Have The Relationship You Want

Who’s wrong? Is it me, or is it you? I’ve been trying to figure it out all day. If it’s neither of us, then who is it?

I’m triggered. I triggered you. You triggered me. We’re both upset. Someone’s insensitive. Someone stepped wrong. Someone did something! Whose fault is it? No one? How can I be disappointed and angry if it’s no one’s fault?

If it’s no one’s fault, then why do I feel like this?

Ahhhh. I get it. I feel like this exactly because it’s no one’s fault. I’m too nice to blame someone else. I’m too “conscious” to process backward in time and blame my parents, and my genes, and even you. So I’m hanging out here in space. So…it must be me. It must always be me.

If the Universe brings me what I want (even when I don’t know what that is), and I’m sitting here in yucky stuff, then I must want it. Ahhhh…I’m to blame!

Wait! If it’s good stuff, I’m a manifester of my powerful, beautiful destiny. If it’s yucky, I’m to blame.

This doesn’t go well with my success dressing. Definite clash of colors and tone.

Here’s a Rori Raye way to match yourself up inside, and share how you feel and who you are with your man.

A very famous New York acting coach, Mira Rostova, once taught me how to turn scripted dialogue into human emotions. Some would say it was a highly “technical” way to approach acting. We’d analyze every word, figuring out not how we, as actors, would instinctively say the words or play the scene, but how human beings would actually behave. One of her tools was something she called “The Admit.”

‘The Admit” is simply saying What Is. No emotion at all. A man asks us for the time – it’s two o’clock. He asks us about our work – we’re secretaries or teachers or entrepreneurs. Our man asks us nothing and we tell him the best way to get to the freeway. In life, so many of us live out the dialogues of our life in “The Admit.” We feel blank, numb, on the surface. We go directly to the facts. If we do this enough, we can forget we ever feel anything at all.

And then we start playing the scenes of our lives in other “chosen” emotions. If we’re in “It’s my fault” a lot, then everything we say starts with I’m sorry. If we’re in “It’s your fault,” then everything we say, think and feel starts with Why?

If we’re in “It’s no one’s fault, it just Is,” then what? Confusion, depression, blank, numb, a desperate search to find out Why and find someone to blame? Please?

Try something else. First, try Finding a Feeling. Yep. Anything. Could be anxiety, tension, confusion, emptiness (works for that blank, numbed out state), anger (works for that It’s all your fault place), sadness (works for that It’s all my fault place), anything.

If what you feel is Nothing (like in that song from A Chorus Line) or I don’t know what I feel, look again.

Is it really just “two o’clock?” Are you really just a job description? Do you really have to get to the freeway at all? If you really sink down into yourself, you might find yourself appreciating that you even know the time, or that he asked. You might feel nervous that a cute guy walked up to you and tried to make conversation.

You may actually find you feel something about two o’clockness, or about the work you do. And about the freeway, you may discover how odd and helpless it feels to really allow yourself to be a passenger.

Just because your first thought may be judgmental – either about him Couldn’t he come up with a better line? Doesn’t he know the freeway is faster? or about you I look yucky! – doesn’t mean you’re feeling angry or irritated, or that you don’t care if you ever go on another date with anyone as long as you live, or even that you’re “insecure.” You could actually be feeling scared, or uncomfortable, or overwhelmed.

Even if, in this moment, you can’t be who you want to be – you can be who you are. Even if who you are right at this moment is no one you can quite put your finger on – you can simply be where you are. And you can put words to that.

You can actually say, Oh, it feels so great to go without a watch – I don’t know what time it is! Or, It feels so great to wear a watch that works – it’s two o’clock. Or, It feels great to be almost done with shopping and it’s only two o’clock! Or, I get to feel like a kid teaching teenagers all day, or I get to have fun looking at houses all day for my clients to buy and sell – I’m a realtor. Or, in the case of the freeway, just say nothing at all and feel how uncomfortable that can feel.

And then see what happens.

What happens, always, is that the dialogue moves from inside us to out in the world.

Suddenly, instead of talking only to ourselves and behaving as if we are somehow different than we feel at any given moment – as if the men in our lives are not real people capable of talking with us – we allow someone else into the conversation.

Most of the time, we don’t even give the guy a chance. We decide what’s up with us, and then what’s up with him, and then we guess about how to behave, and then he bounces off that. Before you know it, we’re in a dialogue with no one but ourselves. Connection can’t happen until we let him in – not just into the conversation in our heads, but into the feelings in our bodies.

We are all movers and shakers. We all make things happen and stop things from happening. Sometimes we are triggered, and sometimes we do the triggering. The problem in assigning the “fault,” or the “blame,” or “the responsibility” is in trying to figure out exactly who got the ball rolling in the first place. Sometimes we think it’s pretty clear, and sometimes we guess and find out later there’s more to it than we saw the first time around.

Most of us only go to It’s all your fault because our first thoughts are It’s all my fault. Then, again, some of us go to It’s all my fault because long ago, we were taught never to go to It’s all your fault.

What if it’s no one’s fault, but it’s okay to still feel awful?

Can you live with that? Sure you can. Feelings are just feelings. They come and go. They do not define us. They do not relegate us to categories and descriptions and labels. Feelings do make us human, touchable, wonderful, magnetic and individual.

Instead of spending your energy asking yourself Why? first ask yourself What Am I Feeling Right Now?

If the answer to the question What Am I Feeling Right Now? seems to always be I don’t know, then please believe me, you have feelings. You may not be finding them just yet, but they’re really there. And there are great, wonderful, ecstatic feelings to be found along with the yucky ones.

Feeling is like breathing. Sometimes we hold our breath. Sometimes we forget to breathe. Breathing is simple to us, complex if you really think about it. Feelings are complex, and really simple if you think about it. Like breathing, feelings are not about Why? Feelings, even the absence of feelings, are about Right Now.

Mira was right that so many of us real people speak so much of the time in “The Admit,” whereas actors, wanting to juice everything up, want to find emotions to play. Be the actor of your own life. Find out what’s behind your thoughts, not by climbing up into your brain and asking “Why?” but by sinking down into your feelings and asking “What?”

When I left Mira and found another teacher, one who worked in a completely different and very organic way, I discovered many, many more layers of real human behavior than all of my “Whys?” could touch. It’s my life’s journey, and now my life’s work, to follow feelings, rather than try to put them in boxes with labels.

Find yours, baby step by baby step, and treasure them. As you cherish your own feelings, so will every man you meet, even one you’ve lived with for years.

It’s not a matter of whose fault it is. It’s a matter of how you feel.

Love, Rori

Here’s a question from Alice – very unique, and yet I know many of you are dealing with it, or know more about it than I. Please help out if you can…

“Dear Rori, I have listened to your work and read items on your website and what you say seems to make some sense to me but I am stuck.

My situation is that I have been in a “relationship” with a work colleague for nearly 10 months now. We started as friends. I then got the courage to tell him I was attracted to him. I left it for him to decide where he took that information from there. He decided that he wanted to pursue it further and we have enjoyed amazing physical and emotional connection – of which he will openly acknowledge that connection also.

The issue is that our relationship is “secret” – because we work together and secondly because he comes from an asian background – and I dont. His mother (who I believe became aware that he was seeing someone in the first month) has since moved in with him and is now taking all his time and attention. He told me at the start that he had an ex-girlfriend who he was still friends with as his and her parents did not know they had split.

There was an expectation that they would marry. After many discussions he told me he would speak to his mother so we could be “out in the open”. He did do this but his mother’s response was that he had to “work things out” with his ex-girlfriend who she wants him to marry to “save face” so people can benefit.

I can see that he is torn between his “duty” to his family and his desire to be in a open and loving relationship with me. He swears to me that they have not been physical or intimate for many years now and that before me they both saw other people but the ex-girlfriend (who he says he does not love anymore) is still apart of his life because of his mum, and demands him to put on a front for special occasions that they are together – and he does this (not nearly as often now that I am aware of as it was in the start). I know he has gone to his best friend for advice (as he is not asian) but from what he says he was of little help.

I feel now because of all the pressure that he is receiving at home he is withdrawing from me because he says he “has so much to deal with, pressure going on at home” that he struggles to find time for me – this in turn makes me feel that he doesn’t want to spend time with me, that I am not important to him – but he says seeing me involves thinking of ways to get away from his mother and he feels guilty for lying and doing this. I know it is a mutual attraction, he says he has been physically attracted to me for 18 months (now 2 1/2 years) before we hooked up.

We did not sleep together until six months into seeing each other despite doing all we could to resist and now the sexual attraction from both sides is intense chemistry and passion.

I am unsure of how I assist us in having a future together, I love him, I have told him this, he knows I am committed to him, he constantly asks when we are alone “what are we going to do”. I am stuck on showing him how to have the courage to do what “he wants” and not what is his perceived responsibility to his family. I am even unsure whether I should be helping him with this.

To stop the pain I am feeling I gave him a deadline of Christmas to make a decision on telling his mum/making moves and plans to put this into action or letting me go – He struggles with having this deadline, he says he knows is the right thing but still is not happy with it. I see with this – I am now lost at what I should be doing. I don’t want to push him, loose him or be impatient but this is tearing me up. Alice”

And here’s my answer:

Alice, I work with many women who are stuck in this exact situation. They are more progressive, but their families still think in the way they were brought up, or the way they still live – in different countries, different cultures, different religions that have strict social rules of conduct and duty, and the good men they’re with are all torn up by their duty to family and ex wives and even simply women friends who are also friends of the family.

I don’t believe you can do anything to help this along. I’ve seen women stuck in these situations unendingly. And even when the man seems to move forward, he is still feeling pressure from the ex and the family. He never escapes the aura of “shame.”

Painful as it is, the best thing here is to simply say you will continue to date him, but not exclusively, and then Circular Date. You can decide if you can handle sex, but I wouldn’t even try it. If you can’t handle this “dating” rotation, then you must break it off until he can figure out what to do…

I’d so appreciate it – and know Alice would too – if any of you are very familiar with cultural differences and difficulties, please give us any information you have – I know it would help many women in these same situations, especially since we have readers here from all over the world….

Love, Rori

Hormones are intuitive. Even when they’re nicely balanced, it’s as though they speak from inside – tingling, sparking, soothing, spreading calm or unease. I can’t remember my thoughts from an hour ago, but I can remember everything I felt in the last forty years. It all comes back, like high-speed footage suddenly set free from a dark can, resurrected, ready to leap into this moment as if it belonged here.

I can’t decide for sure whether it belongs here or if I made it up in the first place.

I can’t tell what’s a story and what’s real. Perhaps everything is a story, and every story feels real.

It’s as though the moments of my life I remember (and I seem to remember the same ones over and over again, like on a loop) are guideposts I use to hang my reality on. They take on significance they may or may not rightfully possess. But why? I ask. (And why am I just now in my head, asking Why? – stuff for the next issue.)

And then I suddenly know why. Because they bring with them a feeling. It may be a yucchy feeling, a sad, dreadful feeling. Or a glorious, happy feeling. (But most often a yucchy one, because right after the glorious ones, the yucchy ones seem to follow.)

And I don’t know why, exactly, I’ve conjured up this or that particular memory with a particular feeling, except that, every time, it’s something I’ve seen before. It’s something I know, something familiar. As though dread, horribleness, sadness, loss is so familiar it’s comforting. And, I’ve noticed, when one comes I instantly tune out what’s right in front of me. I stop looking at my daughter. I stop seeing my husband. I see only the computer, the words on the page, and no heart at all, anywhere.

So that’s it. I can, if I want, create a continual stream of loss by allowing old losses to deprive me of what’s here now. And next year I can remember this moment as one that passed me by. And then, the next year, I can just pile them on, and continue forever, and never live my life at all!

I realize I don’t even know exactly what I was feeling then. My memory is colored by what happened after. I can’t always remember what happened. I remember walking through my father’s rose garden, smelling flowers, and then judging them – Miss America style – for beauty. I remember doing that, and it seems long ago and far away, but the feeling – that part feels like right now. See a rose, want to examine it to see how it measures up in comparison to….what? Another rose? And I feel that now as such a waste of time, and – I must have been lonely and I must’ve been so judgmental….and perhaps it wasn’t like that.

Perhaps I was totally in love with the contest of rose petals and blissfully, single-mindedly immersed in my occupation. Perhaps it wasn’t about judgment at all – it just looks like it from here. Perhaps it was about appreciating beauty, and deeply examining each petal in such detail I could be one. Perhaps it was my Zen experience. Zen and the Art of Examining Rose Petals.

What’s the memory, the memory of a feeling, that keeps infiltrating your mind and heart? What sends you backwards, away from wherever you are? What’s your tradition of longing – of unfinished dreams and hardly recognized wants? And how can you stop the old pictures, dressed with increasingly new interpretations, from interrupting you? Even while you’re reading this?

You can. And you don’t have to. Much of my work tells you to Stop. Stop talking, Stop thinking. Stop doing. Stopping gives you a moment to breathe, a moment to see what’s around you, a moment to feel. So let’s say you’re in the grip of something that’s wistful, that’s pleasant, or that’s plain misery-making. Instead of trying to Stop it, in order to be in the moment, try something else.

Try making it bigger.

Try just being with it, and with what’s right in front of you at the same time. We’re talking about just Being.

Let’s say you’re working on a project, and all of a sudden, your rotten last Saturday night date comes to mind, and then before you know it, you’re into the rotten date three months ago, and then you’re back to your rotten ex, and then you’re back to being a girl with no date for the prom.

The pictures (I adore a healing modality called Holodynamic Tracking…I won’t go too far with this now – but ask me) might be flooding in from other people’s lives, from your ancestors, from what you’ve seen on film, from the Big Bang. They may have absolutely no meaning for you now, except for the feeling they’re able to bring with them. Why fight them?

It’s as though those pictures and feelings and memories are stuck in a time warp. They take us back in our minds, and bring our hearts along with them. Sometimes it feels wonderful, and sometimes it feels awful.

Instead of taking yourself backward, try bringing them with you into the present! Incorporate them into who you are now. Let them grow up. Treat them with compassion, as if they are no longer you.

You can be who you want to be now, not who you think you were then. You can take yourself and all you’ve learned backwards, maturing the thoughts and pictures and feelings as you bring them forward into the life of this moment.

You can, like me, be, not judgmental and cold, but resourceful and focused. You can be, like me, not lonely and quiet, but curious and enchanted. You can be what you want. You can be what you say you are.

I am a lover of things and animals and people, of detail, of molecules, of what is. I am in my heart from the moment of my birth and before, and I get to start fresh every split second, no matter what.

You can be a child and a grownup, helpless and helpful, wicked and glorious and angelic. All at the same time. All the time. Even the time that seems like it came before. Every moment, you get to start over.

Love, Rori

Here’s a comment I thought was really universal, and I wanted to jump off from it:

“Rori, I can tell you that on the dating site, it seems to work differently. I would like Rori’s opinion, but here is my take on dating sites: It is OK to contact a man online first–I am of the opinion this is the ONLY time that is OK, because for some reason, online guys are reluctant to contact people. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. After the initial contact by you, though, I never make the first move after that. I let them contact me from then on. Just the initial contact is OK with me. Try this and see what happens. I have met some really great men online and lots that I have contacted first. It didn’t seem to make a difference at all. Remember, just the initial contact. After that, follow Rori’s advice and don’t call or write unless they have contacted you. Good luck!”

Sandra, Welcome, and thank you for your suggestions on online dating…and here’s my take:

If you are a woman who has absolutely not one little bit of desperation or need creeping up in her— ever –then you are a rock star, and you can do ANYTHING.

You can take off your clothes, walk up to a man on the street and wrap your body around him.

You can call every man in the phone book.

AND – if you are already a rock star – then you would already be in a fantastic relationship, and I would not see you here.

The truth is…start FIRST with HEALING yourself…and for most of us this means getting rid of desperation and need – which shows itself in masculine energy things like initiating, working to make things happen, calling, and..yes…surfing through the men on Match.com and winking or emailing them.

It RELIEVES our internal pressure when we DO stuff…which is why I’ve created so many Tools for your “boy” energy to use pro-actively that work FOR YOU, instead of against you, and give your “girl” energy a chance to shine.  This takes practice.  It’s reversing years and years and years – our whole lives often – of doing things in ways that simply don’t work for a relationship.

It’s undoing a lifetime of squashing down our needs, our wants, our feelings…and using every bit of our energy to just “get by” – survive.  We’ve been taught to work for what we want…and that works in many, many arenas (that’s why I want you to develop and use and celebrate your masculine energy in Tools like “Channeling) – but it DOESN’T work for romance.

If what you want is a man who’s mostly a “boy” in your life , your heart, your bed…then you have to learn to be mostly a “girl” in HIS life, HIS heart, HIS bed.  That’s weird for many of us.

But that’s the way you get what you really, truly want and deserve.  We are ALL, truly “girls” inside.  We’ve just hidden that light behind a flurry of “doing.”

It takes a bit of bravery, and a lot of practice to slowly let that light be seen.  But you can do it, I know you can.

Love, Rori