The Conscious Heart (33 page)

One couple in our acquaintance makes love every morning, and they have for years, even though they are both in their seventies. For our own benefit, as well as for the couples we counsel, we asked them how they accomplished this. Their answer speaks to the heart of the matter. They do not resist the transformations that go on in their sexual relationship every hour of every day:

“We make love all day, in a thousand different ways. Sexual
energy is flowing through us all the time—that’s the way life is and the way people are put together. We are big conductors of sexual energy. We found that out when we stopped being interested in each other’s genitals—it just meant that it was time to channel our sexual energy in a different way. Our bodies had had enough stimulation, maybe, and it was time to make love with our words. Then we would make love with our words, by speaking in a loving and tender way. Or maybe it was time to make love with a touch as we were passing by the other in the kitchen. But it’s all sexual energy. You can make a salad with the same energy that you have actual physical sex with. Sometimes it’s time to be quiet, and then we sit together. Did you know you can sit quietly next to someone with the same tender feelings that you would touch them with? That you can actually make love to the person without touching?”

We got the message. When you allow sexual expression to shift from the physical to other dimensions, you allow the physical to recharge its batteries, so to speak. The recharge doesn’t take long at all. What is required is to shift into another state of consciousness, to transcend the physical for a while. If we celebrate this process rather than resist it, we come back to the physical very quickly, refreshed by our contact with a deeper and more subtle dimension of sexuality.

14/Stretching Your Relationship

T
he problem of “going to sleep” is endemic to long-term relationships. Couples have to put a lot of attention into keeping things fresh and alive. One way we do it is through varying our routines. We do not have set times for getting up, going to bed, eating, or exercising. We eat when we’re hungry, and we go to bed when we’re tired. Once when we were on vacation in the Yucatan Peninsula, we found ourselves seated at dinner next to a couple who seemed to be so bored with each other that they were virtually sleepwalking. The man mentioned that he was eating dinner a lot later than he liked, (It was about seven-thirty.) He said, with a kind of homesick satisfaction, that they always ate dinner at five-thirty.
Then he turned to Gay and asked what time we ate dinner. Gay looked blankly at Kathlyn and said, “I don’t know. What time do we eat?” The man blurted out, “What? You don’t know when you eat dinner?!” Later, we had a laughing fit back in our room, because the fellow had reacted with the kind of surprise that would have been appropriate had we said we kept a pet rhino or were members of a transvestite church choir.

Stretching in the relationship stimulates the variety gland, which is the fuel and spice of long-term relating. You have to have room to stretch your potentials, your fears, your limitations, your preferences. The paradox of stretching is that you must stretch against something stable in order to create more length. In aerobics bouncing can produce injury; steady stretching from a stable joint gives the best result. In close relationships stretching works in a similar way. Those people who bounce all over from one new hobby to another, from one career choice to another, create more stress in the partnership. But you can actually stretch, becoming longer and fuller than your present self, by facing and accepting reality as it is now and choosing what you really want. Then action steps, often baby steps at first, gently lengthen the possibilities. Many people open new careers by going to school part-time over several years. They learn to paint, to ski, to write, to build, by taking small, steady steps, bolstered by the stability of their relationships.

In your partnership what strengths would you like to develop? What new potentials would give you more joy when you get up each morning? With what limitations would you like to experience peace and resolution? What experiences would you like to cultivate and share with your partner? These are some of the potentials of stretching. The Japanese work ethic is to improve a little each day. That is a useful description of stretching in the work sphere. We want to acknowledge the human tendency to hibernate, to repeat survival and other learned patterns, simply because those patterns worked in the past.

Kathlyn says: “When I was about nine and visiting my aunt
and uncle at their lake cottage, I sat in like an invisible ear listening to many adult conversations when groups of grownups would get together. During one particular conversation I remember this friend tossing her head back and saying, ‘I don’t think too much about my appearance anymore, I’ve already got my man.’ ” The hook-your-mate model of relationship has been very popular but has some frightening potentials. In many couples one partner suddenly bolts after many years of benign neglect and numbing sameness. The other extreme was brilliantly illustrated by the movie
A Thousand Clowns
. The creative and potently unpredictable hero confronts the shadow side of his Peter Pan persona when the woman he comes to love demands more consistency and when he has to choose whether to get a steady job or lose custody of his nephew.

Fortunately, humans have another urge, however dormant, to “push the envelope.” That urge to become more can be a great asset to the ongoing growth and excitement of your relating. Instead of trading in your partner for a seemingly newer model, you can each re-create yourselves and the quality of your being together by looking for ways to stretch. The rewards of consciously stretching are enormous. Spark and sparkle appear at unexpected times. Hitherto unknown facets of yourself and your partner emerge from the closet and begin to shine.

Our best stretching move is to let go of being right and to step into wonder, curiosity, and not knowing. Kathlyn says: “I remember the many times that I let go of being right; it felt like stepping off a cliff. Will I fly? Will the parachute open? Where will I land? Will I survive? I can appreciate how frightening and absurd that step seems the first time, when everything in your history and everything you’ve learned and seen around you says, ‘Hold on to survival, hold on to your beliefs about relationships!’ Our experience and the experience that thousands of people have reported is, ‘Wow, this is much more fun than I ever imagined! I like recreating myself and renewing myself.’ ”

Down inside we have come to appreciate that this sacred
moment is all we really have. The ultimate stretch is to realize, “This is it!” Sometimes we feel sad at realizing how much of life went by while we were waiting for something better to happen. As time passes, we come more and more to savor the immediacy of this moment and to put our attention into sourcing the kind of love we want. As the Beatles told us, “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” These words ring truer now than when we first heard them half a lifetime ago. We always get exactly what we give, and we have only this moment to experience it. Immediacy renews relating. This truly is the only opportunity to celebrate, to fully express our potential and support our partner’s. Savoring this precious moment causes us to make choices that are very different from those we made when we thought we had time to waste.

15/Dealing with a Betrayal

A
friend of ours, whom we first met when she took one of our professional training programs, told us a powerful story of betrayal and personal redemption. It stands as a documentary example of the power of integrity and consciousness to heal wounds. “As I began my personal journey of awakening,” Bev told us, “and especially after reading
Conscious Loving
, I began to want integrity in my marriage. I sensed that my husband and I did not tell the truth to each other, and certainly the joy had been gone from the relationship for years, but I didn’t know exactly what the problem was. One day I clearly stated my intention to the universe, that I wanted to live in integrity and be in a relationship whose basis was
integrity. Almost immediately after I expressed this intention, my husband ‘out of the blue’ told me that he had been having sex with my best friend for seventeen years.

“I don’t know how I could have saved my sanity without the body-centered skills I’d learned: conscious breathing, feeling my feelings deeply in my body, telling the truth, moving freely to evocative music as I expressed my rage and sadness. When he told me we’d been living a lie, I felt as if someone had kicked me in the stomach. I could barely breathe and felt nauseous. I was afraid and sad and then numb. My thoughts were: ‘How could I have not known this? What were they thinking of? How could this have gone on for so long?’ Suddenly everything fell into place, showing me at least one reason I’d felt so unhappy and off-center for so long. My astonishment was total: I couldn’t believe how I could be married to a person and be the friend of another person and not know something was going on between them.

“In the days after the revelation, I decided to apply to the mastership program [one of our advanced programs], which involved writing the answers to a number of deep questions like ‘What do you most want in your life?’ I found that my creativity was pouring out of me as never before. Even though I had every right to be depressed or numb or blocked, as I participated with all my feelings, tremendous creativity gushed forth from me. I am grateful also to my therapist and several friends who kept me out of claiming the victim position (which I often felt I had exclusive right to) and instead invited me to feel my authentic feelings of anger and sadness and fear. They kept me focused on what I wanted to create in my life instead of regretting what I didn’t have.

“The biggest challenge I faced was to feel all my rage and sadness. In the beginning members of my family treated me as a victim. When I talked to them about my anger or sadness, they would quickly shift to blaming my husband. I found this unhelpful and asked them instead to focus on their feelings and let me have mine. I have a strong belief that ‘nice girls don’t get angry,’ and I ran up against this constantly during the first few weeks. I would be
feeling guilty about my anger and would be hearing a little voice saying, ‘Anger is bad—just forgive and forget and everything will be okay.’ I knew, though, that my healing depended on letting myself feel everything. As a result I learned things about myself I don’t think I could have learned any other way.

“As I took responsibility—asking ‘What is it about me that required this event in my life?’—I realized I carried a belief that I was not worth being treasured or valued. I felt deeply that I was fundamentally wrong and bad and therefore did not deserve to be here on this earth. This old belief had driven me to settle for less in all areas of my life. I realized that I was my own real betrayer—I betrayed myself constantly by devaluing myself, not asking for what I want, brewing and stewing over old hurt feelings.

“Now I am genuinely grateful for the gift of this experience. I am not sure I could have learned what I needed to know any other way. I have learned that I deserve to have authenticity and love in my life. I have a full-body knowing of what it means to be in a loveless marriage, and I know I’ll never settle for less again. The story is still unfolding, so I don’t know where it will all lead. But with a new ground for our relationship—truth, responsibility, a shared commitment to our creativity—who knows what my husband and I will be able to create?”

This woman is a living example of plum-blossom courage: the ability to open and flourish even in the midst of a deep contraction. She and her husband are still learning and remodeling a continually evolving relationship. In her latest update she said they were no longer living together but were better friends than ever and were united around parenting their two children.

16/Finding Stillness in the Midst of Busy-ness