Love gives breath to a wonderful material world that knows no scarcity, domination or adversary. 
Intrigued? Go to WomenLikeMe and find more out about The Structures Explanation.

I have changed a lot in the last decade or rather what I think and believe has changed AND that has changed my Life, drastically.

The biggest change is how I live my life and how I am be-ing. I feel far less dominated, I rarely feel the need to complain, I am careful not to get into overwhelm and I definitely no longer desire to run around like a lunatic.

I have fewer possessions that take up space and cause me grief. Most things that I have, I love and use. In short what changed is that each day, more and more what I do I actually love to do, I love what I have and I love who I have become.

I love. Love is the breath of Life, love brings forth wonderful lives; love is the real Father Christmas. Let me show you how love works.

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Aligned relationships are described in WomenLikeMe as;

A heart centered team comes from love, flexibility, co-operation, integrity and joy and produces phenomenal results while not sweating it in the process.

Go to WomenLikeMe for more on Playing Team in Relationships.

When it works it is a wonderful system, but when it does not, you have a real problem on your hands.

You have to clean all the ‘you know what’ mess out manually and you can guess the nature of a job like that.

Things like this seem to come up at the most inconvenient time.

In the next few days we are going to have lots of visitors, 6 in total will be staying this weekend so our non-working toilet system needs to be sorted NOW even though we actually don’t have the time to do it!

John in particular is not looking forward to this task and given that we already have a lot of other things to do, it could have become a real problem between us if we had a parallel relationship rather than this aligned one.

In the old days I would obsess about problems while feeling I had to solve them all by myself.

My ego and I would panic, then moan and groan continuously and blame everybody and everything else.

My ego self would have blamed John for inviting all these people, I would have complained about stupid eco-systems and I also would have done John’s head in with my problem focused ways.

I would have wound him up and having contributed nothing, I would then expect him to sort it by himself. Then I’d spend the time panicking and grumping about how all this is inconveniencing me; all the time continuing to be a total drag.  Nice, isn’t it?

But that is not happening now.

When we both realized ‘what is so’, we took a deep breath, sat down and looked at all the options on how to solve it.

I did not panic.

I no longer added to ‘John’s’ problems, instead my heart centered self focused on us solving the problem together in a way that is efficient, productive and without mental torture.

AND that is what I keep noticing more and more; this peaceful, harmonious and effective dealing with sh*tty problems that come our way.

I am thoroughly enjoying being in a relationship now.

I have learned to play team from a heart centered, aligned place rather than coming from a hierarchical, ego centered parallel way of being.

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While our heart knows how to play together, we have learned the hierarchical way of control and obey, driven by fear.
It is invisible that this way produces limited relationships and resolves few problems.
On the other hand it is perfectly possible to have extraordinary relationships which produces phenomenal results joyfully.
(WomenLikeMe on Playing Team in Relationships)

When we think or talk about our relationships, we describe them in a certain way, we describe them as they appear to us through our so called colored glasses. How our relationships ‘appear’ to us is of course often not the ‘what is so’ for the other party when you come from a wholeness point of view.

Accepting how things appear is not going to give us access to thinking and doing things differently; all THAT is doing is giving us more of the same or resignation.
The greater level of ‘acceptance’ is not a case of accepting appearances, but going to a place of wholeness about ‘what is so’.

Hmmm.

I thank God that I have been made aware of my tendency to make others look incompetent so I can shine.
I am also thankful that I have learned to forgive, to forgive myself and to forgive others.
I am accepting that I often come from fear and I am learning more and more to come from love and peace instead.
I no longer feel the need to compete for attention and to be the best, I am very happy to cooperate and have the focus away from my performance towards a bigger ‘for the sake of what’.
I no longer disempower others, all I desire is to bring the best out in all of us and encourage integrity and taking ownership.
Knowing this and acting accordingly is making a huge difference in what John and I are achieving. I trust him and give him credit for what he knows and does and thus we cooperate using each others resources to the full.

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“Our context either holds us firmly where we are or allows us to become the change we want to see.”
(WomenLikeMe on Context is King –How to use it Powerfully)

To become the change you want to see, you have to carefully choose the context you live in. For most of us it is the context that either eggs us on or drags us back. 
And with context I am referring to the daily conversations you are having.

I came to New Zealand to live differently but all I managed to do was live a similar life in another country. Big deal!

Nothing changed because the conversations I had with my ex-husband and with friends were the same as I had in Holland. 
The conversations focused on problems and never on possibility and solutions. 
Living was fearful and even with money in the bank scarcity conversations prevailed and change became impossible. 
The conversation was certainly not directed at trust, abundance and joy; it was on worry, what could go wrong and doing it all myself.

My big changes happened after I started living with John. I first noticed that the daily conversations he had were very different from the ones I was used to.

He consistently talked about abundance, freedom and possibilities, I consistently continued to talk about lack, duty and what was NOT possible.
I talked about the future I could NOT have and how I could never save enough money, while he talked about what he needed to buy today to make his life work now!
How’s THAT for a big difference in conversations. And John’s conversations make a huge difference in how he lives his life, what he creates from day to day!

He mentioned month long holidays in which the sea kayaks could take us to the most isolated wilderness places, he explained about combining resources, he expressed how working less was the way to go.
He even suggested I gave up my full time job!
What????
He had conversations with me about what would be possible when I gave up my job; I could only come up with all the negative things that could happen. 
I said he was crazy and that we would end up living on the streets.
His response was that I was talking fearfully and not used to living life to the full and looking for creative solutions.

It is disturbing to observe that in the early days of our relationship my conversations had the power to undermine even John’s feelings of well being. 
My worry and continuous questioning of his suggestion that I stop work, wore him out. 
After a frustrating day at work, I would come home to find John in the best of moods. 
He had a good day but not for long. 
Within the hour, like clockwork, my same old complaints about work would bring down his mood big time.
John had little or no defense, what else could he say? He had already told me to give up my job, so I could have good days too. 
Anything he would have said in his defense would have been shot down with a barrage of my old beliefs about the virtue of working hard, earning lots of money and how lazy people never would get anywhere.

It is quite obvious that our relationship would have collapsed if I’d have let my conversations prevail. 
My savior was that I started to shut up and began to listen to the difference between John’s conversations and mine. 
His were definitely more fun to listen to than my own. 
His life was definitely more joyful and exciting than mine. 
He had done amazing things while I was not up to much.  
I had a big mouth, he had big projects.

It was not until I interrupted my conversations of impossibilities that I gained access to what else was possible.

The proof is in the pudding how conversations support change. 
I came to New Zealand to live in nature 28 years ago. It took me till last year and lots of conversations about possibilities with John to have that finally happen. 
Need I say more??????

Now that I have my own conversations of possibilities, I experience how my old contexts of friends and family stop me and how they make me feel insecure and inarticulate. 
When I return to their contexts I hear my old conversations around fear, scarcity of money and impossibilities.
I only hear talk that is problem obsessed rather than solution focused and is all around the importance of working hard but not smart. 
I notice the effect they have on me.

After seeing how life has changed through all my great daily conversations with John, it is still hard to believe how quickly and effectively those old conversations, my old context, can drag me back to my old fearful self.
In their presence I cannot articulate my new views of life and when they ask me how work is all I can do is mumble something vague and change the subject. 
I do not even want to talk to them intimately anymore as I know whatever I say will meet with their disapproval and will make me feel uncomfortable.

When you realize how powerful contexts and their conversations are, then you have a chance to become the change you want to see.

“Before anything happens there is a conversation that precedes it. 
That conversation is a necessary preamble that sets two or more people up to effectively act together or to coordinate action.”
(WomenLikeMe on How to Create our World through Conversation)

There are three different types of conversations that eventually lead progressively to intimacy that supports sponsorship.
Every type of conversation has a different interaction with a listening that has a different intention.

The three types are;

• conversation for social integration to suss each other out and get to know each other
• conversation for shared understanding to deepen our intimacy and understanding
• conversation for coordinating action to effectively end up working together to make an awesome expedition happen

Each of these conversations has a different level of intimacy, and a different intent with the listening and the sharing.

Let’s explore social integration a bit further as we already have a sense of shared understanding and coordinated actions by having covered asking questions and making requests.

Social integration is the first type of conversation that takes place when people meet. 
The pattern is determined by culture and to be effective one needs to know the culture. 
Different countries do social integrations differently and so do people of different age groups, religions and professions for example.
Social integration is done by talking very superficially about very non threatening subjects and looks like the talking that happens at work around the coffee machine on a Monday morning.

It is the social lubricant in the early stages of connecting or reconnecting in any social setting.

At this level of conversation most listening is usually very light and the level of intimacy very low.
We actually do not expect to be listened to, we do not expect requests at this stage and we certainly do not expect too many personal questions.  
If you have ever tried to get down to business straight away, you know that without some form of social integration you are dead in the water.  People will look at you as if you come from Mars and will not play with you.
What I’m talking about here is light weight social interaction and everybody attunes their listening and their intimacy expectations to that level.

However and this is the big however . . . most of us stay at this first level of conversation and never move beyond, onto the next stage.
If you look closely at relationships, many couples, families or friends do not go beyond social interaction.
They joke, they talk about insignificant things and never reach intimacy by exploring personal questions to deepen further understanding. 
Sex, money, careers, child rearing, household chores, beliefs, future dreams stay very much unexplored terrain.
Shared understanding is never reached and thus many people cannot literally get their act together to get on to bigger things and bigger expeditions.
To get one’s act together, one needs to go beyond superficial talk.
One needs to be daring enough and allowed to dive deeper into intimacy to reach shared understanding to come to coordinated action.

There are tons of examples of people staying stuck at this level in their relationships and thus they can never play a bigger game. All they do is work together to have life work out, but not much else is happening.

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However, if that sort of listening is not present and it often is not, especially with those closest to us, then it takes great courage to speak truthfully into that type of conditional listening. The conditional listening I’m referring to, often still looks like loving and caring, but is still very conditional and is still not conducive to us answering questions truthfully. The listening of “I love you” can also be the listening of “and don’t hurt my feelings”. Our tendency is to speak into the listening of “don’t hurt my feelings” and it takes great courage to speak our truth into that listening.

Gossip is a real killer of intimacy and seems like an epidemic in our current world that is obsessed with other people’s dramas rather than authentically caring for the person’s issues. For me the same rules apply as with responding to requests, if a gossip asks me a question I do not want the whole world to know, then I use my ‘right of refusal’ and decline to answer the question. Not answering a question is easily done, few people even notice as they are out for drama but not really that present to want to know the information. Most of the time they do not even notice that they are not getting an answer or I just say I do not want to talk about it. I now use my discernment and when I feel slightly uncomfortable with the person I will not be intimate but observe their behavior for a while. For us to have freedom with questions, we must feel free to not answer questions as well.

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Wilma Ham and Ann-Marie Fagan are both editors of Wilma’s Blog. The blog is part of WomenLikeMe, an online learning program. The blog and WomenLikeMe are encouraging women to embrace living life differently by questioning the status quo and becoming skilled to live into their greatness.

The little baby bird in its nest beside our front door is totally dependant on others for her survival and she knows it. There is no doubt about that when you see this beak and its clear request for food! She goes for it, no hesitation.

When MY survival is at stake, I am no different from that baby bird.

When I really need to, I can make those requests too.

Thank goodness I have not been in many desperate situations; however in the few times that I have had my back up against the wall, I was very capable of making requests.

When push came to shove, believe you me I asked.  I asked for things I never imagined I could ever ask for.

BUT … and this is the killer, as soon as the crisis was over I would immediately forgo my ability to make requests. I’d return as quickly as I could to my independence and I’d try to forget the instance as fast as I possibly could.

In my judgment, having to ask is horrible, horrible, horrible.

I HATE it!

I cringe when I think back on those times when I was dependant on others, I cringe about how helpless and powerless I felt.

And I vouch never to go there again, not if I can help it.

Thus requests have had an unjustifiably negative reputation in my book.

And it could have been so different.

Instead I could have looked back on those times that I needed to make requests, with gratitude and joy. I could have looked at the fact that my requests were indeed granted and that there were people who granted them so lovingly.

I never realized that requests are a superb safety net and are a tremendous way of accessing resources that could make my life amazing beyond belief.

Wilma Ham and Ann-Marie Fagan are both editors of Wilma’s Blog.
The blog is part of WomenLikeMe, an online learning program.
The blog and WomenLikeMe are encouraging women to embrace living life differently by questioning the status quo and becoming skilled to live into their greatness.

• Dealing with my unanswered e-mails. 
• For our family it was okay to borrow things and not return them for an eternity.
• It was okay for us kids to blame each other in order to get our own way.
• It was acceptable to use my mother as an excuse for being late for school or not having our homework done. “Just tell Mrs. Keane that you were helping me and it was MY fault” my mother would say.

Of course she thought she was helping us out and even though it did come from a place of love and protection, it did not bode well when the time came for me to venture out into the big wide world for myself. I got a rude awakening; not everyone operated at the same level when it came to integrity.

So my old familiar behaviors of blame, excuses and denial just didn’t cut it in this new arena and in the beginning I was shocked. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Integrity was and still is a vast word to me, originally presented to me as a moral ethical issue. I am not alone in this.

Most people when asked if they have integrity will put their shoulders back, hold their head up high and reply with a firm ‘Yes, I have’. However when I look at people around me, myself included, and their actions or lack of them as the case may be, it is all very confusing. For instance, for some people it is not all right to lie and be deceitful, yet it is OKAY to simply ignore people and their requests. Aren’t these all integrity issues?

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So all that teaching of good manners has resulted in lots of limiting constraints and Skellie does a good job of listing some of them;

Don’t ask for more than is offered to you
Don’t try to talk with people who are better known or higher status than you are
Don’t admit failings and mistakes
Don’t celebrate success publicly
Don’t try things that could fail badly
Don’t change your mind once it has been made up
Don’t give up, no matter whether circumstances and goals change
Don’t question what everybody else does
Don’t ask others for help (just think about how often we begin such a request with a pre-emptive apology)
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Top students at universities are applying for my internship.Each of the applicants just sends a resume. Sort of, “here are the facts about me, please put me in the pile.”  There is no attempt at self marketing.This is controversial, but here goes: I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.Here’s why: A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, “oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out.If you don’t have a resume, what do you have?How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects?
Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch?
Or a reputation that precedes you?
Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up?

To get that smart and effective you need to live, try things out and be okay about egg on your face and a dented ego.