The Conscious Heart (32 page)

Deep anger often doesn’t clear up until the underlying fear is identified. Elaine discovered that under her drama of retribution, she was afraid of emptiness. She was afraid that she wouldn’t find her authentic self. As she continued to express and be with her fear, she realized that to find her authentic self, she would first need to listen closely to herself. And she made an agreement with herself to write about her thoughts and feelings for five minutes every morning.

As if by magic, when she began to respect herself enough to listen to herself carefully, others, particularly her husband, began to show her more respect by listening to her.

11/When Roles and Rhythms Change

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thriving relationship straddles paradox. Each day is new choice and yet is based on assumptions and shared history. As Kathlyn puts it: “I re-create my commitment each day, depending on how I see and receive my mate. I love my mate and may also simultaneously dislike his habit of leaving his cups wherever he’s finished using them. If we use our relationships to reveal more about who we really are, being and doing blend to extend the rich mix between us. When I go out into the world to teach workshops, I make notes of events, people, and articles to share with Gay when I see or talk to him. I cut out ads for music I know he likes. We both bought the same book for each other not long ago when I
was out of town. Gay recently said how surprised he has been by the recent role reversal in our relationship. If someone is traveling now, it is usually me. He was marveling at the paradox of a former ‘ramblin’ guy’ loving to be home. When we first got together, I was the nest-maker and he was utterly indifferent to his domestic surroundings. He was constantly on the road doing lectures and workshops.

“One day about five years into our relationship, he blurted out that he liked sitting in our living room. It made him comfortable, he said. I was deeply touched, because I’d never heard anything like that come out of his mouth. This moment began a role shift in him. Now he takes great care to look for objects for our home and to arrange them ‘just so’ for their aesthetic effect. At the same time I have grown in the opposite direction. I’ve found that I really enjoy speaking in public, being on television, and meeting new people, activities that would have been unthinkable for me in the early days of our relationship. I definitely saw Gay as the ‘doer’ and me as the ‘be-er.’ It has shifted completely now. I have become the ‘roving ambassador’ for our work and have logged over a million air miles teaching for our institute in the past ten years.”

Relationships may have life-spans that are similar to developmental phases. In each relationship there is the exhilarating first head of foam, the first sip, the first rose. Then you come to a plateau of challenge, when the shadows that hid in the first bright flash seem to grow with separate strength and force.

The shadows of the middle of a relationship are like the shadows at midlife. The things we’ve outgrown or not turned to see nip at our heels. Relationships may flow through natural cycles of death and rebirth over and over. What can hold a relationship through the changes of aging, illness, differing interests, and limitations? If we don’t face and accept the little deaths, we cannot choose a new direction. I can become frozen in trying to hold on to an image of myself or my partner that is falling through the hourglass.

To die and yet remain alive happens over and over in relating.
What stays when appearance changes? What remains when a severe illness deeply marks one partner? What is renewed when children leave home, when the family moves, when your parents die? How do we keep revealing essence?

If we don’t grow beyond what we were taught to be, the future can look isolated and desperate. Kathlyn’s mother learned to keep house, to clean thoroughly. She learned to dress with coordinated colors, to wear formal or informal clothing on the proper occasions, to use the proper utensils and serving dishes when entertaining, to play bridge, have a luncheon, sew, decorate, and paint. She had to look under that corseted role to find out what additional purpose life might have, to read books and contribute time to organizations. Any role is both a shelter and a straitjacket.

Standing together in the larger vision of what you both want—your commitments—creates a gyroscope for the fluctuations and shifts of job, children’s needs, separate interests, sexual desires, spiritual values, friends, and the whole complicated constellation that surrounds any couple. In relating there are definite cycles of ebb and flow, of intense joining and more quiet gathering, of stillness and exuberance. Each individual and each couple has preferred rhythms of close contact and separate breath that often express themselves in different role preferences.

What are your cycles? Do you recognize them in yourself and your partner? And do you honor the pulse of unity and the pulse of your individual dance?

Most difficulties in relating have to do with not seeing the rising impulse or not following it in a satisfying and friendly way. The impulse to closeness can feel like being drawn into the exhilaration of mingling and sliding with another’s skin, scent, and breath. The impulse to separateness has a more focused, happy-in-my-own-skin-don’t-add-any-stimuli feel for many people.

Keeping love fresh and alive acknowledges a central paradox, our human need for sameness
and
variety. I can commit to the relationship and to continued growth. Sometimes the different rates of growth between partners create stress and conflict. Often
one partner will really jump into a new interest, while the other feels threatened or mystified by their mate’s exuberance. Commitment can hold the ground of relating when rhythms don’t match—and they rarely do between partners. The dance of relationship is inherently arrhythmic. If you have chosen down in your heart and bones to be with your partner, you breathe ease and elasticity into the structure of your relating.

We often ask couples in our intensive trainings whether they can conceive of their relationship as big enough for both partners to express their essential potentials, desires, and feelings. Is their relationship big enough for them to move at different rhythms and to be interested in different things, which they then compost back into their union? Role reversals of various kinds increase both balance and renewal in long-term relationships.

12/Dealing with a Life Transition: Menopause

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any of our women friends now speak in shorthand about menopause: “I never notice it when the temperature dips anymore.” “I have my own little furnace—just can’t get the thermostat set right.” “I’m not blushing, I’m flushing.” Kathlyn shares some recent experiences about this still-mysterious transition:

“Until I became premenopausal, I never really sweated. I could do a full hour of aerobics and not break into a sweat. In my forties, though, my body began to go through various heat changes. One day as I was moving around the kitchen in my red kimono, I smelled this strange musky odor and suddenly realized it was coming from me. I smelled like our son did after karate practice when
he was fifteen, as if a layer of sticky molecules had settled over him like a mantle. I told Gay about this new smell, and he nodded as if to say, ‘Yes, I already know,’ then commented, ‘Who is this musked woman?’

“We both burst out laughing, and I found myself appreciating Gay’s relaxed acceptance of my hormonal fluctuations. We talked a little about the clash of his mother’s menopause against his adolescent rising sexuality, and how we could envision this current life transition as a friendly time. Gay’s mother was volatile as long as he knew her. When she entered menopause, he never knew when she would rage at him or careen around the house yelling, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do!’

“When a friend of Gay’s brought some porno pictures over to share with him, Gay’s mother caught them in the backyard and exploded in rage. Then she collapsed, sobbing, saying that she’d failed as a parent. He learned to stay away from her and to avoid mentioning anything about sex, which seemed to further enrage her. From that moment he realized she was ‘a dangerous customer’ and didn’t really tell her the truth about anything.

“As we talked, Gay realized that he had generalized his circumspection around ‘female issues.’ He had held back from asking me about how my sexual feelings might be changing and what my body was actually experiencing when I had a hot flash or a mood swing. He actually knew my body in ways that I didn’t, which was very helpful. For example, he could tell from my skin tone when my period was due, often before I registered any symptoms. We saw that there was a whole important area of life that we hadn’t explored.

“Later Gay said, ‘I love you in all your forms.’ I felt such space to grow, change, and reinvent myself in his words and touch. I experienced a wash of relief that I didn’t have to try to maintain an image that was fleeting at best and certainly hard to hold on to against the awesome forces of time. Suddenly the expanding waistline and falling chin receded in importance, and the possibilities of loving this new evolution of my form appeared.

“I’ve been able to return the favor when Gay has worried about thinning hair or liver spots. Each of these changes in appearance and functions has given us a chance to appreciate essence more and to make room for essence to find a new expression.”

13/Sexual Energy as an Evolutionary Force

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n conscious relationships sexual energy must be treated as an evolutionary force all its own. Sexual energy concerns a great deal more than physical lovemaking: It holds a key to the sustained regeneration of relationships over long periods of time.

As most people have probably noticed, the physical aspects of sexual attraction are often prominent in the early stages of a close relationship and tend to recede in prominence as time goes on. Many long-term couples complain about this aspect of sex. They want sexuality to have the same hot and electric qualities that it had when they first felt the attraction to each other. When the heat diminishes, they panic and try to find ways to turn it up again.

This effort is missing both the point and the potential. Here is our advice, which many couples have said changed their lives: When the physical aspect of sex begins to fade, don’t try to keep things the way they are. There is a natural progression in sex from physical to emotional to spiritual—and back again to the physical—but this progression must be accepted fully if it is to flow smoothly. If you let the changes happen rather than resist them, you will find that the physical comes back stronger than before. This progression does not have to take months or years—usually it is a matter of days—but if it is resisted, denied, or overridden it can stay stuck in place for decades.

The physical part of sex was originally designed to produce a physical result: children. Then we humans adapted it to meet our emotional and spiritual needs. But if we go back to the very beginning, before there were complicated physical structures like bodies, we could also say that sex was originally a spiritual activity. If you look at one-celled organisms like amoebas, for example, you will see that they engage in what seems like vibratory sex. They cruise up near each other, vibrate rapidly, then move off. This activity does not produce a physical result, such as offspring. It is more complex organisms whose sexual unions produce physical results. Still further along in evolution, organisms turned their attention to having an emotional and an essence-connection through their unions. So up and down the evolutionary scale, all manner of transitions are going on, from the tangible to the ethereal and back again. If we resist the movement away from the physical toward the ethereal—or back again—we are resisting an evolutionary trend that is very powerful.