Love has many levels so physical love is what babies need to thrive. Emotionally couples need to be established in loving consciousness to sustain long-term relationships, which is what we’re going to talk about in this episode.
Mentally, love can erase toxic patterns, the sometimes damaging voices of the inner critic, and we will discuss toxic versus healthy relationship patterns. In this episode and spiritually, we can say that love is our true foundation because conscious love invites us into the truth of being. Conscious love supports us in all ways, including spiritual awakening and the process of self-realization. And if conscious love really interests you or you find you’re in the process of spiritual awakening, there some Wisdom of the Ages episodes you might want to refer back to. You can also listen to the ego to self-realization with my guest and husband, John Patrick Sullivan. You can listen to the power of divine love with Mirabai Debbie and the holistic liberation and sacred relationship with Dr. Gabriel Cousens. They’re all very interesting. So there are multiple, multiple levels of conscious love.
A spiritual path without Bhakti or love is not a sustainable path. And that’s also true for committed relationships. So where does it all begin? And it really begins with one choice. This one step that’s really important. One step is choosing self-love and then also understanding what not love is. It will show up for integration and as my husband and I like to remind each other, our relationship is about polishing our pearls. So the ego could get polished to the point that it’s not this difficult contractive P but it’s this beautiful shining Pearl. And that’s what we can do together. We can shine uniquely. We can shine together. So when we learn to shine in a relationship, we can also learn how to collectively love each other. And I’d say that’s what the global learning curve is right now. So loving another leads us to our guest Ann O’Brien who I’ve known for about a decade or so. I asked her to be on the Wisdom of the Ages because I feel right now, we really need to understand how to develop and sustain healthy relationship patterns.
And this was really her life work. I’d like her combination of academic, intuitive, and embodied coaching because it demonstrates a lovely balance of the masculine or the rational, mental, and feminine or intuitive and embodied and the integration or dance of the two. So the balance of the masculine, the feminine can lead to heaven on earth and the imbalances lead to the opposite, which is where our work really is. So keep in mind that we all have an inner masculine and we all have an inner feminine, so this isn’t gender-based but for many centuries, we have favored the inner masculine, the rational, but to our own peril.
In this episode, we will focus more on the creative, inner feminine so that we can all dance harmoniously together, which is what the world needs. So let’s turn our focus now to Ann O’Brien’s new book, wonderful new book, or really enjoyed reading it. It’s called a Woman’s guide to conscious love: Navigating the play of feminine and masculine energy in your relationships. It’s described as a post-feminist love manual. And after the break, we will explore what that means and what we might’ve lost in our quest for equality. So we might go into feminism a little bit and how that’s helped and hurt us. So we also want to know what might help us to achieve balance now. So this episode is an invitation to embody love, to be the love that we seek. And before I introduce her, I want to read two quotes by her that I really like. And the first one goes like this. “Imagine going through your days, making love with life itself.” It’s beautiful. I’ll read it again. “Imagine going through your days, making love with life itself.” Doesn’t that just make your heart open?