Spirituality and Healthy Relationships © Martyn Carruthers

Are you entangled in difficult relationships or painful emotions?
Do you suffer from your parents’ drama, your partner’s demands,
your boss’s moods? We help people untangle their lives.

A Yoga of Love

I refer to Rajah Yoga, Kundalini Yoga and Tantra Yoga, not Hatha Yoga, and I offer no yoga postures nor sexual techniques. Nor do I ask anyone to believe anything – I help people solve emotional and relationship problems.

Relationships can be the greatest source of happiness – and the greatest source of stress. Do you want to heal your wounds, reclaim your wholeness and share your love?

Relationship concepts are implicit within yoga. Many Hindu men considered themselves superior to women, and to men of lower castes. This was based on beliefs about reincarnation and karma, in which it may be appropriate to abuse people who may have sinned in some past life. Hence references to relationships in yoga may reflect very different models of the world to those used by most Westerners.

Enlightenment usually refers to transcending suffering and desire. In a yoga of relationships, fulfillment may better describe the deep, multi-dimensional happiness available to you. Whether your relationships are in a romantic stage, a power struggle or in crisis – our relationship yoga can help you end your struggles and heal your wounds. You can learn to express – and receive – the love you want to share.

Relationship Habits

Your relationship habits can lead to deep and long-term happiness – or deep and long-term suffering. Feeling love is not enough! Express your love … appropriately.

Your relationship habits can attract or repel people. This relationship yoga can help you find happiness. It can help you clean up your life and help you fulfill your dreams.

You carry memories and projections of important people with you – like ghosts. Are you haunted by ghosts of the dead … and by ghosts of the living? Do you endlessly remember and rehash conversations? Do you squander your time obsessing about might-have-beens and if-onlys?

You are haunted – and you give your ghosts time, energy and space in your life. Within your consciousness, nobody is missing and nobody dies – only bodies. This can be a curse and a blessing. The curse is that you may obsess about past or unpleasant relationships. We can help you clarify your relationships with people – including people who are dead or missing.

In this relationship yoga, you can build a happiness that may transcend death.

Relationship Abuse

Some people are skilled at distracting you. Instead of considering how you may increase your long-term happiness – you may be lured into short term distractions. Marketing often promises pleasure – but rarely delivers. Use this toothpaste to improve your marriage. Make your family happy with this furniture. Love your children by buying this hamburger. Impress your friends by drinking this beer. Within such toxic wastes of marketing, your expressions of love may be reduced to the products you purchase.

In this technological age, many people learn how to create computer connections, but such knowledge may not help you build human connections. Although sometimes you may get lost as the blind follow the greedy; you can always reorient to happiness.

Sometimes, in our desire to be loved, we may play games. We may sometimes act like lost children or hurt victims. Such games have high stakes – we gamble with our health, our integrity and our happiness – although we cannot ever win. These games can be so intense that we forget that we are playing. A desire for love can decay into a desire for pity. When I hear an adult say, “I don’t know what love is“, I wonder what happened to that person’s integrity.

I wish to share with you what I learned – often painfully – about lasting happiness.

Yoga & Perception

Yoga affirms that certain disciplines can liberate you from the limitations of sense and thought, and help you find true knowledge. Most practitioners of yoga want to gain knowledge of a universal spirit, called Brahman in India. Yoga physical and mental training offers paths to this goal.

You limit your life by your imagination. You are unlikely to seek or attempt what you cannot imagine. Your perception has external limits and internal rules.

We humans are adept at overcoming external limits. Since Galileo’s time we have struggled to overcome the limits of our human vision. Overhead, space telescopes push our limits of observation towards the beginning of space and time.

But even a space telescope cannot change your rules of perception. You cannot explore what you do not acknowledge. Your beliefs and emotions influence whether you can see what is under your nose and what is in your heart. Or do you prefer abstract theories and dogma that you cannot test with your senses?

Your inner rules were derived from your parents – friends – teachers – partners – communities and your culture. And if you challenge these rules – you cease to be normal. You accepted many of these rules unconsciously, and you use them to participate in a collective experience of interlinked beliefs, values and judgments. You are part of a mythos of shared normality that includes important interlinked experiences such as religion and culture.

If you step out of your shared culture – if you deny or reject shared normality – you are abnormal. Your conversations and behavior become evidence of difference. You are wise to tread gently at the borders of normality. Your sanity may be questioned, although only outside your mythos can you change your personality and your karma. (See Chaos & Identity).

Relationship Yoga

Whenever you choose to share your mind, heart and perhaps your body with another human being, you will find conflicts, expectations and fears. In a yoga of love, each relationship offers you steps towards fulfillment.

Following the influence of (mostly male) mystics, the goal of enlightenment is often sought through actions, loneliness and thoughtlessness. In a relationship yoga, a goal of fulfillment or shared happiness is attained through shared love and thoughtfulness.

Every relationship includes the family karma of each member. Unfulfilled parental expectations, family secrets, suppressed emotions … people reflect the drama of their ancestors and early family. Although many people are damaged from acting out their ancestral patterns – they often seek to become whole.

Contact us to manage negative emotions and solve relationship problems.

Online Coaching, Counseling & Soulwork Therapy

… Insert page break here? …

Energy Fields & Emotions

Many yoga systems refer to energy fields that surround a human body, which can only be sensed by naturally sensitive or trained people. The words energy and energy work seem overused and under-defined in yoga, and I find that the words emotion or feeling may be more accurate.

Confusion arises if you enquire which emotion an experience of energy refers to. Although many people can identify far more tastes, colors and sounds than they can identify feelings, most people can discriminate between pleasant and unpleasant feelings.

If you experience an unpleasant feeling, and name it fear, sadness or anger, you may call it a negative emotion, and try to not feel it. If you do this, you lose access to huge information. Your emotions exist in the context of your relationships – relationships with people, animals or lifeless things, with further divisions to include relationships with the living, dead, yet unborn and the imagined.

Within a yoga of love, emotions are not negative, stupid nor random. Emotions help you understand deeper truths than words. If you accept emotions and nonverbal signals as communication, you can open yourself to a sensitivity that approaches telepathy. See Systemic Magic and Psychobiology of coaching.

Duality

Deep intimate relationships are most often heterosexual – between a man and a woman. Most partnerships are male-female balanced, with the partners each taking more dominant and more passive roles. Within the duality of a partnership you can find unity – but some people may sabotage intimacy to avoid unity.

Chakras & Relationships

When you discuss relationships, you probably spontaneously use your hands to point at certain parts of your body. I noticed that the body positions that people most often mark with their hands are similar to the chakras of Eastern mystics.

Chakras are locations in a human body which many people believe to have mystical properties. Chakras are part of many Eastern philosophies that have been adopted in the West. Many people feel emotions centered in their chakras, and especially the heart chakra (which may correspond with high blood pressure) and solar plexus (which may correspond with ulcers).

Based on these observations, I created a simple table of chakras and relationships:

	Chakra	Relationship	Task
	Crown	Humanity	Bring communities to harmony
	Forehead	Community	Help families to cooperate
	Neck	Parenthood	Nurture & support children
	Heart	Partnership	Commit to partnership together
	Solar Plexus	Teamwork	Cooperate towards shared goals
	Abdomen	Own Parents	Accept support and guidance
	Groin	Infancy	Accept & acknowledge yourself

Relationship Coaching and a Yoga of Love

If you want to explore your relationships; here are a few tools:

1. Identify and describe your underlying emotions.
2. Share feedback calmly, not in denial or accusations.
3. Recognize complaints, criticism, justifications and blame.
4. Check if you prefer to blame, punish or win rather than communicate.
5. Observe people relating; watch their behavior, without trying to fix them.
6. Separate the content of your messages from how you communicate them.
7. Interpret what people communicate. Identify what may be missing or inferred.

Loving relationships are both the path and goal of a yoga of love;
and lasting love requires clarity, commitment and maturity.
We help people build bridges across forever – bridges to integrity.