Gentleness: 6 Steps to Cultivating Real Love
When it Comes to Cultivating Real Love using Gentleness is an Essential Element
Sometimes it feels pointless trying to be gentle when the person facing us is erupting with anger and blame. Furthermore, being defensive feels safer. It keeps us feeling powerful and in control.
How can we be gentle with others in complicated situations of fear, anger, and suspicious motives?
Can Compassion and Gentleness be our mode of Operating when Situations put us in the Complete State of Vulnerability?
According to A Course in Miracles, it is in such moments which allow us to create a shift in our consciousness and relationships. This naturally puts us in a state-protected from harm, risk, loss, and destruction. It is when we realize “the act of judgment destroys honesty and shatters trust” that we must learn a new path for relationship navigation.
Following are the six steps that will allow you to cultivate real love by using gentleness with others in the moment of an argument or crisis. This is the process by which you are learning to be an open channel and integrate a level three relationship, according to the Relaxed Relationship curriculum.
Gentleness: 6 Steps to Cultivating True Love
The next time you find yourself in a challenging moment with someone here’s what you can do to ensure you are cultivating real love and not building higher walls:
Step One – Acknowledge you do not know what to do.
Keep lips shut.
Step Two – Silence your mind.
Do not allow your thoughts to formulate a response or judgment.
Step Three – Repeat affirmations.
Interrupt the defensive mind chatter and silently focus your mind by repeating one of the following affirmations over and over:
-“I need do nothing except not to interfere”
-“I am determined to see this differently”
-“I am not upset for the reasons I think.”
Step Four – This is your opportunity for the right use of humility.
The ego will convince you at this moment that it is your opportunity to be right and in control. The ego will work hard to formulate a response through your judgment. “You do not know humility; you only know humiliation as the ego wants you only to know shame.” It might look like an attack, anger, blame, or fear. In addition, you can find more on navigating this process through the blog post, “what is a Relaxed Relationship”.
You will have no faith that what I’m telling you is worth the risk of giving up being right and feeling important. At this moment I can offer you no proof, but if you allow yourself to follow through this process . . .
I can guarantee your freedom from the agony and disappointment a disagreement with another inevitably brings.
Step Five – Enlist your leap of faith.
You have to trust in this process before you have proof that things will be different in your relationships. In step 5 you recognize that “you cannot possibly know how to respond to what you do not understand.”
The Ark of Peace is Entered Two by Two
Continue waiting and trusting, still repeating your mantra or affirmation. Continue this process until you experience a profound shift in yourself. It’s important to know, this might take hours or even days, but in reality, the first five steps happen in an instant.
When you are in the process of cultivating real love expect it to happen - It will come.
Always, hold in your pocket the 7 conditions for true love.
Continue to trust in the process, be willing to allow this process to work through you, and furthermore, accept everything as it happens, with grace.
Most important to note, look for the meaning as I promise it is coming. This is Level 3 according to the Levels of Consciousness and the Relaxed Relationships Compass.
Acknowledge the truth that you will not have trust that Love (God) is going to take this final step for you because you have never allowed this process to happen through you to completion. This is the atonement. Do your part, and Love (God) will do His.
Step Six – The completion and the full recognition that you are not the teacher in the moment of a crisis but rather the student.
This is the path of integrating your Authentic Self through your relationships.