Read About Forever...
/"There are only two kinds of people that can tell you the truth about yourself. An enemy who has lost his temper and a friend who loves you dearly." - Antisthenes, 445-365 BC.
Your Enemy, Your Friend, is a ‘way of life’ education that will change everything you used to believe was right, real and true about personal happiness and relationship fulfilment. The series consists of two books, titled Forever & Always – that intelligently challenge everyday notions of human being. They reveal how and why the conventional mindset unconsciously prevents us from acquiring these precious commodities in any substantial way, but more importantly, they describe ‘who’ we must become, in order to reacquire them in abundance. The journey takes place as a conversational monologue that centres and pivots on five key themes: Greater Awareness, Emotional Freedom, Personal Happiness, Relationship Madness & Profound Serenity - in whatever way makes sense for you.
This is a 360 degree reinterpretation of Emotional wellbeing that focuses on ‘who’ we are being in our life and our partner relationships - as an outcome of 'who' we are being with ourselves - because it is essentially, the same equation. A distinct and uniquely defining feature of this work is the dual persona of the Enemy and the Friend, working both separately and together, to make politically asymmetrical messages accessible when they are difficult to hear and accept. The premise for this approach, is that our reality is often trapped inside of learned preferences and preconceptions that prevent us from seeing ourselves and our world in raw and clear terms – and moreover, that to overcome those barriers, we must sometimes be confronted with information that conflicts with and contradicts what we prefer to believe. Enter the role of the 'enemy', whose primary function, is to make us present to unpalatable information.
The discomfort and resistance that we experience, is then mitigated by the complimentary 'friend' persona. This is the force that comforts us. The force that we trust to steer us through the minefield that awaits us; something, perhaps, not too unlike a field nurse holding your hand to help you endure the pain of removing leftover fragments from a bullet wound – so that the wound can begin to heal. Title 1 Forever, focuses on partner relationships, using thought-provoking insights that compel your attention to the undesirable dynamic that partners fall into, despite aiming for something different. It describes ‘how’ we gradually descend into relationship unfulfilment, and explains ‘why’ we become confused and trapped by our choices, until eventually – we either implode, explode or die compromising and pretending.
Through various confronting scenarios, Forever, exposes the inadequacies in our curriculum for living, by identifying common emotional intelligence deficits and revealing unexpected sources of inner conflict in our belief and value systems, that distract us from the real issues. So we search for remedies in places where they cannot possibly exist, while we become progressively unfulfilled in the process. Forever disrupts that process, by enabling us to determine hidden insecurities, overcome lingering fears and outgrow insidious preconception fictions that prevent us from acquiring healthy life and relationship goals – especially in the domains of love, lust and romance.
But what distinguishes this book and indeed, this series uniquely, is its raw practicality in a world where a life of ‘worthwhile’ can only actually be created somewhere between material and spiritual, rather than at one extreme or another of the human being spectrum and moreover, without guilt or anguish or issue. Very conventional wisdom, for example, will often have us searching for happiness as though we somehow lost it or misplaced it and moreover, direct our search for it to places where personal happiness cannot possibly exist, as though it remains, waiting to be discovered, but only after a lifetime of extreme personal sacrifice and irrecoverable compromise. Title two of the series Always, is an unashamedly antagonistic prequel to Forever, that permanently shatters the preconceptions and behavioural constraints preventing us from solving our ‘Speed of Life’ equation.
Anything insidious that lingers after being confronted by the sentiments in - Forever, is promptly assassinated by Always, provided you are prepared to be bold. Together, Forever and Always expose way of being frameworks (that make no provision for their constituents to outgrow the captivity of those frameworks) as insubstantial and fraudulent. The series declares that every kind of personal happiness, is exactly where it has always been; inside of you and right where you left it, because the reality, is that you were born with it as a way of being a possibility that is always available to you by virtue of you being human. All that happened, is that you learned to bury it underneath seemingly insurmountable layers of unhappiness that you were taught to create for yourself throughout the course of your life by your predecessors and indeed by your community.
Layers that are so deeply ingrained in your way of being psyche, that they resist revealing themselves as separate to the ‘self’ without a firm nudge in your awareness. Instead, they appear as ‘way of life’ inevitabilities that we struggle to comprehend as the choices we were taught to make; choices that can actually be ‘unmade’ simply by the simple and yet so misunderstood act of - CHOOSING. This work is so practical and powerful, that when properly understood, even partners in unworkable relationships can change directions without anger, selfishness, hate or destruction; and that’s because the ‘way of life’ mind shift that occurs from acquiring a more informed and sophisticated kind of emotional freedom, changes our perspective profoundly. What we once considered inconceivable, may be re-understood as sensible. Something irrational may suddenly appear logical.
The seemingly ridiculous might be re-determined as entirely appropriate, useful, practical or even proper, and dangerous or risqué, could be re-comprehended as safe, natural, empowering, desirable and even necessary for an emotionally healthy life. Together, Forever & Always, articulate the emotional intelligence shift needed to acquire the adventure we were promised by the community that we trusted with our ‘way of life’ education. Real personal happiness and genuine relationship madness are available to everyone. But to overcome the learned resistance to this ‘way of life’ possibility...
“We must Unlearn who we think we are, so that we can Relearn who we can become!”.
