The Conscious Heart (34 page)

K
athlyn recently had the opportunity to do some sea kayaking in Alaska. “I was most struck by the vast stillness of the bay,” she says, “so still that we could hear each animal breathing. The distinct breathing patterns of the whales, sea lions, and porpoises defined the space and direction of each animal. As I sat paddling in the glassy waters, I became aware of the larger purpose of stillness. By participating directly with the rhythms of the water, my internal sense of stillness and space expanded. Even after being home for several days, I could close my eyes and feel the rocking and gentle lapping, punctuated at intervals with the memory of a furry head silently emerging.

“When a tugboat chugged by, I realized that the noise of civilization has no space. There is no stillness in technology, especially in engines. Most of us have grown up against the constant background of motors. I could feel how I have taken the constant drive of technology into my nervous system, and into my relationships. As I lay in my tent hearing only the drops from the spruce trees bouncing off the rain flap and the occasional
schoosh-schoosh
of bird wings, I breathed into a deeper appreciation of stillness and the gifts that conscious stillness can provide. I realized how much I value stillness, how rare it is, and how committed I am to create it in the center of the often-chaotic world of work and close relationships.”

Relationship partners often glaze over the opportunities for stillness by driving an agenda in their daily interactions. This is equivalent to always taking an inbreath and never exhaling. Stillness provides a deep organization for experience, a chance to take in and integrate moments of intense intimacy and the many shifts and fluctuations of daily living. Despite the relationship mantra, “There’s always something,” we can renew our ability to fully participate by embracing stillness. The ebb of relationship, the receding tide, rests in the pregnant pause.

While working with a vibrant and talented client recently, we noticed that she busies herself from the moment she awakens until she collapses at night. Her mother died from cancer in her early sixties, and all her life she gave and did for others, never cultivating an inner stillness or harmony with herself. Now Ariel, in her mid-forties, has been heading down the same path. She complains about her husband’s requests for midday sex when they’re both home: “I just have so much to do. We’re making love, and I’m making lists of the next projects I need to complete.”

In our own relationship we actually structure stillness to fuel our creativity. In the mornings we have a sacred quiet time, where phone calls are not accepted and discussions of business or household items are postponed. During this inviolate time creative ideas and projects take priority. We meditate, write, draw, paint, play
the piano, or co-create trainings or workshops. Sometimes we lie on the floor or sit on the deck and “just be.” It may not look like something is happening, but the internal fuel cells and neurons are purring with electrical potential, waiting for the breeze of possibility to spark a new connection.

Kathlyn was amazed at how long and how tenaciously she resisted making still-time a priority. Her background and training had laid down deep tracks of busy-ness and organizational hubris. Now, she says, “committing to this time each morning was the single most important factor in changing my life and my perception of myself from a support system to a creative generator and innovator.” Most of the people we know and work with long for the ongoing flow of creativity in their lives, the direct experience of inventing something new that adds to the beauty of life. The simple practice of enjoying stillness can open undreamed-of vistas.

In close relationships some of the sweetest moments are communing without words, the times of walking in the woods or sitting on a swing looking at the twilight. These moments emerge from the commitment to value simplicity and quality rather than quantity. We have come to notice the times when we interfere with a natural still point by rushing, making a list, or focusing on what’s wrong. A conscious stillness is transparently different from the silence of withholding feelings or truth. In conscious silence a flowering of essence is possible. Each partner can breathe in the fragrance of simple being, and simply being together.

Since becoming grandparents, we have reentered, at least periodically, the sounds and rhythms that come with having young children in the household. Chris and his wife, Helen, reminded us recently how precious moments of stillness become when the day is structured around responding to an infant. Even in the midst of sharing child care and juggling two jobs, they recognize the renewing power of stillness and do their best to give themselves regular doses. One of them takes Elsie for a walk or plays with her while the other gardens or just sits in the rocker for ten minutes. When leaving the house isn’t feasible, they use their music earphones to create a womb of stillness for shorter periods of time.

Stillness is different from withholding. Kathlyn says: “As I write this, I am looking out a hotel window at several fourteen-thousand-foot peaks in Breckenridge, Colorado. Until a dog barked briefly this morning, I hadn’t realized that that daily sound in my normal urban life was missing. I hear an occasional car winding along the mountain, the tinkling hum of the refrigerator, particularly ardent grasshoppers, and that is all. Stillness of vibration in the ears, stillness of visual distractions, stillness of a quiet mind, of fullness in your relating to yourself and your partner. Withholding creates static, not stillness, something there between you that the antennae of the heart register and fuse with. Withholding interferes with the clear surface of the pond you both share, like someone dangling their toe in the water and jiggling, jiggling.

“Gay and I have spent many evenings swinging in a rope hammock on the porch. Swaying, I feel like a feather settling on a vast field of poppies, or a dandelion blown across a field of wheat.”

Part of being still involves being in a state of completion, where there is no unfinished emotional business between you and your partner. The mind and heart can breathe in the cool space of completion. To achieve this stillness, we do our best to stay current with each other. When Kathlyn goes away to teach or Gay leaves on a trip, we know we’ve said everything that we’ve thought and felt. Since we’re complete, we can be still inside at parting. Our times of being together have no chatter, just fundamental rhythms like swaying and turning, breathing in and out, feeling the ocean of stillness rock us.

Kathlyn continues: “When I have withheld something, usually something I’m irritated about, my mind starts buzzing, and a shield goes up around my skin that short-circuits my connection to stillness. I become a live electric wire snapping and popping randomly, or a loose cannon, as Gay says, if the withhold grows in silence. In many couples the crackling leaves of withholds between partners is so loud that they can’t recognize the stillness, that rich loam underneath.”

Here is a “homework” assignment to cultivate stillness: Spend
five minutes with each other not doing anything. No errands, no planning, no criticism or judgment; just being. Recognize the tunes that you play in your head about yourself and your partner, and wonder what would allow them to be silent. Connection and creation spring out of stillness.

17/Dealing with Illness and Aging

T
wo of our most inspirational friends have given us a new model for aging. We first met Mary Kent and Jerry when they were both in their seventies, and they get more vital each year. Since taking one of our workshops five years ago, they have attended both our body-centered and our relationship transformation trainings. Most recently they have turned their children on to our books, and now a second generation of their family has started to explore the work.

A dashing couple, Jerry and Mary Kent radiate health and love. They have become mentors for us and a number of people who have had the chance to experience Mary Kent’s graceful
gumption and Jerry’s beaming curiosity, Kathlyn interviewed them to discover more about their perspectives on this time in their lives and relationship—they’ve been married more than fifty years.

KATHLYN: We’re interested in a couple of areas that you know intimately. First, how have you used aging as a spiritual journey in your relationship? What have you learned from aging? And second, how have the illnesses and accidents you’ve lived through impacted your relationship?

JERRY: When I left the navy after thirty-five years and the federal government after fifteen years, I felt that I was just starting to live, to move ahead in my life. Your trainings made a container that is very permissive, and I started to see another model for relationships than the one I had to operate in while I was in the military and the government. I also got to see just how we’d been running ourselves around all these years.

MARY KENT: The most important tool I discovered from the work was the clarity that truth-telling provides, first to myself, then with Jerry, friends, and family. Allowing and knowing what’s really going on—what a revelation! I felt so accepted and acceptable in the trainings that it opened the possibility that
I
could be that way. The moment when you had us looking at each other and asking, “Would you be willing to let go of each other as your personal improvement project and celebrate your essences?”—that was a turning point for me.

JERRY: Boy, the hardest thing for me was this whole commitment business. It was hard for me to live up to it at first—it was such a new and different way of living my life. The most important thing I learned was to recognize and feel my feelings when they came up. When Mary Kent had her accident [a serious car accident about a year after Gay and I met them] and I got the news on the phone, I just cried. And I let that happen, which was great! For about a week, when friends and
the kids would do something for Mary Kent or me, I just cried. That’s when I
really
started to appreciate Mary Kent and our relationship. I really got my priorities straight there.

MARY KENT: Yes, when I came out of the hospital and Jerry was there—he could have been dead from the heart attack he’d had a couple of years before—I just had this huge, heart-opening gratitude. It was powerful! I’m so grateful to have Jerry as a partner.

JERRY: I’d had this near-death experience and knew it wasn’t painful at all. And somehow I can enjoy what we have right now in the present. I really feel I have all the time in the world. Fifty percent of my Naval Academy classmates are dead, and the rest are still talking about the battles they fought in World War II. I have time now to be here, like talking to you right now.

MARY KENT: When Jerry had his heart attack, I had just graduated from Barbara Brennan’s school [healing through the human energy field]. Boy, I just used everything—heartwise, energetically, spiritually—to help Jerry get better. And the response from the family and friends was
enormous
! It really gave me a sense of my value and the contribution I can make.

JERRY: When we came to this work, I had been looking for a long time. Something was missing for me. We’d been together forever, but we were still operating out of personas. I was looking for a better way of life when we first met you and Gay. Now I have a different relationship with time. The kids are out on their own, and I can look at taking 100 percent responsibility for what I want, for what we want.

MARY KENT: The longing, really. We were longing to find a way to connect that wasn’t tinged with right and wrong. We had been exploring and searching. We went to Shalom Mountain, a place of process and love and community. We
learned there to combine the sacred and sexual, that they’re the same.

JERRY: And right after that, we came to the workshop, where we met you. I have to admit I was resistant to the idea, and I was saying, “Okay, I’ll do it to please you.”

MARY KENT: Yeah, I almost gave in to the badgering, then finally I just wouldn’t give in. I said, “If this is something you don’t like and you lay it on me, I’ll kill you.”

KATHLYN: It sounds like that got your attention, Jerry.

JERRY: Yes, well, we’ve often been the catalyst for each other moving ahead, sometimes one of us, sometimes the other. And often, I’ll have to say, Mary Kent was the first one interested in the way-out things. But now I’ll be just as likely to suggest something we learn or do—and you know how tight I can be with money. But I’ve never regretted spending it on our relationship. Boy, this is the happiest time of our lives.

MARY KENT: Oh, yes, the feeling of aliveness is so much more now than when I was fifty. I’m much less frantic. I meditate more, and I’m walking more clearly now. This accident really smashed up my body, but I didn’t acknowledge that at first. I just thought, well, I’ll do this rehab stuff and be fine in a couple of weeks. I wasn’t fine for a long time. It was really hard to accept the ways things are. I did that with aging too. I’ve wanted to deny getting older—I
feel
young—I look in the mirror and I know differently. Just getting the way it really is lets me know that, yes, my time is valuable. I can ask the big questions now, like, “How can I be an aging woman who inspires others in the most delightful and fun way?”