The Conscious Heart (11 page)

Committing to full, healthy responsibility is a path, not a single event or a mark on a chart. It always reveals our learning edge. Each time we step into full responsibility for a situation, we discover more creativity in ourselves. As one of our clients once exclaimed to us, “I’m creativity waiting to happen, and I’m also the cop waiting to stop me!” For us, taking responsibility frees the energy that has been tied up in the power struggle and makes it available to create projects, to make up stories for our granddaughter, to play with our cat, Lucy. Now, whenever our creative juice wanes, we ask ourselves: “Where am I not taking 100 percent responsibility right now?” We actively search for the places where we’ve slipped into victim or rescuer. Sure enough, as soon as the imbalance is corrected, creativity flows again, immediately.

C
OMMITTING TO
H
APPINESS

C
hoosing happiness and harmony in our relationship was the most radical thing either of us could have done. It was truly setting forth into the unknown: To our knowledge, it had never been done before in either of our genetic histories. Once we regarded
it as a thrilling adventure—a spiritual path of the most sacred kind—we began to savor even its challenges and adversities. As Barry Targan once said, “Adventure is hardship aesthetically considered.” The founders of the United States created this country as a place for the “pursuit of happiness.” When we first heard this idea in school, we did not understand it fully because we thought of “pursuit” as chasing after something. It brought to mind the image of millions of people running after happiness, which was trying to elude them like a scared rabbit. But in the days of the founders, the word
pursuit
meant a job or profession; it was common to say you were taking up the “pursuit” of law or medicine. So in America happiness is our profession, and we all have to ask ourselves if we are doing our job.

When we look into our granddaughter Elsie’s eyes, it’s absolutely clear that the essence of human beings is happiness. We are meant to express our deepest selves, and our children remind us that the pure expression of joy is at our very center. We pursue happiness on a daily basis. When a wave of happiness crests, we like to say so out loud to each other: “I’m happy!” (When one or the other of us is traveling, we sometimes forget that our usual audience is missing. Recently Gay was down in the locker room after working out at the gym. As he and a bunch of guys were changing clothes, he exclaimed, “I’m happy!” without editing himself. Several people gave him slightly strained smiles and more space, but several others said, “Yeah, me too!”)

C
OMMITTING TO
E
MBRACING
O
URSELVES WITH
L
OVE

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earning to love ourselves is one of the key lessons of the conscious heart. One reason that traditional religions have lost favor today is that shame pervades their teachings. People now seem to be tired of feeling bad about themselves. Over the past few
decades, a new wave of psychology and spirituality has swept the world, a wave that is cleansing the old shame-based spirituality from our minds and bodies. The shame-based model is still firmly in control in much of the world, however, and if we look deeply enough, most of us can find it in the cells of our own beings. To love ourselves, and to become a space in which others can love themselves, is a high calling and a foundation stone of the path.

Psychologist John Gottman’s extensive marital research indicates that in relationships that thrive, the ratio of appreciations to criticisms is at least five to one. We like to invite our workshop participants to practice that ratio in their close relationships. One of our friends, Liz Barrow, taught her daughter Mary about appreciations and shared with us recently her daughter’s use of the game.

“I worry about my weight, which bothers Mary, because she loves me and thinks I am beautiful. If she finds me looking critically at my image in the mirror, she demands that I state five appreciations about my fat. When I get stuck trying to think of
anything
to appreciate about fat, she prompts me. ‘Mom, I love the way it jiggles when you dance. Feel how soft it is. Here’s what Miss Greenfield [her large teacher] told me: She was swimming in the ocean and got stung by some jellyfish, and it didn’t even hurt her because her fat protected her! Your fat will help you if you get stung by jellyfish.’ ”

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OMMITTING TO
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REATIVITY

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any relationships are transformed when both partners make soul-level commitments to their creativity. The greatest source of pain on our planet is untapped creativity and wasted potential. In the Third World untapped potential may be seen in the squalor of a Brazilian squatters’ town or in the haunted eyes of a veiled woman in a Tehran marketplace. In Europe and America the same pain may be seen in a shopping mall, where the creative
potential of millions is squandered to fuel the hungry machinery of a consumer society.

When you commit to the full expression of creativity and to facilitating the creativity of people around you, a major shift happens in your relationship. For one thing, making this commitment ends control. As therapists, we have been amazed at the amount of energy people spend trying to control things and people that are outside their control. Many people seem to think that others are there only to be controlled by them. The key to any spiritual path is to release control. It is fine and wise to have goals and plans, but if you think you can control exactly where you are going and how you are going to get there, you are thumbing your nose at God. If you think you know where your partner should go, look out.

C
OMMITTING TO
C
ELEBRATION

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ife works better when we commit to living in waves of learning and appreciation rather than in contractions of control. This commitment won’t stop the occasional spasm of control, but it will let you and the universe know that you do not plan to take them as seriously.

When you commit to celebration as an operating principle, you set a high emotional tone for your relationship. The dictionary tells us that
to celebrate
is “to praise and honor publicly” and “to have a convivial good time.”
Convivial
, by the way, comes from the Latin word
convivium
, “a banquet or feast.” Both of these intentions are important to a spiritual path. When we can praise and honor publicly our close relationships and live in them as an ongoing feast, we are using our relationships fully.

Celebration moves happiness into a higher gear by bringing more people to the feast. When you publicly appreciate your relationship, you inspire the heartfelt participation of your larger community. You widen the circle of essence by sharing the full
expression of yourselves. We can all remember to source joy more easily when we are in committed company.

Making these soul-commitments has put us on the right path. They have not prevented us from slipping into our painful old patterns, but they have given us a place to come home to. A soul-commitment is like a destination to an airline pilot on a long journey: You will always have a tendency to drift away from your course, but the drift and its correction are both built into the plan. When the drift occurs—and it occurred for us a hundred times a week in our early days—you have a plan for coming back into alignment with the destination.

FOUR

How to Keep from Sabotaging Your Commitments

Most of our energy goes into upholding our importance. If we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusion of our grandeur, and two, we would provide ourselves with enough energy to catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe
.

—CARLOS CASTANEDA

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e all sabotage our commitments in one way or another, and we all need to find out how and why. If we see the reasons clearly, we are less likely to act them out. There are four main reasons we break commitments: We make insincere commitments; we commit to things we cannot control; we leave a back door open; and we make unconscious commitments that contradict the original commitment. Ultimately all of these reasons are rooted in the same problem, fear.

F
EAR
: T
HE
U
LTIMATE
S
ABOTEUR

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he power of commitment is so great that it flushes our deepest fears from out of the depths of ourselves. On a Sunday afternoon one client couple made a commitment to financial equality in their relationship, but on Monday morning they were close to calling their lawyers about divorce. After several sweaty days and a couple of conference calls, they realized that they had gotten caught (again!) in their fear of being overpowered. Both had had intrusive, dominating parents and had learned to shoot from the hip at the slightest hint of unfairness. Her request that they control the business assets equally set off a storm of accusations and justifications. This is the power of unconscious commitment: It wants to keep you in the first zone—the familiar zone of the known. When your conscious commitments take off, you soar into the third zone of the unknown, the expression of your true potential. Then fear kicks in, and we either fall prey to it or soar beyond it. To help you soar beyond it, understanding how fear works is crucial.

Fear is the real issue underneath questions like “Can I get my needs met?” and “Is it safe to grow toward autonomy in this relationship?” When you’re afraid in close relationships, you are usually feeling one of the following fears:

• I’m afraid I’m inadequate and unworthy of love.

• I’m scared of losing your love.

• I’m afraid of dying.

• I’m afraid of letting go of control.

• I’m scared of getting old.

• I’m scared of not being able to take care of myself.

• I’m afraid of losing my connection with my creative energy.

• I’m afraid of being alone.

• I’m scared there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.

Fear causes contraction. When we’re scared, we contract the muscles around the navel, fold in around the core, steel ourselves
to survive, and cut off the flow of energy to our own essence and to the hearts of those close to us. Failing to see that we have cut ourselves off from our own experience and essence, we assume that others have cut us off.

When we get scared, we forget how to love ourselves, and we certainly forget that others love us. As for our loving others, forget it entirely—in those moments they’re the enemy. Adults who are afraid can instantly revert to ancient survival patterns that they learned before they entered school. The veneer of adult life can peel off very quickly in the face of big fear. One moment you’re in love; the next you’re going for the jugular as a rampaging two- or three-year-old, if not as a raging infant.

When we’re in the grip of fear, we can contract in several styles, some of which don’t look like contractions on the surface. Anger, for example, can be a cover-up for fear. When you’re angry, go ahead and say it, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t solve the problem. You can pound a pillow to discharge the physical energy of anger, but you will never really get rid of it that way because the real issue is fear. Many people come out swinging at each other when they’re really afraid of losing each other.

We worked with a couple recently who were on the verge of separation after a weeklong battle. On the surface it looked like it was his fault. He had broken their agreement that he would not see an old girlfriend. He had seen her in a social situation but had withheld that information from his fiancée for several days until she guessed that something was wrong and confronted him. Then he reluctantly told her about this incident, which he sarcastically said “didn’t mean anything.” She was making a big deal out of nothing, he declared. He expounded loudly and at some length about how he and his friends allowed each other some “basic humanness”—an allowance for mistakes that she, “Ms. High Standards for Everybody,” obviously didn’t. She spit back that what really galled her was that he had stonewalled when she had sensed distance between them and repeatedly asked him what was wrong. Her arms windmilling, she yelled that his withholding drove her “crazy.”

We blew the metaphoric whistle and asked each of them to take a breath. What fear was their anger covering? we asked. Both of them quickly saw that just prior to the broken agreement, they had decided to live together after a particularly sweet and intimate weekend retreat. He saw that he had been afraid to give up the freedom of a separate residence and had retreated into righteous anger about her controlling behavior. She realized that she had climbed to the high ground of moral superiority out of her fear that she would lose herself if they got closer. They shifted back into seeing and supporting each other’s essence only when they identified and expressed their fears.