Keeping Relationships Hot! Shine the Love-Light (Part 3)
Keeping Long-Term Relationships Hot!
Shine the Love-Light (Part 3)
Opening the Windows
In part one, we covered kissing and in part two, touching like you did when you first fell in love can sustain the heat and turn-on your turn-up even in long-term relationships. Here, I offer one more area to explore: shining your love-light onto and into each other.
Seeing Into the Other
Eye-gazing is a powerful way to connect. Cliché though it is, the eyes really are like portals that allow us to see into the heart (and possibly the soul) of another. They show our true feelings, vulnerabilities and desires.
It’s not always easy to eye-gaze, though. Looking deeply into another’s eyes can be dauntingly intimate. You need courage to show up fully and stay present, to see and be seen.
When we’re first enamored of another, we tend to gaze deeply into their eyes, beholding the wonder of our beloved. Wanting to eye-gaze comes naturally, but it tends to be limited to those times when our love hormones are in overdrive. As the years go by, most couples spend less and less time looking into each other with wondrous love. Or, if we do look, it’s not with the open-hearted delight and passion that earlier overflowed through our eyes and face and heart. The result is less intimacy and connection.
New lovers don’t need to set aside special time to use their eyes to pour their love into their mates, but if we’ve been together for a while, we’ve probably fallen out of this habit. Help yourselves fall back in love, by remembering to look at your partner, with love, throughout your regular interactions. Make giving a loving look a regular and frequent occurrence.
In addition to making love-looks an ongoing habit, you can also set aside time for eye-gazing practices as another way to increase the flow of heart-energy between you.
Eye-Gazing Galore
Here are a few suggestions for some simple eye-gazing practices.
- Get into a comfortable aligned position where you can easily look into each other’s eyes. Lay side-by-side or sit facing each other in chairs or have one partner straddle the other’s lap.
- Decide which eye will be the focus of your gazes. One particularly useful trick is to look into each other’s non-dominant eye, which is theoretically more connected to emotional state. Look into each other’s eyes. Allow your gaze to be soft and relaxed. Let your gaze softly focus, resting on one eye. Try to avoid switching from one eye to the other or glancing at their mouth.
- Simply look into each other’s eyes, breathe and be. Relax into the experience.
- To make sure your gaze is filled with love, it can be helpful to silently say loving things like “I love you” as you look. Try doing that and notice how your heart expands as you repeat loving words and how more love-light shines out.
- The more love you feel, the more you give, the more loved your partner feels, the more they give, creating a positive love loop between you.
Oh, Baby
Another practice is to see your partner as if they were a shining newborn baby. Imagine seeing your sweetie with the love, delight and open-hearted joy that greets a new and beloved child.
You Are Divine
One more option is to consciously imagine that you’re seeing the Divine in them.
To expand this practice, try to coordinate your breathing, so that you’re both in the same rhythm. As you sync up your breathing pattern, it often becomes easier to stay in a tranced out, heart-centered love space.
Let There Be Love
Incorporating the actions of new lovers into the habits of long-term ones is crucial to keeping our love luscious. The actions are simple: looks of love, sweet deep kisses and tender touches. Remembering to do these simple actions isn’t so simple. The new love biochemicals aren’t there to drive our impulses toward intimacy. To create sustained ardor, we must call on our conscious choice and our intention. When we add these sorts of fuel to our fires, they can burn on, and falling in love can be transformed into a sustainable life of living in love.
Want more long-term love lessons? You got it! Here’s Part One: Kiss Like You Mean It and Part Two: How Touching
