The Conscious Heart (27 page)

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INTRODUCTION

Twenty-one Lessons on the Path

A
s we open the conscious heart of relationship, we encounter new potentials every day. Once we made the master commitment to allow our relationship itself to be our primary teacher, we have never had a dull moment together. We have had moments charged with the full range of feeling, from grief and anger to ecstasy, but these experiences have always carried learnings that were just what we needed to know at the time. In Part Three we would like to present some of the most important lessons we have learned as we’ve ridden these waves in our relationship and seen others take off on their own magnificent surf-journeys.

We have organized this material around common problems and issues that come up in close relationships. We often ask couples who are in relationship struggles, “What would you be doing with your energy if you weren’t involved in this conflict?” Here we report on what we’ve learned.

1/Finding Balance

T
he Cirque du Soleil is a fantastic surreal circus whose performers have so mastered the art of balance that they take it into another dimension. In a recent performance one man walked backward up a pole with his body straight out horizontally. We admire and enjoy the strength and balance that makes such optical treats possible. But we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the hours of practice necessary to achieve a single moment of perfect balance.

People often don’t appreciate or tolerate the hours of practice that make a balanced relationship possible. What is balance in a relationship? Is it simply dividing up the tasks, qualities, and roles?
Most of us pick partners who are not just like us but complement us. Then we spend the next years and decades trying to change them into ourselves. What would it look like to support balance, both in ourselves and in our partners?

Balance can be cultivated by deliberately going off-balance and then recovering, falling into your relating with trust that truth or love will catch you. Commentators for the 1996 Olympic gymnastics events in Atlanta often mentioned that a performer lost balance because he or she was too cautious. Contrary to what you might expect, the gymnast who held back from hurtling into the unknown was often the one who wobbled or fell. Balance does not mean clinging to your position until death pries your fingers away. When you let go of a conviction, especially being right, the load lightens. You dump ballast to ride higher on the waves of relating. Most of us have too much ballast, not too little.

Attaining balance means opening to opposites, eating and digesting opposites in yourself so you don’t expect your partner or the world to take on that function for you. For example, someone who doesn’t know what she wants might squander her creative skills by imagining what her partner wants or what he thinks she wants. She could tie up her creative energies further by evaluating whether he is meeting her vague and unformed expectations. Even if she focuses on a virtue, like giving, and consciously gives her time and skills and attention to those who need them—but doesn’t look at giving to herself or receiving from others—that imbalance puts a strain on the relationship. It’s like being on a seesaw with one end heavily weighted. No flow between opposites can occur. Couples can create a continuum by appreciating their opposites, by owning the fluctuation between opposites of yes and no, powerful and powerless, do and don’t.

Anytime you feel stuck, your experiential seesaw may be weighted. You may not realize that you have options to rebalance it. You can ask, “What is the opposite quality from this experience?” It’s probably something you see in your partner that you either resent or envy. If your complaint is about your partner’s
messiness, for example, you may not be giving yourself enough free unstructured time or play time. If you envy your partner’s articulateness or grasp of ideas, try using the energy you are putting into that envy to develop those skills in yourself.

When you actually see life through your partner’s eyes and take a few steps on his or her path, you begin to re-own the polarities of separation. List in your mind the qualities of your partner that differ from yours, both positive and gratingly negative. Here’s a sample list:

• My partner is much smarter than me.

• My partner is the messiest person I’ve ever met.

• My partner is never on time.

• I’m the disciplinarian. My partner is just mush around the children.

• My partner lets me do all the talking and never speaks up, especially in social gatherings.

• My partner couldn’t balance a checkbook if death were the consequence for failure.

• My partner is the creative one in this family.

• I’m the feeler, and my partner is the thinker.

• I’m the provider, and my partner is the homemaker.

Now take a moment and breathe. Flex your body to actually try each of your partner’s qualities on yourself, as if you were putting on a new outfit. Take on the body posture of messiness or being the provider. Spend five minutes doing a daily task from your partner’s perspective. What does life look like from that viewpoint?

All polarities are invitations to balance, invitations to step out onto the tightrope and find your way to the other side. Liz Barrow, a single parent, gave us an example of how ten-year-old Asa helped her regain balance:

“In our family some of our best conversations happen while we are riding in our van. Asa and I were recently discussing anger as we headed downtown to do an errand. A couple of days earlier, I
had accused him of trying to control me with his anger, the way his dad used to do. Asa said that he had been thinking about my comment and believed I was mistaken. He didn’t personally feel he was trying to control me. He was just angry and expressing himself appropriately. Asa thought that perhaps I was responding to his anger by imagining he was trying to control me, then behaving defensively. He suggested that I was responsible for my reaction. He then wondered if I had taken a similar approach to his dad’s anger. All this from a ten-year-old! I could feel in my body the truth of his words, and I thanked him. I could see how I had been casting myself in the role of martyred anger recipient, and I stopped. I now give him the space he needs to be angry and don’t feel the need to take a position about it.”

2/Cultivating Curiosity

T
he moment we invoke curiosity and wonder, our perception changes. We stop thinking we already know or should know and begin wondering about the issue at hand. The need for perfection dissolves, and we suddenly have free movement, meeting each moment as an open-eyed, full-breathing being. A question asked from genuine curiosity has no sharpness; wonder takes the edge away.

In curiosity there are more verbs than objects. I wonder what something is about—I am curious about it. Curiosity is a set of actions, not a static thing: I explore, I turn things over, I turn myself over to look differently, to breathe into the ribs of my “curiousing.”

If I’m curious, I don’t automatically label things and their functions. I haven’t already decided what this thing can be used for, how it might benefit me, who this person really is, or how it all fits together. I give myself time to look at it from different angles, to toss the question up in the air and not even know if it will come down again. Keeping the ball in the air keeps the game in play. The famous children’s character Curious George got into some predicaments out of his curiosity, but they were also exhilarating adventures.

Everyone has senses, but each of us registers, processes, and communicates them through a unique nervous system. Everyone has the same feelings, but not all of us cooperate with them, listen carefully to them, or do our best to express the sounds that match their momentary vibration. That’s what poets do, or any artist in her medium. Everyone can be an artist expressing life as it flows through their mind, heart, and gut. We can be touched by life and want to touch back.

It may be that people are taught to rein in their curiosity to preserve social decorum. Little ones forage in the world to discover the names of things, many of which automatically go into the mouth. As adults, we still need to take data in and surround it with some sense to continue feeding our curiosity.

In a relationship interpretation dampens curiosity. When we assume and don’t clarify, meanings get stuck together over time. For example, a certain look from your partner may get stuck to the thought, “Oh, she’s mad again. I’ll withdraw to the garage and work on the car.” Being genuinely curious about your partner means letting him or her get right up under your defenses to look, smell, and taste, just to be there, just to keep the moment fresh.

When I’m not curious, I make myself all-knowing. I assemble a box labeled “you,” and I keep dumping items into it. I organize you, I assemble a coherent inventory of you that I can reproduce in my mind: “You like these colors, you sleep on the right side of the bed, you don’t like your sauces to touch the rest of the food on the plate, you have your coffee black, you don’t like action movies.” I
assume that I know what your gestures mean and where your sentences are going. I have already heard everything you have to say. “Now I am safe,” I think—“I cannot be surprised by you.” At that fateful point where I complete my assembly, I assume that that’s all you are. I close the lid and sit on the box so that none of my collection gets loose. How can I move into curiosity from already knowing everything? Genuine curiosity opens the box.