The Conscious Heart (29 page)

5/Creating Space for Essence

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any relationship problems dissolve when you take space. Space is different from distance. Distance is space between you that is filled with fear and unspoken communications. Space is creative openness, a clearing in which you can bring yourself to full flower.

Most people long for a balance between chaos and numbing sameness in their relationships. As one of our therapy clients put it, “My husband and I seem to feel one of two extremes, either overwhelmed or bored. Why can’t we find a middle ground where we feel stimulated yet serene?” This question is a good one for all of us to ponder. How can we renew and refresh our relationships
every day so that we surf on waves of creative change rather than drown—or fear getting our feet wet?

Do you make enough space, in your relationship, for each of you to be completely real and completely happy? Do you have the physical space, space for your own needs and interests, for thoughts to develop, for growth to mature and flower? Taking space and owning your own space are essential to spiritual growth and to integrating new learning and more love. Taking space feeds the basic relationship pulsation of individuation and unity. We can go higher and deeper when we honor our individual needs for space. Taking space cultivates internal space, the place where we can rest and renew.

Each of us has space signals, triggers that let us know we need space. Kathlyn gets a cranky and irritable sensation under her skin. Gay’s sentences get crisper and slightly critical. The space signal can also be projected, as in this example Kathlyn gives:

“I noticed that I was following Gay around and reaching across him for something in the kitchen just as he was heading in the other direction. We would bump into each other. Or I would interrupt a sentence, trying to anticipate what he was going to say. At first I thought the hovering sense of crowding meant that he needed space and was unconsciously pushing me away. Then I realized that it was my personal beeper signaling me that
I
needed space.”

Many couples believe that love means being together or wanting to be together every moment. So they push against each other’s expansion and prevent the growth of space in their relationship. One therapy couple had never spent any time apart in their whole marriage except when she went to the store. Even when he was at work, he’d call her every hour on the hour to make sure he knew where she was. Our first assignment for them was to take fifteen minutes apart to do something they both enjoyed. It took them a week to complete the assignment by taking separate walks in the same park.

You can consciously decide that your relationship includes
space as well as closeness. Making that decision will create spaciousness in your listening as well as in your activities. The very core of creativity comes from space, so taking space nurtures creative impulses. In space we have no agenda, no demands, no focus. It is lax time, where mind and body just float free. Gay often takes space this way by lying down and staring at the ceiling. Kathlyn likes to walk on the beach or watch the waves. One of our friends describes a sensation of letting go of weight, as if she were dropping a suitcase of thoughts and plans. Meditation is another reliable way of taking space. We have often been asked how we can accomplish so much and still have fun. Taking space and resting in space regularly increase efficiency and ease.

Taking space from routines or patterns can also produce spontaneous insight and growth. For example, in the early fall, when we were taking a retreat to write this book, we played hooky one morning and changed the schedule. We decided to take a bike ride before writing together. As we were cruising through the park, we were enjoying each other, the crisp air, and the breezy sense of space. We have always had fun together, even when we didn’t have much money.

Kathlyn spontaneously asked, “Why do people settle for less?” Gay, pedaling, thought for a moment, then said, “I think most people don’t want to open up to the transformation necessary to realize their essence-desires. So many people buried their true desires so long ago that they’ve forgotten they have them.” Kathlyn then mentioned the Buddhist belief that desire is a cause of suffering. Most of us struggle with the idea that wanting is bad or selfish. But essence wants to express excitement and has desires that come from who we really are. What a tragedy that we lose touch with the flow of essence-expression!

Gay continues: “It reminds me of that interaction I had many years ago with my landlord, who was over at the house doing some repairs. I was making some coffee (I am a coffee connoisseur), and Ralph noticed the tantalizing aroma coming from the kitchen. He’d apparently never had drip coffee from freshly ground beans,
and he commented on how wonderful it smelled. I offered him a cup, genuinely excited by the possibility of turning someone on to what coffee could taste like. He shook his head sadly. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t. If I had a cup of that, I couldn’t go back to what I drink every day.’ I was stunned by this way of thinking. It would be just as easy to drink the cup and have it inspire you to make a commitment to a higher level of existence. He owned dozens of rental properties and was a member of a locally prominent family, so I knew money was not an issue. It was simply his self-imposed limitation of what life could be. In other words, the space he was coming from was impoverished, so he couldn’t give himself room to have a more pleasurable experience.”

Giving your relationships some full breath creates space. The inbreath of full experiencing and the outbreath of full expression form a spaciousness-glider where you can both rest and soar. In our relationship and in our workshops and seminars, we breathe together without words. You can breathe together with eye contact or while touching each other’s ribs to feel the waves of breath. Appreciate the rhythm of your partner’s breath as it interweaves with your rhythm. Match your breathing paces to experience the harmony of breathing in the same space. Perhaps such resonance happens naturally in the hammock on a summer night or just after lovemaking. You can also choose the deep space of being together that is created by breathing. We find it’s a great way to shift from conflict to cooperation. Specific problems tend to disappear, and remembrance springs up in their place. We remember the sparkle of each other’s laughter and the safety of closeness.

Kathlyn recalls a time where taking space changed the course of our son’s life: “Chris had gone to live with his father for a year when he was thirteen. We butted against my desire for an equal relationship and Chris’s choice to withhold and not keep agreements. He was getting the opportunity to take space by living with his other parent, whom he had not really known since we separated, when Chris was one.

“I went to visit Chris over the Christmas holidays and
discovered that he was scraping his ego off the floor each morning. He was the most depressed I had ever seen him. My first impulse was to fix him, to offer him suggestions about school and getting along with his father and classmates. But some deeper impulse led me to just hang out on the couch with him, watching TV and breathing together. We had little conversation over five days, but many moments where I would rub his shoulders or stroke his forehead. He allowed me to just be with him and his waves of feeling.

“About a month after that visit, Chris decided that he wanted to return to live with Gay and me. A wellspring of maturity seemed to flow from the formerly sullen and passive person who had left in the fall. He began to seek out our company and to ask questions about fine points of philosophy and how to make his life work. This, of course, thrilled us. The turnaround seemed to have come from the deep space we shared over those days.”

6/The Essence of Play

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ome friends came back from Hawaii with a package of presents for us, including a very realistic-looking bird-of-paradise flower made of plastic. It rested on the kitchen table for a day or two. One evening Kathlyn came home from editing some videos and found it sitting in a vase on the kitchen floor. Delighted by this gesture, the next day before leaving she stuck the flower in the top of the washing machine. When she returned, it was peeking out the back door. This play went on for several days. The next morning Kathlyn heard steps coming up to the bedroom, then saw the bird-of-paradise bobbing around the corner, followed by Gay’s head and the question “Would you like a hot beverage?”

Play is motion, keeping the spark of invention moving in new ways. Changing routines is a great way to play. One of our favorite forms is what we call persona play. Gay or Kathlyn will take one of our familiar personas—the Chameleon or the Ramblin’ Guy—and exaggerate it to ridiculous proportions. Kathlyn may take her Supercompetence persona, then purse her lips, raise her eyebrows, and race around the house exclaiming, “We’ve got to get organized!” Gay will counter with an improvised Country Boy persona. Several exchanges occur before we move on.

Play stops in a relationship when the partners start thinking they know all there is to know about each other. What enables people in a relationship to enhance essence, a deepening sense of spiritual presence and fullness? What if your relating allowed you to dream yourselves in brand-new combinations that weren’t serious? Play doesn’t have to mean anything. Could you allow the golden ball of play to spin over and over, to find new glimmers of yourself laughing?

Many couples create breakthroughs by learning to play with their most deeply hidden feelings. During one relationship training we had the participants identify the emotion they had the most trouble experiencing and expressing. They chose from the core emotions: fear, anger, sadness, sexuality, joy. Working in small groups, they explored their history, their rules, and their comfort level with each of these core feelings. One man was surprised to discover that joy was the feeling that was most prohibited in his family. Many people felt acutely uncomfortable when anyone was angry. Several people identified the numb tingling they experienced as fear.

They spent some time identifying the body-sensations they were aware of with each feeling, then sharing their explorations with their group. Then we had each participant express their troublesome feeling in a simple statement: “I’m scared. I’m sad. I’m angry. I feel sexual. I’m joyful.” Next, each of them picked a partner to work with and stood facing them. For the next several minutes each partner took turns saying their feeling-sentence with
as many different inflections, tones, and emphases as they could. We asked them to think of the feeling as a piano or symphony and to play along its entire range with whole-body communication. From the sound and motion in the room, you might assume bedlam had let loose. When the entire group reconvened, people were glowing and laughing. One woman exclaimed how her life had been totally controlled by her fear of anger and her attempts to siderail anyone’s rising anger, much less her own. She felt exhilarated to own anger in a new way.

The next day one couple shared with us an experiment they had carried out that morning. She had been angry, and so had he. Instead of fighting about who did what, they took a few minutes to play with saying “I’m angry” in different tones and with funny faces. They both felt enlivened and came in holding hands. When we asked them what they had been angry about, they couldn’t remember.

7/Expressing Gratitude