Happy Sexy Love How to bulletproof relationships with happy, sexy love
In Part 1 of my interview with PBS-TV host and New York Times bestselling author, Marci Shimoff, you learned how to stop chasing love in all the wrong places and connect with unconditional love inside you. It’s difficult to be love and be happy when facing life’s toughest challenges–unless you use three exercises that Marci Shimoff explained in Part 2 of her radio discussion with me on A Lasting Love.
Hadley Finch: You said that you were able to keep your heart open when you faced several difficult challenges at the same time, including your divorce, the death of your mother and the loss of your childhood home. Tell us how we can love and be happy even as we deal with loss and tough challenges.
Marci Shimoff: I’ll give you three exercises from my book, so you can choose your favorite. First, I’d like you to do this Heart Math exercise three times a day for two weeks:
Put your hand over your heart. This starts the release of oxytocin–the love and bonding hormone.
Imagine you are breathing in and out through your heart. Picture your breath coming in and out through center of your heart. It doesn’t matter if you see it or feel it or which sense you use to breathe through your heart.
Breathe in ease and compassion and love on every inhale. Then exhale normally. Again, inhale love through your heart, repeating the process for a couple minutes.
You may feel soothed, grounded and open hearted if you do this exercise once. If you do this exercise a few times each day, you place your body in the Love Response. As soon as you place your hand on your heart, you feel love washing over you.
Hadley Finch: According to a Harvard Study, the Love Response allows your body to adapt to challenges, reverse disease, maintain health and improve rather than deteriorate with age. So we’ve all got incentive to love for no reason. Yet we also can block the flow of love through criticism, limiting beliefs, judgments or fears. What exercise breaks through our love blocks?
Marci Shimoff: You can’t have a great experience of love until you are loving to yourself. You can use this exercise in self love to care for yourself and open your heart to love:
Three times each day, stop and ask yourself this question: What’s the most loving thing I can do for myself right now?
The answer might be getting a glass of water or some fresh air. Or stop beating up on yourself and acknowledge your good qualities and focus on gratitude. If we don’t pay attention to our own self care, then we aren’t being loving with ourselves. The way we treat the world is a mirror of how we treat ourselves. So do this 3 times per day to create a new Love Habit of loving yourself.
Hadley Finch: To clarify, we’re not talking about self love that is selfish, but healthy self love that promotes your well being and that of everyone around you.
Marci Shimoff: And if you’re a parent the best thing you can do for your children is to raise your own experience of love so you model it for them. Your emotions are contagious, and your children catch your emotions. Let them catch your love instead of fear, anger and stress.
Hadley Finch: We want to be around people who are loving, and we want to run from people who are angry and stressed. So how do we fast track more love in our life?
Marci Shimoff: The quickest way to feel more love and happiness is through forgiveness. You can’t feel love if you’re holding onto grudges. Unforgiveness is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die. My favorite forgiveness technique is from the Kahuna Hawaiian tradition. It involves thinking of the person or act that has hurt you and feeling 4 phrases in your heart:
I’m sorry
Please forgive me
Thank you
I love you
It doesn’t matter who the offender is. You simply sit with your eyes closed for a few minutes and think of person or incident that you need to forgive.
As you feel each phrase, you enter their name or your own name if you need to forgive yourself for something you did or failed to do.
Do this forgiveness exercise a few times every day for a couple weeks, because the experience of love is about creating new habits. So pick one of these three exercises and practice it three times a day for the next two weeks to form a new love habit. And let us know how you break through your blocks to love so you can be love and be happy even in tough times.
Hadley Finch: Forgiveness transforms your life because it frees your infinite source of love to flow inside you again. What exercise actually transforms a person who’s accused of wrongdoing?
Get the answer in Part 3 of my discussion with Marci Shimoff during my radio show, A Lasting Love.
And you can get 12 gift reports from Marci Shimoff at http://TheLoveBook.com
Create happy, sexy love that lasts,
Hadley Finch
