grapple with can in some way be traced back to letting go or more specifically the refusal to let go. Philosophically we know what we should do. We generally know when we need to let go of a relationship, issue, or area of baggage. We know but we do not allow ourselves to know. We hold onto old beliefs that no longer serve us. We repeat patterns of behaviour that leave us enslaved and addicted but still we do not let go. In our hearts we know, but under the spell of the ego and fearful of change, our minds hold on tightly.

It follows therefore that the human being must have a very good reason for behaving in such seemingly contradictory ways. It is generally about feeling safe. So rather than condemn ourselves for not moving past old aspects of ourselves, perhaps we could have a little compassion! If we accept that we cannot let go and even embrace our difficulty, ironically life opens up new possibilities. So power then lies in the acceptance of the difficulty of letting go!

The next time you berate yourself for not letting go consider this: some aspect of what you cling to represents something that a part of you feels is essential for your survival. By not letting go you are protecting yourself from feelings that seem threatening. However, in spite of wounds still bleeding and psyches still aching, we need to make a choice to be whole. To reclaim our power we need to be unified. So this means turning toward our hearts and refusing to make choices that keep us stuck in conflict and division.

Have a good look at your life and ask yourself where do you feel divided? This will give you a clue as to where you need to let go. Letting go can mean you give up trying. It can mean you stop being the one who takes too much responsibility for a relationship. It can feel scary to give up in this way because we tend to feel the harder we try and the more effort we put in the more success we will have. But this is not always so. Sometimes we just need to get out of our own way.

Letting go of excess responsibility frees us to see what is happening in a relationship and prepares the way for more mutually respectful encounters that have a reciprocal energy exchange. Letting go can be the most loving thing we can do and also the most empowering, both for ourselves and those we love. When we free up our energy by letting go of what is not our legitimate concern, we have a whole lot more space to be creative and invest our energy in surprising and life giving ways.

Maureen Moss says there are undoubtedly many parts of you being torn in different directions but there is only one of you listening! So be prepared to consider what the pay off is for not letting go and, look beyond the obvious. What have you projected onto the source of your clinging? What could you possibly lose by giving up or letting go? What feelings would you have to feel? It might help to keep in mind that whatever you stand to lose by letting go, the freedom that ensues will guarantee that the cost benefit analysis is well worth it! The alternative is slavery. For our fundamental leaning is toward growth not away from it. Letting go can be a supreme act of love and it is essential for the health of our souls.

Parents who fail to let go when the time is right condemn their children to struggle. It is essential for parents to give their adult children appropriate messages about leaving home, growing up and becoming independent. Parenting is one continual experience of letting go and this is particularly difficult if parents themselves have never really developed their own independence. By letting go you send a message of trust and of course the opposite also applies. A refusal to let go perpetrates fear and anxiety.

According to Dr Chris Hunt there are five essential messages an adolescent needs to hear:

“You can go”
“We believe in you”
“We will miss you”
“We will cope without you”
“Let’s stay in touch”.

Forgiveness is also often a necessary part of letting go. Our heart wants to let go of anger and resentment but our minds cling tightly to remembering the pain of past hurts. Anchor yourself firmly in the moment of now and let go of attachments to past experience that keep you bound prisoner. With each step we take towards forgiveness we take steps to make ourselves whole. Letting go of the need to be right is an essential part of this process. It serves no purpose to be right except to maintain the illusion of supremacy of the ego.

When we forgive ourselves and others we can truly become free to be the people we are created to be. We often fear that we will lose control if we let go. Pardoxically, what appears to be a loss of control actually serves to enhance our control. For ultimately it is in letting go that we claim and reclaim ourselves, individuated and whole, human and dignified.

Letting go involves making a commitment to ourselves and to our growth. It involves an inner commitment to integrity and authenticity in spite of the pull from the outside world to what we think we should have or need to experience. Commit to be happy now, even though things outside have not yet become exactly as you think they should be. Let go of ideas of perfection, of unrealistic expectations and of worrying about what others may think. Just choose in every moment to be the best you can be.

Letting go involves refusing to take things personally and accepting with gratitude whatever is happening right now. This means we let go of the desire to control. Letting go of the fixation on outcomes, letting go of all the conditions we impose, the rules and regulations and expectations we have of others and ourselves allows for all sorts of possibilities. In fact the miracles of life wondrously start to spontaneously appear, simply by letting go!

If you would like some support with your relationships or creating greater happiness in your life, please contact me on 0403 814 477 for a free 10-minute consultation to discuss your needs.

The Law of Attraction: Hokus Pokus or Bunkum?

By Margie Ulbrick Leave a Comment

I first heard the Law of Attraction described in scathing terms by a psychologist who was advocating that it simply meant more business for him! I was curious about his perspective because I was quite intrigued at the time with the concept. Having “discovered” Norman Vincent Peale (You Can If You Think You Can) at the age of about 16 when going through a depression of sorts, I was given a lot of hope by the idea that your thoughts create your world. Could it be that simple? Clearly my psychologist friend did not think so. Also this fitted like a hand in glove for me with my spiritual understanding, I’d always had a strong faith which had taught me things like ask and you shall receive, knock and the door will be opened.

But I have come to realise over time that it isn’t that simple and then again it is. It is true that we project aspects of our disowned selves onto others and thus encounter our own selves mirrored back to us in our relationships. How does this fit into the law of attraction? Well it’s a matter of what is going on underneath things. If we really want to invoke the law of attraction we need to understand that what we are attracting is the product of deeply held beliefs about ourselves and the universe which we are often unaware of. Thus my psychologist friend was wrong and right. For those who think they can work with the law of attraction without going through the long and arduous process of self revelation and reflection it is bound to fail. The hard reality is you have to be prepared to do the work. There are no magical quick fix solutions, although synchronicity does happen as do miracles. In fact my experience is that miracles are so common place that we need a new word to describe the concept! The everyday occurrences when we are so totally aligned with our deepest selves and with the force of universal energy outside of us that the light from outside colludes with the light inside! Perhaps that’s the definition of joy.

However, to really invoke the power of the life force that is known as the law of attraction we cannot do any Dorothy tricks. Nevertheless that does not mean that it does not work! And this is where my psychologist friend was naïve. He had not understood how to harness the powers of creation to bring healing love and light. It’s not that complicated, it’s about manifesting and aligning ourselves completely with our soul purpose. In order to do the hard work required, we first need to be open to growth and committed to collaboration with Spirit. We need to understand the fundamental principle that that which we seek to attract will in fact at first invoke it’s opposite. Have you ever noticed how the day you decide to be more peaceful you are suddenly surrounded by chaos? This puts many people off. They feel afraid of their power almost as if they are likely to sabotage all their best efforts. The trick is to know that this is simply part of a process. It is the process of bringing out what is hidden in order to heal and make space for its opposite. It is the process of revealing the fears and beliefs which lie beneath our desires in order to move to a place of trust. But we must be prepared to confront ourselves and our shadow. Carl Yung knew what he was talking about when he spoke of the shadow side and also of synchronicity.

The most exciting thing on this journey is to become truly aware: aware of our projections fears and anxieties, aware of our limiting beliefs. Let them surface like gold, face the darkness and become part of the light

If you would like some support with your relationships or creating greater happiness in your life, please contact me on 0403 814 477 for a free 10-minute consultation to discuss your needs.

Love

By Margie Ulbrick Leave a Comment

Such a grand big topic and such a difficult one to define! We all want more of it; in fact we crave it and sometimes spend our whole lives searching for it. Unless of course we feel we already have it. Even the Romantic poet John Keats said “Love doth know no fullness nor no bounds. / True-tender monitors! / I bend unto your laws.”

So what makes up the life experience of someone who feels abundant in love? What do they do to give/receive love? What are some of the qualities of a loving relationship? What are the “laws of love” to which Keats refers?
When we are “in love” we can experience the heady (and bodily) sensations which are evoked in great romantic literature and art, merging and separating and merging again but “love is blind” for we know that we see what we want to see and disregard the rest! Being “in love” or “falling” in love is not talked about as being “high” on love or as our senses being “drunken” on love for nothing. When me and you become as one we experience a state unlike no other. What John Donne referred to as new worlds are experienced, in fact are brought into being and a sense of transcendence of the ordinary life experience is felt, the earth shakes, the planets align, God is in her place and all seems well with the world!

Our earliest experiences of love shape our ability to give and receive love. There is the ideal: a child developing in the safety of a loving home, who is mirrored and responded to and forms what psychologists refer to as secure attachment patterns. However many of us were not given adequate mirroring, were not listened to and were not able to grow and develop a sense of self and of other, which ideally occurs with the appropriate mirroring. Mature “I love you” requires a strong sense of I and of you. In our longing we sometimes merge the two and seek symbiosis: you should think and feel as I do, if that was me I would never say/do that to you. We fail to appreciate our separateness fully. Experiencing it provokes the anxiety of abandonment triggered by the separation that happened when we were vulnerable and small, and so we attempt to merge boundaries: you should want what I want, should know what I want without me telling you!

Therefore, a healthy relationship of love requires that we have a strongly defined sense of self and of other in relationship. It can be difficult for some people to express empathy or to have a genuine concern for the experience of the “other” in relationship. This makes love feel very far away for those involved; their unmet needs from childhood are still unmet! But if we have a well defined “I” as well as an appreciation of what makes “you” then love becomes possible. If we can tolerate our individuality and sense of separateness, together with an appreciation of another’s experience as being valid even though different from our own in relationship, we can begin to negotiate the junctions and intersecting points of “I”, “you” and “we”.

In choosing the path of love we can consciously cultivate certain qualities. Qualities of a loving relationship are easily seen. Control is absent and trust is present. Presence is a definite hallmark. We are present one to another and to our own experience. Looking at it this way it’s not hard to see why love can be a tricky path. We allow each other to be as they need to be, respecting that it is not up to us to takeover the journey of another. Our presence and acceptance in itself is a mark of love. Simply showing up and being there is one of the most loving things we can do. In a spirit of allowing another to walk their own path but in commitment to be present for one’s own lived experience and for another, we confront all of our own humanity. We overstep our reptilian brain response of fight or flee and instead we give another human being the greatest gift of all: the offering of self in connection.

Listening is another quality which is pivotal to love. It is in seeing/hearing ourselves mirrored in another that we settle. It is this fundamental need from our early development that provides the connection for which we long. It is often said that deep listening is rare. Listening with our hearts as parents to children is a wonderful gift. Do we listen to our partners in love and do we respond by attempting at least to meet them where they are? Many people stonewall their partners, pretending to listen but never being prepared to change their behaviours (or giving up the illusion of control). Of course it’s no surprise that the result is often passive aggression; resentment and frustration are expressed underground.

So if love is our destiny and love is our calling, how essential it is to our happiness that we consider the implications of being loving. Love, the call of the spiritual path and the true call of all the great religions. Love, the meaning of which is still partly mystery and partly ethereal, partly from another world partly earthy, partly sensual essentially practical. Love is fundamentally creative and life-generating. Even while it involves a kind of death of aspects of the self, and knocks the very edges off of us, sometimes taking us to the very edge. On this precipice, love paradoxically generates something new.

If you would like some support with your relationships or creating greater happiness in your life, please contact me on 0403 814 477 for a free 10-minute consultation to discuss your needs.

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Where’s the Magic? Tips on How to Create a Magic Relationship

Letting go or Loosening Your Grip

The Law of Attraction: Hokus Pokus or Bunkum?

Love

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