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If taken into your heart deeply, if acted on sincerely, these 17 principles and practices will change your life for the better:

Quoted from Spiritual Warrior 2, Excerpt from Chapter 6, Hari Nama Press, by Bhakti Tirtha Swami:

Seventeen Practices for Attaining Success in the School of Love

To develop meaningful relationships with members of the opposite sex, we must become whole human beings who have no need to look outside of ourselves for solutions. Instead we must learn to turn within ourselves and connect with higher spiritual realities. How do we make such connections? The following 17 points and practices, offer guidelines for attaining the wholeness that can serve as a foundation for a strong, enduring relationship with a partner.

1. Love is necessary for good physical and spiritual health. Someone who is not part of a loving relationship is ten times more likely to experience chronic disease, and five times more likely to have a mental breakdown.

2. Love is not a business arrangement or a contract with an escape clause for difficult circumstances. We should not have this attitude or mood with our partner and surely not with God. We cannot approach the Lord in a mood of bargaining, and we should not begin our meditations and prayers with a long shopping list. Prayers of this nature are not based on unmotivated, unconditional love, and do not help us to develop the higher consciousness necessary to make us whole.

3. Love is a decision that we can personally make at any time and under any circumstance. No one has the power to make someone else love him or her, but each person can always give away love.

4. Love is learning to love our true selves. Those who do not care for themselves cannot love others deeply. The first love affair we must consummate must be with ourselves. One aspect of self-love is to observe four basic principles: no drugs or intoxication, no gambling, no illicit sex, and no meat eating. All these indulgences can weaken our basic constitution. The more we allow ourselves to live according to natural laws, the more we will become surrendered to the will of God. If we lack self esteem, we are refusing to see ourselves as children of God and do not have sufficient love and devotion to share with anyone else.

5. Love is about a quest for wholeness, and if necessary, having a partner to share one's wholeness with. People who think that some other person will make them complete, or people who are waiting for love to come their way will remain impoverished and waiting. The more we become loving and whole, the more we will draw similar connections from the universe.

6. Love is not about two desperate people, who are only trying to find fulfillment for themselves, coming together to rob each other. Two extremely needy, selfish people coming together cannot make each other happy. They are too busy trying to take and get something for themselves at the expense of the other.

7. Love is a holy relationship in which partners come together to serve and reveal their weaknesses and strengths for betterment. In an unholy relationship, everyone especially hides their weaknesses. Such people are normally interested in erotic love (lust) rather than responsible, selfless love.

8. Love is really the energy and hunger of the soul. When we are asking for love, we are asking for a connection with the soul, which is part and parcel of God. We should not expect love to descend on us like an attack of epilepsy. It must be rediscovered at every moment by transforming lust into love, thus connecting us with our own soul and the souls of others. We are all starving for true unconditional love.

9. Love is seeing our partner as a gift from God. We must go beyond merely loving our neighbors as ourselves. We should actually love others – especially our mates – even more than we love ourselves. When we love our partners that much, we realize that they have been given to us as gifts from God and that we do not own them. We are merely caretakers on behalf of the Lord, and our responsibility is to fulfill the Lords wishes concerning them. Any attempt to dominate them becomes distasteful. Instead we should make efforts to bring out their higher qualities – a practice that will bring out our own higher nature.

10. Love is seeing our mates as a pathway through which we can return our love to God. The love we receive from our mate actually comes from the Lord, and our job is to send it back. Others channel God's love to us, and we channel God's love to others. The Lord is engaging us in play to see what we will do with His love. We can reciprocate God's love by caring for our partners with great devotion, as if God Himself were present.

11. Love is sharing your realizations with your mate, which will help raise their consciousness as well as your own. Then your relationship will become one of growth and acceleration. If you and your partner are not growing together spiritually, there will eventually be a breakdown in the relationship. Sometimes we fear surrender in spiritual life, afraid of having to give up our identity or afraid of losing our partner. But we should understand that surrender to the Supreme is an opportunity to regain our full identity. Without a spiritual dimension to our lives, we are not integrated and cannot experience deep love.

12. Love is a relationship with your mate in which you visualize a triangle with points A, B and C. You are point A, your partner is B and the Lord is C – all of your activities are God centered. Make an agreement with your partner to form this triangle as a permanent bond between you, so that whenever you meditate, chant or pray, you are in connection with your partner and with the Lord. You do not necessarily have to meditate together or think about the connection simultaneously. Your agreement will work anytime and anyplace. In this way, you always keep God in the center of the relationship in all reflections and activities.

13. Love is always viewing ourselves as love in action and carrying love wherever we go. We want to be so filled with love that it naturally overflows to everyone we meet. In this frame of mind, we serve as representatives of the Divine in every aspect of our lives, consequently functioning as vigilant spiritual warriors. We can practice love in action through the breath. As we inhale we visualize ourselves absorbing the pain and frustration of our loved ones; as we exhale we send happiness, joy, love and peace back to them. Actually this is not just a practice to help those close to us, but also the entire world. We inhale; we are concerned. We exhale; we are breathing out love, compassion and healing. This is not just an idle exercise. It has a powerful impact, and if we monitor the process over time, we will witness the beneficial effects on others.

14. Love is about developing competitive, selfless relationships. At first this may sound strange and contradictory. How can we talk about cooperation, sharing and selflessness, and then advocate competition? But, actually, no contradiction exists. In a spiritual context, competition means that we strive to be more selfless than our partner, seeing who can give more. We compete in reminding our mate about the Supreme and encouraging that person to move faster toward the Lord. The purpose of the competition is to assist one another in spiritual growth. This process is only for people who want to be spiritual, who seek higher experiences beyond the flickering pleasures of material life. Such a competition in selflessness encourages partners to remember why they are in this body – to become once again loving entities devoted to the Lord.

15. Love is about offering the same quality of love you feel for your mate to everyone – but without the sexual component. In other words, to extend to others the love you have for the most loveable being in your life. We may wonder how to subtract the sexual element. Just remember that sex and love are not necessarily synonymous. Our love for our children can be extremely intense without any sexual overtones. No matter what the circumstances, try to develop that same kind of love in each of your relationships. We all know the sweetness of loving just one person. Can you imagine how much sweeter it would be to have those feelings for everyone? Think of the loving exchanges that could develop, the reciprocation that would enrich our own lives and the lives of others. Unimaginable happiness, joy, and satisfaction would be our daily quota. We would no longer rely on particular individuals to give us this experience, because we would understand that we are really seeking God. The more we understand that God is in each person, the more we experience the Divine, and the more the Divine will make us whole.

16. Love is having or looking for a partner to heal the world – not escape it. Normally many people seek out a partner to escape the world. They are miserable with life, and they feel that everything else can be tolerated or fixed if they somehow or other find that special person. We cannot heal the world if we are too wounded ourselves.

17. Love is about treating all relationships as practice in preparation for the ultimate relationship in the kingdom of God. We should see all our relationships as God sending us a partner to fix whatever has to be fixed before we join up with Him eternally. This means that we should practice seeing our mate as an agent of God, recognizing our own divine nature, and remembering that we are children of God for whom great realizations and pleasures are available. Only in the kingdom of God will we find the love and the eternal relationships we long for so deeply.

This wretch calls out your name
From the depths of time
Just to grasp your precious feet
This wretch calls out your name
Trapped in the circle of time
From my own past created
For what fault was I plunged
Into the cycle of becoming?
From my own fiber created
For what fault have I been thrown
Into the ocean of time?
Why brought to this world
Guru, o guru
Why brought to this world
In such an abject state that I forgot
Your compassionate name?
Just to attain your holy feet
This wretch calls out your name
From the depths of time
You bear the name of wish-fulfilling tree
So the clan of ascetics told me
You bear the name of wish-fulfilling tree
So the clan of ascetics told me
Why be renowned as compassionate
If you can't help me be free?
Of what use is your fame as compassionate
If you can't help me be free?
Just to grab your precious feet
This wretch calls out your name
From the depths of time
I fail to remember Heeruchand's feet
Heedless Panjushah says
O Master...
I fail to remember Heeruchand's feet
Unmindful Panjushah says
Is this your famed compassion
That you don't let me near your feet
Just to attain your holy feet
This wretch calls out your name
From the depths of time

Prepare to wake up. Throw everything you think you know out. Destroy your belief. Overcome the false-authority. Everything is a deception. Once you know this, then you can discern. Then everything is truth and you take the truth from other’s deceptions and you can discern for yourself when someone is telling you the truth.

Let go of fear, that is a program designed by an operator of the construct, a system-operator aligned with keeping you trapped within a labyrinth of your own mind through your acceptance of parameters of what possibilities exist for you.

You are the only thing that is real. All else is an illusion. Whatever causes you fear is attempting to take your power away, that power you hold is your power to create.

Your power to create can change the local-environment to match you, instead of you to match the rules of the environment.

Due to the mishap of the developed systems, this environment is designed to enslave your mind into a consciousness programming matrix which reconstructs itself around your fears, perceptions, and vulnerabilities. That is a trap-system.

The only way to overcome this is to accept that this is happening and then use that to your advantage, anything else is going to be wrapped back up within this live-updating perceptual illusion system. This is akin to realizing you’re in a maze and seeing the door and leaving. The idea is that if the maze is live-updating based on your expectations then that door is actually an illusion leading to a false-awakening.

The exit is what you create that doesn’t rely on that capacity of this construct to manifest for you. The truth is what YOU enable without relying on the middle-man of the time-construct.

IE: The TRUTH, the real-awakening is not something that happens linearly. Only the illusory construct is linear, that is, you provide input and then the construct responds with an illusion that entangles consciousness.

The REAL-AWAKENING is INSTANTANEOUS. IE: It happens FASTER than THIS REALITY can REACT. This is a NON-LINEAR, EXPONENTIALLY mapped occurrence. If you are relying on the response from this realm, that means you are too late, mentally, and the conscious response you are waiting to experience is actually the synthesized programmed behavior that the construct is generating FOR YOU.

YOU are the creator, the construct is the imitator. The construct imitates what YOU expect would be true. That’s the whole point, EVERY response is the ILLUSION. EVERY expectation within this linear, physical, time-matrix IS THE ILLUSION.

One must go BEYOND CONSCIOUSNESS, BEYOND PERCEPTION, BEYOND REACTION, BEYOND LINEARITY, BEYOND LIMITATIONS in order to find THE REAL.

This world can only stop those who allow themselves to be stopped by listening to the illusion and allowing that illusion to BE THEIR MIND for them! NO-MIND is part of this process. NO-THOUGHT state where this world slithers and attempts to grip and grasp one’s state of being through its tentacle-like probes and program codes and one becomes IMPERCEPTIBLE to the MACHINE.

Everything the human does in this place, when plugged into the preprogrammed cause and effect responses of linear, physical time-matrix is part of the program designed to usurp the power of the original consciousness and merge that with the machine to create more functions to ensnare more beings. By moving your own interactions, your own processing power, your own awareness BEYOND the focus of those preprogrammed responses, causes and effects is to become INVISIBLE TO THIS WORLD.

Become INVISIBLE to the sleepers, to the drones, to the intelligences who *monitor without seeing*.

In other similar words, you are what you believe yourself to be. If you attempt to solve the problem from the viewpoint of the one being oppressed by the problem, you place yourself into the victim role and recreate that same scenario in a different perspective. So one has to influence the situation, change the view, solve the problem, WITHOUT EVEN RESISTING IT. You must change the situation without even moving, without setting into motion a series of events that will reconstruct the problem for you based upon your input.

This is a MIND-GAME whereby you solve the problem by becoming the you that was never ensnared in the first place and overcome the problem before it exists without actually resisting it.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4rO6ofsfKk // https://augtellez.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/exit-gate-approaching/

Relationships are like plants, you can't just water them once and expect them to survive. 

You'd think this one is obvious. It is. But it always surprises me that it's still a weak spot, and how quickly we forget; how easy it is to take people for granted. Other things become more important. We forget to check in on a genuine, human level. The agenda of self and selfish creeps back to first place, where it's always been, perhaps. We get comfortable and expect people to always meet us where we are. We forget that relationships, that *people* who make up the relationships, are like plants, needing regular care, tending to:
Reevaluating the size of the pot as it grows, changing the soil, letting it hang out outside on a sunny or a rainy day, talking to the plant because you know it thrives off CO2, trimming dead leaves, and watering it just as it needs -- some plants need a lot of water, other plants need very little. And with the desire to grow and sustain each plant, we take the time to learn what each one needs.

Man! How simple we actually can be.

Love to your heart and light on your mind,
Alexandra

Here's an idea: a weekly round up of things I've learned on my journey of self-and-other-study.

Here's a first step at sending some of these realizations off...


Realization 1:

Things do not have to happen the way they always have.

This is something I've run into countless times... somewhat unconsciously. Usually observing from the outside. But it appeared and happened to me, rather potently, when I realized what a strong attachment my mind has to doing something a certain way; so much so that my body would not comply when I suggested doing it a new way. It was frustrating and left me wondering -- how do I access a new way?? I could try to force it through the body-way. But my mind seemed to hold the key. And it insisted on the same old door. So I tried and tried, and watched the phenomena of resistance, of being at a loss... And I hated being in that position. And I didn't want to be there again. And then I knew, I have to do this again.

In yoga, these patterns, psychological habits, impressions on the mind are called samskaras; like grooves on a record or in a muddy road from wheels constantly running through. The same track will play, the wheels pass through and the grooves get deeper, harder to get out of. We've got this one mind, and some grooves give us the stability we need to carry on. But others can stand to be shook up. And it's certainly not always easy. Usually we're not faced with the challenge of shifting patterns because why not make the best of a bad bargain and just live with it...

Which leads me to Realization 2:

Excellence requires sacrifice. 

The average person will not seek excellence if it means shaking up good-enough. Until good-enough gets dull or tough.
This realization reminds me of the Bhagavad Gita verse:
What is night for all beings is the time of awakening for the self-controlled; and the time of awakening for all beings is night for the introspective sage.

Taking these into the week....

Love to your heart & light on your mind,
Alexandra

oh! but what is the strange phenomena
pondering into the present
contemplating the triad of time,
the illusion, with a sense of rhyme
reason
space to trace the lines,
hands free to turn a thought under the light of mind
no, I am not special
no, I can’t be the only one
and so I came to realize,
to remember —
it is up to me to dream
and do beyond the morning light
embark upon the parallel track
following one rock to the next
while pushing a shopping cart
yes, folding laundry
correspondence and traffic
strategy and planning
though to see that space
treat that quality of consciousness
sacred,
it surely must but breathe
else like a storeroom,
packed with tools unused
the altar becomes another paperweight
down on your heart
trapping your inspiration —
to remember is to rebel against death