Do you know that feeling when you realize it... damn... you're back in the pattern again. You're doing the thing you swore you'd never do, and they're doing that thing again that irritates you most... that thing they vowed they'd never do.

Oh those solemn vows...

If you've been struggling to shift a pattern that seems endless, I wanted to take a moment to give you some alternative approaches that I've used with clients to make love better.

First consideration. A lot of love patterns are bio chemical at the root. Meaning our body is engaging with the world based on its interior landscape. We layer meaning on the world around us based on our physiology and how efficiently (or inefficiently) our cells are functioning. You wouldn't think I'd launch into a message about healing love patterns with a sojourn into physiology, but here goes...

Imagine (or remember) being in a relationship with an alcoholic. They can be moody and burst into sudden bouts of rage, and then slide lazily into depression or melancholy. That's an extreme example to illustrate a point. The one you love isn't this creature doing all of this undulating in and out of sanity... the one you love is in there, just beneath those patterns, aching to be healed.

Those patterns are merely the ancient, unresolved events in someone's life, surfacing to be healed.

And yet, for some of us, they're surfacing most of the time, so who are we really in love with?

People don't actually want to hear the holistic picture oftentimes. They want a quick fix or a simple solution that takes seconds. It's not that simple.

A woman came to me with a broken heart, and I had her focus on her foot to release the grief of losing her parents. Another woman couldn't trust men, and we had to regress into a 'archetypal memory' where she was shot and killed by someone she'd trusted.

Einstein is on point again when he said... You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

Karma - Cause and Effect

Most of us are suffering unnecessarily as a consequence of behaviors that don't align with our core values; a poor diet, dehydration (poor diet and dehydration are paired twins), indulging in addictive tendencies, radiation exposure, to name a few.

In the long term, the most fulfilling relationships require healing and rewiring ourselves so that we can thrive on our own. Once we move closer to thriving, it is easier for us to thrive alongside another. Until that time, we are merely clashing wounds.

What's Possible?

Imagine showing up into the room with the full life force trilling through your whole body, and an abundance of mental clarity and focus. You are profoundly rested and refreshed, so that your senses are in a state of relaxed awareness. You can hear the words and you can see the actual message in the posture, and you're in your most loving state, able to look on the whole situation (including your part in it) with compassion.

Would the little things that normally trigger still do so?
Do you think that you may have a more benign interpretation of other peoples' words and actions?

When the body is suffering, the whole system needs to reroute some physical energy toward detoxifying the body and fending off disease. Or when emotions have been repressed, they're's this frantic effort on the part of the consciousness to set them loose. This is precious energy that could be spent in much more rewarding ways... lovemaking, socializing, creativity, legacy dreaming, and hand-crafting gestures of affection. The list goes on.

A More Holistic Vision of the Broken Heart

Whenever someone comes to me with a painful or a crushing pattern that keeps repeating in their love life, like a broken record, I can't help but see the whole picture, because this is how I'm wired. People will often keep trying to get me to focus on one issue, and I'll keep diverging toward what I believe to be the underlying cause. In the classic parlance of the psychologist, first, let's talk bout your father. It's funny because it's true.

We have a tendency as individuals in this culture to isolate cause and effect, and to break down vast cosmologies into oversimplified dogma. I catch myself doing it often, and I catch others doing it constantly, particularly the closer we move to a charged subject.

A few questions to ponder:

Are you miserable because your heart is still broken from years ago, and you need to forgive the whole other gender?
Is your body/mind constantly struggling with some inflammatory stimulus (food or drink perhaps)? Arthritis, cancer, physical pain, or 'acidic' emotions, for instance.
Or you addicted to sugar and refined starch? These behaviors create the ideal breeding ground for a yeast explosion, and parasites drive us toward craving for things that create an acidic internal / emotional environment. Are you starved for affection? Or are you desperate for fulfillment? Empty calories make ghosts of us. (By the way, there's no such thing as an 'empty' calorie. Empty makes it sound innocuous... actually, it's damaging).

The Overarching Journey

All we can do in the end is turn the mirror back on ourselves and be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.

Relationship patterns are only signposts back to that fundamental tenet. We forget time and time again, so that pattern re-emerges. And in my experience, patterns are never gone entirely, at least for the mere mortals, but we graduate to other layers of the pattern. I've seen that happen many times, and it correlates with a whole life shift.

We can shuffle around the content of the game ad infinitum. There are certain tools that can ease communication, or further understanding of the other, or bring greater emotional awareness, but those are all limiting in and of themselves; the whole life needs to be resurrected.

We ultimately need to shift the context; the way we're telling the story of our lives. Then, we become a different character in the narrative, and so do they. The hero's journey becomes more clear, and the goal shifts. The ground beneath our feet changes. Life blooms.

Soul Retrieval

You've left pieces of your soul somewhere, and this is an invitation to go gather those pieces up, and invite them back into your life.

I often do this with clients by literally having them imagine their younger self, shining with innocence, and invite them back into their body wherever the hollow collapse has formed. This simple Somatic Soul Retrieval™ process works wonders. Sometimes I combine it with touch.

She was Being Choked by a Ghost When her Lover Touched her

She was lying on the table and I touched her neck gently. She convulsed and started sobbing.

She was enraged at her boyfriend for what seemed to me like a minor offense. As I touched her neck, the memory came back... someone was choking her. She couldn't quite recognize the face... it was shrouded in darkness. And then it all came back, with a flood of tears.

'A man had attacked me while I was walking across campus,' she cried. 'All those years ago. I'd forgotten all about it. After that, my life changed. I was afraid to go out alone. I stopped trusting men. I realize now that I'd been projecting this onto Jason."

And then the tears of pain ebb into tears of compassion, and eventually, free flowing love.

Wherever we're blocked, and withholding love, there is a wound. Watch an infant give love freely, before they realize what rejection and pain are. If you're withholding from your partner, friend, or family, there's an origin story. It may play in the forefront of your mind, or it may be running under the surface. Either way, it's pretty much never exactly what we think it is. Usually there's a hidden component that is profoundly meaningful that has not been touched; this is why the pattern hasn't moved much. Most people only move their patterns and thus the trajectory of their lives by a faction of a percent. Being more ambitious with the evolution you want to catalyze for yourself means finding more effective alternatives.

These are most easily accessed through the body, though they can also be accessed through conversation. It might have taken 10 or 100 hours of conversation to find that point in her neck that I only had to touch to surface that unconscious memory.

And while we're carrying those charged triggers around with us in our anatomy, they become like magnets for our core patterns. I haven't seen anyone will themselves out of a pattern; it's exceedingly rare. Usually, the anchor needs to break broken and the tether undone. Then the shift happens organically, and requires no willpower at all. It just flows with the self-compassion that naturally arises.

For physical intimacy, those areas of charge are destructive, because imagine carrying a throat wound, and the unconscious fear that would arise if anyone, particularly a man, even grazed the area. We spend a lot of our lovemaking time in paralysis due to these unconscious holdings that are scattered all over our bodies.

Lovemaking can also clear them, as trust and intimacy develop, except for the fact that most people don't even realize the objective.

Healing is vast and beautiful. Thank you for your courage on the journey.

Love and Bloom,

Steven Budden