How to make your love sacred

Keeping your love sacred will: 

• Help bring more romance and love into your life
• Help you let go of the past and have the relationship of your dreams
• Reveal the path to sustaining a magnificent, devotional relationship
• Help you love a partner who can share life’s journey with you

What if you understood how to make the honeymoon last forever? What if you had the keys to help you work through challenges and emerge more loving and more inspired than before? What if you could fall in love over and over again at will? This is not a Utopian dream, it is an achievable reality, and it can be your reality if you are prepared to make your love sacred.

In many relationships, the honeymoon is expected to last little more than a few months, sometimes less. By contrast, in a relationship built on the principles of sacred love, the honeymoon lasts forever. Honeymoon really means “honey mood”: a mood of gratitude and great affection, appreciation and devotion, a sacrifice of lower priority choices in order to love.

There are five universal laws of love. These principles stand the test of time and, if followed, promise that you and your partner will celebrate love in its highest form throughout your lifetime together.

The first principle: Stillness

Falling in love is, for most people, an accident of fate. One minute we are standing waiting for a train, the next moment we are in love. Our mind stops just long enough for love to appear through the haze of everyday life. The ego is bewildered and cannot function, there are no expectations, and we literally succumb to a sacred and magnificent experience. From that point on, the details are left to chance. That moment of falling in love becomes the memory on which the relationship is built. As if lost in a jungle after having once glimpsed the treasure, we search and search and waste our precious lives trying to recapture that moment.

The first principle of sacred love provides the road map back to that first exquisite, sacred experience of falling in love. It will no longer be an accident, or something to search for. A couple will learn how to re-experience the very reason for their relationship. They will fall in love at will.

The key is stillness – the ability to separate love from mind noise, expectations, doing, chasing, wanting, desiring, emotionalising and all other distractions. Being able to separate the external world of the ego from the internal world of emptiness and truth is really important for love. There are many paths to this place of stillness and most of them come under the umbrella of spirituality. The problem with this is that any spirituality that holds a philosophy is imparting further mind noise, and it is easy to replace one noise with another, one “should” with another.

Real stillness can come only from nature. Being in nature, experiencing the quiet of the forest, the calm of the ocean, the magnitude of the mountains, a soft breeze against your skin or the feel of cool, icy snow: all this brings peace to the human heart, and awakens the spirit of love. Go to a park, a garden, a riverbank or a beach. The key is to forget yourself. Lose the self-obsession of ”I want” and surrender to nothingness and emptiness. Then the love that is the real purpose of any relationship will surface, and you will be renewed.

The second principle: Appreciation

For most people, romance is what they do when they want something. Sacred love is a function of giving, not taking. In most relationships, romance stops if we don’t get the response we expect. But sacred love is about giving – not giving in order to get, but giving in order to love.

Romance fluctuates for the vast majority of lovers. Foolish love thrives on emotion and therefore runs out when a challenge presents itself. It is unsustainable. Wise love, on the other hand, knows that challenge is an opportunity for depth. The victims who turn to empathetic ears to groan about how they were mistreated, only gather more aggression. True power in life comes only when you can honestly repeat the mantra, “Nobody does to me more than I do to myself”.

This is why the second principle of sacred love is the principle of appreciation. It is an easy principle in the first months of love but then expectations and old baggage can create negative mindsets, which subsequently create what they fear. Better to force your hand in love, to reach deeper and to greater consciousness by asking, “How can I appreciate this?” or “What is the benefit of that?” Do this remembering that what you appreciate grows: appreciation and gratitude are the path from emotion to love. Feel the emotion, search for the other side and you will have romance of a sacred nature in your heart and in the heart of your lover. It is magnetic.

The third principle: Change

To err is human, yet in love, forgiveness is a promise few people can truly sustain. Accidents happen, stupidity takes only a second. A word misplaced, an act of unconsciousness, a fear revealed – all these can destroy the sanctuary of love if we cannot grow from our mistakes. The height of your love is determined by the depth of its roots. To judge, be righteous or to smother your lover with your fears is to kill the most precious gift you can give or be given.

What stops growth? The ego stops growth. What drives the ego? Fear drives the ego. What drives fear? Knowledge. So learning more does not cause growth. No, this is the wrong path. Learning less, actually “un-learning”, is what causes growth. With learning we learn to judge: this is right, that is wrong. But this is the ego; it is also an illusion. With unlearning, you see that there is no right or wrong, just your own fears and beliefs. With unlearning you can rise above myth and beliefs that keep you locked in an internal war. You can only find peace by growing through challenges. You can only sustain love by growing through unlearning.

The key here is sustainable happiness. Many believe that the love they first experience is the love they will sustain in their relationship. This is not the case. Love is not a fixed thing. Love that does not grow deteriorates because emotion and noise crowd it and darken it. Emotion and life itself crowd love out and replace it with materials, expectations and emotions. To sustain love you must be vigilant against righteousness and emotion. You must be prepared to change and grow, evolve and expand. You must be prepared to acknowledge that it is your mind that kills love, not your partner’s behaviour.

The fourth principle: Shared dreams

What binds the stars in their seemingly eternal orbit? Why don’t the planets fly into oblivion? What holds every molecule and every atom in a state of harmony? Why do water droplets hang together, and how do we explain the synthesis between the mind, body and soul of humanity? The answers lie in the powers of attraction and repulsion.

Forces bind molecules and stars and humans. Those forces are universal and they are known by many names: gravity, magnetism, desire and centrifuge. But they are united by one of the most potent powers, known throughout time as thought.

Thought in its purest form is light. Thought spun into the emotion of the ego is material. Two people can fall in love but if their thoughts hold no magnetism, no attractive force, then, like comets in the sky, they will, with time, pass by each other. Thus short-term, highly potent, emotionally charged love affairs fade into the night if no power of thought underpins the experience.

The thoughts that hold lovers together are dreams. This may seem trite, but the potency of a human dream is beyond any measure. Dreams have driven all actions worthy of remembering in human existence. The scientist and the poet dreamed before they acted. This fourth key is the glue that binds love forever.

Dreams can be short, like ”I dream of happiness”. But such a dream will hold no power. Dreams can be material, like “I dream of a new house on the hill”. This, too, will fade and leave lovers wondering why they ever struggled with love at all. Dreams can be fantasy, like ”I dream of a lover who does not confront my beliefs”. Such a dream is destined to result in a cold, hard, loveless and violent life.

The dreams that bind lovers are shared dreams. If you are in a relationship with sacred love at its core then individuality only accounts for two-thirds of your motives; the remaining one-third must be common ground. That common ground must be real. There is no forgiveness in mythical dreams that end in disappointment, or escapist dreams that will end in blame. The dream that has most potency is real and speaks of the contribution a couple can make to the world outside of their love – what they can do as a couple that they could not do as individuals to make the world around them a grander place.

Dreams built on myth will fail, and the resentment of unfulfilled promises will flow into all aspects of a sacred relationship. Body, mind and spirit will lose their attractions, and the love that united the couple will become damp. The key is shared dreams, the dreams of intent rather than content.

There is a footnote attached to the fourth principle: Beware the dream that arises from myth. If you hear yourself speaking in half-truths, shake your consciousness violently. If you hear yourself speak of happiness without challenge, love without sadness or pleasure without pain, then shake yourself hard. Such trivial thinking is sure to kill the sacredness of any relationship you create in your life.

The fifth principle: Love is a lifestyle

I once visited a home decorated with amazing paintings. The woman who lived there was divorced and accused her ex-husband of being a cruel, vindictive man. All the things that decorated her home were gifts from him, bought with stolen money, including the jewellery on her fingers. The diamonds that glistened on her hands came from what she called a very dark place. Although she admired the rings and the paintings, and claimed them as her ”share” of the marriage break-up, she was truly unaware of the effect that these affirmations were having on her life.

This woman was seeking spiritual support in good faith, but nothing could overpower the toxins that surrounded her everyday life. Her attachment to the material possessions and victories of her relationship kept her bound to an ever-present resentment and negativity related to the past. She could neither heal the past with love and appreciation, nor create the new relationship she desired.

Every word you say, every thought you have, every possession and every wall in your home carries with it a story far beyond what is seen on the surface. A second layer of life exists but with our busy lives fixated on the future and accumulation, we are often oblivious to the effect this other layer can have.

Illnesses are often traced to environments. Emotions are very much a product of your environment and relationships can be highly vulnerable to the environment – the artifacts, paintings and circumstances in which they exist. Everything you do, think, say, feel, own, want and wish to get rid of, affects your relationships. Most toxic are your thoughts, in particular the thoughts you have about the past. Any person who carries anger, hate, resentment, blame or victimhood from the past into their future relationships (usually by saying, “I’m over it now”) guarantees the pollution and toxins that they left in the last place will sabotage the current one. Unfinished business must be dealt with in order to be truly available for a sacred relationship.

Love is a lifestyle. You cannot be a loving partner and a cruel employer. You cannot be a loving friend and a miserable lover. You are one person, at work, life and play. You cannot fake it and you are highly affected by your environment.

Love is cumulative. Love builds in great environments and dies in bad ones. Just as negative thoughts during meals can affect the food and your digestion of it, so negative environments affect our love for each other. Negative phone calls from past partners cast shadows on your relationships, anger at past lovers kills the joy and spirit of laughter that is natural in a healthy relationship. Expectations created from wounds or infatuations with role models and guru worship kills spontaneity. Love is affected by environments and environments are affected by everything you can hear, see, feel, taste and smell.

So how do these five principles feed into making the honeymoon, and honey mood, last forever? Begin by acknowledging that you, and only you, need to make the commitment to love by accepting that nobody does more to you than you do to yourself. This is spirituality in its highest form and the pathway to experiencing sacred love in your life.

Chris Walker’s latest book, Sacred Love: The Honeymoon that Lasts Forever, is now available. W: www.sacredlovethebook.com