The Conscious Heart (4 page)

O
ur relationship began in a crystalline moment of essence-recognition. Since its evolution mirrors themes we will develop in this book, we would like to share our story with you.

Our moment of recognition cut through years of baggage that we both carried from our childhood and our previous adult relationships. Both of us had come from families where, although basic needs were met, emotional closeness was absent. We survived the relationship experiments of the sixties and seventies with a few scars and some rich stories. By the time we met, each of us had weathered a previous marriage and divorce and the roller coaster of relationships that had foundered. Each of us had a teenage child,
and both of them were accustomed to the rights and privileges of being only children. One of our cars was near death, and the other spent considerable time with a mechanic under it. One of us had just enough money to move to Colorado, and the other’s American Express card had just been repossessed. On the surface it wouldn’t seem fertile soil, but essence has a way of growing even from humble beginnings, when there is a willingness to make commitments and live authentically.

Gay begins the story: “In 1974 I was about to start my job as a professor of counseling at a university, and I felt like a fraud. I was a knowledgeable fraud, but a fraud nonetheless. My master’s degree and Ph.D. had given me credentials and a useful toolkit of therapy techniques, but there was nothing I knew deep in my soul that I could call my own. There was nothing I knew for sure that would produce transformation in myself or others; I felt the lack of a deeply felt organizing principle.

“I wondered where I could go to get such a principle or experience. I had already been through all the formal education I could stand, and if I didn’t have it yet, where would I get it? In a moment that changed the course of my life, I decided not to go anywhere outside myself, but to ask myself and the universe what I most needed to know. It seemed a radical and even ridiculous idea, but I decided to try it. I simply paused under the trees and asked out loud what I wanted to know. What was the one thing I needed to know or experience to give me unshakable confidence in my ability to transform myself in every moment? Was there something I was doing wrong that, if I did it right, would smooth everything out in my life? Seconds later the answer roared through my body in the form of an ecstatic energy-rush that left in its wake a deep wellspring of knowledge.

“The answer was nothing like what I had expected: I was keeping myself distant from my feelings and my joy-in-the-moment with the keenly developed mechanisms of my thought. I was filtering everything through my intellect. Like Mr. Duffy, in James Joyce’s
Dubliners
, I was ‘living at a little distance from my
body.’ The answer continued: ‘Let yourself feel deeply, let yourself open up to who you truly are, and you will have the unity you seek. If you simply feel and express what is unarguably authentic, you will always be grounded in a space of integrity.’

“Standing under the trees, I took this advice, and for the next thirty to forty-five minutes, I felt every feeling I had repressed for my whole life. I opened myself to whatever was true in me, and I was surprised by what emerged. I cried tears for my absent father, quaked in fear of my powerhouse mother, felt waves of grief and cascades of love. It was all there for me to feel—the misery and the ecstasy—and with every deep breath, I opened to it more.

“The answer continued: ‘The real problem is that you do not love yourself and the world exactly as it is. Every moment is an opportunity to expand in love; your job is to love yourself and all your experiences as they are, then make new choices from that space of love.’ Again I took the advice: I loved myself for everything I felt, and I embraced others—even those with whom I had deep conflicts—exactly as they were. The process of loving myself and the universe around me brought intensely pleasurable waves of bliss, which swept through my body with each breath. When the waves subsided, I felt cleansed, brand new, and whole.

“This new knowledge gave me the organizing principle not only for my life but for my therapy practice. When people would talk to me about a problem, I would help them lovingly embrace anything about themselves or their problem that they had not accepted. Once they were grounded in a sense of loving acceptance, I would ask them to make new choices and brainstorm the required action steps. Every day of my life, using this new learning, I saw miracles unfold in my clients. But while my therapy practice bloomed, my own intimate relationships were more challenging. Although I had discovered a map, I sometimes forgot how to use it and had to rediscover the territory all over again.”

Kathlyn’s journey to our first meeting began when she was nine: “I remember standing in the dining room watching my mother and grandmother argue in the kitchen. I don’t remember
the content of their disagreement—just their pain, frustration, and longing to love and be loved. That moment set the course of my quest. I saw that their conflict wasn’t personal or unique. I ached for the generations of misunderstanding and lack of connection. I spun inside with an archetypal yearning and confusion. My mind formed a primal question: ‘What’s wrong, and how can we fix it?’ I saw that I come from a line of sensitive women who long to be seen and treasured for their intuition and soul-seeing, but who also create thorny barriers to intimacy.

“All of this swirling recognition happened in a minute or so of unarticulated feelings that took me years to understand and express fully. I did know absolutely, at nine, that I would stop that pattern and not pass that heritage to another generation. I think that most children see clearly what is going on in their families and then make up stories to explain the dynamics. Since family myths are so often based on secrets and incomplete issues going back many generations, nobody really knows what’s going on or where it started. Rather than try to understand the complexities of family history, I decided to do whatever I needed to do to create harmonious relationships in my own life. I promptly forgot that decision—at least consciously. But my body and internal director remembered, giving me tasks and lessons to shape a new course.

“I embarked on a quest in which I read everything I could find on the archetypes and myths of relationships:
The Thousand and One Nights, Bluebeard
, the Arthurian legends, the Greek gods and their messy alliances with one another and humans, the Norse myths, Native American tales, Sufi tales, and Hasidic stories. By the time I was thirteen, I was very well read and incredibly inexperienced in my own relationship life. I had also picked up some distortions from my literary sources: I came into my early relationship years with lots of romantic and idealistic myths. I thought that men were more interested in adventure than in intimacy. I imagined that women needed to keep their sexuality and passion hidden or they would get into cataclysmic trouble. All my novels proved that there is a vast gap between the first flush of love and
its fulfillment, and that true love is racked with suffering and huge obstacles. Early rock ’n’ roll repeated the message: Love doesn’t last, but the memory of what might have been does, haunting every subsequent alliance. I carried these myths in my mind while appearing on the surface to be a fairly normal adolescent.

“This passion of my childhood desire shaped my life-decisions even when it looked as if I were making huge mistakes. I developed an incredibly accurate bullshit detector and was incapable of lying about what I saw around me. After several episodes when I was subjected to outraged punishment simply for making observations, I learned to make them in my mind—except when other people were being treated unfairly. Other students were drawn to talk to me about their deepest feelings, and teachers were surprised when this quiet student would suddenly bolt to her feet to denounce some injustice perpetrated on a fellow student.

“I realize now that I was already looking for my Beloved, and knew intuitively that this was a heart-centered, not a head-centered, quest. I observed interactions between my parents and their friends to try to find The Answer but was often disappointed at their level of communion. I looked to the Christian tradition for basic nourishment—a feeling of unity and deep connection—and became a youth group counselor and Sunday school teacher, only to crash when I read ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ chapter of
The Brothers Karamazov
. I could not reconcile a God of love with the suffering of innocents. I knew I needed to look further.”

Gay continues: “Practically as soon as I had this soul-shifting experience of loving myself, I entered a relationship in which the magic I’d learned was put to the test—by far the most intense relationship of my life. It was my first adult experience of ‘falling in love,’ complete with all the symptoms I had chuckled at when I heard about them in pop songs. I wasn’t chuckling anymore. Now I knew firsthand about being in a jealous rage and being unable to sleep at night and dropping ten pounds in three days because I forgot to eat. Looking back on it, I can now appreciate that I had ordered up the perfect relationship to test my ability to love all my
feelings. I didn’t always feel so appreciative at the time, however. Half the time I reeled around in the dazed ecstasy of love, while I spent the other half wondering why the universe was making me so miserable.

“This relationship continued on an on-again-off-again basis for about five years. One day in 1979 I ‘woke up’ and realized that she and I had been having the same argument over and over again. The theme was always the same: I would complain that she was too critical, too demanding of my time, and too concerned about ‘communicating feelings.’ In our worst moments I would accuse her of lying to me about significant issues. Her complaint was that I wasn’t committed to her, that I had my eye on other women, and that I never really let down my guard. We would vigorously defend our positions through various escalations until we were exhausted. Then, somehow, we would make up, and all would be well for another month. The arguments seemed to last three days, with a few days of recovery time afterward. All in all, about one week per month was taken up by this drama.

“One day, after being away at a two-week meditation retreat, I came out of this five-year trance and decided to put an end to the drama. I sat down on the floor of my office and confronted myself unflinchingly: What was it about me that caused me to repeat this pattern? Within a few seconds of asking this question from an undefensive place of responsibility, I was flooded with awarenesses and answers.

“I saw that I had created my relationship with this woman out of the pattern of my relationship with my mother. In addition to her many wonderful characteristics, my mother was possibly the most critical person I have ever known. She was also a consummate stonewaller when it came to telling the truth about significant issues in her life. She would hide her feelings until she boiled over, then she would blow up in a major escalation. Oddly enough, this would happen about once a month. My own withheld truths usually revolved around some bad thing I’d done and was hiding from her. Eventually, of course, I would get caught. Then I would
get punished, sometimes physically, sometimes with restrictions, or my mother would go into a tearful funk for a couple of days. A subconscious part of me must have decided that this is the way intimate relationships are supposed to be—so I created one critical relationship after another as an adult. She was also a very powerful person, and I feared being engulfed by her, of losing myself if I didn’t stand on constant guard against her. Here I was, years later, in my thirties, playing out this same drama.

“It was very enlightening and sobering to see how powerfully able I was to create my reality. I remember thinking: If only I could harness this power to my conscious, creative goals, I could put a few Nobel prizes in my pocket.”

Kathlyn continues her journey: “That moment in the dining room when I was nine also opened my life work. I grew adept at observing body language to discover what was really going on underneath what people were saying. My closest friend and I played all sorts of mimicking and acting games. One of my favorite pastimes was guessing the feelings behind people’s gestures when I was walking or waiting for the bus. In my late teens I discovered that a profession called dance/movement therapy actually existed; it used nonverbal communication and movement to heal individuals and groups. The more I explored this medium, the more my conviction grew about the need to ground decisions in the body. When I was confused or troubled, I would move until clarity surfaced. And I added ‘energetic,’ ‘aware of his body,’ and ‘good dancer’ to my wish list for my ideal mate. I wanted someone who was as passionately absorbed by human behavior and potential as I was.

“This choice, which I would now call the Short Path, required me to make decisions that superficially looked ruthless. My inner voice would demand that I leave a relationship—even if it seemed as if I were jumping off a cliff. Sometimes I wondered about my own judgment. I left my son’s father when Chris was a year old, even though my mother, and others, warned me, ‘You could do worse.’ But it had become clear that he wasn’t interested in the kind of evolving path we had originally talked about and
united from, so I decided it was better to be alone. I was twenty-one, still in college, and had about two hundred dollars a month to live on and an infant to raise. I knew I would rather navigate single parenting and juggle day care with school than continue to live in a dead end where the most that was demanded of me was to keep the refrigerator stocked with beer.

“The moments when relationships end seem so much clearer in retrospect than they do at the time. The night before Chris was born, his father had been taken out drinking by his buddies for his twenty-first birthday. So when we got to the hospital in the early morning hours, he was tipsy, tired, and somewhat lacking in social proprieties, in my opinion. I had really followed the happily-ever-after script as best I could, complete with embroidered hand towels, coupon-cutting, and homemade German chocolate cake for the big birthday. I went to the hospital with my hair in curlers because labor was scheduled to be induced the next day and I wanted to look as pretty as possible. I was in strong labor, three and a half weeks overdue with what turned out to be a ten-and-a-half-pound baby, in an unfamiliar atmosphere—and my husband was either asleep or flirting with the nurses.