Dear Friends

A lot of research indicates that emotional reality, unlike physical reality, is created rather than observed. By and large, people create the emotional reality in which they live.

Unfortunately the choice of which reality we create is usually made by default, a kind of habitual automatic pilot derived from temperament, metabolism, and experience. The human brain filters information within its default choice, processing that which conforms to it and excluding that which deviates from it. The result keeps us pretty much stuck in a rut.

When we try to make changes, we think in terms of problems and challenges, as if these were rocks to be removed from a garden. The reason this approach often fails is that the emotional reality we create is more like a broad cityscape than a particular rock or garden within the city.

In creating the reality of intimate relationships, for instance, we tend to choose among the following cityscapes:

• A dark, cold, nameless place, where no one is welcomed and no one is missed  

• A boring, listless, meaningless terrain of low energy and little conviction  

• A place of threat and alarm, where there is little respect or affection, only attempts to manipulate or dominate  

• A place of light, promise, and connection.

Meaningful and lasting change requires alteration of the entire cityscape, not merely rearranging a few rocks within a garden within a city.

For example, consider the common relationship problem of pursuer-distancer, where one person wants more closeness than the other can tolerate. Removing rocks from the garden of love would likely take you into therapy, where you would try to improve communication, reduce fear of abandonment and engulfment, learn intimacy techniques, or delve into childhood issues. You would find these efforts to be fruitless when the fault lies in the cityscape of the relationship, as it usually does, rather than in the details of the garden.

Create Light, Promise, and Connection
The key to lasting positive change lies in the mental state of connection. That’s right; you create connection in your head. (It doesn’t even require that another person create it with you, as so many parents of estranged children or survivors of deceased loved ones know.) As with everything you create, you choose to feel connected or choose to feel disconnected.

When you choose to feel connected and forsake excuses to feel disconnected, you create a cityscape of light and promise. You see then that there is enough power in the human heart to light up the world.

Sincerely,

Steven Stosny

CompassionPower

email: stosny@compassionpower.com

web: http://compassionpower.com