Web Exclusive—Revive a Flagging Relationship

By John Welwood

This exercise will help you explore how being loved allows the window of your heart to open, so that you can experience love as something within you, rather than something that someone hands over to you.

1. Think of someone in your life who loves you—a lover, spouse, friend, or family member. Let yourself feel this person’s love and caring for you.

2. Notice how you associate this good feeling with the other person, and how you tend to see the other as the cause or source of it.

3. Now let go of thinking of the other person and pay attention to what happens in your body when you feel loved. Pay particular attention to the heart center, the area at the center of your chest. See if you can recognize the warmth or fullness in your heart as your own experience, as something that arises from within you, as something that is yours.

4. How does it feel to recognize that?

Excerpted from Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart, by John Welwood, (Trumpeter Books, 2006). Used with permission. For more information, visit www.johnwelwood.com.