The Conscious Heart (7 page)

Taking Healthy Responsibility

In our original families responsibility meant asking, “Whose fault is it?” It was associated with blame, punishment, and burden. Both of us were well trained to run for the victim position in any conflict. We both had siblings with whom we were in constant conflict, and often the issue was “whose fault it was.” Who broke the glass, who burned a hole in the rug, or who left the dirty dishes in
the sink after eating the last of the pie occupied a lot of the daily conversation.

In our relationship we have learned that true responsibility is not about finding fault or accepting blame. It is about a genuine insight into the causes of an action or event. If you drop a heavy object on your mate’s foot, as happened in our kitchen once, it does no good simply to apologize or make yourself wrong. Taking responsibility is the ability to make a real connection with the cause—perhaps seeing that you were thinking of something else and weren’t paying attention. When true responsibility is taken, learning can take place. Instead of stopping with an apology, we learned to keep the inquiry open: to wonder out loud what was occurring just before the event. Kathlyn said at the time, “I realize that I was mad at you for leaving a bunch of coffee grounds on the counter, and I didn’t say anything. I feel sad that I hurt you and sad that I was more interested in being mad than in being aware of your presence in the kitchen so I could move around you. I make a new commitment to telling you when I’m angry directly so I don’t act it out in ways that cause pain.”

But to this day taking healthy responsibility remains a challenge for us. Even though we are a thousand times better at it now than we were fifteen years ago, we still get stuck in places where it really looks like it’s the other person’s fault. On occasion we still make mental lists of the other’s shortcomings, correct each other’s grammar, accuse each other of sloth, huff about broken agreements like not taking out the trash, and so on. But it never is the other person’s fault; in a relationship there is always an interlock between both people’s programming. There are no victims and villains in the real world of relationship, only people who have not yet learned to operate from a place of true empowerment. We’re still learning—often in the heat of conflict, while we’re making a mad dash for the victim position—to ask ourselves, “What am I bringing to this conflict? How is this my creation?”

Learning Integrity

We’re still learning how to make and keep meaningful agreements. As Tom Peters once said, “There’s no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity,” and in our relationship we have found those words truer than we would like them to be. We discovered that even the smallest unclear or broken agreement, when swept under the rug, always came back to haunt us.

For example, in the first years of our relationship, Kathlyn would ask Gay to complete some household task or take care of making a travel arrangement. A couple of days later she would proceed, thinking that that task had been handled, only to discover that Gay had forgotten. We both learned about our habits from examining our reactions to this kind of small-agreement snafu. Kathlyn learned that she would often ask Gay to do something just when he was in the middle of a creative project and his mind was immersed in layers of thought. That timing almost guaranteed that he’d mumble, “Uhhuh,” and go back to his work, having filed the information under Later. Gay, for his part, learned that he needed to make time to hear about the trivial but essential elements of daily life and to stop assuming that Kathlyn would be the exclusive organizer.

In our most recent agreement uproar, Gay asked Kathlyn to call a mutual friend who had said she missed having Kathlyn’s attention. He understood that Kathlyn had agreed to do it on a Monday night, so he asked Tuesday morning how the conversation had gone. Kathlyn hadn’t made the call, not having understood that it was Gay’s perception that they had an agreement. Gay got angry about it. It sounds trivial, and many agreements are, but Gay’s mind ran away with it. “I soon found myself thinking,” he recalls, “that Kathlyn didn’t like Mary, whom I wanted Kathlyn to like because I liked her. I realized I was trying to control Kathlyn’s feelings toward Mary. Then I started wondering if I could trust Kathlyn, which led to wondering what I was doing to create lack of trust in our relationship. And all of this because we hadn’t been clear with each other about when a phone call would be made.”

Overcoming Inertia

The inertia of the routines, distractions, and pulls of daily life is one of the biggest barriers to embracing essence. Early on we noticed that our relationship worked well when we remembered to nurture it—by taking walks together, bike riding, communicating our feelings, meditating together, and dancing, among other things. A well-known psychiatrist once said that if people spent an hour a day dancing, we could close down all the mental health clinics because there’d be no need for them. We certainly agree and would add meditation, breathwork, and stretching, along with a daily touch-in of intimate communication.

We found that we had to make a priority of nurturing the relationship, then guard that priority zealously. Otherwise, the busy-ness of life would take over, we would lose our connection with each other. Then, of course, conflict would happen. When we sorted it out, we realized that we had been forgetting to take walks, meditate together, dance, and have our times of intimacy in front of the fireplace.

In our hectic first years together, we had two young teenagers to nurture as well as our relationship. Amanda, Gay’s daughter, was in boarding school and came to visit on holidays and for longer periods over the summer. Chris lived with us full-time. A typical day in our lives involved the multiple merry-go-rounds of our various commitments and work. Gay juggled classes and office hours at the university with several therapy groups and private clients per week. Kathlyn coordinated her growing private practice with Chris’s school schedule, since for a few years sessions took place in our living room. Chris needed daily support for one school project or another and transportation to his beloved martial arts classes. We also had the daily chores of cooking, cleaning, shopping, doing laundry, and paying bills that all households face, and the challenge of blending two families.

Several times a week the phone lines hummed between Amanda and Gay. Amanda often had crises at boarding school or with her mother and counted on Gay to rescue and liberate her.
She first saw Kathlyn as an enemy to disdain or ignore, and for several years her visits were punctuated by sullen outbursts or utter silences. Kathlyn gradually chipped away at her armor and made herself available whenever Amanda was open to contact with her. (Now Amanda calls Kathlyn “Katie-Mom” and counts her among her best friends.)

For a year or so, Chris felt rather displaced from California, where he had had close friends, good schools, and soccer. He knew immediately that Gay wasn’t a pushover, as some of Kathlyn’s previous relationships had been. He also sensed that at some intimate level our bond didn’t include him, and he resented having to share Kathlyn for the first time in his life. Kathlyn remembers the afternoon of our wedding: “Gay said to Chris, ‘Look, just because I love your mother, you’re not going to lose anything. There’s plenty of love for us and for you. You can have the kind of relationship you want with your mom and the kind of relationship you want with me, and I want you to ask directly for what you want.’ I was so relieved to have the game called and a simple solution offered, rather than go through years of covert power struggles and diverted possibilities.”

Interwoven in this mix were Chris’s pets—snakes, gerbils, and hamsters—and a neurotic but treasured cat who didn’t take to the move graciously and would hurl herself at the screen door for hours whenever we attempted to put her outside. We went to school plays and Boy Scouts, on camping and skiing trips, to the swimming pool and the video arcade. Finding time for our personal relationship was a daily challenge.

This problem has become much more extreme in our present lives. Fortunately our sensitivity to it has also grown. We’re much busier now than we were in those days, even though our kids are grown and we are no longer full-time chauffeurs for young soccer players, ice skaters, and martial artists. Nowadays we average one air trip a week and more than a hundred presentations a year—which sometimes keep us apart for days at a time. This means that we have to be much more vigilant about nurturing the relationship.
In the early days we compared developing our relationship skills to learning to drive an oxcart: We didn’t have a lot of skills, but we weren’t moving very fast, either. Now we feel like we’re moving at 120 in a Ferrari. It’s exhilarating, but it means we have to keep our unwavering attention on the path.

Giving Up Being Right

Sometimes we say that our relationship works well because we’ve added one word: We’ve progressed from valuing Being Right to valuing Being Right There. Hundreds of times in our first few years together, we would get stuck because we were choosing being right over being present in the relationship. Being right is one of the most powerful addictions human beings face. Being wrong is not far behind, but it is really a twisted version of being right, in which we get to be right by making ourselves wrong. It has the same effect—withdrawing into a shell of defensiveness instead of being fully revealed in the relationship.

We noticed that when we got stuck in our conviction of our own rightness, we were always scared. As we caught on that fear drives the conviction of rightness, we began to make progress. Instead of swaggering around being right or whimpering around feeling wrong, we started seeing and saying what we were scared about. Sometimes we were afraid of being left; other times we were afraid of being alone or losing control or being engulfed. Whatever the fear, we found that when we could express it clearly to the other person, our need to be right would melt into intimacy.

It really came down to choosing and rechoosing a thousand times to be present rather than to be right, to be intimate rather than protect our own cherished patterns of defensiveness. After making a few hundred sticky choices like this, we found that the short-term glee of being right was nothing compared with the deep, resonant satisfaction of harmonious essence-communication with each other.

We began to see that in our relationship we could create a spiral of flowing essence rather than get caught in the push-pull of a power struggle. When we both focused on supporting each other to experience and express who we really are, that support set up an exchange of possibility. We began to actively choose seeing each other clearly and wholly rather than focus on what was wrong. We found that we could build the essence-connection between us as well as uncover it in ourselves. As one of us listened consciously to the other’s expression of a real want or a deep feeling, the other would feel a surge of aliveness and deeper intimacy.

We could also choose to notice and appreciate each other’s essence-qualities. For example, as Gay acknowledged Kathlyn’s unconditional loving, she felt more at ease about expressing herself spontaneously and following her intuition. Later, when she might notice his furrowed brow, she could follow her impulse to give him some space. Her recognition of his need for alone-time increased his trust that his essence was being seen and appreciated. The heart of this path is to look for and support each other’s essence. When each partner actively looks for opportunities to support the other’s essence while also supporting their own deepest self, essence overflows in a growing spiral that includes both.

Most couples could use a set of practices to apply to the ongoing flow of a close relationship. We’ve touched already on what many of these practices are, and the rest will be clear by the end of the book. For ourselves, through the practice of embracing and supporting essence in our relationship, clarity and bliss are there almost all the time now. And when they’re not, we know how to get them flowing again.

TWO

The Master Commitment That Opens the Conscious Heart

The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one’s relationship has a glowing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase
.

—SIR HUGH WALPOLE

T
he way to get started on the path of the conscious heart is to make a commitment at the level of the soul. People who are thriving on the path are doing so because of the power of the specific commitments they have made in the deepest part of themselves. One particular commitment opens the path. In order to invoke its full power, you must make it deep down in your cells.

A soul-level commitment is one into which you surrender with your whole being. It must be something you really want. The moment you make this master commitment, you activate a force-field of energy that carries you with it and arranges learnings for you that you could not have gotten otherwise. We are dealing here
with a very powerful force, and the universe seems to have arranged things so that you have to invoke its support, through making your commitment, before it is granted you. No doubt this is a protective measure to keep ambivalent, uncommitted people from hurting themselves.