Gay and Katie Hendricks

Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., and Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D., are the authors of the bestseller "Conscious Loving" and more than 20 other books on forging more loving, fulfilling relationships. Their many appearances on TV and radio shows including "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and CBS' "48 hours" have highlighted both the techniques they teach and how well those ideas work in their own marriage. (They say they haven't had a fight in 28 years, and we believe it.) The Hendricks live in Ojai, Calif., offer personal growth workshops through Gaia Illumination University and fund research, films and scholarships through their nonprofit Foundation For Conscious Living.

One of the keys to healthy relationships is spoken appreciation. Other kinds of appreciation (such as touch or giving a hand with a chore) are great, too, but spoken appreciation is highly valued and easy to do. We recommend a technique we call verbal valentines, which work wonders in any kind of relationship.

We give each other 10-second verbal valentines all year long. We believe it’s one of the main reasons we’re more in love now than when we met 32 years ago. Verbal valentines are not just for lovers, either.  You can give them at work, to children, to other family members and to cherished friends.

One thing we keep an eye out for is what kind of relationship advice is being dispensed subliminally through sit-coms, dramas, even the news shows. So when a morning show host began an interview with an expert on infidelity the other day, I watched out of the corner of my eye.

Relationships and the Body (Part One)

Is alexithymia wreaking havoc in your close relationships? Most of us struggle at one time or another with an inability to feel what’s going on inside us at the level of emotion and energy flow. The technical term for this problem is “alexithymia.” If you look it up in a medical dictionary, you’ll find some very interesting clues as to why relationship conflicts recycle without resolution. The word alexithymia comes from ancient Greek and literally means “without words for feelings.” If you’re alexithymic, you suffer from three main traits:

Recently there have been a number of discussions — on Facebook and elsewhere — about couples fighting in public. Most of us don’t get into the kind of marital slugging matches routinely featured on Bravo’s “Real Housewives” where spouses are likely to rip off their wigs and use them as blunt instruments to beat spouses around the head and shoulders. However, most of us have at least been within earshot of a heated relationship spat.

Part of creating prosperity in your life is learning how to ask the right questions. Our early life experiences often lead us to focus on limited questions like these:

• How can I survive?
• How can I get even?
• How can I get by?
• How can I hide so nobody sees me?
• How can I get people to love me?

There’s a lot of information about conscious manifestation, but hardly anybody ever talks about how unconscious manifestation works. Here’s the way it looks to me. Without realizing it, we draw experiences and people to us unconsciously and interact with them in programmed ways.

For three decades, it’s been part of my life purpose to teach the principles and practices of manifestation. I use all the principles and practices I teach daily in my own life. I can’t think of anything more important than learning how to create prosperity for yourself, your family and community. I sometimes wish someone had taught them to me earlier in my life, which is why I want to make sure everyone who wants to know about manifestation has the opportunity.

“I feel out of sync with my family of origin around the holidays, when I spend more time with them than usual,” wrote one reader recently. “They aren’t interested in honest communication, working on relationships, or other things that are important to me … How can I deal with this in a positive way?

“Politics doesn’t make strange bedfellows — marriage does.” Groucho Marx

Most of us grew up learning to avoid speaking about politics and religion in public. Many of us also remember the dinner table squabbles with parents who just “didn’t get it” about music, the current administration or really anything else that was truly cool.

Kathlyn and I are just back from a meeting in the mountains of Colorado with the Transformational Leadership Council. TLC was founded by a group of us, meeting in Jack Canfield’s living room about 5 years ago. Now, it’s grown to 100+ people, necessitating a move to larger quarters (Jack’s living room is big, but it’s not that big!) We meet now about twice a year, to hear what everybody’s doing and to help move the field of personal and relationship transformation forward. One of our new members, Marianne Williamson, gave a rousing talk based on her new book, The Age Of Miracles. Her talk touched on something dear to my heart, the incredible explosion of creativity that can come forth at mid-life.  I gave the opening invocation, which I will quote from to give you a taste of the expanded yet playful spirit of the event: