THE HEART OF LOVE

The Top Ten Secrets

1. Love yourself and help your partner do the same thing. We come together to love, but so often we don’t even love ourselves well. Loving yourself is not selfish. It is a way of enriching your own heart and life and taking your partner higher with you. Successful love partners are constantly encouraging and praising each other and helping each other see their unique magnificence.

2. Treat your partner like your best friend. Best friends are wide open with each other with lots of laughter and playfulness. They don’t judge. They accept and like each other as is. Successful love mates know this secret that deep friendship is one of the inner secrets of love success.

3. Listen deeply to each other’s heart. You can be right next to someone and have no idea what is in his or her heart. So much is going on in our hearts and changing so rapidly. In truly successful relationships, partners listen to each other’s heart with compassion. And they do this often.

4. Ask Love Questions. This is one of the biggest keys to intimacy success. Ask your partner tons of love questions that get beneath the surface and create intimacy, such as: “What’s going on in your heart?” Or “What are you most struggling with and how can I help?” Or “What are you dreaming of in your life right now?” Or “Is there anything you’d like to talk about so we can be even closer? Love questions create immediate intimacy.

5. Speak to each other with honesty and kindness. Kindness without honesty feels superficial. Honesty without kindness stings our hearts. Love partners inevitably have struggles and disagreements, but the words you choose can have dramatic long-term consequences. What good is honesty if it kills love? Find ways of speaking the truth with gentleness and love. Remember, the relationship is more important than the issue.

6. Cherish each other’s dreams. We all have inner dreams and desires, but often, even our love partner or best friends don’t ask us about our dreams. In truly successful love relationships, each partner’s dreams are actively cherished. Take delight in finding out more about your love mate’s dreams. This depth of heart sharing creates enormous intimacy and bonding and a life of sharing and creating dreams, not just being together.

7. Listen deeply to love, think of love, spirit or whatever you name your Higher Power, as being present in your most cherished, intimate relationship. Let the divine enter your relationships. Ask divine love together for guidance and watch the unity unfold where separation once existed.

8. Empower each other. Each partner has different strengths and weaknesses. Rather than staying satisfied with this status quo, empower each other to become strong and successful in areas where each is weak. As you do this, you become even more intimate partners and self esteem rises dramatically. And guess what? So does love!

9. Treat each other with equality. Our civilization has treated women as subordinate for centuries. Although the tide has turned, successful love partners are keenly aware of creating equality for each other – in all areas of living, including making love, careers, finances and decisions. Can you imagine what this does to intimacy and love for both women and men?

10. Honor the full, liberated expression of womanhood and manhood. Women are beginning to find their true voices. And men are discovering new choices for expressing manhood. As each partner opens to the highest possibilities of being a woman or being a man, the relationship finds greater depth of awareness and freedom. Love thrives.

© 2006 Scott & Shannon Peck

Dr. Scott Peck & Shannon Peck are co-founders of TheLoveCenter, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to “Raising universal love awareness and awakening a world of love masters.” This column is based on their new book, “Love Skills for Personal & Global Transformation: Secrets of a Love Master” in September, 2006 or at www.TheLoveCenter.com. For more love, & information about TheLoveCenter’s School of Love, email TheLoveCenter@aol.com or call (858)792-6018.