A Five Star Practice for Creating Beautiful Relationships [35]
By Dr. Keith Witt
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November 6, 2011
Say you’re single and yearn for love. What’s the first step?
“What do I do?” “How do I find someone where we’re both into each other?” “How can I tell if we’re good for each other?” “What’s the difference between someone who’ll rock my world or ruin my life?” I’ve heard these questions for forty years, and here’s one answer—the Five Star Practice for creating beautiful relationships.
The Five Stars are five questions you ask yourself about other people. That’s right—just ask yourself these five questions about everyone you meet and your chances of having successful relationships skyrockets.
This practice is awesomely simple:
Ask yourself these questions about everyone you meet:
- Is there erotic polarity between this person and me? Is there a sexual spark?
- Does this person stay healthy physically and psychologically?
- If we were in relationship and had conflict, would this person be able and willing to do what it takes to get back to love?
- Would this person be a superior parent?
- Does this person live life from a sense of deep, even, sacred, purpose? If I do, would they sense it and admire it in me?
- We absorb huge amounts of information just meeting someone briefly for the first time. One study looked at the differences in interpersonal evaluation between people who had three to five seconds of face-to-face contact with another, and those who knew another for five weeks. Both groups had about the same accuracy in evaluating the other person.
- Our brains naturally—nonconsciously—scan the environment to look for threat, safety, beauty, social position, and potential need/desire gratification (like food, water, sexual partners, warmth, light—basically all the tasty/secure/comforting/yummy stuff we yearn for).
- Even better, we can train our brains what to look for. For instance, if you’ve every picked fruit or vegetables from a garden, you’ll find that very quickly you automatically start discerning the ripe from the unripe, and where on the tree or vine these prime delicacies are likely to be hanging out. In other words, brains love to play, “Where’s Waldo?” with people, objects, or qualities we decide we want to monitor for.
- When we make eye contact with people, mirror neurons in both our brains resonate, revealing our states of consciousness and intentionality—what we’re feeling/thinking and what we intend towards each other. This is an imperfect system since all of us can lie and hide from ourselves or others, but we share quite a lot with someone just meeting them in person and looking into their eyes.
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