Lovingly Smiling | Love Time | What is a Love Reversal?

Lovingly Smiling

This article appeared in the October, November, December 2008 issue of the Open Exchange magazine.

Keith Braselton, founder of Engage Love, offers classes and individual healing sessions in Open Exchange’s seminars section on page # .

Did you know that there is a huge difference between feeling good and feeling love or loving? It is like the difference between thinking about being rich and being rich. There is really no comparison. Even so, many people spend most of their lives looking for a way to feel good instead of concentrating on the real thing, to feel love and to feel loved.

Have you ever stopped yourself to consider what you want most out of your life? Is it that house on the hill or is it to be happy moment by moment? Is it to experience love within you and all around you all of the time? Did you know that was possible?

Have you ever experienced love in a strong way? If you have experienced love in a strong way, was it valuable to you?

Just pondering over a loving experience for a few moments will bring a smile to your face. Would it be incredible for you to be able to create very loving experiences all of the time?

What would you be willing to do to make yourself feel love all of the time? Would you be willing to change a few things about your life? Would you be willing to do a little bit of work every day?

You can learn to use and feel love moment by moment. You can learn how to bring love out in you and learn how to put love into motion. It is profoundly simple. It does take a little work on your part, but if you’re willing, you will love the results.

If you look at any person in any state of love, what is the first thing that you notice about them?

The person will look exactly like the manifestation of love they are experiencing, like the love they are putting into motion. Excited people look excited. A person in a state of passion looks passionate. A happy person looks happy. A common trait that you will notice in anyone who is in any state of love or experiencing any expression of love, is that they are smiling -- all of them. You can use this knowledge to help yourself feel love. If you have the intention of feeling love, you can use a loving smile to engage the love that is within you and put it into motion at any time. (It is possible for a person to smile and not feel love. So when I talk about a loving smile, I am talking about smiling with the intention of feeling love, with your heart open.)

Lovingly smiling engages love within you.

You might say, “That’s silly, it couldn’t be that simple!” But wait; let me show you how powerful a loving smile can be. If you would like to learn how to feel love at any time and all of the time, then play along with me here for a moment and let us see if we can help you create a profound experience.

Make yourself feel ecstatically happy, totally fired up, amazed, extraordinarily wonderful. You are standing or sitting proud, chest out, face lifted up, smiling like crazy. You are breathing deep and strong. Jump up and down, yell and scream, “I feel good!” You are loving yourself and everything around you! You are excited! You are beaming! (When you are feeling absolutely wonderful, read on.)

Now, without changing anything about your physiology -- do not change your posture, do not change your smiling beaming face, do not change your breathing -- try to make yourself feel sad, angry, or hurt.

Isn’t that amazing? No matter how hard you try, you cannot make yourself feel sad, angry, hurt or any other negative feeling when your physiology is loving or happy! That is very profound! What an incredible tool!

It also works in the opposite way!

Make yourself look as though you are sad. Bow your head, make your eyes and mouth look sad, make your breathing shallow and short, droop your shoulders, stare at the floor. You are so sad. Make yourself feel this sadness for a moment. (After you’re sure you’re in a sad state, then read on.)

Isn’t it strange how much you have to work to make yourself feel sad?

Now, without changing your physiology in any way, try to feel any state or expression of love.

You can think about love and you can see love around you but you cannot feel love unless you are smiling. That is so incredible! You can use your physiology to change your state of being anytime and all of the time. It is possible for you to manifest any quality of love, happiness, ecstasy, wonder, passion, and so on, by changing your physiology to the desired quality of love, anytime.

This is the purpose of having free will. Free will gives us the choice to choose to be loving or not.

Lovingly smiling is the way to start any state of love. Try it. Lovingly smile and will yourself to feel excited. Smile and lovingly will yourself to feel peaceful, enthusiastic, wondrous. If you have the intention to feel love and put love into motion, the more you smile, the easier it gets. The more you smile, the better you feel. Just knowing that can empower you to want to smile more.

AND THAT IS HOW POWERFUL A SMILE CAN BE!

This is not a gimmick. The ability for you to feel love through lovingly smiling is metaphysically built right into you. It is built into your physiology. You can use your physiology at any time to help yourself achieve a loving smile.

If you were not aware of this profound understanding about love, then you have probably been lovingly smiling as a reaction to loving experiences in your life. Now that you understand, you can use lovingly smiling as a proactive tool to empower yourself with love any time you want. You have a choice. Learn to do that and you will be amazed at the changes that come over your life. You can use this tool to light up your life and the lives of others.

Here is a list of some of the advantages:

-- You have to think positively in order to engage love all of the time. Thinking positively draws good energy. It helps create positive experiences in your life.
-- Love in and of itself is an energy source. When you put love into motion on a regular basis, you tap into abundant energy. You have more energy for work and for play.
-- Adding love into your life daily actually physically expands your spiritual aura. Spiritually you become bigger. This has many advantages. When your aura is filled with love it provides you with clarity to make decisions throughout your day. It changes the way you perceive your reality.
-- When a loving state becomes your normal state of being, when you can lovingly smile through long periods of time, you will be able to develop incredible compassion for your fellow beings.
-- Lovingly smiling moment by moment will help you develop the mindset to be a very giving person. Any time you give to other people, to life, to Mother Nature, you feel the love of giving and those to whom you give gain a benefit.
-- For those of you on a spiritual path, it will help you to increase and enhance your prayers, studying, meditations, chanting, physical yoga, and your ability to relate to other people, to make each day a better day.
-- The act of trying to lovingly smile all of the time helps you develop your awareness, the awareness of the here and now and the awareness of what is going on in your mind. You will start to become aware of your thought process and anything that might keep you from smiling or feeling love. This will help you learn more about who you are.
-- The best part of all is that your relationship with life will become more than you ever dreamed possible! If you make being in love the most important thing in your life you can make your life magical!

You get all of that just from learning to lovingly smile moment by moment as much as you can. Experience it for yourself!

You can practice feeling love through all parts of your day. You can make yourself feel love at a stoplight, standing in a line, when you are on hold, during a conversation, when you are driving, anytime, anywhere. You can smile at everyone you meet. Smile at work, at school, at church, at home, in the shower, while you’re getting your hair cut, while you are washing the dishes.

It is your choice. You always have that choice.

Have you ever noticed when a person with a big smile on her face walks into a room of people, how it makes other people smile and how it just makes you feel good? That person could be you! That is so cool!

SO SMILE REALLY BIG AND MAKE YOUR LIFE MAGICAL!

By Keith Braselton

Love Time

One of The Most Powerful Tools In The World

This article was appeared in the April, May, June, 2009 issue of the Open Exchange magazine’s website section.

Keith Braselton, founder of Engage Love, offers classes and individual healing sessions in Open Exchange’s seminars section on page # .

In the last issue of Open Exchange, you found that you have the power to create love anytime you wish by smiling and opening your heart. The next tool you may want to practice and master is to learn how to keep your heart open for longer and longer periods of time. Of course, this means you will be feeling love for longer and longer periods of time. It will make you stronger and wiser, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. And it’s a lot of fun!
Learning to live in love for extended periods of time is the basis for developing your inherent strength. The part of your mind that controls your ability to make decisions is your will. You will yourself to think, act or react in love or an unloving way. So if you learn how to engage the love within you for long periods of time, you are strengthening your ability to willfully choose to be in love moment by moment. You can think of strengthening your will in the same way you would strengthen any muscle. The more you use your will and push your will to its limits, the stronger your will grows. One of the tools you can use to accomplish this most effectively is Love Time.

Love Time

Love Time is spending time in a continuous state of love. Ten to fifteen minutes, once or twice a day is a good amount of time to start off with.
Take the time to organize your life so that you can set aside ten to fifteen minutes a day, and use that time to create loving experience. Set up a schedule so you will know that the times you have set aside are reserved for you to give to yourself. During your Love Time use any means you can of bringing love to expression.
During your Love Time the object is to play with life, to develop passion for being, to have the most fun you can and to feel as much love as you can. The more love you can feel in a concentrated way through a given length of time, the stronger you will become at engaging love.
What do you do during your Love Time? Whatever makes you feel the most love. Be creative! Be passionate! Be WILD! Be soft! Be CRAZY! Be humble! BE TOTALLY HILARIOUS! Be grateful! Be relaxed! Be Silent! Talk with God/your guides/the universe. Share and express your love to the universe, nature, a lover, a friend, a pet, play with them. Tell the world of the love you feel for her in different times and places! Remember all of the things in your life that are special. Think of good friends and good times. Dream of and visualize things you want to experience. Sing songs, do chants, read or write poetry, draw, paint, sculpt, listen to music, play an instrument, compose a song, write in your diary, light candles and incense, soak in a hot bath, give a massage, get a massage, make love to yourself or someone else, clean your house, surround yourself with beautiful pictures, go for a walk or a hike, cut the grass, work in your garden, commune with nature, beat on some drums. Do anything that makes you feel love for yourself. Do something different everyday or if you like what you have done, do it again the next day. Plan your love times or be totally spontaneous.
Take a little time right now to make a list of the things you would love to do for your Love Time. What brings a smile to your face? What touches your heart?
You will find that Love Time is one of the most powerful spiritual tools that you can use to know love, life and yourself. If you will do a Love Time for ten minutes a day for seven days in a row, you will find a significant difference come over your life.
After you do ten minutes a day for a week, move up to twenty minutes a day for a week. And then thirty minutes a day and then ten minutes an hour, and then twenty minutes and hour and eventually you will find yourself living in love all of the time. As you get more and more comfortable doing love time, you will find that you do not have to set time aside to do love time. You will be able to integrate it into your life in many different ways.

Why is Love Time so powerful?

Because when we spend time creating loving experiences, we are growing. We are actively training ourselves to be in a loving state more and more. Love IS in all of us, all of the time. We're training ourselves to become able to feel and access it more, which is what we all desire to feel all of the time. We’re growing spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. Our spiritual body is actually growing metaphysically bigger. As our spiritual body becomes bigger we are becoming more of who we really are. We are putting ourselves in the position to be able to see and heal all of the unloving ways of thinking, habits, addictions, and obsessions we have within our life. We're expanding our ability to heal past unloving trauma and experience. We're expanding our ability to engage compassion and passion in our life. We are raising our consciousness level and the consciousness level of the planet. AND, we're having fun! What a glorious way to discover more about who we are and how life works. The more fun we have the better our life becomes.

The Change Transition

If you become addicted to love, if you become excited and develop the discipline to create a Love Time on a daily basis, you will continue to grow. As you grow, you will become aware of many of the unloving habits you have in your life that keep you from being able to feel love. As you grow in love, these habits will become more and more obvious and sometimes more uncomfortable. You will catch yourself throughout your day, acting and reacting in unloving ways due to these habits. At some point, you will begin to make changes in your life; you will drop the unloving habits or replace them with loving habits. You may reach a time in your growth in which you will feel uncomfortable with your old habits and you might not feel comfortable with your new habits. When you reach this transition, it may be hard for you to feel comfortable about anything. This transition is called the Change Transition.
Generally speaking, when people who are learning to fill their lives with love do not understand the Change Transition is going to happen, they stop adding love into their lives and they go back to their old habits because their old habits are more comfortable. The familiar feels more comfortable even though it may not be the best thing for us. If you understand that the Change Transition is going to happen, then you can become very excited about your growth and you can use your excitement to carry you through the uncomfortable feelings. When you make it through the Change Transition, change will become your new way of life. You will find changing to be very comfortable and a welcome part of your life. Change becomes the sign that you are growing and growth means you are able to experience more and more love.
Now if you start making lots of changes in your life and change becomes a way of life, imagine what is going to happen to your relationships with people. Most of your relationships are going to change. Because you are moving and changing in love, your relationships are going to become healthier. This will become such a blessing in your life. You may find some friends and family dropping away from your life. You may find that some friends and family have so much love for you that they will allow you to go through your changes and still remain close to you. And you may have some friends and family that become so inspired with your changes that they will decide to grow with you.
It is not uncommon for people who are learning to move and change in love to lose most or even all of their friends and family. Some people have been living in such unloving environments that the only people they have around them are people who support their unloving habits. As soon as people like this start growing in love and changing their own unloving habits, their friends and family can become very uncomfortable with them and lose their desire to be with them. This part of the Change Transition can cause people to go back to their old habits. Many people have become so attached to beliefs of how friends and family are supposed to act together regardless of how unhealthy the relationships are, that they will sacrifice their own ability to grow in love in order to maintain the relationships. Or, because of their programming as children, they may find more comfort in living in unloving relationships than they do in loving relationships. Any of these things could happen to you when you enter the Change Transition. Many people will find evidence of these factors within days of making Love Time a daily ritual in their lives.

There are a number of ways to make the Change Transition more comfortable:

- Just knowing that the Change Transition is going to happen is a big plus factor.
- Be patient with yourself. As you start engaging more love into your life and you are able to see your unloving ways of thinking, habits, addictions, and obsessions, be patient with yourself. You have plenty of time to make changes and you do not have to make a lot of changes all at once.
- Be patient with others. Have compassion for them. Your friends and family may not be ready for you to start changing. To them, they may see you as not caring about them because you are starting to do things differently. You may have relationships based on supporting each other in unloving habits. Your compassion for your friends and family will help you to arrive at healthy decisions with less tension.
- If you start making changes and you lose a lot or all of your friends, you will make new friends. As you start to move through the Change Transition and you begin to make change a way of life, you will start attracting likeminded people to you. You can help this along by searching for spiritual groups of likeminded people to associate and play with.
- In time, when you are able to successfully move through the Change Transition and make loving change a way of life, your life will become so rich with loving experience that you will eventually know heaven on earth.

Moving through the Change Transition can be a most exciting time in your life. Learning to embrace change will tune you into more of your loving nature. Loving change is the very essence of all of the expressions of life. Therefore, learning to create Love Time for extended periods of time will move you to embrace a life of change and to understand your relationship with yourself, your guides/God/All That Is/the Universe. It will bring extraordinary clarity. It is a way to make your life magical.

By Keith Braselton

What is a Love Reversal?

This article appeared in the July, August, September 2009 issue of the Open Exchange magazine.
Keith Braselton, founder of Engage Love, offers classes and individual healing sessions in Open Exchange’s seminars, personal growth, and healing sections on pages #

When a child experiences an unloving action or reaction over and over every day for weeks, months and years, he/she will develop what I call a Love Reversal. In this case, the child experiences the condition so often that he/she eventually feels comforted, in a sense, by the experience. Even though the condition doesn’t feel good, the child feels the condition is normal/familiar/comfortable. It’s one of the ways we become programmed, so to speak.
Here’s an example: Betsy’s father was physically and verbally abused throughout his childhood. As a father, his interactions with Betsy are always conducted at high volume. His only way of communicating is by yelling and screaming, for example, “Why did you do that? I told you not to do that! Jesus, you never listen!” He’s also prone to grabbing her and shaking her to force her to act in a particular way. Because Betsy grows up accustomed to this kind of abuse, as an adult she’ll attract people to her that abuse her in a similar fashion. Emotional and physical abuse feels comfortable to Betsy. In other words, she’s programmed to feel comfortable being abused.
Love Reversals like the one just described can be very obvious but they can also be very subtle. For instance, if you were raised by prejudiced parents, you might find yourself mistreating people according to their race, sex, size, looks or the way they act. Most of us are literally filled with many different types of Love Reversals, which means we’ve been programmed to act and react in many different unloving ways.
Love Reversals are very hard for us to find within ourselves because we feel comfortable acting and reacting in certain unloving ways. It’s much easier for other people to see them in us. Most of the programming we received as children is stored in our unconscious - it is, therefore, powered by instinct. So, it can be difficult to access and change these old patterns of acting and reacting because they’re so engrained within us. Even when we can see Love Reversals in ourselves, they’re still difficult to heal. So, if you ever find yourself acting in an unloving way and you don’t understand why, you probably have a Love Reversal working against you. We can safely say that the confused, conflicted state of our world right now is mostly being caused by the presence of Love Reversals within all of us.
Fortunately, there is a new process that enables us to grow strong enough to see and heal our Love Reversals. It’s the process of learning to grow more and more loving day after day. When a person learns to concentrate on choosing love, being love, and acting/reacting in love more and more everyday, their aura literally grows so big that they become stronger than their unloving programming. This expanded state enables them to see their Love Reversals and heal the patterns created by their presence.

By: Keith Braselton