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Ariel Kane and Shya Kane are bestselling,award-winning authors, Internet radio hosts, seminar leaders,and corporate consultants who have helped transform the livesof individuals, couples, and organizations around the world.

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How to Create a Magical Relationship

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

As you begin reading this book, ask yourself why you have picked it up. Is it because you have heard good things about it? Were you attracted to the title or cover? Perhaps you are stuck somewhere on your personal journey toward creating a magical relationship. Or perhaps you are searching for tips to fix your partner so that he or she is less irritating. Maybe you are simply curious. Any reason is valid. To get the most from all that How to Create a Magical Relationship has to offer, it is important that you begin to know yourself.

Since you have picked up this book, chances are you are interested in having relationships that are rewarding to you and to the people with whom you relate. In the following pages, you are likely to come across things that you do and have done naturally all along that work well in your dealings with others. You will also identify things that are impediments to your ability to have a day-to-day sense of well-being. Both are important.

The ideas presented in this book are a radical departure from working on yourself or your relationship to bring about positive change. This book is about discovering a new way of seeing, a new way of looking at yourself, your life, and your relationships. It will require you to learn a few very simple principles that can shift the way you relate and the way you think about your life.

The two of us have found a far faster and more lasting approach than that of picking on oneself and one's partner and making endless lists of resolutions designed to force ourselves to behave in a more positive manner. We have discovered the possibility of Instantaneous Transformation.

WHAT IS INSTANTANEOUS TRANSFORMATION?

Instantaneous Transformation is a phenomenon that we will be exploring over the course of this book. This is only the initial foray into an explanation of this complex, yet simple, happening.

Transformation is a shifting in the essence of something. For example, a molecule of water turns from liquid to solid at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Even though its molecular structure stays the same, ice does not resemble water because it has transformed.

It is a shifting of the way you interact with life so that mechanical, automatic, unaware behaviors cease to dominate your choices. Transformation might be equated to a proactive way of life but not in opposition to anything. Most people have determined their lives either in agreement or opposition to something they have experienced or to which they have been exposed. With Instantaneous Transformation, the circumstances of your life may stay the same, but the way you relate to those circumstances radically shifts. Before people's lives transform, they blame their circumstances for how they feel. However, after transformation takes place, circumstances are no longer the determining factor. It is a state where the mere seeing of a behavior pattern is enough to complete it.

Transformation is simply a word we use to describe what happens when you discover how to live in the moment.

Instantaneous Transformation affects all aspects of a person's life, not merely one area. It is not produced by will or a desire to transform. It happens to a person, and it happens when a person lives life directly rather than thinking about how to live life the "right" way. Transformation is the natural outcome when you bring awareness to your life.

AWARENESS

Our definition of awareness is a nonjudgmental seeing. It is an objective, noncritical seeing or witnessing of the nature or "isness" of any particular circumstance or situation. It is an ongoing process in which you are bringing yourself back to the moment rather than complaining silently about what you perceive as wrong or what you would prefer.

Most of us have been taught that when we become aware of something, we then have to do something to change or fix what we discover. With Instantaneous Transformation, awareness itself is often enough to facilitate resolution without doing anything about what is seen.

You could equate it to walking through a large conference hall with the lights turned off. If there were chairs and tables strewn about and you attempted to cross the room directly, you would undoubtedly stumble or fall. However, with light, you could easily avoid all of the obstacles. Merely by illuminating what is, those pitfalls that stand in the way of having a harmonious relationship can be circumvented. This is accomplished not by rearranging the chairs or tables but by simply bringing awareness to them.

An Anthropological Approach

Our approach is anthropological in nature. Rather than being concerned with why people are the way they are, we are interested in seeing the mechanics and dynamics of how people function. An anthropologist suspends judgment to study cultures objectively—not as right or wrong, good or bad, or as something that needs to be fixed or changed, but simply to see their social mores, customs, and standards. He or she observes how a culture operates and interacts. We invite you to investigate your way of relating through this anthropological metaphor. Be a scientist and objectively, without judgment, study a culture of one—yourself.

In order to create a magical relationship, it is important that you learn the art of self- observation without self-reproach. Most of us do not simply observe how we function. Rather, we judge ourselves, comparing how we are to how we think we ought to be based on cultural standards (or the resistance to those standards). We are addicted to fixing what we perceive as our weaknesses and faults rather than observing ourselves neutrally. Instantaneous Transformation is not about fixing yourself to be a better you or fixing your partner to be a new and improved version of himself or herself. It is about being the way you are. If you simply see how you are without judging, manipulating, or trying to fix what is seen, this will facilitate the completion of unwanted behaviors.

How? Well, neutrally observing something doesn't add energy to it—for or against—and everything in this universe needs energy to survive. If you don't energize your habits, they will naturally dwindle and die away all on their own.

It took the two of us many years to discover how to relate in a way that allowed our relationship to flower and grow, be nurturing and deepen.

If you pick on yourself, you will pick on your partner. We have discovered that working on yourself (or your relationship) doesn't work.

If you want to have a soul mate, not an opponent in a never-ending fight, the place to begin is with yourself.

HOW TO APPROACH THIS BOOK

To begin with, see if you can read the information presented without trying to apply it to your life or your way of relating. We realize that this may be challenging, but with Instantaneous Transformation there is nothing that you need to work on or do, try to fix or change, in order to create a magical relationship.

Agreeing and Disagreeing

Please hold in abeyance the tendency to agree or disagree with the ideas being presented, because if you pick them apart, you will never get the essence of what is being said. This is...