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Honesty Is The Path To Perpetual Passion

This is a poignant excerpt from my Revive Her Drive Mastery Interview with Taber Shadburne about Soulful Communication.  He talks about how honesty changed his life, starting with forgiving his parents and creating more intimacy.

Note: The “Sometimes I pretend that _(fill in the blank)_.” The exercise is below.

It’s not a fluke. You don’t fall into intimacy. There’s a cultural myth about romance. You find the right person, and fireworks go off. You live happily ever after. 

We all have those moments, but the truth is that sustainable, deep, perpetual passion is something that you learn the skill of creating. 

I am happy to say that I learned that skill, and now I can create intimacy with people. I can create intimacy with the lady from the phone company when I’m pissed off about how they screwed up my bill. Seriously! 

Or my neighbors. I mean, your love relationship will be your laboratory and your ultimate achievement in this art form. Still, it will eventually just fan out to where you just have a juicy relationship in your whole life.

PERPETUAL PASSION

As Susan said, I healed my relationships with my family. I lost my dad a couple of years ago, but I felt a bittersweet quality because I had done the work of complete body forgiveness, as I called it, when he died. I was not torn up about it; I felt sad I wouldn’t be able to sit with him anymore and stuff, but I felt a lot of gratitude for who he had been and how he had shaped my life and stuff, and not one that was phony, not one that glossed over his weaknesses and stuff, but one that just really honored all of who he was. 

And my mom is alive, and we have a better relationship than I have ever had with her in my whole life. We talk for hours and are both genuinely moved by the quality of our connection, and if you had known us years ago, you would have never guessed that. I will say that I found her a challenging mom to have sometimes, but she felt sad. She was just a kid when I was born, and she had to go through forgiving herself and some guilt about not showing up in the ways that, in retrospect, she wished she had. But the point is that now we both can stand in that full-body forgiveness and open-hearted love for each other.

And let me tell you, when you heal your relationship with your “source family” — your mom and your dad and your siblings — it heavily impacts the quality of your relationship with your spouse. You may not know there’s a direct relationship, but it heavily impacts it.

In our workshops, we assign people to do this work with their families because it’ll help your relationship immeasurably. After all, in your love relationship, you repeat the patterns of your background family.

So anyway, it’s transformed my life in ways that I obviously could talk all day about, and it’s my joy now to share this art form, as I call it, with other people because it’s like somebody getting saved, born again, and then wanting to spread the gospel. I know it’s possible. I’ve seen it change my life and thousands of other people’s lives that I’ve worked. So now I’m on a mission from God to share this juicy information with people and help them implement it in their lives.

We don’t have the passion we want to experience because we spend so much time hiding those we don’t like to share. Say that again so that you let that sink in. 

You don’t have the degree of the passions you want to experience because you unwittingly spend a lot of time hiding those you don’t want to share. 

This seems understandable, but emotions are a package deal, so you can’t stuff some of them without accidentally stuffing all of them, at least to a significant degree. 

To hide the truth about yourself, you must put on a mask, a performance, and a false front with others. 

And by doing this, you automatically disqualify yourself from ever feeling truly loved. 

This isn’t conscious again, but you just sort of like, you start slipping into a kind of showing people what you think they need to see or what they can accept or such and such, and over time that becomes a performance that you’re putting on, unconsciously, automatically. 

And when you do that, you disqualify yourself from ever really feeling loved. And that’s because even when you seem to receive love, you know secretly that what’s being loved is your performance, and you think on some level, “If you knew me, then you wouldn’t be able to accept it” or “You wouldn’t like me.”

How do we hide from each other? We go around pretending. We present an image of ourselves that isn’t complete, inaccurate, and doesn’t portray what’s happening inside us. We pretend that we’re not angry when we’re angry. 

Or we pretend we’re interested in what someone else is talking about when we aren’t. I do this little exercise with people in workshops where we play a game where they talk about sometimes I pretend when really… and they talk about the things they act and what’s going on with them simultaneously.

And I’ve done this with thousands of people, and I hear the same answers repeatedly.

‘Sometimes, I pretend I’m not bored with what you’re talking about.’

‘Sometimes, I pretend I’m not pissed off at you when I am.’

‘Sometimes, I pretend I’m not attracted to someone when I am.’

‘Sometimes I pretend I know exactly what I’m doing, and I’ve got it all together when I’m flustered and nervous.’

‘Sometimes, I pretend I’m not trying to impress you when I am.’

I’ve heard them all over and over again. And the hilarious thing is we all go around pretending the same stuff all the time, and it’s ludicrous when you look at it.”

Try Taber’s exercise with a trusted friend or lover.

Fill in the blank:

“Sometimes I pretend that _____________________.” 

Stop when you begin to understand how much of your life you are spending pretending instead of being who you are, instead of who you think others want you to be.

Then ask yourself why you live for what you imagine others expect of you. 

For more wonderful advice on co-creating the best relationship you could ever have with your partner…

Check Out Revive Her Drive ⇐ Bring Back And Ignite Passionate Romance

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