The following is, I humbly believe, very important, yes. I think there's important, precious good sense, wisdom in this. I wish much love to each and everyone of you! - Transcript "I'm Dr. Margaret Hall. In my work with my clients, and with the many members of the inner bunny website, people often ask me how do I know when I'm in love, how can I really tell if this is the right person for me. So I'd like to talk a little bit about that today. There's two kinds of sort of falling in love. And one is from what we call the wound itself, this is our ego self. When we fall in love from our ego wound itself, we get infatuated with that person, we get infatuated with how they feel about us, how they look, the image that they present, maybe we get infatuated with how they're treating us, maybe they're caretaking, maybe they're giving us lots and lots of compliments, and if there's a part of you inside that has been yearning for love, because you don't know how to love yourself, you've never learned what it means to take responsibility for your own sense of worth. your own sense of safety inside, and for filling yourself up with love, then you're a sitting duck for infatuation. You're sitting there for somebody to come along, and tune in to what you need, and give you that as a way to kind of have control over how you feel about them, and people do this all the time in relationships, they learn to tune in to oh this person feels insecure, so I'll make them feel secure, and to fill them up with love when there's an emptiness inside. Now that is not real love, and the problem is that it's not likely that you're going to know what real love is until you discover who you really are inside, your true essential self. If you're defining yourself by your looks, and your performance, and your accomplishments, these are all externals, and then what's going to happen is you're going to just see the externals in the other person. But when you learn to go inside, and have a spiritual connection, and you learn to see who you are intrinsically, your inner qualities, your kindness, your caring, your gentleness or compassion, your creativity, your aliveness, your sensitivity, your sense of humor, all the inner qualities that we all have, and when you learn to love, and value who you are for your inner qualities, then you're capable of seeing the inner qualities of the other person. And when you are truly attracted to those inner qualities in another, when you really enjoy being with who that person is, spending time with that person sharing conversation, when you find yourselves never having enough time together because there's so much you want to talk about, that's when you're really in love with who the person really is, rather than who they're presenting themselves to be. So, unfortunately, it's very difficult to know when you're in love when you don't, when you're not in love with yourself, when you don't know how to truly love, and see yourself. And here's where the inner bonding process comes in. Inner bonding is the ultimate way of learning to connect with yourself, learning to know who you truly are on the inner level, learning to love yourself, and take responsibility for your own feelings, learning to fill yourself up with love so that you have love to share with another. And so you might not really know when you're in love until you learn to love yourself, and that's what inner bonding is all about. You know you can fall in love with how somebody looks, and how they act on the external level, but what happens when you get married, what happens down the line when that person gets older. What sustains love is loving the soul of that person, loving the essence of that person, not just loving how they look, and how they act externally, and how they perform externally, but who they are on the inner level. And when you just love being with who they are, when you love their energy, that's when you can start to know that you're in love. Now the other thing is that it's really impossible to know what's really going on in a relationship until there's conflict. You don't really know a person until there's conflict. That person might be caring and loving to you until there's conflict, and then what happens. Maybe that person is explosively angry, maybe that person takes everything personally, and shuts down, and withdraws, and blames, and goes into total resistance, maybe there's no openness at all to talking about conflict issues. So you can't really know if you're in love with this person until you've been with them long enough to have some conflict. Usually the first few months of a new relationship is a honeymoon period, everybody's on their best behavior, and what you see is that person trying their very best to be who they think you want them to be. And so it's not until you run into some kind of conflict that you really see what happens with this person, who they really are, and who you really are, because, what do you do in conflict, do you get explosively angry, do you withdraw, and shut down, do you go into resistance, do you give yourself up. And so the other person also needs to see what you do in conflict, because if each of you are unavailable in conflict, it doesn't matter how in love you feel that you are. you will not be able to sustain that love when you don't know how to stay open to learning in conflict. Which is really what the inter bonding process teaches you, how to do, how to stay open to learning with your own feelings and needs, and take responsibility for them so that you can stay open to learning with another person when they're behaving in a way that pushes your buttons, so that rather than going into your traditional ways of protecting, you are able to also stay open to learning, because it's not just about falling in love, it's about maintaining love. And people do not maintain their in love feelings when they're very reactive in conflict. So I want to encourage you to learn, and practice the inner bonding process, to learn how to truly see, and love yourself, to learn how to stay open to learning with another person. And you can begin to learn inner bonding with our free course at inner bonding dot com by joining inner bonding village, by coming to a workshop, and intensive, by having phone sessions, by reading the books, hearing the CDs, watching the DVDs, there's many ways of learning the inner bonding process." On YouTube, look exactly for: - Dr. Margaret Paul: How To Know When You Are In Love Margaret Paul Published on Sep 3, 2010