The Radical Happiness Newsletter is written by Gina Lake and offers inspiration and support for awakening out of the ego and living in the moment. In this issue, you will find three blog posts: Will I Awaken? How to Get More Love in Your Life, and How to Destroy Your Relationship in a Few Easy Steps (and How to Save It).

If you've been enjoying Gina's books and you'd like to do something to support her work, a review on Amazon.com would be greatly appreciated. Your reviews on Amazon really matter. You don't have to have bought the book you are reviewing on Amazon to review it; you only have to have bought a book on Amazon sometime in the past.

October 8-10 intensive in Sedona, AZ (Columbus Day weekend): Moving from the Ego to Essence. This intensive with Gina Lake and Theo will help you experience the sweet Presence of your true nature and uncover and heal whatever stands in the way of living more from your essential Self. It will be held in a beautiful home overlooking the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. Please see "Intensives" for a description of the weekend. $150. Space is limited to twenty participants. Attendees are responsible for arranging transportation, housing, and meals. For more information, including information about hotels, and/or to register, please download a registration packet at http://www.radicalhappiness.com/images/stories/downloads/Registration_Packet.pdf or contact Gina through the form on the "Contact" page. Find out more about Sedona at http://www.visitsedona.com, one of the most beautiful and sacred places on the planet.
Gina is now offering two DailyOM.com online courses:

NEW: How to Quiet the Mind: Gina is offering a second 8-week online course at DailyOm.com for whatever you choose to pay, which you can begin at any time. Would you like to spend more time in the Now and in Presence and less time lost in worries, fears, judgments, and other negative thoughts and feelings? This course contains information, exercises, videos, and meditations that will give you the understanding and tools you need to become free of negativity and suffering and experience the peace, contentment, and joy of your true nature. You can break free from the limitations imposed by your thoughts and live more at peace with life and with yourself. The understandings and tools presented will help you discover who you really are and live as that rather than being tossed to and fro by a negative mind. Please visit http://www.dailyom.com/cgi-bin/courses/courseoverview.cgi?cid=144 for more information.

How to Create a More Loving Relationship: Gina is offering an 8-week online course at DailyOm.com for whatever you choose to pay, which you can begin at any time. This course contains information, practices, videos, and meditations that will help you create the loving relationship you desire. Find out how you may be sabotaging the love that is possible and what you can do to transform your relationships by changing your relationship to your own thoughts. You have the power to determine how much love you will experience in any moment and in any relationship. Learn to unlock the love that is your true nature. Please visit http://www.dailyom.com/cgi-bin/courses/courseoverview.cgi?cid=131 for more information.

Announcing a New Free E-Book by Gina's husband, Nirmala: That Is That: Essays About True Nature: That Is That is a collection of articles and answers to questions posed by spiritual seekers. It captures the essence of spiritual inquiry and provides the reader with a real transmission of Presence on every page. It is much more than an exposition about our true nature as infinite Oneness, it offers an experiential exploration of who we really are, not only through the transmission in the words, but through the many thoughtful questions it raises. Nirmala's warm-hearted and accepting presence makes it possible to drop into the space he so eloquently describes, where peace, love, and joy abide. He is a master at helping you fall in love with life and the many expressions of the one Being we all are. That Is That is being offered for free as an e-book or for $11.95 as a paperback. To get it, please go to http://endless-satsang.com/free-spiritual-ebooks.htm.

Listen to a 30-minute radio interview with Gina about nonduality (Part 1), hosted by Jerry Katz of nonduality.com on his radio show Nonduality Street: http://www.radicalhappiness.com/audio

Announcing a new book by my friend Guy Finley: The Courage to Be Free:

Today, September 8, my friend Guy Finley and over 70 other authors and experts, including myself, have come together to offer you 70 free tools to transform your life. We are giving these tools away for free for just one day when you purchase Guy's new book. Guy Finley is the author of 35 books about getting free of conditioning. His newest book The Courage to Be Free, which is being released today, will help you make positive changes in your life.

To find out more, go here: http://www.TheCourageToBeFree.org/special/1482/

Announcing a new film about non-duality: Recently, a film about non-duality was brought to my attention and I wanted to share it with you. The film is “Calling it Quits.” It is a beautiful story about a man's search for happiness—from his worldly quest to his turning inwards on a path of Self-discovery and awareness. The film is funny, thought provoking, and uplifting. It’s a rare gem to see such a beautiful feature film about non-duality! After screening at festivals across the country, this award-winning film has just become available on DVD. I highly recommend that you take a look. Academy Award Winner Martin Scorsese called it "A sweet film." You can watch the trailer and learn more about the film at:

http://www.callingitquitsmovie.com/cmd.php?af=1225187

Also, use this exclusive code ciq2010 at checkout and in addition to the premier offer with bonus extras, you’ll also get a special discount.

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HOW TO GET MORE LOVE IN YOUR LIFE from Gina's blog at www.radicalhappiness.com

The question, "How can I get more love in my life?" is itself part of the problem, because this question assumes that you don't have enough love right now and that you have to do something to get it. It also assumes that love is something you get from other people. If you believe these assumptions, you will get busy trying to do something to get love, and you will be doing those things from a sense of lack, which is not particularly attractive. When you believe you lack love, you create a sense of lack within yourself, and that sense of lack becomes somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophesy, as people sense that you want something from them.

When we are looking to get something from people, even love, it is coming from the ego, which is a place of self-centeredness, tension, and discontentment: "What can you do for me?" Other egos are also looking for what someone else can do for them. Those who are looking for something or someone to fulfill them from the outside are not likely to find it, not only because other people don't necessarily want to fill that role, but also, more importantly, because we can never get enough love from outside ourselves to fulfill the ego's feeling of lack.

The only solution to wanting more love is realizing the truth about love: It is your nature to love, and you have an unlimited supply of it. But you must choose to activate this supply of love by giving it to someone else. The way to get more love is to activate your own capacity to love. When loving is flowing out of us to others, we experience love. Love doesn't come from others. This is apparent at those times when someone is in love with us, but we aren't in love with him or her. Someone loving us isn't enough to get us to feel love.  Love isn't something someone can give us. What we really want is to feel the love we have inside ourselves. The source of love is inside of us, and we feel love when we choose to give it.

We are used to thinking of love as an emotion, a feeling that sweeps over us, like when we fall in love. Falling in love is the most wonderful feeling, and yet, the feeling of falling in love isn't true love, and it doesn't last. We long for that feeling to be our ongoing experience, but it can't be. Falling in love is a feeling that comes and eventually goes. True love is not so much a feeling as a doing. It is an act of acceptance, openness, kindness, receptivity to another. We experience love as a result of being open and attentive to and accepting of whomever is in front of us.

Love also flows when we are simply open to and accepting of life and whatever experience we are having. Love flows from us (and is experienced by us) whenever we are fully present and accepting of how life is showing up right now, whether a person is showing up in the moment or not. Love flows whenever we aren't complaining about life, wanting something different, or judging and evaluating whatever is going on.

Love is our natural state. It is the state we drop into whenever we are simply saying yes to how life is showing up in the moment. The only thing that can interfere with this yes is the mind saying no to life. So the only thing that can interfere with love is a thought! No person or circumstance can interfere with your ability to feel love unless you allow it to. And no person can make you feel love unless you allow it either. The really good news is that love is a possibility in every moment. It is in our control. It is our choice: We can choose to love whatever and whomever we are experiencing or not.

Our default position as humans seems to be to reject and find fault with our experience and with the people we encounter. But that doesn't have to be our response to life. We have the power to ignore the judgments and negativity of our minds and to open our hearts in acceptance to whatever happens to be showing up in our life. When we do that, we discover that there is no shortage of love. When we are very present in the moment to whatever experience we are having, instead of involved in our thoughts about life, love flows outward from within us to whatever and whomever we are experiencing. We also find that love from others is the natural response to this outward flow. But the love that is returned to us is not the source of our love, as nice as their love might be.

You are the source of love, and you have the power to feel love. In any moment, you can choose love instead of following your train of thoughts about what you want and how you'd like things to be. You are the creator of your experience of life because you can choose how you respond to life. We may not be able to control what comes our way and whether we are in a relationship with someone at a particular time. But we can control how we choose to see and respond to whatever life brings us. Once we learn that we are masters of our experience in this way, life can be full of love whether we have someone special giving us love back or not.

WILL I AWAKEN? from Gina's blog at www.radicalhappiness.com

Here's a question I often receive, and what follows is the answer I commonly give:

I want to awaken. Will I awaken in this lifetime?

Before awakening, people experience a longing to awaken, which comes from deep within them when it's time to awaken. This longing can easily turn into a desire on the part of the ego to be special and to transcend suffering. Awakening, then, becomes one more desire for the ego to suffer over. So this time of wanting to awaken prior to awakening can actually be quite painful, as all desires are.

The problem with desire is that it comes from a sense of lack, since you can only desire something you believe you lack. If you believe you lack something, then you are believing a lie; you are caught in ego identification, in believing that you are the limited self. This belief, itself, is the problem because it makes seeing the truth—that you are not limited, that you are, in fact, already awake—more difficult.

Awakening is the permanent (as opposed to temporary) realization of this truth. But this truth can be realized in any moment temporarily. Whenever you drop into the experience of the present moment and out of your mind, you experience awakeness—the state you long for—if only briefly. The only thing that can draw you out of this state and back into the experience of lack is an egoic thought—a thought about yourself, who you think you are, your life, or life in general. All of your thoughts and beliefs about yourself and about life create a sense of self and a story about life, which take you away from real life and the real experience of life in the present moment. When you are involved in this alternative reality instead of reality, you are, in essence, asleep to your true nature; you don't experience awakeness. You aren't awake to reality, but to the false reality.

The beauty is that you don't have to have an awakening to experience awakeness; you only have to drop out of absorption in your thoughts about yourself and your life into the Now. The more time you spend awake in the moment, the more likely the shift called awakening will happen. The foundation for this shift is prepared by being in the moment and becoming very familiar with what that's like and by falling in love with being in the moment. Then, when this shift happens, it will be very natural and not so surprising.

When there isn't an adequate foundation for or prior experience with awakeness, the shift of awakening can be disorienting and disruptive to one's life. When the ground hasn't been adequately prepared for the shift of awakening, it can be difficult to remain in the awake state, and the ego often re-constellates and regains power. This is one reason many are confused about whether they have had an awakening or not and what awakening is. Quite a few people have awakenings, but far fewer remain awake even after experiencing this shift because either the ground hasn't been adequately prepared to stay awake or the circumstances in their lives aren't supportive to remaining awake or both.

There's no way of knowing if you will awaken in this lifetime or not, although a deep longing for awakening points to that possibility and even probability. It's not up to you when this momentous shift takes place. However, if awakening is part of your soul's plan, you can, because you have free will, either choose to cooperate with that plan or interfere with or slow it down. So when you awaken is somewhat up to you, although your free will doesn't ultimately determine it. Someone can want, with all his or her heart, to awaken and perform practices that support that, but if it isn't time yet, awakening won't happen until it is time. Nevertheless, someone for whom awakening is primary is very likely to awaken because that intensity of desire for it and the willingness to make it a priority tend to indicate the soul's intention to awaken.

HOW TO DESTROY YOUR RELATIONSHIP IN A FEW EASY STEPS (AND HOW TO SAVE IT INSTEAD) from Gina's blog at radicalhappiness.com

•    Be honest about everything you don't like about your partner.
•    Get angry every time your partner doesn't live up to your expectations or do what you want. Or whine and complain a lot or withhold sex.
•    Try to improve your partner and shape him or her into your ideal mate, presumably for his or her own good.
•    Expect your partner to make you feel good and make you happy.
•    Blame your partner whenever anything goes wrong.
•    Remind your partner of his or her past mistakes.
•    Carry a negative image around of your partner, and notice all the ways your partner fits that image.
•    Reinforce your negative image of your partner by complaining about him or her to your friends.
•    Don't notice all the good and helpful things your partner does or what you love about your partner, just what he or she doesn't do well or what you don't like.
•    Expect your partner to change just because you want him or her to change.
•    Express your negative feelings to your partner whenever they come up.
•    Don't do things just to please him or her.
•    Don't ever say "I'm sorry," "Thank you," or other nice things.
•    Fantasize about being with someone else, especially while you're having sex with your partner.
•    Constantly process your feelings with your partner. Try to be each other's therapist.

We all have done these things in our relationships. We do some of these things because doing them is the path of least resistance, even though the results don't bring us the love we want. In other cases, we believe it is the way to relate to others. However, relationships work much better when certain principles are followed. Here are just a few:

•    Keep your judgments and negative thoughts and feelings to yourself. If there is something you don't like about your partner, the problem is not your partner, but that you don't like something. Once you realize this, it is possible to choose love over your preferences and desires. When we choose to accept our partner the way he or she is, love flows outward from within us to our partner, and that love is likely to be returned. But when we judge or try to change our partner to fit our "needs," expectations, and preferences, it is not a loving act: We stop the outflow of love from within us, and we are likely to stop the outflow of love from within the person we are judging or trying to change. Judgment stops and eventually kills love. No matter what you think or what you might prefer, your opinions, judgments, beliefs, and desires are not more important than love. If you make them more important than love, you will lose love.

•    Recognize and express gratitude often for what you appreciate about your partner. Notice what you love, and ignore and don't focus on what you don't like. Noticing what you love will get the love flowing between you. Noticing what you don't like will stop the love flowing.

•    Don't bring the past into the present moment. The past is gone, and only the present moment is real. Respond to the person who is in front of you, not to your images and ideas about him or her that you carry around with you. Try to see your partner freshly in this moment. And don't bring fantasies into the present moment. Be with the one you are with fully for as long as you are with that person. Don't waste your attention on memories or fantasies. Put your attention on what is real and true now. Love flows to whatever you give your attention to. If you give your attention to memories and fantasies, you won't be giving it to the real person in front of you. Love is attention.

•    Take responsibility for your feelings. If you have a negative feeling, you created it by telling yourself something. What did you just tell yourself that caused you to feel that way? Your partner can't cause you to feel a certain way, and it isn't in his or her power to change how you feel. You create your experience of life by what you tell yourself about life and whatever is happening.

•    Let your partner be the way he or she is. You are not in this world to change and improve your partner. That is your partner's business—and life's. Life has a way of evolving all of us. Accepting others is the greatest gift you can give them, and they will love you for that.

•    Make yourself happy. It isn't your partner's responsibility to make you happy. Learn to be happy within yourself. Happiness isn't something you get from something or someone outside yourself, but an attitude that you choose. You become happy by choosing to love life just as it happens to be showing up in the moment and by choosing to love your partner just as he or she happens to be showing up in the moment.

Please forward this newsletter to your friends. They can subscribe by going to http://www.radicalhappiness.com/newsletter-signup. When they do, they will receive two free e-books by Gina Lake.

For information about consultations, to order any of Gina’s books, to read book excerpts, to get free e-books, to listen to free recordings of talks or watch videos, or to read Gina's blog, please visit Gina's website: radicalhappiness.com