The Conscious Heart (8 page)

The word
commitment
originates from Latin words that mean “to bring together” and “to send forth.” The modern definition includes the idea of “pledging and binding yourself to a chosen course of action.” A genuine commitment, then, comes from bringing yourself together body and soul, then sending forth your unified being into a chosen path of action. Are you willing to make this kind of commitment to your relationship? Are you willing to unify yourselves and be taken into the zone of the unknown?

By
unknown
, we mean the territory of embracing and supporting in relationship. Even though other adventurers have walked this path, no one can walk it for you. To walk it you must be willing to open up a zone of yourself that is unknown to you at present.

Imagine that there are three zones of yourself. The first zone is what you know that you know. This is an easy zone to navigate: You know how to type, and you know how you like your hair to look. You are comfortable there; you can almost travel this zone in your sleep. You know it, and you know you know it.

Then there is the second zone—what you know you don’t know. This is also an easy zone to navigate: You know you don’t know how to fly a helicopter, perhaps, so you don’t even try. Of course, you may be learning new things as self-improvement projects. If you know that you don’t know how to enjoy an orgasm or communicate effectively with your teenager, you may be working to improve in those areas. But you know that you don’t know enough about these things now.

Finally, the third zone: what you don’t know that you don’t know. This is the zone that can, will, and must be enlightened if you are to embrace essence. The barriers that keep us stuck in old patterns in relationship all lie in this third zone.

Bill gets angry at Marilyn for dawdling over her coffee while he is champing at the bit to go out. Ask him about his anger, and he will tell you more than you want to know about why he’s right and Marilyn is wrong. He thinks that her behavior is what upsets him. But the truth lies in the third zone. The real source of his upset is that he was trapped in the birth canal for thirty-six hours, building up a lifetime charge of “gotta get outta here.” When Marilyn dawdles, enjoying her easygoing rhythm, Bill is triggered into what feels like a life-and-death struggle. And he doesn’t know what it is. Worse, he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know it.

This true example from therapy is one of several thousand we’ve collected in which people were able to disappear their problem by opening themselves up to the third zone. As soon as Bill let go of thinking he knew what his problem was—Marilyn’s dawdling—he got to find out something that he didn’t know that he didn’t know. It changed his life, enabling him to truly enjoy his daughter’s erratic progress on the violin, to draw more creativity from his employees, and to make his way through eighteen holes on the golf course without bending a club around a tree. The third zone will change all of our lives when we open up to it.

The moment you make a soul-level commitment to embracing essence, you begin to shine a light on the third zone.

H
OW TO
M
AKE A
S
OUL
-L
EVEL
C
OMMITMENT

Y
ou surrender into a soul-level commitment with the intention of participating in every cell in your body. You make a conscious decision to hold nothing back. The decision is radical, but in order to travel the path of conscious relationship safely, radical commitment is required. We call it radical for two reasons: because it produces a truly revolutionary effect on people’s lives, and because the original Latin word—
radix
—refers to the core or root of
something. We must make this special commitment at the very core of ourselves if we are to arrive safely at the goal—the transformation of ourselves in our close relationships.

You also go public with a soul-level commitment. If there is someone close by you right now, say clearly to that person what your commitment is. In fact, a commitment gains power by being declared openly. In our trainings and workshops, we often have participants declare their chosen commitment to another person. Some friends of ours who were exploring commitment found that saying it out loud allowed them to feel its power as a tangible, even scary, force rather than merely as an interesting idea.

There is one primal commitment that opens up the path. Once you have made this master commitment, you can move on to seven soul-level commitments that move you safely and rapidly forward on the path.

THE MASTER COMMITMENT

The master commitment is a diamond with several facets. It begins in this way:

•
I accept relationship itself as my primary teacher about myself, other people, and the mysteries of the universe. I open myself to letting every relationship interaction, no matter how seemingly trivial, deepen my connection with my essence and the essence of others. I invite all healing powers in myself and the universe to remove any obstacles to my relationships being a source of joyful fulfillment to me in all my depths
.

The master commitment continues:

•
I commit to clearing up anything in me that keeps me from full loving unity with myself and my loved ones
.

•
I make a commitment to intimacy that is greater than my
commitment to being right and perpetuating my conditioned patterns
.

The master commitment will change at every moment of your life, and as you deepen your embrace of it, it will heal parts of you that you cannot heal otherwise. Conflict becomes a gift that reveals your current learning edge. Problems come to be viewed as signs of what you most need to learn, not as evidence that there’s something wrong with you, other people, or the world. What you once regarded as moments of pain and strain become powerful teachers of your most crucial life-lessons.

As teachers and therapists, we have seen miracles of transformation occur once the master commitment is embraced. A graduate of one of our workshops gave us a beautiful example: “As my relationship with my wife deepened over our first year together, I kept repeating a pattern that I’d seen happen a lot in past relationships. I would get close to her, then I would do something to mess it up. Usually this would mean forgetting to do something I’d promised to do. I would forget to do an errand, or I’d leave a sink of dirty dishes when it was my turn to wash them. When she would criticize me, I would get busy defending myself and not do anything about the pattern. I would withdraw and do a lot of meditation and exercise. These practices would get me to feeling better, and eventually I’d reconnect with her. But the pattern wouldn’t budge.

“Finally, after one particularly bad time, I woke up. I saw that I had not accepted this relationship event as my teacher. I was using it as an opportunity to feel bad about myself and defend myself. I paused, closed my eyes, and said the master commitment a few times in my mind—I accepted relationship, and this pattern in particular, as my teacher. Within seconds I felt a big shift in my body. Something dropped away down in my belly, as if I had dropped my defenses. A few seconds later I had a major realization: that the pattern was a replay of my ‘naughty boy’ programming as a child, when I had played out the rebel role in my family. I was
simply being the naughty rebel in my new family. But I didn’t see that until I let this pattern be my teacher instead of my righteously defended way of operating.”

Read the master commitment, and say it aloud a few times until you get the feel of it in your body. Think carefully about what you are committing to. You are agreeing to have all relationships—lover, spouse, boss—enable you to learn things that will advance your journey toward essence, who you really are.

You are agreeing to drop the barrier between what you might previously have thought of as essence-practices—such as prayer, meditation, or churchgoing—and the ongoing, moment-to-moment interactions that make up your relationships. These are now equal aspects of your path. If you previously thought going to meditation retreat was a more enlightened activity than speaking to one of your children, this inequality is now erased by virtue of your commitment.

You either commit or you don’t. It is not possible to be 12 percent committed or even 98 percent committed. What many people think of as commitment is a percentage plus a compelling story about noncommitment. One of our students recently said he had thought commitment “was a razor blade to stand on.” When he stepped into full commitment, he discovered a safety and ease that he said would have been impossible to imagine from his can’t-commit stance.

Further, in making the master commitment, you are agreeing to let a transcendental energy-force assist you in removing barriers to enjoying the path. You are committing to enjoyment. And why not? What is the use of meaningful relationships unless they are joyful?

Here we part company from conventional wisdom and a host of other relationship experts. We say that essence and relationship are designed to produce joy and creativity: We are committed to living all of life in expanding waves of happiness. But some people think enlightenment and relationship are very serious business, perhaps even that they are about suffering. In some places in the world people still flagellate their bodies in the name of
religion, and in many other places people beat their partners in the name of relationship. Certainly most of us still beat up on ourselves with our critical thoughts and words, in the name of both relationship and spirituality. It is time for the suffering to stop. The first stand we can take against suffering is to commit ourselves to joy.

One of our life-goals is to be happy all the time. Other feelings—grief, anger, fear, sexuality—are important and are certainly not to be denied. Nor is the path of the conscious heart merely about positive thinking, a false cheer that covers pain. True happiness is a large enough container to allow you to feel angry or sad without disturbing the underlying context of happiness. You are agreeing to clear the barriers to a deep and lasting happiness. In our trainings participants agree to have their learning occur in ways that are friendly and fun. Initially most people are startled at the juxtaposition of learning and fun. But we want to support people in experiencing joy even within painful emotions and memories. We have heard hundreds of delighted exclamations as people discover that they can be happy even in the midst of fear or the memory of an old loss.

By making the master commitment, you are agreeing to receive each experience in your relationship as a learning gift. Many people ruin their lives and relationships by ignoring the learning potential of the events that befall them. They tend to run for the victim position when relationship energy gets ruffled. In a close relationship the act of learning about commitment is really an act of constant recommitment. Unless you’re superhuman, you’ll find yourself wobbling and falling off your commitments from time to time. It is what you do when you fall off that makes or breaks your close relationship.

New monks in a monastery are told that their deepest doubts will not even come up until they have made a soul-level commitment to their path. When the doubts come up they regard them as part of the path, not as a sign that their commitment was a mistake. Some difficulties emerge
because
of the commitment, not in spite of it.

During the 1970s Gay had a life-changing experience practicing meditation at a Zen monastery: “Our teacher gave us our first instruction one morning about five
A.M.
He said to count our breaths until we got to ten, then to go ‘back to one’ and start all over again. If we lost the count somewhere on the way to ten, we were not to judge ourselves but simply to go ‘back to one’ and begin again. He said that if we got to ten without our minds wandering, we should not stop to pat ourselves on the back, but just go ‘back to one.’ ‘No praise, no blame’ was how he put it. Before he left, he said to practice until nine-thirty, when we would have breakfast!

“Needless to say, it was a long and often frustrating four hours. By breakfast I thought I had been through both heaven and hell. My mind went through every possible flip-flop to keep me from getting to ten and going back to one. I saw how committed I’d been all my life to judging myself and others, a judgmentalness that kept me from focusing on the task at hand. After a few hours, though, my mind had a major meltdown. Everything was clarified and purified. I quit judging myself and just focused on counting my breaths. When I lost it, I would simply go ‘back to one,’ making it no big deal. By the end of the week, we were doing this practice about fourteen hours a day. But by then, living in this state of no praise and no blame, the hours melted into each other, to the extent that I was always surprised when the meditation period was up.”

That’s the way commitment works. You start by making a master commitment as best you can, with your whole being. The act of making this commitment flushes to the surface any places in your being where you are not yet capable of living up to it. You fall off. Then you go “back to one” and start again. You look at the issue that threw you off, then remake your commitment and get back on again.