The Conscious Heart (3 page)

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INTRODUCTION

Plum-Blossom Courage

T
he path of the conscious heart is sacred to us, and we treat it as the ultimate spiritual path. Only through relationship, we have found, can we see our shadows, the parts of ourselves that most deeply need to be embraced. Relationships are always bringing to us the very thing that most needs our urgent attention. “Life is fired at us point-blank,” said the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, and nowhere is that more true than in relationship. In relationships we are always having the experience we are supposed to be having, in spite of how we protest our innocence and victimhood.

When we speak of relationship in this book, we are talking
about all types of relationships. We refer not only to couple-unions and romantic love but to relationships at work, with family members, and with the universe itself. The principles and practices we explore work equally well in the boardroom and the bedroom, between parent and child, in a busy group, and by yourself on a deserted stretch of beach at sunset. Although we have used them most frequently with couples in therapy, we have also used them in consultations with corporations and families.

Drawing on these diverse relationships, this book primarily explores the nature and issues of committed, long-term relationships. Long-term commitment, better than anything else, can open the doors for mutual growth and creativity. In our own lifetimes we have seen an enormous change in cultural attitudes about long-term relationships. We were both born in the 1940s, when long-term relationships were simply taken for granted; anything that differed from this pattern was odd and somewhat rare. When we were in elementary school, no one in our neighborhood was from a divorced family. Then everything changed. By the time our own children were in elementary school, they and most of their friends came from families in which divorces had taken place. Long-term relationships had almost become a rarity.

Now the pendulum has swung again. Many people are finding that changing partners is not the solution to their problems. They have come to see value in the depth and richness that a long-term commitment can bring. And they are asking questions like “How do we handle our diverging goals after twenty years of mutual focus on childrearing and work?” “How do we rekindle sexual passion?” “How do we deal with one of us being more committed to solving problems than the other?”

As a relationship matures, the partners have the opportunity to embrace aspects of themselves that were latent in the early years of the relationship. The early years are often full of career and family decisions, hard work, and struggles to juggle societal roles and expectations with individual desires. Both men’s and women’s essence can be overshadowed by these demands.

As the years pass, however, the drive toward wholeness in each partner grows stronger and presses for expression. If this drive is acknowledged, the partners begin to live in the question: “What aspects of me need to be developed in order for me to be whole?” If this drive is not consciously embraced, they may sink into the unconscious heart and defend themselves against the very learnings that could liberate them. But in a relationship that supports and embraces essence, both partners open up to learning what they most need to learn.

In the majority of couples with whom we have worked, a role reversal occurs as the relationship matures. Typically the men, who have been trained to be outer-directed, open up to the inner aspects of themselves. They become more attuned to feelings, dreams, and needs, developing a nurturing quality that may have been only latent earlier in their lives. Women, whose nurturing aspects are usually more highly developed earlier, become more focused on their own needs and creativity. In mythological terms the woman who was a martyr in her youth steps forward into the hero role. As one of our colleagues, Barbara Marx Hubbard, puts it, “she becomes vocationally aroused.” Her mate, who played hero to her martyr when he was young, now is saved by learning to adopt the ways of being and feeling that she has already mastered.

These issues go beyond the psychological into the realm of the conscious heart and the possibility of embracing essence. Through our therapy practice we have had the opportunity to work with many spiritual seekers and their close relationships. We can testify that many beautiful, well-intentioned people struggle with applying their spiritual knowledge in the point-blank world of relationship life. “The great failure of my life,” one renowned author-lecturer said in our office, “is that I cannot seem to practice what I preach.” This is a problem that resonates with almost everyone, and the only solution that we have found is through the practices of the conscious heart.

Another problem that many people encounter is that they come into relationship with an expectation that nearly guarantees
misery: the expectation that conflict is a sign of failure and therefore should be avoided. Lack of meaningful education about relationship, coupled with fairy-tale programming from childhood, may lead us to expect that if the relationship is sound, we will not feel ruffled, either inside or out. But the exact opposite is true: In a sound relationship that is opening your conscious heart, you will be bringing to the light the deepest feelings and ancient patterns that are stored inside you. They come to the light to be welcomed into yourself, to be bathed in the radiance of the spirit. They
are
the path, and how you handle them determines your progress on the path.

In our own relationship we discovered that much was required of us if we wanted to go all the way to having open, conscious hearts. We had to make a commitment to the relationship that was bigger than our respective needs to be right. In fact, the act of making that commitment was the only thing that could reveal to us our deepest patterns of resistance.

Each moment requires us to choose either commitment or complacency. As we’ve encountered that choice-point daily, we’ve learned something valuable each time we’ve chosen commitment over righteousness. It was in those moments of going beyond the power struggle—of surrendering the need to be right in favor of the authentic experience of wonder and not-knowing—that we first felt the clear, open, spacious warmth, the essence-connection with our own inner being and that of our beloved.

To experience this essence-feeling all day every day! That is the great reward of the practices of the conscious heart. To start with only a glimpse of it and then keep it flowing all day for years: that is, we think, the true miracle of co-creation.

Following this path requires considerable courage. We must overcome many layers of programming. Deeply embedded in our cells is an ancient prejudice against our own bodies and the sacredness of relationship. Many of us in the West have inherited a crippling split between relationship and essence. Our clerics have often railed against a harmonious relationship with the body, projecting
their own misery about their feelings and their sexuality onto the rest of us. They have withdrawn from the hot and unpredictable world of close relationships into the safer, cloistered boundaries of inner and outer monkhood. We have inherited centuries of mistrust of our own organic feelings, along with a tendency toward a sheeplike relationship to authority. This is costly. We settle for someone else’s boundaries for our relationships, rather than asking ourselves how we would like to design them.

Lack of self-knowledge, particularly in the deepest areas of intimacy, can actually make people sick. The body will not be lied to. No matter how much we distract ourselves with overwork or numb ourselves with alcohol and drugs, no matter how tightly we regulate the flow of our deeper feelings, our bodies will always be speaking to us until we listen to them or kill them in order to silence them. We may think we can lie to our bodies by trying to hide our anger, our fear, or our sexual feelings. But the throbbing temples or the painful low back at the end of the day will remind us not to lie to ourselves about something so sacred.

Many scientific studies have now discovered that good relationships contribute to good health. One study found that the only thing that increased the life-spans of cancer patients was the quality of their relationships with their loved ones. Just as we cannot lie to our bodies, we cannot lie to our relationships. Relationships are the living body seen in three dimensions. When we are at home in ourselves, we are at home in our relationships.

There is ultimately only one relationship, and it’s where you are right now: The universe itself is the sum of all our relationships. Whatever we withdraw from—or whatever we go toward and embrace—becomes the universe that we have created. If we feel angry at a loved one, we have a choice to embrace that anger and tell the truth about it, or to hide it. We may think this choice is simple, with few ramifications, but it is actually the cosmic moment that defines the universe we will live in. When we withdraw from any experience—love, anger, sexuality—we condemn ourselves to repeating the lesson until we learn it: the lesson that
everything in ourselves must be bathed in the light of truth and love. The ultimate learning at the beginning and the end of the journey is: Love everything and yourself with exactly the same embrace, and you and everything are forever changed.

We have only one choice to make, now and always: to open ourselves to embrace truth and its constant companion, love; or to withdraw from truth and love, defining ourselves through contraction and resistance. This choice is placed before us relentlessly, with exquisite precision, in our close relationships.

Zen masters speak of the development of plum-blossom courage. The plum blossom appears soft and glowing, even when the winter winds still blow. It knows, deep in its essence, that spring is almost here, even without outside agreement. The plum blossom symbolizes the resilience of the human spirit, its ability to open again to love and to go forward into another opportunity for celebration. In close relationships we gradually develop plum-blossom courage through coming back, time and again, to fundamental skills like telling the truth, taking responsibility, and holding ourselves and our significant others in a space of loving acceptance.

There is no better place to practice all this than right where we are, every moment of every day: in a relationship with our own hearts and souls, and with the hearts and souls of people around us. This is why close relationship opens the conscious heart.

ONE

How We Found the Conscious Heart of Our Own Relationship

Love demands all, and has a right to it
.

—BEETHOVEN