Relationships last longer when both parties want, need, and support each other. There are bumps along the way but may be prevented or mended with the right moments and right emotions. Keeping the fire burning among couples is mandatory for their union to last longer. As Frederic Gobeil and Christy Whitman talk about how to keep relationships exciting, they always emphasize on having a mindful relationship with love manifesting. If you want to have a lasting relationship with your partner, make sure to take note of Frederic and Christy’s top ten things that ignite your couple’s flame.
—
Watch the episode here:
Listen to the podcast here:
Below is a transcript of the video and audio above. The paragraphs and sections are alternated between bold / not bold for ease of reading along with the video or audio.
Conscious Coupling – How To Keep Your Relationship Exciting: Mindful Relationships and Love Manifestation
We are going to talk about how to spice it up in your relationship. How to have your relationship be exciting? How to have a mindful relationship and be able to have love manifesting all the time?
We’ll give you some wonderful things, suggestions that you can take home with you and apply to have a great, lasting and loving relationship.
Give And Receive Love Through The Eyes
We’re going to do the top ten things that you could do. The first one is, and this is something that we suggest that you do at least once a day. It doesn’t take a long time to do. It’s something that takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. You look at your partner in the eyes, soul to soul, the windows of the soul. Look deeply into their eyes and allow yourself to feel and to receive. Allow yourself to give and receive love through your eyes.
It’s amazing how intimate you can be with saying no words and doing nothing by being in each other’s eyes, looking into each other’s eyes. A lot of times when you think about it, couples may not even look at each other. They go on about their days. They get up and they run into the day. They’re not even taking that time to be mindful. Love, in order to grow, you have to have that mindful presence.
When you are feeling uncomfortable looking into each other’s eyes, you might have some uncomfortableness about intimacy. That’s something to look at in yourself and why you’re not feeling that you’re wanting to give and receive love from your partner. These are good clues that if you go to do this little exercise that takes seconds to do, what are you resisting? What are you persisting with that?
It’s important when you’re communicating with each other. In the morning when you’re getting ready to go to work, everything is a little bit stressful and it needs to be done quickly. Especially if we have kids that need to get themselves ready, we need to drive them to school. Often, it’s a quick hello, a goodbye kiss, and we’re off to work.
Lasting Relationship: It’s amazing how intimate you can be with saying no words and doing nothing by being in each other’s eyes.
We’re off to doing our chores for the day. I feel that it’s important to communicate when you are talking to each other. Have eye contact once in a while so that there is this connection among both people in the couple.
Number two is to show affection, hug, kiss, and stroke their arm. Do something to show some form of affection-giving. When you do it, it’s not a quick hug. When you’re doing it, when you’re hugging, feel your partner. Allow yourself to be felt in that space of love. Allow yourself to be present. Both of you take a couple of moments.
I remember one time when I was at a transformational leadership council meeting and Dave Asprey from Bulletproof and I was hugging each other. Dr. John Gray, the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus guy, he’s an incredible human being. He saw us hug and he goes, “That’s not a hug.” We looked at each other and thought, “That felt like a nice hug.”
He had us hug each other and take a breath with each other and then release. He goes, “If you do it more than that, especially if you’re just friends, it’s a little weird.” It could be awkward, but it’s true that if you hug someone and take a breath with them, there’s a connection that happens with two human beings that resonate with each other.
With your partner, hug them and take a breath in their arms together. It quiets you down as you take a breath. That is such a mindfulness thing to do to bring you back into the here and the now, which is where all of our power exists. When you do that with your partner, there’s a synchronicity that happens. That is the second point that we wanted to make.
Make that hug a heart to heart hug. Not a hand or arm-level hug. It’s nice to have that heart to heart. For me, I like feeling the heartbeat of my partner, Christy. She also feels my heartbeat when I hug her. Sometimes she’ll tell me, “I feel your heartbeat.” That’s a heart to heart hug.
The third one is to acknowledge and compliment. A lot of times, your partner may do something and acknowledge what they’ve done, if they’ve done something special or not so special. Maybe they took out the garbage and that’s something that they do all the time. I don’t even have to take out the garbage because Frederic does it. When it’s gone, I’m like, “Thank you so much for taking out the garbage.” Show appreciation. Acknowledge what he does do.
If he makes the kids a meal or takes them to play soccer somewhere to get their energy out, I acknowledge him. That acknowledgment, you could speak to that. When I acknowledge you for what you do, how do you feel?
It feels great. It feels that I’m playing an important part in our relationship together. That’s why we want to hear also from our partners that we are basically acknowledged. We’re doing some things that feel good so that the partner doesn’t feel that she/he is alone in doing things that need to be done.
God knows there are plenty of things that need to be done during the day, especially when you have kids in a household and all of that, bills, whatever it is. The partner does not want to feel like they’re left alone doing everything and it’s not on their back. We want to feel there’s someone beside them partnering with them in every aspect of our lives.
It goes true for compliments too. I’ll come out of the bathroom and if he sees that I did my hair, put makeup on, he’ll say, “Hey, beautiful.” It stops me in my tracks. One day, I came out of the bedroom and my hair was like, “I just woke up.” My hair was all disarray and no makeup on.
He goes, “You’re beautiful.” I was like, “My God.” I don’t need that to feel good about myself, but when I hear that, it feels good to have my husband compliment me and say beautiful things. Words of affirmation for me are important. That’s number three.
Connect With Each Other Without The Kids
Number four is to go on a date, just the two of you as often as you can, at least once a week. If you can’t do once a week, do once every two weeks, but you’ve got to go just the two of you on a date where you’re having time to take away from the things that you’re doing together.
Going to sporting events whether it’s hockey, basketball or baseball. Those aren’t my absolute favorite things to do, but I like to do them with him because I like to see him enjoying doing those things. When he’s there, I get to be with him and connect with him in a way. It’s not my favorite, but I like to do it with him and vice-versa.
We were saying like going to rock concerts, it’s not absolutely his favorite, but he loves being with me when I’m rocking out. We love to do things that are not necessarily a ten on both of our lists of things to do, but we do them with each other because we want to be with each other. We want to have that time to have the experiences, get to know each other better, and spend that time with each other.
It’s great to connect with each other without the kids, without other distractions, without the things often we’ll say, “We don’t want to think about business.” We don’t want to talk about business. We want to go out and have lunch, Christy and Frederic.
It feels good to connect together and have a conversation about what we want to do for our next trip, for example. We talk about that together, where we see each other live in our next home that we want. This is how we connect, things that we do and talk together when we are connecting together when just her and me.
Number five is to have some friends that you can go out with. We have a lot of different couple friends. We have our date nights. We have our time that we go. If it’s not night, sometimes we go to breakfast. If it’s not breakfast, then we’ll go to lunch. Other times, they’re activities.
We also have time that we spend with other couple friends. It might be my girlfriend Lisa and her husband Jeff, they have two younger kids. We do these things as a family or it’s like my other friends, Leslie and Brad, we do things as couples.
My cousin who is also my dear friend Natalie and Tim, we do things as couples and go out for a nice dinner or we went to Medieval Times with Natalie, Tim, and the boys over Christmas. Doing these activities with other people also adds to the fun of the relationship and it’s going to be people that you both enjoy, that you both feel comfortable with and enjoy being with.
Lasting Relationship: Invest energy towards creating and growing that relationship spark.
Number six is doing small things to show that you care. Something like when Frederic grabs my foot and gives me a foot massage, it’s like, “He cares.” If I was going to make him a snack or if I call him up and say, “I’m heading back home. Do you want me to pick you up Subway?” It’s something like that.
Doing things to show that you love, doing acts of appreciation like that. Whatever it is, picking up something, like when we were coming I’m like, “Honey, I’m making myself some eggs. Would you like me to make you eggs?” It’s doing things like that that he appreciated. He had a full-on breakfast before we came in and he didn’t have to worry about making himself breakfast.
They’re small actions. As we say, actions speak louder than words. These small gestures are the little actions throughout the day sometimes that are thoughtful of the other one. Have them say, “I’m thinking of you and I know you like that. I felt like I want to give you another iced tea,” for example, for me when I get her an iced tea.
Getting me an iced tea from my favorite place, to me, it’s amazing. It’s such a small thing, but it’s a huge thing for me. They are the small things that matter.
Different Things Keep The Relationship Alive
Number seven is activity. We talked about big activities, but what about little daily activities? Things like taking the dog for a walk or even going for a walk saying, “Babe, let’s go for a walk around the block,” to connect in nature.
It might be doing something like cooking together, making a meal together where you’re in the kitchen. Maybe we sometimes turn on some music and we’re dancing around the kitchen. He’ll make the meat, I’ll make the veggies, but we’re doing something as an activity together.
All these things make the relationship more interesting because during these moments, those are the moments where we get to know more about each other. It’s not in a relationship where the first couple of years you get to know each other and then that’s it. You don’t know the person anymore. There’s growth.
There are things that evolve. As we say, everything in our lives, including ourselves, we all change and we all evolve. We all have different tastes, different things that we like to experience. That’s what keeps the relationship alive.
It’s what keeps the relationship interesting. It’s how to make your relationship last and how to show love to your partner, how to love your partner more, and how to have that love spark. You’ve got to feed it like a fire. You’ve got to spark, you’ve got to flame that fire. You’ve got to create that spark. The spark doesn’t create itself. It’s like with anything.
You have to put yourself in it. You have to invest your energy in it and be able to show that to your partner and give to your partner to be able to have love manifest, to manifest love into your relationship, and to have your best relationship manifest.
Number eight is one of our favorites, that’s cuddling in bed. Our alarm goes off and I usually snooze it. What that means is I back up and he comes forward and we do a little cuddle time. We love our cuddle time and we get to cuddle up next to each other and he puts his arm. I feel enveloped in his love like in my cozy bed and my cozy comforter. I feel safe, warm, and I feel his love all around me. It starts the day in such a beautiful way. Sometimes his back is to me, I’ll tap him and then he’ll come.
It’s like, “It’s time to cuddle.” We get our five minutes cuddle.
It creates a beautiful connection of being able to touch each other not in a sexual way but being able to cuddle with each other, hold each other and start in that way. Whether it’s at night before you go to bed or when you’re waking up in the morning, when you cuddle doesn’t matter. You could be cuddling on the couch, but having that cuddle time has been a big deal for us.
Especially if you both like the touchy part of the relationship, touch for us is a good, important part of our relationship.
Number nine is to do growth together. Do a course together. Come to couples retreat together. Frederic and I, we always invest in our relationship. We are going to our own couples retreats. We’re doing our courses together. We’re always doing something whether it’s a meditation, sessions with the council, or sessions with my healer to make the relationship even more connected.
It’s to release those places that we talked about a couple of episodes, release any places in our pain bodies so that we can be relating more from our love bodies. If you want that, we have an amazing course that we released called From Drama to Love.
It’s getting out of the Drama Triangle, getting out of struggle and chaos, and getting into the circle of love. You can go to FromDramaToLove.com. If you want couples coaching, we have that available and we have a Couples Retreat that we do once a year.
You could go to ChristyWhitman.com and find out about our Couples Retreat. They’re always amazing. We had couples that came and said that weekend completely and absolutely changed their relationship in ways that they couldn’t even have imagined. They had a good relationship but it’s like they pushed the reset button and they have more love and more connection than they ever have. Doing those things together is important.
We put together quite an experience for both sides of the couples, the men and the women. It’s a once in a lifetime experience to take a look at. Number ten is to have more sex.
Don’t just have more sex. Have more toe-curling, awesome, hair-curling sex with your partner in the relationship.
If touch is a good part of the relationship, it will lead to more intimacy and intimacy leads to sex. We all need sex. Let’s not lie about it. Good sex is a good part.
It’s medicinal. It’s a good release.
Apparently, when we orgasm, it keeps us physically young.
That’s why we look like we’re in our 30s. Those are our top ten best advice on how to spark a relationship, how to keep it alive, how to start fueling more fire to your relationship, how to have a happy relationship. Try one of them. Do one of them. See what the reaction is from your partner. Do something to feed your relationship now. You will see that what you send out comes back to you.
Next episode, we are going to be talking about, those of you that are parents, how to empower your children whether it’s your own kid or a step-kid. Whether you’re in a step situation or they’re your own flesh and blood, how to parent and empower your kids.
See you in the next episode.
