Learn how your ad can appear here! Get Your Vision Board Iphone/Ipod App and start moving toward your dreams today! Books by this Author All Aboard the Brain Train Teach Your Child to Travel a Purpose-Filled Path Think of your child’s brain as a series of train tracks with thousands of stations. The Brain can be trained to travel to magnificent destinations. "All Aboard the Brain Train" will help you train your child’s brain to lay tracks in the most positive directions.   Friendship on Fire: 52 Weeks to Passionate and Intimate Connections for Life Do you feel like the sparkle in your relationship is dying? If you want to start – or keep – the glow of love in your relationships, then begin building a solid Friendship on Fire.   The New Marriage: Transcending The Happily Ever After Myth Make your marriage succeed, even though seven out of ten couples who marry today will eventually divorce. Learn how to identify and overcome the emotional problems that arise from marital troubles, and gain the knowledge to achieve a long-lasting union. Strengthen yourself and your partner instead of helplessly watching your marriage dissolve.   Train Your Brain: 8 Keys to Successful Relationships (CD) This CD is taken from Dr. Miles’ successful radio appearances around the country. Through humor and real life examples from her practice as a Marriage and Family Therapist, Dr. Miles focuses on how to stop blaming and start living.   Train Your Brain: For a Peaceful Pregnancy (CD) Stress for the mother equates to stress for the baby! Parent's reactions to stress, train the child's brain. Parent's relaxation can train them better.   Train Your Brain: For Successful Relationships Love is a Practice. You CAN change your brain patterns and chemistry. A respected Neuroscientist, Dr. Wayne Drevets explains, "In the brain, practice makes permanent." With regular use, this CD is designed to create more inner peace.. Using techniques that have been researched at major universities, Dr. Linda Miles, psychotherapist and author for thirty years, leads you through mental exercises for mind and body control that research has shown to effectively lower blood pressure, improve sleep, improve the immune system and reduce stress reactions.   Train Your Brain: To Be Heart Smart Deep Relaxation Techniques. Specifically designed for people at risk for heart problems (high blood pressure, family history, elevated cholesterol, type A personality) or those with cardiovascular symptoms or problems or those recovering from heart surgery.   Unlimited Autoresponders! Unlimited AdTracking! Free 30 Day Trial! http://www.trafficwave.net Feature Articles: The First Step to Manifesting Money... Goal Achieving Strategy - Thinking Prosperity... Build a Better Business - Give Up the Copy-ca... Life Balance: 3 Ways to Bring More Peace and ... 3 Biggest Mistakes With the Laws of Attractio... How to Detox and Balance your Immune System f... Thanksgiving Day and the Secret to Wellbeing... Vegan Handbags: Where Style Meets Compassion... Click here for more >>

Are you focusing on who and what you want with a partner? Or are you focusing on who and what you don´t want? Because, we do get exactly what we expect.

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, famous author and Jungian analyst, created these 12 characteristics to seek in a long term partner. The 12 points are listed below, then I expanded upon them.

Here is a Guide for Conscious Choices in a Partner.

1. Kindness and Respect - The __expression, "we should treat family like strangers and strangers like family," is indicative of the amount of disrespect that is tolerated in relationships. This attitude is a barrier to the basic building blocks of long-term goodwill and respect.

2. Ability To Learn: Curiosity - Although it is normal to have disagreements and power struggles, many couples fail to learn from conflicts and may repeat the same self destructive scenarios and behaviors for decades. We shouldn't´t talk unless we can improve on silence. As James Thurber noted, our tendency is to look back in anger or forward in fear, instead of "around in awareness."

3. Flexibility - Many people grew up in rigid families, with rigid roles. Consequently, it doesn´t occur to them to let go of patterns that clearly aren´t working.

4. Ability To Hear Your Pain - This is what often brings couples into therapy, because they have not learned to sit and listen to one another with empathy and compassion.

5. A Deep Inner Life On A Personal Journey - Often couples become too fused together, losing their individual joys and passions.

6. Similar Passions - (Ability to have many varied good times together) - Many couples lose their pleasure bond with each other, sharing mostly complaints and drudge.

7. Similar Values - Unfortunately we read too many "happily ever after" fairy tales, instead of understanding the importance of conscious negotiation of rules, roles, religion, and money issues, early-on in couple-hood.

8. Compassion - Many people learn "shame and blame" games in their family. They engage in rascal hunting and learn to use these behaviors in close relationships. Families fail to watch each other with "soft eyes," (Levine 1995) in order to address problem behaviors in a gentle manner without judgment about toward partners. Often a partner will take the "moral high ground" and lecture to the other about perceived inadequacies. Instead, of compassion shared between two equals, partners often relate to each other like they are parents of children.

9. Ability To Laugh At Ones Self - Because many people grew up in a shame-blame environment, it is difficult for them to look at themselves lightly.

10. Substance Abuse, Dishonesty, Cover-up – A lack of knowledge about substance abuse introduces a wild card into relationships. Also, dishonesty and cover-up cause a build-up of bad feelings, becoming ”brown stamps.” This can lead to what I call the “anchovy pizza” syndrome. In my practice I have seen countless couples who`ve saved “brown stamps” of bad feelings, until they are ready to cash them in at the break-up redemption center. In one such case, a woman saved book after book of bad feelings about her husband`s inability to hear her needs. The last stamp was pasted when he ordered an anchovy pizza. She hated anchovies. Then, she announced, to his shock, that the pizza was the last food he`d ever order for her, because she wanted a divorce.

11. Ability To Be A Friend And Not Just A Lover – Passion without friendship in relationships, is like doing somersaults on a circus trapeze without a safety net.

12. Someone Who Makes Your Life Bigger, Not Smaller – Unfortunately, too many people grew up seeing family in terms of correction-city, drudge and duty. Consequently, they perceive commitment as a prison sentence, instead of a shared adventure.

Although, this is an easy list to memorize, the difficulty lays in breaking the patterns that prevent maintenance of our desired behaviors. Peggy Papp, a famous family therapist remarked that we come out of our own family of origin with a “cookie-cutter” approach to life and it requires “heroic moments” to change the shape of our own cookie-cutters.

Visualize your dream relationship several times a day and that will help to begin to change your cookie-cutter. Focus on who and what you want, instead of who and what you don`t want. Only one person can defeat you in the endeavor, that person is you. Inner correction, creates outer correction.

Abraham Lincoln said, “Man is just about as happy as he makes up his mind to be.”

Copyright 2005 Linda Miles Ph.D