HOW TO BE REAL

When you are truly being real to someone and they are
being real in return, when you both are being rigorously
honest about yourselves and your feelings, a little fire
starts deep down inside---- a sure sign that something
precious and important is going on
between two people. And if real is love and love is what
we need, then we better learn how to be real.
By Jess Lair PhD

Physical intimacy by itself isn't worth any more than the
small sum it costs in any city.Those single young
adults who choose to get into bed with each other
think something big has happened. They're wrong.
Something very small has happened. If you don't
believe that, you swingers, just go out and try being
blazingly real with someone this afternoon or evening.
It is a lot tougher to do that than to jump into bed
with them. A lot tougher, but fortunately a lot more
satisfying and rewarding. I don't ask you to take my word
for it. I ask you to go out and prove it to your
own satisfaction.
When you are truly being real to someone and they are
being real back, when you both are being rigorously
honest about yourselves and your feelings, that little fire
starts deep down inside. And this warm feelingis, to me,
a sure sign that something precious and
important is going on between two people. I don't know
anything that is more loving that one person can do for
another than to tell that other person how it
really is with them in their deepest heart.
To give, in a sense, a part of yourself.
So that is why I think "Real is Love." And if real is
love and love is what we need, then we had better learn to
be real. Take the analogy of a farmer who has
just a few seeds of wheat. If he wants to gather
enough to start a big crop, he had better plant those
first seeds carefully. Similarly, our resources for loving are
very limited at first.The answer is, rather than start with
the hard-to-lovepeople, we had better love the easy ones.
When we love the easy ones, we improve the chances we
will be loved back. Then we use some of the favorable
experiences that will occur to give us the courage,energy
and understanding to do a better job next time.
Giving and receiving love, not just from a few select
persons, but from every living and breathing soul we encounter,
is terribly hard to do. But it is even harder to admit to ourselves
that we don't even try.One of the exercises that I use with my
students andurge you to practice right now is, go tell five
people that you love them. I don't mean to tell the next five
people you meet on the street that you love them.
I mean to tell five people where this is appropriate.
I am sure some of you are in the good situation of having
used these words often------ where they apply ------- so it isn't
much of a problem. But, more commonly, there are
parents, husbands, wives, close friends to whom the
words "I love you" would have been appropriate a long time ago.
Yet they have never been said. And this is
why you frequently get such drastic results when you
do this assignment.
One of the most common responses to these words when
they have been long delayed is that the person will cry.
One girl said, "When you gave me that exercise, I
thought of my parents and the trouble I had with them.
So I called my mother and dad and told them that I
loved them.They said, "What's wrong?' I said,"Nothing" and
they started to cry.
A nurse called an old nursing supervisor of hers out
in Washington long distance one night. She and this
woman had had some trouble when the woman was her
supervisor originally but, nevertheless, this woman had also
been very helpful to this girl. And she had a
real deep feeling for her still, despite the
difficulties they had together. She said, "Hey,. I
love you." It was about five minutes before the woman
on the other end of the line could stop crying and
start talking again.
A mother in my class wrote me a card.
She said,"I told my son I loved him. He cried.
He's eighteen," But why? Well, the answer is; We just
think we feel, we just think we are alive.
By seeing ourselves this way, we avoid the whole problem of
looking squarely at ourselves in a realistic way.
But then we will get some sudden shock and realize
"Hey, we aren't doing what we thought we were doing.
" Some of you are going to come up to people to whom
saying the words "I love you" would be very
appropriate. Even so, you are going to choke on these
words a number of times before you get them out. Toy
our horror, you are going to realize, " I am just not quite
living the swinging life that I thought I was."Now, here is the
second assignment I will give you.
This isn't theory. It works. Do this if you want to
have a more meaningful, closer relationships with others.
All you need to do is, with five people speak
of what you feel in your deepest heart. Speak of these
difficulties you have of accepting yourself. Speak of
your fears and your worries.And you know what the other
person is going to do? What would you imagine?
Feel sorry for you? No, they don't feel sorry for you.
Most of the five will want to be closer to you and they
will reciprocate with the same thing. They will recognize
their kinship with you. And they'll feel calm because they will
see that you and they are in the same boat.
Almost every time I've mentioned the mistakes I've
made as a teacher, I find that people have come rightback
at me and said, "Oh, boy, I've made those mistakes, I'm so
glad to hear that you've had that kind of problem too."
You can see they have been afraid of admitting their problems
because they thought they were the only ones who had them
and if someone found out they might get fired..
Too often, people think they are not worthy---- that they would
face rejection or some kind of punishment if others
really knew their secrets.
Now I'll give you the opposite kind of experiment
where you fake it. It's an assignment that I hope you won't do
on purpose. But if you're like me, you'll find yourself doing it
despite your hatred of it. Try these gambits and you'll find people
can't get away from you fast enough.
Like saying, "Gee, my problem is just terrible. I paid my income
tax the other day and I had to take four thousand dollars out of
savings because I made so much more money last year than
I expected." That will really get people.
You know, they hope you are lying but they are afraid and
you aren't. I tried this on a guy once as a joke but he believed me.
We will always believe the best about the other guy but not about
ourselves. And people will run away from you in droves. I guarantee it.
Here are some other ideas. Complain about how poor the
air conditioning system is in your new Cadillac. Or
how bad vandalism has been at your second home in the
country.I remember a conversation like this between two women in
Houston. These women were loudly complaining to
each other about the terrible problems they were
having keeping their swimming pools cleaned out. Now
this happened nearly twenty years ago when you had to
be pretty rich to have a swimming pool. And I'll bet
these two gals really hated each others company.
So you can see the sickness in that kind of faking—yet
how easy it is to do. I've been sitting around
with groups of people where everyone was close and
having a good time telling stories and laughing. And
I've seen myself or someone else say some faking thing
and bust the group up like flushed quail. The party
was over.
So okay, telling five people you love them isn't easy.
But it's even harder to show five people that you love
them by telling them how it is with you in your
deepest heart.
I know people who have never done that to anyone— or
just one or two people.
When you go out and be real to five people, you are going
to have one,two, three, four or maybe five people be real
back to you.
And perhaps in one of those cases you are going to get
that little glow there in your tummy. And then
you get up tomorrow morning and remember that and your
tummy feels nice and warm. You've got some reserve,see.
You've got something to go with, to help you be a little bit
more real, and to help you go a little
deeper into yourself.
And the thing that you can find, if you chose, is here, ready,
waiting and available to you.
You can come more alive to life.You are either open to life or
you ain't. And the way to stay open to life is to get some love
and affectionand joy and tenderness into your hearts so you can
really look at your life and enjoy it five minutes at
a time.
When I talk about being real, I mean we should take away a piece
of our mask and show the fears and worries we have, not out angers.
The result is that we actually change the world we live in by
the way we act. It isn't that some people are real and others
unreal. The more real you are them more real people
you'll find. So being real helps us have richer,deeper relationships
with the people around us.You can come alive to life by getting
some nourishment for your heart so it doesn't shrivel up and want
to die.
And you can do that by going out and being as
real as you can and getting as close to what's in your
deepest heart as you can.That helps you be real more
often and helps you be more real next time.You can't live your whole
life twenty-four hours a day that way. But do it five minutes at a time
and sneak a few five minutes in today of being real and getting
those rewards, And then sneak a few more five minutes tommorrow
of being real and getting those rewards, You
will find a drastic change in your life.



This as sent to me BY ROGER YOUNG-A READER.
Enjoy as I though Valentine's Day would be a good time to
place it on my blog.