Why you SHOULD Change For Your Relationships.

People tweet it, text it and say it to each other over coffee-house tables. They post it in bold script in pithy little e-cards on Facebook, decorated with line-drawings of frustrated 50’s housewives.  Celebrities say it in interviews on late-night talk shows while we watch in bed, nodding and telling ourselves: “What great wisdom Theater majors have.”   You hear it in songs and read it in books.  It’s written as dialogue in movies and plays.

It seems a harmless couple of phrases, and at first glance, full of veracity: “Don’t change for anyone.  You be who you are.”  It reminds one of grade school and how young teenage girls would write in each others' year books in pink, permanent marker: 2 Good 2B 4gotten.  Don’t ever change! XXXOOO 

Can you imagine how horrifying that would be?  To wander through life with the emotional and intellectual maturity of a frustrated 8^th grader who’s most desperate need is to be accepted by other frustrated and insecure 8^th graders?  

Still, adolescents aren’t the only ones to say it.  We hear it all the time as adults from parents, from friends, from “experts” on talk shows.  “Don’t change for anyone,” They say.  “You be yourself!”

And just which “self” are we supposed to hold to so uncompromisingly?  The self we are at work? The self we area around our parents?  The self we are at home while we’re warming up a family-sized frozen lasagna for one? Or while we’re being a parent?  Or is it the self we are when we’re out partying with our friends?  Is it the self who sits alone on a Tuesday night reading a book?  The self who wants blood when our favorite hockey team is losing?  Is it the self we are when we’re jerking off to our darkest fantasies (Don’t deny it—you know you’ve got a dark side.)  Or is it the self we are when we’re standing on Sacred Ground and we feel closest to that bolt of Divinity that zings through all of this chaos and tells our heart that there is some kind of Holy Order to all this mess?

Which of these "selves" are we supposed to cling so firmly to when we’re in a relationship and not give up for the sake of another? Humans are constantly changing. There is no such thing as consistency even though we lie and tell ourselves there is.  If there was we wouldn’t develop gray hair and wrinkles, wouldn’t end up buried in six feet of dirt like every human who ever came before us.  And why shouldn’t we change? Why is change so bad?  And why are people so keen on telling everyone else to be inflexible and immovable in their relationships? 

“Don’t change,” they say.  Subtext: “Let your lover bend to your will, your needs, your caprices.”

What sort of person refuses to change when they’re in a relationship?  The person who is either going to end up leaving that relationship or be destroyed by it.  People who can change are the people who can adapt and find happiness in any situation.  The also have what it takes to grow with someone else.  The people who can’t are put on medication to make sure they can stay one mood all the time in all situations. 

Have you ever taken a walk in nature and seen what happens to areas that do not change?  They fester.  Water becomes stagnant.  Blood drinkers appear: mosquitoes, ticks, and other nasty biters.  Animals get sick and die because their food and drink gets poisoned.  Carrion eaters show up.  The place smells foul, of death.  Things rot.  It’s only when floods or rain showers come in and wash all that rot away that healthy things can begin to grow again in such spaces.  What makes humans believe they are so far removed from nature?  Everything in nature is meant to change.  EVERYTHING.

People who refuse to change in their relationships, because of their relationships or in relation to others end up like these static places.  If you get into a relationship you should change.  You will change.  If you don’t, you’re not in a relationship: you’re inflexibly inflicting your damage on someone else.  Relationships—real relationships anyway—should help us to become better.  To grow and be more than we could be on our own.  They should unlock potentials in us that would otherwise remain inaccessible.  Relationships should show us contrast because it’s through contrast we learn very valuable things.  

We get into relationships to begin with because we feel an absence of something. If we didn’t we wouldn’t need to have lovers.  Every one of us falls in love because we want someone else to accept us, cherish us and act as a mirror of who we are.  Relationships should help us to become aware of something bigger than just ourselves. If they don’t they aren’t relationships.  They are self-centered indulgences.

The current trend of encouraging people to be inflexible in their relationships and consider only their own needs is the very sort of advice that’s leading to such a high break up rate. The fact is: if we never change, never grow, we might as well walk around scribbling adolescent wisdom into each others’ yearbooks: ”I like you as you are.  So, don’t you ever grow or be different than you are at this moment.  Because that makes me uncomfortable.”  

Which, if you think about it, is really the gist of it. 

So, love.  Grow.  Change.  Get messy and see what the hell this thing really is we call life.  Become bigger and better then you ever could on your own. Watch what kind of power unity with another can give you.  See what else you can become.  Otherwise, what’s the point?

The new novel cover. Aiden and The Dark Man are back in this exciting sequel to Taboo. Out soon.

The Problem With MY

You hear it all the time. People using my to express their relationship to someone else. It’s a common habit in our culture.

When’s the last time you said: My husband or my lover or my God? Have you ever thought about what you’re really saying when you do that? Ever wonder if such a simple and seemingly innocent slip of the tongue (innuendo intended) has any lasting, negative effects?

There’s a problem when we refer to our relationships this way. The possessive pronoun undermines the equality in a relationship by its assertion of ownership of the other individual. It’s a subtle point and one that many people dismiss as inconsequential, but all you have to do is look at the state of relationships right now to see that an attitude of possession is one of the things that squelches the respect, the esteem, the true romance and longevity of our love affairs.

How much more robust and durable do you think our relationships would be if we met each other with genuine respect and esteem rather than as possessions?

Even our spiritual relationships are a mess of “my god/your god” attitudes that prevent our ability to see any wonder, hope and power in the world around us. After all, how can you see the miraculous of that which is bigger than you if you place it in a subordinate position to you in your language?

Words are very powerful. Anyone who’s ever had a bad day turned around by a kind word or a good day crushed by someone else’s criticism knows this. One might even say that everything that comes out of your mouth at any time is either:

• A blessing (it praises someone or something)
• An invocation (it calls for someone or something. Like, ‘I’m hungry’ calls for food; or,‘I wish I was young again’, calls for some kind of security.)
• A curse (it dams someone or something). 

When you think about your words that way you start to realize how potent they really are.

Those who know something about the Old Ways also understand a subtle mysticism in all of this. Knowing someone’s true name gives you power over that being. For evidence of this read the story of how Isis took Ra’s power from him by learning his secret name.

That said, realize that every time you call someone “my” you are invoking ownership over that person’s life and claiming their power as your own by naming them as one of your possessions. After all, the accomplishments, feelings, dreams, hopes, hurts and victories of a person are the things that make a person. To refer to someone as my lover or my husband or my wife is to claim all of those things as your own. It places us as the subject of the sentence and them as the object.  To do this is to deny them the freedom of being their own creative source for those things. 

It’s the first step towards what Italian grandmothers use to refer to as ‘overlooking someone’. Also known as the evil eye. To overlook someone is to deny their power, their beauty, their innate talents. It’s on the road towards pushing an individual into being something you want them to be rather than something they really are. The results of that are disastrous, even sinful, because they cause a person to deny at their source who they really are. All of us know how very horrible it feels when we deny who we really are because someone else wants us to be something else.

So, where does this habit of using ‘my’ lead us?

It leads to frustration, dissatisfaction and unfulfilled relationships. It gets us in the habit of making unbalanced agreements and tarnishes our understanding of our own true value. It creates fundamental chaos at our cores and prevents us from seeing the truth of what we really are.

So is there hope? Of course there is. There is always hope, providing we’re willing to see it. And we’ll talk about that hope in the next few blogs on this subject.

But first, we’ll continue with this discussion by looking at what using ‘my’ reveals about your mental state and your potential for happiness.

Until then…don’t be afraid to be bad.

What if everything they've ever told you is a lie?

Fill that Kindle with something Taboo: http://www.amazon.com/Taboo-ebook/dp/B006OSMDHU/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_t_1

Is love in your heart or your head?

Every author that writes about relationships is bound to have some strong opinions about how humans love and relate. I won’t deny there’s always been a strong romance element to everything I write.  Maybe it’s because love’s always fascinated me.  It’s astonishing to see what people will do to be loved and accepted.  How many will face incredible fears and risk so much on the chance of being cherished by someone else?  It's truly mystifying.

Ever notice how some things defy traditional logic?  How some things are bigger than right or wrong, good or bad, up or down.  I'm sure you can all think of times when something defied your codes of understanding or you took a risk even though it didn't seem sensible.  Love does that for us, you know?  It changes the rules and makes us wander into the gray areas and see bigger pictures.  At least it does when it's the good stuff!

When I was young I believed passionately love was all in the heart.  Two decades later I know love is all in the mind.  (Others of you, I know for a fact will argue it’s in the testicles but that’s another blog.)  But there’s one thing all lovers need to be aware of: love is an equal exchange.  A value for value partnership.  It’s when that value is missing or the perception of that the value exchange is missing that partnerships tend to break down.

Now, some of you may find this very shocking because the concept is either contradictory to your own experience or so foreign to you that it doesn’t even register intuitively. It's amazing how many people get uncomfortable when you say that love should be a value for value exchange. But think about it for a minute. 

Think about those times when you were most unhappy in love.  It was most likely because some violation of this value for value ‘golden rule’ was violated.  Either you gave something to someone and they didn’t respond in kind or there was some agreement that was made, either clearly stated or understood that one or both of the parties violated.

Now, in some cases the partnership is unequal but both parties have agreed to this arrangement.  Many of you know people, maybe close friends or members of your own families, who wish to be the slave or unequal of another.  In such cases if both people agree to this then there is an actual value for value exchange.  Even if both parties don’t verbally agree to an uneven exchange, the fact that both parties stay in the relationship constitutes an agreement.  The very act of staying in a dissatisfying relationship, for whatever the reason, overrides any emotional dissatisfaction either party may feel about the relationship.  An agreement for dissatisfaction is, in this case, the value for value exchange.  That’s one of the fascinating things about love.  It doesn’t have to be satisfying to draw two people together.  In many cases it is, in fact, the suffering, the sympathy, the pain that one or both parties really seek to feed on.

The value for value that I'm speaking of here is always in the minds of the individuals.  It’s their minds that set that value and seek to have it satisfied.  If the value sought is slavery, abuse, indifference, so be it.  If the value is equality, inspiration, affection and deep respect, so be it.

That’s the beauty of freedom.  In the end we can choose whatever love we wish to choose.  And no matter how we claim to want something extraordinary, something golden and pure, in the end we pick what we value: some experience we think we need or deserve.  It may very well be that we were taught to undervalue ourselves, in which case our relationships can clue is in that maybe we should start to see our own worth before we seek to share it with another.  That too is valuable.

But you may say: “That’s just not true, Hayden!  I was in a relationship where someone cheated on me, or was unaware of my feelings even though I gave him everything,” or “I loved him and he just walked all over me.  That’s just not right!”

Maybe.  Except there’s one thing we all should be aware of: People treat us the way we train them to treat us.  If we allow others to treat us in an unequal fashion: to take from us without a value for value exchange, then we are, by our inaction, making an agreement to be treated this way.

The concept behind the lovers in my novel Taboo, Aiden and the Dark Man (Yes he does have a name that will come out in book two) is the illustration of the idea that love should leave us better for the experience.  Engaging in a love relationship should inspire is to become bigger and better.  Not settle for laziness. 

So many people say that once they found their partners they let themselves go. Why?  Shouldn’t love: that thing that inspires people to face their darkest most terrifying fears inspire people to become better rather than lazy?

In an ideal world both partners should treat each other with respect and equality.  Both rising to the demands of the relationship to become something better: to consider each other’s growth and special talents. 

Except there’s one problem with that, it means we have to be excellent ourselves and be generous with that excellence in our relations with others.  That takes some self awareness courage and strength.  The good news about that: you just have to make a decision that’s what you want and stick to it.

But then, you wouldn’t want anything less for yourself.  Would you?

Two Essentials They Never Told You About Writing

One time, in graduate school, during a discussion about ‘audience’, I asked my classmates if they thought writers had a responsibility to their readers.  At the very least, shouldn’t they try to use their writing to change people’s limiting beliefs?

There was a lot of strange writing happening at that Chicago Private Arts grad school I went to.  Some of it was pretty abusive, bordering on sick.  A lot of it seemed to be aimed at alienating the reader.  Even more of it was just lazy and self indulgent.   

The response of my classmates surprised me at the time.  Most laughed at the statement.  Some openly scoffed.  No kidding—they snorted and sniffed like they were saying, Piss off.  Someone actually said “Fuck the reader.”  Another said that, “Artists had a responsibility to their art and nothing more.”  The teacher Amen-ed that last one. 

That was a long time ago and I’m not sure what happened to any of those people.  But for those of you who really want to write, here’s something for you to consider:  If you don’t want to change belief then why the hell are you writing?

There are plenty of other, easier ways to express yourself.  All day long, every day.  And they give instant feedback and gratification. But writing is unique.  It takes a special kind of dedication, determination and a lot of energy.  It utilizes communication—a very complex and powerful thing.  And good communication seeks to initiate change.  It can bring out the best or worst in people.  It can make people question those things that are limiting them or passionately embrace the very shackles that are killing them.

There are two things to remember as you embark on any journey that’s going to take an investment of your time and energy:

·         First: do it because you want to make a difference in this world. Whether it’s cooking a meal, making a bed, making love or writing a book.  Do it to make a difference.

·         Second: Do it because you want to change beliefs.  Preferably limiting beliefs that keep people stuck.  That means really educating yourselves on how people think, what they believe and how to reach them.

If you do these two things, and keep them in your mind at all times, you’ll never fail.  Because your purpose will be so much bigger than just self-expression or acceptance.  The bigger your goal, the more you’ll learn on the road to it.  Keep your eyes on bigger prizes guys.  Let writing just be one small piece of a larger and more exciting life.  And you’ll not only change others for the better, but yourselves too.