Make Love

For example, if you haven't resolved your own contradictory emotions and beliefs about your spending choices, you might spend lots of money on a luxurious lifestyle, but you're still not happy. So you think, "If this doesn't make me happy, then I'll live simply instead." So you change your lifestyle-- you go in the opposite direction. But you may still not feel fulfilled, because you've only shifted to an opposite polarity. You still haven't resolved your inner ambivalences about your spending and lifestyle choices. No matter which polarity you're playing out in your life, unless you resolve and integrate the opposing feelings within yourself, you'll either get stuck continually re-experiencing the problems associated with that polarity or you'll go in the opposite direction, and that won't make you any happier-and you still won't be fully aligned with your life choices, so you won't be able to harness the power they hold to bring good to the world. Temple-Thurston offers an exercise to integrate these polarities. It has produced amazing results for me, as well as for my coaching clients. The idea behind it is that by making conscious the ambivalences we have inside ourselves, we can integrate them; this not only relieves our emotional tension around a given issue, but things in our "outer" life end up changing, too. We're no longer stuck in our old, unfulfilling or ineffective patterns, because we're changing our lives from the inside out, not vice versa.

AD4