The Fruit Code: The Spiritual Shortcut to Loving Your SELF and Others

By Dr. Jeffrey Ickes

The Fruit Code: The Spiritual Shortcut to Loving Your SELF and Others provides an honest and humorous look at ourselves from the inside out, while learning to identify, honor, and appreciate the diversity and uniqueness of others. Readers are provided a groundbreaking method for discovering and unlocking their own inner human spirits. And they will also have fun using this method to quickly recognize the unique and different spirit types within their fruity families, flavorful friends, nutty neighbors, and assorted acquaintances. Current relationships can be repaired or enhanced while new dynamic ones created by using the book’s simple decoding tools and straightforward relationship principles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636303536

Book preview

cover.jpg

The Fruit Code

The Spiritual Shortcut to Loving Your SELF and Others

Dr. Jeffrey Ickes

ISBN 978-1-63630-352-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63630-353-6 (Digital)

Copyright © 2021 Dr. Jeffrey Ickes

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

Personality And Spirituality: An Introduction to The Fruit Code

Decoding The Passionate Plum: The Feeling Spirit

Decoding The Analytical Apple: The Thinking Spirit

Decoding The Pleasing Pineapple: The Dual-Modality Spirit

Decoding The Talkative Peach: The Verbal Spirit

Decoding The Commanding Coconut: The Commander-in-Chief Spirit

Decoding the Belonging Banana: The Serving Spirit

Decoding The Fearless Orange: The Adventurous Spirit

Fruit Salad, Anyone?: Blended Spirits

Self Care: To Thine Own SELF Be True

The Four Pillars of Spirit-Based Relationships: and Relationship Actualization

Love Thy Neighbor: Ten Principles for Spirit-Based Relationship Success

Dedication

There are many that I would like to acknowledge in this dedication. My beautiful Pineapple partner who has inspired me with her commitment to live life daily by the highest spiritual principles, my Peach mom, Coconut dad, and Apple brother, and so many other spirits who constantly remind me about the inner goodness of people. However, one spirit spoke to me above all the rest in terms of her purity of heart, exuberance of spirit, and consistency of unconditional love, I thereby dedicate this book to the ultimate Plum spirit that I have known:

Lulu, even though she passed on this year, her incredible spirit remains firmly in my heart.

Acknowledgment

I also need to acknowledge the incredible talent of Aurora Sidney-Ando whose beautiful illustrations perfectly capture the essence of each of the spirit types. Thank you my friend for sharing your talent with me and now with so many others.

Section 1

Introduction and Deciphering Key 1

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

—e.e. cummings

Chapter 1

Personality And Spirituality:

An Introduction to The Fruit Code

Personality and Spirituality

Let’s face it—in the search to discover who we are and to impress others, we do a lot of quirky things. We try on, take off, change, and rearrange outside parts of ourselves, hoping to create positive impressions and avoid negative labels. We want others to be real and honest with us in our relationships, and then we color our hair to cover the grey, wear clothes to hide our love handles, pad and cinch to change our shapes, use creams to cover wrinkles, or post Photoshop enhanced pictures of ourselves on websites that make us look younger and thinner. We emulate celebrities, movie stars, and other human icons even though we suspect their lives may be troubled; we look everywhere but inside ourselves to help answer those age old questions that haunt us in our quieter moments: Who am I? and Who could possibly love me as I am?

The problem is that this crazy, quirky activity remains truly unrewarding. It takes a lot of time, energy, and expense to become a media version of attractive and popular; it takes a lot of heartache and disappointment to realize that even after all of our frantic activity, we are sometimes not what our ideal friends, family, or partners think we should be. While filling our days with all sorts of ways to change or hide our actual self, we all the while miss that deep inner satisfaction that comes from knowing and being at home with oneself, while ever yearning for more authentic connections with the true self of other people we meet. When we give too much attention to our outside world, and too little to the world inside us, we often travel a long road away from our authentic self.

Outside SELF versus Inside SELF: The Road Home

The Fruit Code: The spiritual shortcut to loving your SELF and others is not just another self-help relationship book. As a reader of self-help books you probably have taken inventories to understand your personality, answered questions about your love languages, analyzed your astrological signs, or even delved into the eastern mysteries of enneagram types. You may have created artificially positive social network profiles of yourself for Internet strangers based on relationship matching surveys that promise love ever after. Like many readers of relationship books you have also likely analyzed your physical appearance, your verbal and non-verbal communication signals to partners, and have solicited feedback from trusted friends (and maybe some who are not so trusted) who are just as confused as you are. And now you are reading this book, so what is different?

This book utilizes a radically different approach. In stark contrast, The Fruit Code works from the inside out. It assists you in reaching your human potential by refocusing your energy inward to nourish your human spirit at its core where all authentic relationship roots originate. The tools provided are not designed to have you change who you are, but rather the book’s innovative, easy-to-learn, and incredibly intuitive framework will help you to renew and enhance the you that is already present without making major external changes required by other approaches. Ultimately, the recognition, awareness, and nourishing of your inner spirit and the spirits of others will lead to permanently deep and satisfying relationships with others and with yourself.

Be True to Your Spirit SELF

In this big world filled with about 6.7 billion people, there are no examples of human perfection to serve as the ultimate standard; to be human is to be imperfect, quirky, and a unique expression of one’s own genetics, experiences, and most importantly, that something more at the core of our being—our spirit—that stands ever ready to guide and energize us on our path to becoming a fully authentic expression of our human potential.

We are all familiar with the word spirit from common phrases like kindred spirit, team spirit, broken spirit, even Christmas spirit. But what exactly is the human spirit? The Free Dictionary says that the spirit is the force or principle believed to animate living beings and endures after departing from the body (Spirit, 2019). The spirit has also been described as a fundamental emotional and activating principle determining one’s character (Spirit, 2016). The Bible says that the human spirit is the very breath of God that was breathed into humans at the beginning of God’s creation (Genesis 2:7, KJV). It is indeed ironic that our spirit is perhaps the most fundamental and most defining part of who we are as individuals and yet we have mostly ignored it as we plow into relationships in this earthly world. Why is that?

Part of the reason we have tended to ignore the human spirit’s powerful presence in defining who we are and how we relate to others is because the spirit is an invisible force, not easily measured, mostly associated with the more mysterious and faith-based domain of religion. Also, because of its seemingly mysterious and somewhat complex inner nature, we seldom take the time to decipher our spirit’s specific needs, gifts, and influence on us. It simply is easier to judge others and us on outside things like appearance, behaviors, interests, and personality. However, this book posits that those outside things are at best only the fruit of the spirit and while they may provide clues as to the nature of the human spirit, they may actually detour us on the road to relationship success if we exclusively focus on them. If you truly want to know yourself deeply and authentically relate to others, you need to begin inside of yourself and truly understand the dynamics of your unique human spirit at its core.

The question then becomes, how does one understand the human spirit at its core when the spirit is such an indiscernible, non-quantifiable entity? The answer is that the investigation into the human spirit simply requires a more intuitive, non-linear approach to reveal its nature. And it is this creative qualitative approach that this book utilizes to unlock The Fruit Code: The spiritual shortcut to loving your SELF and others. Specifically, we can begin to know the nature of our spirit by knowing the fruit it has produced in our lives including our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and interactions with others. Just like we can know qualities of the seed that produced a certain fruit by inspecting that fruit, so we can also begin to understand the inside spirit of a person by observing that individual as he/she interfaces with life. And ultimately, to accurately identify, comprehend, and embrace the unique spirit within, we must appreciate the ways in which these separate elements have been combined and transformed to produce your spiritual fruit.

In this book you will discover whether you primarily have a Plum spirit, an Apple spirit, a Pineapple spirit, a Coconut spirit, an Orange spirit, a Peach spirit or a Banana spirit. To accomplish this, The Fruit Code: The spiritual shortcut to loving your SELF and others will take you on an enjoyable journey of self-discovery about the human spirit by providing a simple tool for recognizing different spirit types. Specifically, this book introduces you to seven unique spirit types each represented by a particular fruit. Each type of spirit has its own distinct attributes, needs, communication styles, and personal challenges. Quite simply, The Fruit Code: The spiritual shortcut to loving your SELF and others will help you decipher the millions of seemingly invisible facets of each spirit type into an easy to understand and user-friendly model that will quickly translate into a healthier spirit inside you and more authentic relationships outside.

After deciphering the code presented in this book, you will automatically shift your focus from the outside world to the world inside and find there an amazing source of positive power and energy waiting to be actualized. That energy and power is at the core of what is essential and eternally good about you. Discovering your own distinct spirit type and nourishing its unique needs will ignite the spiritual energy source deep inside of you. You can then share this spirit energy with others to create authentic relationship bonds that will endure the test of time. Your human spirit will allow you to make spirit-based connections with all kinds of spirits, even ones that at first glance seem to be very different from you. To underscore that authentic and eternal spirit self that will be targeted in this book, the following acronym is coined:

S pirit

E nergy

L iving

F orever

Thus, the spirit self—or SELF—is the energy at the core of your being that guides you in the actualization or full expression of your humanity. It is what is best about you, what is most loving and lovable, most precious and most notable, most endearing and yes—most juicy. The SELF is your best and most authentic self; it is the SELF whose energy creates the most satisfying of human bonds. It is the SELF that will positively and permanently connect you to others.

Keys to Relationship Success

To be successful in relationships with others, you must first be successful with yourself and that requires becoming rooted at the core of who you are. This begins by identifying your own spirit type and its associated needs. When these needs are recognized and met, an inner energy is generated that not only guides and feeds the further growth and development of your spirit, but also energizes others around you. This internal grounding and source of energy eliminates much of the neediness that may have spoiled your previous relationships and allows you to enter new relationships in a more authentic and life-giving way. Thus, free from