To maintain a steady growth in your relating, I suggest that as a couple you create a simple ritual to do twice daily. Upon awakening (launching) and before falling asleep (landing), create some connecting time. Gazing in each others eyes, the belly to belly connection or some light touch. This does not have to be a heavy process time, in fact I recommend that you

Extra Credit Homework for the Brave:

Intimacy Exercises:

Inquiry and Bonding questions:

Choose a question from below or one that you both create yourself. One partner can pick the question for the day.

The asker asks the question and the one who answer give a one word or one sentence answer. The asker says, ‘thank you’, and then repeats the question. Keep asking the same question for several minutes. Most find that the answers get deeper each time. Afterwards, you can switch. Discuss.

1. How can I better be of service to your soul?
2. How can I better love you?
3. How do you resist me?
4. How am I your teacher?
5. What do I need to learn from you?
6. How did your Mother show love to you?
7. How did Dad show love to you?
8. What do you regret about our past?
9. I would like to be forgive for…?
10. What I forgive myself for is..?
11. How have your grown in this relationship?
12. What is your backdoor to our intimacy?
13. What are your working on to improve our relating?
14. How are you lazy in this relationship?
15. What do you see as my innate gifts as an individual?
16. What are your innate gifts?
17. What do you see is our mission as a couple?
18. Where are you not ‘free’ in this relationship?
19. Where are you not ‘free’ in your life?
20. How would you rate our sex life?
21. What would make our sex life more creative and passionate?
22. What gives you pleasure?
23. How are we like your Mom and Dad’s relationship?
24. What shadows do you see in me?
25. What do I do that irritates you?
26. What constitutes play for you?
27. What emotions are you most afraid of in you?
28. How do I hide?
29. How do you hide?
30. How do you want to die?
31. How would you like me to support you when you are ill?
32. What are you afraid of in your last days?
33. What shuts you down?
34. How would you like support when you are shut down?
35. Who do I remind you of from your past? Why?
36. What are you grieving?
37. What do you remember about being a child?
38. What did you do to get your needs met as a child?
39. What are your memories of your grandparents?
40. What was your favorite date with me?
41. What do you love about me?
42. I’m writing you a check for $1,000,000. What would you like to do with it?
43. What do you like about my face?
44. What do you like about my body?
45. What do you like about your face?
46. What do you like about your body?
47. How does money feel like to you?
48. What were your dreams when you were a child?
49. What were your dreams as a teenager?
50. What are your dreams now?
51. What do you want to experience that you’ve never experienced before?
52. Speak your sexual fantasies?
53. How do you like to be touched?
54. How do you like to touch me?
55. What words would you like to hear from me right now?
56. What are your beliefs around receiving in this relationship?
57. What are your beliefs around giving?
58. How can we be of better service in our community?
59. What do you resist?
60. How do you feel about getting older?
61. What lies have you told me that you need to get clean about?
62. What would you really like for your next birthday?
63. What were holidays like when you were young?

Add your own to expand to 100.

Celebrate your growing connection.

Have I got your attention now?

This is what I mean by this statement.  We are all incredibly intelligent beings.  Our developed mind craves newness and discovery.  We get bored with doing the same thing all the time.  We need stimulation and energy that is new.  This is why we cheat on each other, why we have such a large divorce rate and why depression is epidemic in our society.  We are bored with our mates, our jobs, our life.

In intimacy, this boredom of doing the same things, eating the same foods, using TV for stimulation, we make love the same way is all a cancer that eats at the aliveness of what could be.  The only way to keep a relationship alive is to let go of what you think it ought to be; give up the fantasies of what you wan the form to look like and focus on the Truth of today.  What is expanding in you?  What is expanding in your partner?  Love and Consciousness  are always expanding as this is their nature.  Current relationships are usually seeking the same juice that you had in the beginning honeymoon phase; or trying to reach a higher high.  Give that up if you want your relationship to grow and if you want to evolve as a man or woman.  Instead, seek the Truth of what is now.  There is a richness that is greater than any high or fantasy that your ego believes it wants.  Share your expansion and consciousness with your partner.  Find what is new about you and your partner today that is different from yesterday.  That is the secret to the richest love there is.

By MaryAnn Williamson

There is a difference between romance and love. Often the true path of love begins only when romance has begun to taper off, for love is the capacity to see light when darkness has begun to eclipse it. Love is easy when romance still lights everything in shades of pink, when the experience of a relationship is like the canvas of a sweet Impressionistic painting. While love grows, everything that is not love becomes revealed. It’s revealed or comes to the surface so that it may have healing. Once the reality of our woundings reveals the darkness still lurking in all of us, romance might die, while true love does not.

Many people are proficient at romance who are not proficient at love. They see the humanness of their partner and say, Nah, I want romance again. Then they start over elsewhere, beginning again the path that will always end up in the exact same place.

Only when we have shown each other the worst side of our natures are we truly ready for the task of love. Then we’re ready to begin. How tragic it is that we so often stop everything just as we reach the starting line.

The point of love is to make us grow, not to make us immediately happy. The deepest happiness comes when we grow.

The purpose of intimate partnership is for us to midwife the perfection in each other. The point of love is to reveal to us the light inside us. This is the lesson.

It’s said in the Kabballah, the Jewish mystic tradition that leaning over every blade of grass is an angel whishpering…’grow, grow, grow. Perhaps there is an angel over every relationship saying the same thing…grow, grow, grow.

To be healed and grow, we must reveal our wounds as well as our love to each other. In that, we can hold their darkness as well as their light. We must accept both faces. Intimacy doesn’t mean that both people are perfect and it doesn’t mean that one is perfect. It simply knows that all of us are wounded and that we are here to be healed. The purpose of intimacy is healing. The purpose of this marriage is to heal, both self and the other.