How we deal with what most stresses us shapes and is shaped by how we communicate, and ultimately the relationship between you, your mind and body.

In Part 1, we looked at how inner self-talk impacts the quality of communication between your mind and body, and how the subconscious relies on this interpretive inner dialogue to understand you, regarding the specifics of your life from day one to the present moment, as part of its job in optimally operating all the systems that come together to make you possible.

In this post, we consider how this inner stream of consciousness also impacts and is impacted by the direction and quality of the relationship you have with your self, mind and body, and arguably your life and relationships in general.

If how you talk to yourself inside decides whether your autonomic nervous system remains relatively calm or unnecessarily turns on your body’s survival system, that means you have a built-in capability to direct – or redirect – the overall state of your mind and body.

The power of interpretive thoughts and beliefs?

Your body, in the form of self-talk, makes subconscious decisions for you around the clock. This inner dialogue is a stream of consciousness that has an enormous effect on every aspect of your life and relationships.

It’s not the external stressors, per se, that block us from happiness, health and being all we can be in life. Actually, the external stressors in our lives often perform a vital role in our physical, mental and emotional growth. But if happiness isn’t a matter of eliminating external stress, then what is it?

It’s a matter of understanding our perceptions, or how we explain our life and experiences to our self.

At any given moment, your stress levels are raised or lowered by what you perceive to be stress, and how you interpret life events in and around you. Not all persons get stressed in traffic or waiting in lines, for example, and some may even welcome these events as opportunities to relax.

So it’s not about removing stress. It’s about learning how to regulate the thoughts that intensify or calm those emotions that most challenge you, in particular, anger or fear.

Nothing is more natural to human experience than story telling. A timeline is a unique way to tell your life story, a contemplative exercise that provides an opportunity to capture the positive and negative shifts of your life on a single trajectory – from where you may also choose to create new, potentially healing shifts in meaning.

In Part 1 we looked at the benefits, as well as the Phase 1 and 2 steps of putting together your timeline on paper.

In this post, we probe more deeply, with Phase 3 questions designed to deepen your awareness and knowledge of certain aspects of your life story, and how past experiences shape the present; and Phase 4 questions that open space to better understand and perhaps to consciously reinterpret past experiences (Phase 4), potentially creating new shifts in meaning and conscious healing action.

A new sort of infidelity has been on the rise for decades, and it’s one of the biggest threats to marriage: ‘emotional affairs.’ Today’s workplace has become the new danger zone of opportunities for ‘emotional affairs,’ surpassed only by the Internet.

A relationship without sex can be just as intense, or more so than a sexual one. Not surprisingly, in most cases, approximately 80% according to Dr. Shirley Glass, author of Not Just Friends: Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity, the dynamics of these platonic liaisons crosses over into sexual love sooner or later.

Why the crisis?

To understand the intensity of emotional infidelity, it helps to see the dynamics as an addiction, a form of addictive love. That’s because it’s easier to let go of a toxic pattern when you depersonalize the experience.