A Powerful Exercise To Redefine Your Love Relationships | Vishen Lakhiani

So welcome to a deep dive on designing your love relationships. Love relationships is part of your experience list. And it is perhaps the most important category of experiences that we want to really craft in our life. As I mentioned before, the Harvard study, the Very Happy People study, showed that the number one correlation with happiness out of everything in life is the strength of your relationships. So we're going to explore love because it's one of those areas that has so much possibility for happiness, but at the same time is so restricted by rules of the culturescape. Now, in every category that we do a deep dive in, we're going to, before we actually do the exercise, we're going to look at your models of reality around love and then explore new symbols, systems to improve the love in your life. So models of reality, think of them as beliefs. We take on these beliefs from the culturescape. Love is one of those areas of human society that is most infected by sheer bullshit beliefs. Then we're gonna look at systems, systems that help you generate better relationships with others, as well as systems that help you generate more internal love. Okay, so let's start with models of reality. So models of reality, of love, include ideas such as, how do you define love? What is love for you? As you may have heard, there are different languages for love. Some people feel loved when they get a gift. For some people it's a compliment. For some people it's touch, it's a hug. How do you expect that people in your life to give you love? How do you give love to others? How do you receive and give? Do you believe that love brings hurt? Many of us as we go through life have moments of heartbreak. We take on a model of reality that love is meant to be painful. Well, it isn't. But if we hold on to this model of reality, we create this pattern in our lives where we almost expect bad things to happen when we are in love. Do you believe you have the capacity to love? Often this is tied to your ideas of your own self worth. Do you believe you deserve to be loved and treasured? All of these are interesting topics and I'm going to give you different access to videos in this chapter from some incredible teachers and speakers who are in our mindvalley network as well as mentioned in my book that you can go deeper in. But the first thing that we want to explore is two of the biggest rules on love out there. The first is that when it comes to a love relationship, we have to define it into a particular subset of humanity. For me, it was I had to marry An Indian girl, preferably someone who was a Hindu. That, at least was the culture I grew up in. If you've read my book, you'll know I rebelled against that culture. I. I married my girlfriend at that time, who was Estonian, a beautiful redhead. But that's a wholly different story. The idea that we have to stay into a particular culture or definition of who is our significant other is one of the dumbest ideas mankind has come up with, you know, so that's one rule that I'm going to ask you to eliminate. Now, if you truly, truly, truly believe that you should marry someone of the same race or religion, that's great. But if you believe that you need to do it to keep your parents happy or your culture happy, I would advise you to rethink that, because you're about to set foot into a deep commitment with someone, and the only reason you should do it is if it's going to make you happy. Now, the second rule of the culturescape is that love should only be between a man and a woman. One of the cruelest rules out there because it causes so many people who are lgbt, gay and lesbians, who want to marry the person they truly love to feel guilty about their feelings. And that just isn't right. So again, I want you to know that if you are gay, if you are in a same sex marriage, we fully, fully, fully support you. And if you are in a situation where you're in love with someone of the same gender, but you feel guilty pursuing it, know that the world is changing. And I strongly encourage you to follow your heart. Now, with that, I want to go into another aspect of love that I want you to keep in mind as you do this exercise. And this is where society has really failed us. We've been trained to believe that love is has to come from an external source. So many of us are trained to grow up to believe that the definition of being in love is to be in love with someone else. But the problem is the most important form of love, at least what I found, is that internal love, love for your own self, is where it all starts. Only when you truly love yourself can you give and receive love from others in a healthy way. And therefore, all exercises around love must include some vision, some end goal of how you are going to be in love and feel comfortable and feel true and honor yourself. I learned this the hard way growing up. I was always chasing love from other people. And for me, it happened because I picked up a series of books recently that shifted my life. And yes, to Me. Even to me. This shift only happened recently. I began to realize how important self love was. The books included Kamal Ravikant's Love yourself like your life depended on it and Don Miguel Ruiz's Mastery of Love. Both those books educated me on the idea that ultimate love wasn't the love I had with someone else, but it was appreciation for my own self. I grew up with low self esteem, and so growing up I always needed validation from others. But when I realized that there were specific exercises and practices I could put in place to heal my internal wounds, to truly appreciate myself for who I was, I stopped needing love from others. Neediness stopped. Feelings of inadequacy when my partner would behave in a certain way also stopped. And that just made my relationships healthier. So as you do this exercise, I want you to know that you need to also set visions, end goals for how much internal love you want to bring into your world. So here are a couple of questions that you're going to ask yourself as you make your list. What does your ideal love relationship look like? Imagine it in all its facets. How you communicate what you have in common. The activities you do together. What does a day in your life look like together? What are holidays like? What moral and ethical beliefs do you share? What's your love life like? What type of kinky practices do you do? So all of those are beautiful things to put down in your three most important questions in the category of love. Now think about self love and what that means. Are you comfortable being alone with yourself? What type of self appreciation self honor exercises do you do? Do you practice daily gratitude where you tell yourself how much you appreciate yourself for being merely you? Can you go through long periods of time without being in a relationship and still truly be happy? So these are all ideas for end goals that you should put under love. Because nowhere in this category did we define love as love solely with another person. So now that you understand the scope of love and how you can expand the scope in healthy ways, and how love is not just about you and your relationship with one other person, but you and your relationship with yourself, let's go deeper into your categories for love. I'm going to give you three minutes, and what I want you to do is write down new visions for end goals that you'd like to have in terms of your love relationships. So let me get the timer started, take out your piece of paper or your notebook, and let's get ready to write. As you're writing, I'll ask a series of questions to Help your thinking process. Go Begin. What does your ideal love relationship look like? Is it travel with someone you truly love? Is it living in a beautiful home with this other person? Think about how you wake up in the morning together. Think about how you go to bed together at night, the fun activities you do. Think about what qualities this person has that you love being around. Is it a particular level of intellect? A particular level of fitness? A sense of humor? Think about how you complement each other. Perhaps your vision is to be with someone whom you can have kids with or not. Perhaps it's not one person. Perhaps you want to explore other forms of relationship. Maybe it's not just monogamy. Maybe it's polyamory. Maybe you want to date around for a while. Maybe you want to be just single again. Don't think about the rules of the culturescape. Think about what you want. How you would define success in love on your terms. Now as you're writing this, think about love for yourself. What practices do you do that truly let you appreciate yourself for who you are? Is it treating yourself to a massage at least once a week? Is it a particular form of meditation or affirmation of self love? Is it a gratitude exercise where you express gratitude? Gratitude on a daily basis for who you are, how you look, how you think, your heart, your personality traits of yours that you truly enjoy? How would you give love to others? Perhaps not a single person, maybe a community, a tribe? You belong to your co workers. So don't feel restricted by any of society's death definitions of love, even marriage is nothing more than relative truth. Different societies, different periods of time all define marriage in different ways. So don't think of defining your relationship with someone or yourself based on any past pattern. Create a vision rather of what love means for you. So congratulations, you're done. Three minutes are up. Now many of you might want to explore this topic further. So what I want to do is recommend some of the most life transforming books and talks and teachers I've stumbled upon in the category of love connection. So in terms of books, by far some of the best books on love are the Men are from Mars, Women from From Venus series by John Gray. John Gray is a friend of mine and his books are incredible. I remember reading his books when I was a teenager. They really helped me understand woman who was so confusing for me. And John Gray's books have sold over 50 million copies. So I truly recommend that when it comes to love with someone else. Now if you want to explore the topic of self love and I really encourage you to two books that you want to read. The first is Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz. It's a stunningly beautiful written book and it's all about love and how the ultimate mastery of love is when you master love within yourself. And when you can do this, all other forms of your relationship will improve. Another book that I strongly want to recommend is by Kamal Ravikant. Kamal Ravikant was a Silicon Valley investor who was going through a serious depression. I share a bit of his story in the Code of the Extraordinary Mind. And what happened is he discovered that the reason for his health blocks, the reason for his depression was because he had stopped loving himself. The book is less than 60 pages long, but in it Kamal prescribes three distinct exercises that you can do to dramatically transform your self love. Now, when I started doing these exercises, things in my life changed. So you can pick up love yourself like your life depended on it by Kamal Ravikant. If you're a member of my consciousness engineering program on the net, Kamal's talk where he shares this exercise is part of the program. So just go ahead and watch the talk. Finally, in this module, I'm going to leave you with two talks by incredible people. Both these talks happened at a fest my festival. The first is by Kamal and it's about his story of discovering the importance of of truly loving yourself. Watch this talk. It is beautiful. It's about 25 minutes and it'll really shift something in you. The second talk is by famed hypnotherapist Marisa Peer, who's also one of Mindvalley's number one authors. This woman is incredible. She uses a model called transformational hypnotherapy to change people's lives and a lot of it has to do with self love. So her talk is about the greatest disease afflicting humanity, which she says is lack of self love. And in the talk she's going to prescribe some really incredible exercises that you do in balding. Get this lipstick and a mirror that will completely transform how you love yourself and how you function in the world. Her talks have sparked revolutions where people are going about their houses using lipstick in a particular way that is not recommended by lipstick manufacturers, but creating so much beauty, self love and happiness within themselves. So I wanted to leave you with these ideas. Congratulations. You've expanded your definition of love, your visions for your end goals of love. I've recommended a few books and in this program I've given you two really beautiful talks that you should definitely watch. So that you grow in your understanding of love and what it means to you.