My mentor don Margarito used to say: “Respeto a todos!” – (I respect everyone!)

When two people live in mutual respect, respect continues to multiply on both sides.

When you respect yourself, you respect your partner and people around you also respect you both. And when people respect you, all your projects grow as do you yourselves. By raising up your loved one, you raise yourselves up. And vice versa.

A relationship can be built over many years and completely destroyed in a second when respect is lost. Juan told me that one evening he was eating in a restaurant with his girlfriend when he suddenly caught her look of disgust directed at him. At that very moment he realized that the relationship had come to an end. One glance was enough to end everything.

If you catch yourselves looking at other men or women as potential partners while walking outside with your loved one, this can be called the beginning of the end. It means that you haven’t yet chosen decisively and are still on the lookout. And this process can be long-drawn-out.

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Unfortunately the main principle of happiness in a couple – devotion towards each other – has almost been lost in our modern society. This is the feeling that, every time you meet your chosen one, you are meeting as if for the first time —la primera vez. And every time you are amazed by the huge mystery before you.

Many people having lived side by side for many years do not even know each other. A couple came on one of our expeditions to Mexico and there they discovered things about each other which they hadn’t been able to discover during all their years spent together. Nature untouched by civilization and the holy mountains of Oaxaca Madre de Sur helped them finally to get to know each other and openly look into each other’s hearts.

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There are unions in which partners feed and strengthen each other like wind and fire, and there are those for which the opposite is true – they suppress and weaken each other like fire and water.

What happened between my ex and I one day was the turning point in our relationship.

45 days had gone by since the start of my last period. My ex started panicking. He said that we urgently need to buy a pregnancy test. I asked him uneasily what the panic was for. He answered that the faster we find out, the faster we can get rid of the undesirable consequences. Everything inside me tightened up. Something collapsed. I felt how two halves in my stomach – Yin and Yang – which were getting ready to fuse inside me any moment now, split into two that very second. I used my willpower to split them apart because I was only open to a mutual decision. There was no fusion and my period started the next day.

I didn’t want my child to feel unwanted. I didn’t want my child to feel lack of love and negation from their parent already in the womb.

No trickery. Either all or nothing.

I knew that I would only conceive a child with a man who truly loved me, who would want children from me, who would be able to give me and the baby tons of love and care, who would be able to deal with the whims of pregnancy, who would melt my heart with boundless gentleness. And this would be mutual.

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Do not allow anyone to destroy your woman’s essence – to be a mother, conceive, be loved… However hard it is psychologically, materially and emotionally sometimes it’s better to leave everything and just go. Don’t leave it for later; the more a woman lives with a man the more attached she becomes to him. But attachment is cured with time.