The Conscious Heart (36 page)

W
e were all born into a party that was going on before we arrived. The rules, language, and power structure were already established and in many cases had been running on automatic pilot for decades, if not centuries. Our survival depended on our being able to learn the rules without being told what they were. We’re all very skilled at fitting in and following the thousands of nonverbal cues that allow us to continue getting fed. The problem is that we think there’s only one party available. We don’t realize we can create a better one.

A big mistake in adult relationships is to insist on getting
from our partners what we didn’t get as children. In close relationships partners will unconsciously repeat their old family patterns and continue to be surprised and hurt that they still get the same result. Even when people have dumped the partner they thought was the source of the problem and gone to great lengths to find someone totally different, lo and behold, the same pattern emerges. Most people don’t realize that part of their brain is still two or three years old, whenever a fundamental need was thwarted and denied. Our effusive life-force dwindles each time our essence isn’t appreciated and supported, and our snapshot of life includes all those crimps and stagnant pools. Based on this snapshot, we think that’s the way life is. We may forget the moment we took the snapshot, but our bodies and our unconscious minds don’t forget.

Many people simply do not see their partners clearly. They see the overlay of old hurts, which they unconsciously expect their partners to fix. There are many examples: You might expect your partner to be the opposite of your parents’ shortcoming—strong if they were weak, a good listener if they were aloof, tender and compassionate if they were distant and abusive. The amazing irony of these surface desires is that we tend to re-create the original wound in order to get a chance to finally complete it, to finally get the love and recognition we long for. Since the unconscious mind doesn’t have a linear sense of time, it’s always two years old or four and a half, depending on how old you were when your flow got interrupted. Many of us don’t realize that our adult relationships are being run by very angry, hurt children.

The solution is not only psychological but spiritual. What heals old traumas is a willingness to feel the old pain and breathe through it, and to take responsibility now for issues and experiences that couldn’t be resolved in the past. Many well-intentioned spiritual people make a crucial error: They pray or meditate to transcend or avoid feeling. If you use prayer or meditation in this way, you deny and suppress body experience that needs to be felt, celebrated, and welcomed into the wholeness of yourself. When
you can love your whole-body experience and accept what happened in the past, then you can consciously decide how to design a life the way you want it now. When you develop a set of goals that stands in the present rather than in the past, you are pulled toward them rather than being pushed by the past.

21/Moving from Persona-Sex to Essence-Sex

S
ex is the place where many relationship problems come to light, but we have found that the problem is seldom with the technical aspects of sex. Sexual union is an exquisite connection-point between people. The intimacy of the sexual embrace is at once spiritual and physical; for this reason, it reflects any distortion in communication and balance that is occurring in the rest of the relationship.

One of our friends, Rod Wells, experienced a powerful awakening in his marriage through focusing on the lesson that a sexual issue was bringing to his attention. We asked him to write the story of his relationship miracle.

“A marriage has transformative potential,” he wrote, “only when the energy it produces is brought to bear on the evolution of the partners. I found that I was wasting my energy, using past relationships as escape routes. I call these incomplete prior relationships ghosts, which I define as illusions generated by selecting out the pleasurable past experiences with the person to produce a romanticized fantasy of them. I found that to access the exquisite transformations possible in my marriage, I had to sever the umbilical cord of the past loves I was using as escape routes. I discovered that when I stood with all my attention on the present, some real magic began to happen with Sandy, my wife.

“Before I got married, I dated several different women at the same time. Since I was committed to none of them, I used them all as escape routes from each other. I was always able to escape any unpleasant feeling with one of them by running to another. The problem was that I also escaped any personal growth, which resulted in a feeling of entropy or stagnation. I never stayed put long enough to get to the other side of an issue. I began to wonder, ‘Is this all there is?’ My circle of friends spotted my game before I did and began referring to me as a snake. When I first heard this characterization, I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. However, my own ‘snake,’ in the Freudian sense, soon communicated with me by failing to rear its head on several occasions.

“I began to fail in my attempts to make love to Sandy because ghosts of other women would be haunting my consciousness even though I was monogamous with Sandy. I became afraid that I would say ‘Sally!’ or ‘Jane!’ instead of ‘Sandy!’ In the past the equipment had always worked, no matter what self-deceptions I was engaged in. But now, probably because of the increased level of commitment with Sandy, it let me down. ‘Is anything wrong, Rod?’ was a difficult question to answer, because my very integrity, or lack thereof, was the answer to the question. I found it difficult to say the simple truth, like ‘I was thinking of making love to someone else and my body got confused.’ Reluctantly, though, I forced myself to be honest with both Sandy and myself. I
consciously let go of using the fantasies and focused all my attention on the present. As a result, an immediate shift occurred.

“Suddenly I shifted into a deeper purpose for our relationship. A tender sensual quality and essence-connection became present. Through the gate of integrity, I had stumbled on a spiritual sexual intimacy. It felt as holy as those exalted mountaintop moments when I felt connected to the whole universe. I was making the same spiritual connection through a whole-being commitment to another person, and it felt great. No wonder I had been confused. Once I tasted true intimacy, I saw that it was the ultimate evolutionary capability I had been endowed with. I had been arguing with it, and that argument affected my body because I was arguing with the greatest force there was. When I started letting go into it, it took me places I had only dreamed of before. Now I’m afraid and excited, and I know what ‘high’ fidelity means.”

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INTRODUCTION

Six Exercises in Transformation

I
n this section we will describe several essential practices that produce the most rapid transformation in our relationship workshops. They were developed first in our own relationship as we focused on it as a spiritual path. Leading hundreds of couples and thousands of workshop participants through these practices has helped us to refine them and to continue uncovering the essential attitudes and skills we all need. We invite you to experiment with each one and to personalize them to reflect your life and your close relationships.

There are six practices we recommend you do to bring the spiritual path of conscious relationship into practical reality. In our
(humble) opinion, any human being could benefit from doing these practices at least once in their lives. But you may do them repeatedly, with increasing value with each repetition. They are designed in such a way that they never go stale. The six are:

Conscious Listening

Making Soul-Commitments

The Essence-Meditations

Balancing Power

Ending Control Struggles

Developing Appreciation

1/Conscious Listening

L
istening is incredibly important to any relationship but especially to our love lives. The first practice, conscious listening, has three levels. People grow on the spiritual path of relationships when they practice conscious listening, and they transform their relationships as well. Fortunately for all of us, listening is something that can be learned and mastered through practice. To listen carefully and deeply in the heat of a relationship conflict is a life-skill of the highest order. It has taken us years of practice to become skilled listeners, but it is possibly the most rewarding thing we’ve ever learned, because it has made life richer at home, at work, and in the myriad interactions in between.

Given the importance of conscious listening, it borders on criminal that it is not taught every day in every educational institution. Most of us must learn in adulthood a skill that should have been well in place by the time we moved up from elementary school But we all have to start somewhere. In our own relationship we began by making a conscious commitment to listening. Once we both made this commitment, we mapped out the skills we needed and began the tough work of applying them in the heat of action. They worked miracle after miracle in our lives, even when we did not practice them surefootedly. As our confidence in them grew, we began to teach them to people in therapy, in workshops, and in corporate settings. The miracles flowed in even greater abundance. Nowadays we value this practice so much that if we have a situation where we can only teach one skill—such as a three-hour seminar with busy executives—this is what we often choose.

Here are the specific commitments that we made to begin our explorations of conscious listening: