THE LOVING RELATIONSHIPS TRAINING
Sondra Ray Returns for One More
Sondra Ray is a rebirther, author, speaker and spiritual teacher, who has rebirthed thousands of people all over the world in the last 30 years. In this rare interview, she shares the origins of her groundbreaking Loving Relationships Training (LRT). Sondra first introduced this revolutionary training over 15 years ago. Never before had any training explained how your conception, gestation and birth experiences create patterns in your life and all of your relationships. We are pleased to share with you how she developed this life-changing workshop. Sondra has been coaxed out of “retirement” to lead the LRT one more time this August at UCLA. See end of article for details.
Maile Vanderford: Sondra, how did you get interested in studying relationships?
Sondra Ray: I used to interview my patients and ask them what happened right before they got sick because I was trying to study the triggering factor to illness. A lot of them told me a relationship broke up or they had a big problem in some kind of relationship—a marriage or a problem with their family members—and that seemed to be a triggering factor of their illness. So, that got in my head and I thought that was fascinating.
When when I got a divorce, the same thing happened to me, and I had a problem with my hair falling out—that made me really look at it. Later I went out to California, got a job and I was freshly divorced and looking for a seminar on relationships. There were all kinds of seminars in the 70s, but I couldn't find any on relationships, and I kept saying, “Where's the seminar on relationships?” And people said, “Everybody's too screwed up in relationships to teach it. And I thought, “Well, what are we going to do? Somebody's got to have a relationship's seminar. Does it have to be me? Maybe I have to teach it.”
I saw a need and I filled it, to be frank with you.” I decided that I would just do the best I could even though I didn't have all the answers for sure. That's how it started out. You teach what you need to learn, you know. So I needed to learn about that subject and so I started studying that subject.
Did you find anything that was especially helpful in creating LRT?
I was reading some research on relationships I came across this research done in a Minneapolis clinic in the 1980s and I read this study and it was so shocking to me that I thought, “I'd better do something.” It talked about the different stages of relationships. It called the first stage the romantic stage and said that stage lasted about two months.
The next stage was the disillusionment stage, when you find out all this stuff about the other person that you don't like and you get disappointed that they're not what you thought. It said this period could actually last for two years, and I thought, “Wow, that's shocking.”
But then it went on—the next stage is even worse—the misery stage. This is actual research done on average Americans in 1980s. The misery stage is when a relationship gets really stuck–like–they're probably married, have kids and aren't communicating. Maybe they're starting to have affairs, drink or gain weight, and all these problems are coming up, and they get into misery.
And then I was really shocked because they said this stage could actually last for 30 years. I read this and I just could not believe it. It was so shocking to me.
The next stage was the enlightenment stage, when each party stops blaming the other, starts looking at themselves and takes responsibility and says, “Well, maybe I should change.” That's called enlightenment—when you look at yourself.
The final stage was called mutual respect. My problem with the study is that by the time you go to that stage, you're too old to enjoy it. I said, “I refuse to go through this. I don't want to be one of the statistics, and I'm going to create a training that heals me and others. I want to skip 30 years of misery and go from the romantic stage straight to the enlightenment stage.” So that was my motivation – reading that study. It changed my life.
How is the Loving Relationships Training different from any other training on relationships?
It's really quite different because this training is based on birth and how your birth affects relationships. We have a rebirthing session right in the training. People lie down, breathe and release everything that comes up during the training. Both of the trainers that lead the training are rebirthers and know the rebirthing process. This gives a totally different energy to the whole thing.
If someone is going through a lot and they get stuck, they don't have to be stuck for the whole rest of the training. They can lie down in the back and get rebirthed, breathe it out and get right back in their chairs. So, it has a certain magic to it because of this energy. You know, I remember I took a training in the old days in the 70s, and one person stood up and they had them standing on the floor for hours and the rest of us had to sit there and wait while this person was being cleared, and he just couldn't get cleared. And we sat and sat through this, and that would never happen in the LRT because the person would just lie down and breathe if they got stuck.
The wonderful thing is having a rebirthing in the training Saturday night, so all day we're processing material about relationships and everybody gets quite activated. If we just sent them home like that, it would be a disaster. That sometimes happens in trainings where you go home and you have stuff going on. Instead, we rebirth people. They lie down and breathe for an hour as a group. It's also a very bonding experience and they leave cleared out from that day, which enables us to go to a much higher level the following day.
You mentioned that when people get activated, you can process them right then. What do you mean by activated?
Activated might be better said as “Have a charge on something.” For example, if there's a topic we're discussing like sex or something that a person has a lot of issues about and that they might have a charge on, they feel things in their body or they might be upset, cry or have to share because they feel a lot going on in their body, we would call that activated.
Another reason that this training is different than most trainings is we cover topics like incest—most people never have the nerve to discuss that in seminars—I felt it would be unethical to leave that out. We study incestuous patterns in families and how that affects your sex life and other things, and people can get fairly activated.
I can imagine. What research is this based on?
It's based on my research as a rebirther and goes way back to the 70s when I started helping people release their birth trauma through the breath. People were coming to me after a couple of sessions and telling me all their problems in their relationships: their problems with their marriage, with sex, with everything. I would give them a rebirthing session and they would have a birth memory and communicate it to me.
I was very surprised because I suddenly realized that the memory they had of their birth was affecting their relationships in present times, and this was like an “Aha” experience for me. A light bulb moment, when I realized there was a connection between what happened at birth and what later happens in relationships. I kept noticing this over and over. I didn't talk about it because nobody had ever done this research and I had to wait until I felt like I really had enough knowledge to speak about it.
When I was in Hawaii doing a seminar I just told people, “Let me explain to you what I've learned about how your birth affects relationships.” At the end of the day everybody just looked at me, their mouths were hanging open and they said, “This explains everything.” Then they asked me to tell all their friends, so the next day, I did the same thing and they had the same reaction.
So then I really got into this research, and I'm still studying it. That was how I originally wrote the training and what was the unique about it—everybody was so interested in that subject and still is.
Then other rebirthers joined with me and we put it all in the Loving Relationships Training. So it's quite unique because really nobody else could teach that unless they were rebirthers.
What are some of the examples of the points that you teach in this training?
One point we teach is that anything unresolved with your parents will come up in relationships, and that's really important. A lot of people want to talk about romance and they don't want to handle their parents. But if they don't handle their parents, that will mess up their relationships every time. We tend to attract our unfinished business and what is not resolved in the past will always come up. You have to resolve your relationship with your parents in order to have a good relationship now.
What do you mean an unresolved aspect of your relationship with your parents?
If someone has not forgiven their father for something, they will tend to create that issue in their marriage or their relationship. Whatever you have not forgiven, you tend to attract, because you'll keep recreating the thing you're upset about.
So if you have an alcoholic father, you may create an alcoholic mate?
Right. You might create an alcoholic mate or you may slowly drive one to drink who doesn't drink so that you'll get it again. You attract what's familiar. You attract what you're used to and what you're angry about. Love brings up anything unlike itself. So, let's say your mate loves you a lot and puts a lot of energy toward you. What that will do is that is energy moving into your system, and that will push up anything that's unlike love. It's like pouring water into a glass with mud at the bottom, the mud gets stirred up. When someone pours love into your consciousness, your subconscious gets stirred up and anything unlike love will come out. That could be hate, fear, guilt—all this stuff has to be handled.
In the old paradigm of your parents, nobody knew how to handle that. So they would either stuff it or act it out and get in a fight. So, in the training we have a way of handling anything unlike love that comes up. It's really important that people learn this principle.
What are some of the ways that you would handle that?
In the training, we would have people share, or get rebirthed, do a writing process or communicate to another person, and we talk about how to handle it in life. You carry on with some spiritual practice in life to deal with that. Most of the things we teach in the training are specifically things that you can use at home to heal yourself also.
You're mentioning how you noticed one's birth affects one's relationships. Can you give some examples of how one's birth can affect your relationship?
Let's just say that the person is a female, and at her birth she was pulled out by a male doctor, hung upside down and hit on the ass by the doctor, which was common practice. Babies have decisions that they make about that. They actually have proverbial thoughts before they can speak about such a thing. They might develop a thought, “Men hurt me,” from the beginning, and then they suppress that thought.
When they grow up and start going out with men, that energy pushes up the thought, “Men hurt me.” They set it up to have the men hurt them and then they say, “See, I knew it. Men hurt me.” They reinforce the thought and then they keep creating it. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's one example. Your life really can't work until you get these core beliefs up and out.
So, you learn these core beliefs, but then are you stuck with them? I mean, what do you do to get rid of them?
The first thing is seeing the truth about something. When you see the truth about something, then it can be healed. The first thing is to identify what your decision was, and then change the thought to the opposite, which is called an affirmation. You also have to breathe out the old thought from the cells. So the combination of affirmations and rebirthing is the treatment.
So just bringing the core belief to your awareness can be enough to shift that energy, plus you do affirmations to counter that thought, and you do breathing to breathe it out of your system.
Exactly.
Fabulous. So, what people—age and relationship status—would you recommend take the LRT?
We've had people as young as 10, and we've had people as old as 85 take the training, so it applies for all age groups. Originally, I did not have children in the training because we had the subject of sex, but when I was doing a preview in New York City in the front row there was all these children. They said they wanted to know what was in the training because their parents took the training and had totally changed. They wanted to know what was in there. Their parents all agreed to let them take it and that was one of the most powerful trainings I ever did. The kids would stand up and tell everything going on in their family. They knew everything.
Then we ended up experimenting with a children's training, so now we don't usually let children in anymore.
With couples and singles – it doesn't matter. If you're single, you're looking for a relationship, this is the place to be. The LRT literally will save you decades of time. Instead of going through it the hard way, sweating it out for ten years, take a training like this and find out decades of research in three days.
You know what I noticed, too, having taken it myself, is relationships can also include your relationships with your children or with your work, your boss, because they've had births and traumas and they project things.
Absolutely. It applies to all relationships. In my opinion, all there is is relationships, so the data can apply to your relationship with your boss because you can set your boss up to be your father just like you can set your husband up to be your father.
So what actually is rebirthing?
Well, one thing it's not is therapy. We don't do therapy on people at all. This is a spiritual purification process. In the course of miracles, it says about therapy, “How can you get the light when you're analyzing the darkness?” So we're not doing any analysis. We're pulling the light into the body and pushing out the darkness. So it's fantastic and it's very magical.
It is a simple breathing process done in a certain way that breathing has to be precise. It's done in the upper chest, not like yoga breathing in the stomach. You pull on the inhale and relax on the exhale, and it has to be in a circular smooth rhythm with no holding at the top and no holding at the bottom or it stops the energy. So this is conscious, connected breathing. You're breathing in a circle and the circle causes the energy to accumulate in the body. Then, the energy has an innate intelligence and it goes exactly to the part of the body that's stuck that needs a release. Then the body starts tingling and vibrating, which means that its working and new energy is coming in, so it's also a rejuvenation process. It's a spiritual purification process, and we consider it very sacred.
The Centre is presenting the LRT, taught one last time by Sondra Ray Aug. 23-26 at UCLA. For more information visit www.thecentre.com , or call 818-468-7324. See ad pg. 51. Sondra Ray is the author of Pele's Wish and most recently, Relationships Treasury . Renaissance of Rebirthing will be published soon. Her website is www.sondraray.com. Maile Vanderford is a rebirther and a LRT trainer. She is the founder of The Centre, which offers classes, healing, massage, and Loving Relationship Trainings in the Los Angeles area.
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