There is plenty of speech that is simply neutral — in its delivery and in its message. Neutral talking back and forth has minimal impact on a relationship. On the other hand, charged speech (closer/further away speech) can have a major impact, particularly on relationships between partners and between parents and children.

There are relationships that are basically no, many that are mixed yes and no, and some, although perhaps not many, that are really yes relationships.

Most of us could use a lot more yes in our relationships.

Here’s what could become an interesting experiment: Say yes much more often and no a lot less often.

The problem with this approach, for many people, is that “yes” is usually taken to mean assent, as in “Would you do my laundry for me?” “Yes, I’d be glad to.” This is unlikely to work if you don’t want to do his (or her) laundry.
However, “yes“ does not have to mean assent or agreement. It can mean —

• “Yes, I can see where you are coming from.“
• “Yes, I sense your urgency. I want to know why the issue is important to you.”
• “Yes, I would be happy to go there, but I am working tonight.”
• “Yes, we need to talk about that.”
• “Yes, there are parts of your criticism that I think are legitimate.”
• “Yes, I hear what you are asking. Now give me a day to think about it.”

As each of these examples shows, it is possible to say “yes” and move closer — in understanding, sympathy, interest, or appreciation — without necessarily agreeing nor giving up a different point of view.

A caution: The “yes” experiment is not going to work if you are simply using it insincerely or to manipulate your partner. The intent to move closer — without assenting to all or even part of what is being asked of you — has to be there.

An “overall yes relationship is a much happier one that is a “mostly no” relationship. Experiment with adding more “yes.” Then tell us how your experiment worked out.

I have never met an angel, nor can I claim any authority about the existence of angels. However, I do suspect that if angels exist, they definitely do take themselves  lightly, and they definitely can fly.

I can’t fly. However, there have been plenty of times when I felt very light, in the sense of open, accessible, intuitive, spontaneous, and caring. These have usually been times when I was behaving lovingly to my wife or to someone else.

To love is to be focused in a caring way on someone other than oneself. While you are loving, you are free of the burden of your own self-centeredness. And that means lighter, more expanded in consciousness, more heart-felt — and less burdened.

The more loving you are, the lighter and more free you become. That’s pretty close to flying, I’d say.

If angels exist, they are highly-evolved beings, for sure. I suspect that angels are very close to pure love, which would make them beings of light. Angels can fly, because they have very little ego self that ties them down.

The more loving we are, the more highly-evolved we become (just as the more murderously we behave, the less evolved we become.) The angelic may be well beyond our reach. However, we can still learn from the angels. We can learn to behave more lovingly. And in the process, we can become lighter and less a burden to ourselves and to others . We can realize what may be the real reason that we are here on the earth — to brighten the lives of others through our love. Through love, we can take flight.

In the previous post, I mentioned a quote from a book I once read. The quote has been very helpful to me in lightening my own load of self-preoccupations and may do the same for you.

The quote is “Angels fly, because they take themselves lightly.”

To me, taking ourselves lightly means getting beyond our usual ego-centered concerns. Whenever I am into my rights, my needs, my resentments, my situation, I am doing the opposite of taking myself lightly. I am heavy (and sometimes ponderously) into myself. And if my wife is around then “heavy” is one of the words that she might use to describe me.

On the other hand, when I am focused outside myself, and in particular when I am involved in the welfare of someone else, I really do take myself lightly — in fact, I’m pretty much not thinking of myself at all. This is one of the tremendous benefits that I have found in being a therapist: When I am working with a couple or with an individual, I totally cease to be a problem to myself almost always. I am focused on the couple or person before me, not on me.

At times, as a result of taking myself lightly, I can “fly,“ in the sense of being spontaneous, intuitive, open, connected in a way that I definitely am not when I am heavy and caught in myself.

The key is to get beyond our small self. The best way to do that is to love.

We’ll get back to the angels in the next post.

This experience has happened to be a number of times. The quotes that get this treatment are always ones that speak to me in a special way. They seem to say, “This is for you. Pay attention to it.” The meaning of such statements is seldom entirely clear to me. It speaks to me, and yet I don’t for sure know what it means. I’m meant to spend time with the statement, do my best to figure out what it means and then, make it mine, by following it, in some sense.  

Of all the statements that have spoken to me in a special way, the one that has hung around the longest is this one:

“Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.”

Now before you read further, take a moment and give some thought to what that statement actually means.

“Angels fly because they take themselves lightly” speaks to me partly because I am not naturally very good at taking myself lightly. In fact, I can, at times, be quite heavy and dark — rather than light — with fuss, or fear, or discouragement, or loneliness — or any other of the characteristically heavy conditions that weigh us down and make it hard to take ourselves lightly.

I would like to take myself more lightly than I do, and the “Angels fly…” statement is beginning to help.

An invitation: Please join in. We’ve got the makings of a good conversation here — better than a monologue.

I’m not sure what they actually mean. However, I wonder about this question a good deal. They seem to point to something really important.

This is a good time of year to celebrate the mystery of light. The Winter Solstice was just a few weeks back. The celebrations that involve light are recently over — Christmas, Hanukkah and the Hindu Festival of Lights.

Consider these references to light:

• “His face lit up when he saw his son.”
• “They had a marriage lived in the Light.”
• “After his resurrection, Jesus appeared bathed in Light.”
• “The Buddha taught the way to En-light-enment.”
• “At her wedding, her face was radiant when she said ‘I do’.”
• When my wife threatened to leave me, I finally saw the light.”
• “The ancient prophets sought to lead the people out of darkness into light.”
• “An illustration in an edition of Dante’s Paradiso shows souls ascending from earth into the light.
• The Apostles and saints are often represented as having a halo of light around their heads.
• People who have had near-death experiences often report of being drawn to a brilliant light that appeared at the end of a tunnel.

What do these references to light have in common? What do they suggest? When in your life have you felt full of light?

I had an experience at Christmas that confirmed my sense that your real family are the people who love you and whom you love, whether they are related to you or not.

My wife and I have been married for 26 years. We have five children who all lived together during most of their childhood and adolescence. None of these now-grown children are the product of our own marriage. When we first met, I was a single-parent raising three kids by myself, and Joyce was a single parent raising two children. Six years separate the youngest from the oldest.

Our five children, their four spouses and one partner, plus the two grandchildren spent the Christmas holidays together at our house — a gathering that happens at Christmas every other year. For three couples and two children being together with the rest of the family meant flying to Maine from the West Coast.

We had a wonderfully warm, chaotic and loving Christmas together. These events confirmed for me that, in addition to being different nuclear families, we are also one loving family. If you are part of a step-family or are otherwise acquainted with step- families, you know that it is no small achievement to come together as one mutually-caring family.

At our family gathering, I was attentive to the powerful bonds that were celebrated by people who, in several cases, had not seen one another for many months, as well as the new bonds between the grandchildren, both two-and-a-half years old and several of the adults present.

The whole experience was an affirmation for me of the fact that often your real family is the people whom you love and who love you, regardless of whether or not you are biologically related. Affirming that fact can be especially helpful for people who are inclined to bemoan the fact that they are not close to their birth family and overlook the fact that they are surrounded by the loving family of supportive friends who have come together over the years.

Here, as in many occasions in life, we have a choice — regret the love that we don’t have or celebrate the love that surrounds us and needs only to be acknowledged and lived for us to be filled by its presence.

It is good thing that everyone will receive something when we gather for the annual Christmas gift distribution. Nevertheless, important things can easily be forgotten in this cultural mania for covering all the bases at Christmas time. Specifically, it is easy to forget the message that should be behind gift giving. That message is “I see you. I care about you. I want you to know that your happiness and your welfare matter to me. I hope that my gift pleases you and that, in giving it to you, you will know that you are important to me.”

Gift giving should be an expression of love. This special holiday season of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and the Hindu Festival of Lights is a time for expressing love and caring.

Now to be realistic, we can’t love everyone to the same degree — at least not the sort of love that is an expression of genuine, personal valuing. We can’t love Johnny’s daughter, Anna, whom we scarcely remember, in the same way that we, say, love our partner. But wait a minute. Perhaps we can also love Anna personally if we sit next to her at Christmas dinner, if we go out of our way to talk with her — if we give her the gift of our attention and our warmth.

Here is a way to use the notion of gift giving to deepen love between yourself and your partner. Train yourself to see that anything anyone does to benefit you, at any time of year, is that person’s gift to you, and therefore worthy of your notice and appreciation. I mean that your husband’s preparing supper when it isn’t his turn to cook but he knows that you don’t feel well is a gift to you. Go further — see as a gift even what your partner does that is “his job” or “her job,” and regularly give thanks for that, too.

Similarly, whatever you do that benefits your partner is your gift to him or her — as long as you have your partner‘s welfare in mind and tell yourself at the time, “This is my gift to you.”

Why not keep it simple, you ask? Why not just figure that your partner does his or her job and you do yours, and leave love out of it? No problem, if your relationship is basically a utilitarian one or if you two are both going along to get along with each other. On the other hand, if you want a relationship of love with your partner, then the more you name the helpful actions of either of you as  love, the more love you bring into your relationship.

I am talking here about ordinary actions, as well as extraordinary ones. You are training yourself to recognize the ordinary kindnesses, considerations and friendly gestures of relationship as expressions of love. By doing so, over time you may discover that you two are living together with love. And what a Christmas present, a birthday present, an any-day present that would be — to take love into your relationship in simple ways and then to realize one day that love really lives between you!

Thinking of love as behavior has a number of important advantages. Here are some.

• If love is behavior, then loving becomes a skill. Skills can be learned. With this view, you don’t have to worry about not being a loving person (i.e., a bad person). Everybody is potentially loving. What you need is skill, plus intention, plus follow-through. You can get all that.
• You come to realize that just as there are different expressions of love (e.g., compassion, listening lovingly, dealing with differences loving), there are also different skills that are needed. You can pick one expression of love and learn that particular skill (e.g., the skill of listening lovingly). You can take learning to love one skill at a time. And you can focus on the particular skills that every day life shows you you need.
• When you commit yourself to acting more lovingly toward your partner, you inevitably confront the issue of where you are going to get the love that you want to give. A lot of us are busy, harried and often tired. Figuring out how to get the energy to give love becomes an important question that will take you into an equally important area of growth.
• Treating love as behavior allows for growth, in a way that regarding love as feeling alone doesn’t. You can experiment with different loving behaviors, note their result and then modify your approach. In that manner, you can become more skilled at loving your partner well.

Loving behavior doesn’t have to wait for loving feelings. You can learn to behave lovingly to your partner even when you don’t feel loving. Fortunately, loving behavior often generates loving feelings, which makes behaving lovingly the best way to get the loving feelings that benefit yourself as well as your partner.

The best one I know is this: Love is action, augmented by feelings. “Oh, I am so devoted to my wife.” “Show me. What are you doing that expresses your devotion?” If you aren’t actually doing anything — then, sorry, but I don’t think that your “devotion” amounts to much more than a good opinion about yourself. On the other hand, if you express your devotion by doing your share of the work around the house, by knowing what is important in her every day life and asking her about it, by sitting with her with an open and attentive heart when she needs your company — well then, you are devoted. And hopefully your wife feels your devotion, and both she and you are the better for your devotion.

At the risk of sounding tough and uncompromising, I think it is important that we get clear about what love is and what it isn’t. Why? Because the survival of our marriages, our families, our relationships and, indeed, our nation and our world depends on loving behavior — showing through your actions that you regard the other person’s well-being as equal in importance to your own. Talk is cheap. Feelings come and go. It is loving action that makes a difference. Make room in your heart for the other person’s reality and then translate your open heart’s knowing into action.

Two people living under the same roof have to cooperate, at least somewhat. Similarly, nations on the same planet must cooperate, even though in some cases it’s very hard to find the cooperation for all the belligerence.

Much cooperation is situationally necessary. (I remember a film from way back in which two convicts who were chained to each other managed to escape from jail and had to cooperate while they were on the run, although they started out hating each other.)

At the other end of the cooperation continuum are those special relationships in which the cooperation is so profound that from it develops a deep and rewarding couple-ness (an “us” so rich that it has a reality of its own — you, me and us. (Suggestion: If you and your partner have such a richly-developed “we,” imagine, each of you, that your “we” actually is a third person in the relationship. Describe that person.)

If you start out with a taste for cooperation and your partner doesn’t, for whatever reason — you become the person in charge of the cooperation venture, and here is what you need to do:

• You need to make it unnecessary for your partner to continue being competitive and
• You need to make “we cooperating with each other” a rewarding and attractive prospect for your partner as well as for yourself.

You need to help your partner realize that s/he loses nothing important by building a good “we” with you. Start out by joining your partner in activities that your partner especially likes and won’t mind having you along. Do so in such a way that your joining your partner strengthens his/her sense of well-being.

Your aim here is to demonstrate to your partner that s/he doesn’t have to oppose you in order to feel safe and strong.

An example might be going to hockey games with your husband or joining your wife in a course that she wants to take. In either case, do your best to celebrate the we experience afterward, without faking it, of course.

Then add more we experiences that are pleasurable and adventurous for you both. When you sense that your partner’s attitude toward cooperating with you has increased to the point that s/he likes being “the two of us together,” then introduce activities that are more tilted toward your own interests.

“Why should I take the lead in this?” you may be asking. Answer: You should because you are the one who starts out wanting it, because you enjoy being “us together” and can introduce the pleasures of that condition to your partner — and because if you are reading this blog, you are probably someone who wants to be more loving, and here is an opportunity. Enjoy.