Five Winners

       I love to think about relationship from a spiritual perspective.  I'm enchanted by the mystery of it all and intrigued by the notion that intimacy is a dance of uniqueness and oneness.  I'm inspired by the idea that every act of human love contributes to an expanding universe of Love, and I'm heartened to remember that, goofy as we are with each other at the level of personality, we're all madly in love with each other at the level of soul.

       In my work as a psychologist and relationship coach, I usually approach the subject more pragmatically.  I'm likely to focus on skillful communication and win-win problem solving strategies.  I invite clients, especially men, to consider the principle of "enlightened self-interest."  From this perspective, generosity is good business.  If we listen respectfully to our partners, honoring their needs as well as our own, we're much more likely to achieve our heart's desire.

       In The New Rules of Marriage, Terrence Real has written a powerfully practical book about intimate relationship.  In last week's posting, I reviewed five relational strategies that don't work.  Here are what Real calls: "The Five Winning Strategies."

·        Shifting from complaint to request – moving from a focus on what's negative in the past to positive possibilities for the future.  More specifically he advises:  "Don't criticize, ask! …  Criticizing what your partner has done wrong rarely engenders an attitude of increased generosity … Great relationships mean more assertion up front and less resentment on the back end."

·        Speaking out with love and savvy – remembering that you're talking to someone you love and being clear about what you want to accomplish.  He's speaking here about a deeply respectful style of assertion that empowers your partner and helps him/her give you what you want.  "A disempowered partner is seldom generous." 

·        Responding with generosity – listening to your partner with a generous heart, temporarily setting aside your own agenda, responding generously, being of service, giving what you can.  "When listening with generosity, points of contention become points of curiosity … When your partner confronts you about some behavior or character flaw, do a one-eighty on defensiveness.  Rather than deny whatever you can, admit whatever you can … Transform argument into acknowledgment."

·        Empowering each other – How can I give you what you want and help you give me what I want?  In relationship, we commit to teamwork, to helping each other succeed.  This, of course, requires overt conversation between partners about how to succeed with each other.  Terrence is not inviting a covert manipulation, as in:  How can I get you to do what I want?

·        Cherishing – cherishing what you have and keeping it strong, moving from appreciation deficiency to appreciation proficiency.  Focus on what you have rather than on what you have not.  Notice what you love about your partner.  Feed your connection.  According to John Gottman, healthy relationship requires that positive interactions outweigh the negative ones by a factor of at least five or six to one.  Sometimes it's a bit of a stretch for us to have it so good.  So, we need to ask ourselves:  How good can I stand it?

       Terrence Real summarizes this way:  "These winning strategies equip you to succeed in the critical tasks of getting, giving, and having.  The first two strategies, shifting from complaint to request and speaking out with love and savvy, help you get what you need.  The second two strategies, responding with generosity and empowering each other, help you give everything that you can to your partner and your relationship.  The last winning strategy, cherishing, helps you grow, sustain and honor all that you have."

       Works for me.

Partnership

       Ordinarily, I'm not a big fan of self-help books.  Last week, I bumped into one, The New Rules of Marriage by Terrence Real, that really (pun discovered, not intended) speaks to me – and I've only read the first half.

       Terrence lists five relational strategies that don't work:

·        Needing to be right – trying to convince your partner that your point of view is the correct one.  Actually, who's right matters little in relationship.

·        Controlling your partner – almost always generates resistance, a great way to get stuck in power battles.

·        Un-bridled self-expression – often confused with honesty, letting it all hang out, without regard to the effect on your partner, usually does more harm than good.

·        Retaliation – when we get hurt in relationship, we often feel victimized and, perhaps, entitled to retaliate.  We tend to think that if we punish our offending partner, we're more likely to be safe from future "offenses".  Not true.  War begets war.

·        Withdrawal – when we withdraw emotionally or physically from connection with our partner, relationship withers.  There are times when we need to pull back to re-group, but that's always with the intention to re-engage.  There are also times when we make a conscious decision to accept some aspect of a relationship, rather than fight a losing battle.  This mature letting go is not a withdrawal of connection or affection.

       So, what does work?  Terrence Real presents a model he calls "relationship empowerment."  Here, we move past the personal empowerment model, where I advocate for me, you advocate for you, and we both presume this path will lead to a good result (which it sometimes does).  In the relationship empowerment model, we are invited, not to settle for "good", but to go for "great."  We honor the individual, we listen deeply to ourselves and to each other, and we work together to give birth to something larger than me or you – a relational entity, an "us".  We advocate for us.

       This is not a co-dependent model, where we assume responsibility for each other.  It's a partnership were we are responsible, together, for what we create.

       This level of partnership:  As an approach to marriage (and other unions), it has a nice "ring" to it.

PS.  Stay tuned.  Next week, I'll share some thoughts from the second half of the book, including five strategies that do work.

Alone and All One

       As I approach the mystery, I see life – especially relational life – as a dance of uniqueness and oneness.  We are alone and all one.

       Here is a passage from the book, Who Dies, by Stephen Levine that speaks eloquently of life's invitation to embrace both aspects of being.  The Levine quote is followed by a poem I wrote years ago, Oddly One. 

       Enjoy.

       "As soon as the mind's conditioning to be someone arises, a kind of pain comes into our heart.  A feeling of being alone.  It is the loneliness of our separateness.  Our alienation from the universal.  But when we sit quietly with that loneliness and let it float in the mind, it dissolves into an 'aloneness' which is not lonely, but is rather a recognition that we are each alone in the One…. To change the intense loneliness of our personal isolation into an 'aloneness with God,' we must gently let go of control and stop re-creating the imagined self.  We must surrender our specialness, our competition, our comparing minds."  Stephen Levine.

Oddly One

If we follow

Our uniqueness,

We’re all

A bit weird.

Odd ducks

In God’s pond.

Oddly One.

Weekend with Richard

       I just spent a delightful – literally full of light – weekend with master teacher and mentor, Richard Moss.  A private session on Sunday was sandwiched between workshops on Saturday and Monday.  Each experience was an inspiration, a healing, a heart-opening expansion of spirit.  Here's a small sample of the teaching, as I've incorporated it.

       Most of us have become masters in the art of poisoning ourselves over and over with a limited number of suffering stories that take us away from the center of being into judgments about ourselves, about others, about the past, or about the future.  To the extent we get caught up in these stories, our aliveness is diminished as we shrink into smaller versions of ourselves.

       The stories may feel true, but they're fictional in nature, an artifact of ego.  Don’t believe them.  Don't identify with them.  The only thing we know for sure that's real about these stories is the effect they have on us right now, the damage they do us. 

       With mindfulness and the techniques of "relaxed readiness" and "focused spaciousness," we can choose to let go of story and stay alive in the richness of sensation, feeling and creativity in the present moment.  "Spiritual muscle" is exercised by the discipline of gently and persistently bringing awareness back to our bodies and our immediate experience in the now.  As Richard says, "Who I am begins now."

       Presence in the now is a gateway to an inner spaciousness, the realization that we are much bigger than any story or problem we can have.  In compassionate spaciousness, we can create a "holding environment" for any human feeling or experience – observing it, making room for it, allowing it to move naturally within us and through us toward integration and transformation.  Thus, we become friends with ourselves, comfortable in our own skins, available for deeper connection with others and with all of life.

       Along with insight, compassion and a personal embodiment of these teachings, Richard offers practical methodology and tools for healing and expansion.  His teaching is uniquely accessible and powerfully relevant.  I encourage you to check out his website:  www.richardmoss.com   

       Maybe with a book, retreat or free e-course, you too can have a weekend with Richard.

Whyte on Heartbreak

       Poet and philosopher, David Whyte has written, among many beautiful works, a book entitled The Three Marriages, in which he delves deeply into the intimate relationships we have with a partner in life, with our vocation and with our deepest self.

       Recently, he delivered a keynote address at the Psychotherapy Networker convention in Washington, D.C.  My good friend Kirk was there, bought a recording of the talk and lent it to me.

       Here's an excerpt from David's keynote:

       "When you think about it, there is no journey of sincerity that a human being can take in life without having their heart broken.  And there's no love affair you can follow, without that imaginary organ being rent asunder at one time or another.  And there's no marriage, no matter how happy it is, that won't leave you helpless and wanting at times, leaving you literally with a broken heart.

       "Not only that, there is no work you can follow without having your heart broken.  If you are sincere about your vocation, you will get to thresholds where you will not know how to proceed, and where you will forget yourself, and where you will start to imprison yourself with the very endeavor that was first a doorway to freedom.

       "And then, in that third marriage with the self, a really sincere examination of the old interior substrate should, if you are sincere, lead to existential disappointment.  And, if you don't become disappointed in yourself, you're not trying.

       "So, it's interesting to think that there is no path a human being can take with real courage that doesn't lead to real heartbreak.  It's astonishing to see how human beings actually spend an enormous amount of their time and energy turning away from that possibility and trying to arrange for a life where you won't be touched and you'll be left immune by the great forces and elements of life.

       "And, of course, when you leave those forces and elements behind, you leave the very genius at the heart of what you're attempting to bring into the world, to incarnate into the world, including the incarnation of your own presence."

       By the way, I don't think David is trying to romanticize heartbreak.  As I listen, I hear an invitation to soften to heartbreak, to make room for it rather than run from it, to appreciate its teaching, to keep a sense of humor about it, and to cultivate what he calls "robust vulnerability" – a necessary courage for those who aspire to live in integrity.

Inside-Out Healing

       A wonderful teacher is coming to Minnesota at the end of April.  I have experienced a ten-day retreat and a number of workshops with Richard Moss and have come away each time deeply moved and more deeply connected.  His work, his wisdom and his presence bring together the spiritual and psychological, inviting a deep integrity with self, with others and with life.

       Inside-Out Healing, his most recent book (on which the Minnesota workshop is based), offers gem after gem of uncommon wisdom, along with a practical methodology to access the power of presence in the now as a gateway to spaciousness, transformation and healing.  If you're interested in the book, the work or the workshop, please check out the website:  www.healing.richardmoss.com

       While there's no way to capture the depth of Richard's wisdom with a quote or two, I'd like to share a couple passages from the end of the book – passages among many that touched and inspired me.

       "When you are no longer the doer, that is when something deeper within you begins to live through you.  This is a state of remarkable aliveness.  This is what every athlete, artist, and writer has discovered at some time in his or her career…

       "When you become a vehicle for your inner wisdom, you are witness to an inner creator, and that experience gives you faith in yourself and a sense of marvel about what is hidden within you that, given a chance, can live through you.  It also offers you profound appreciation for all those who have let their deeper

aliveness and inner genius be born through them…

       "This is really what it comes down to: risking to let yourself become radically alive.  It will help you heal.  At the very least it may soothe your body and take away pain.  Being that alive, even if only for a matter of moments, may actually cure you of illness.  But even if that doesn't happen, your heart will be overflowing with gratitude.  And there is no medicine more powerful than the energy of your own grateful heart."

       A question arose about the authorship of the last two Weekly Wisdoms.  I did write them.  When I say things like, "this came to me in written form," I'm trying to convey a sense I often have that the material writes itself somehow – that words seem to come through me and not necessarily from me.  

       Anyway, what follows is something I did not write.  It's from the work of the late psychiatrist and spiritual teacher, David R. Hawkins, and is a compilation of quotes from his book, Truth vs. Falsehood.   The quotes are featured on a YouTube video, Pathway to Freedom and Happiness, created by LaMarAzura. 

       While the language, at times, feels foreign to me, I found the ideas interesting, thought provoking and worth sharing.

Pathway to Freedom and Happiness

       The steps out of failure, unhappiness, frustration, lack, want, anger and depression are deceptively simple.  Life is a voyage, comparable to being out at sea, in which a shift of one degree on the ship's compass will determine by the end of the trip whether or not one is hundreds of miles off course. 

       The strongest tool, which already exists within, is the spiritual will itself, which when firmly set will face and take on any obstacle.  It is this spiritual will that determines the success of the venture.  From subjective experience, as well as many years of clinical practice, spiritual education and research, it is confirmed that the spiritual will is the primordial rudder that determines, not only this lifetime, but also the course of one's consciousness over great expanses of time, classically termed karma. 

       From consciousness research, one can quickly confirm that the adoption of an attitude immediately invites in that entire field of consciousness, which then unwittingly begins to dominate the personality and thoughts.  What are considered to be "my thoughts" are merely thoughts common to that particular energy field and are not really personal at all. 

       It is well to avoid, rather than oppose, negativity and resist the temptation and illusion that one can play with it and not get burned.  The nonintegrous fields of consciousness contain seductive programs that are extremely cunning. 

       While the frantic person flails in the water and drowns, the more evolved person learns how to float.  The ultimately buoyant sea that supports spiritual progress is the overall, powerful field of consciousness. 

       It is the power of this field that precludes the possibility of even death itself.  Man has intuited and known this since the very beginning of civilization and has been aware that life cannot be extinguished, but can only change form.

       Here's something that first moved through me in written form nearly ten years ago.  The first half you may recognize as an expanded version of the cosmos story I shared last week.  The second half tells the rest of the story.  While the narrator is younger in this piece, the story still speaks to me.  Perhaps it will also speak to you.

Cosmos and Growth

        Stories don’t have to be totally factual to be true.  Cosmological stories, my favorites, are especially hard to prove.  But the cosmos is in us –- and so are the stories.  Here’s one about the universe and how we evolve in it.

Cosmos

        In the beginning, there is no-thing.  Pure being.  The silence of God.  This void, because it is the silence of God, is quite fertile.  The emptiness is full.  In an attempt to name this emptiness that cannot be named, physicists might use the term “singularity.”

        From the fertile void flares forth a great blossoming, an explosion of love, the energy of God.  Love is a name by which God is known.  This energy of love first shows itself as an ecstatic expansion of light, then heat.  Creativity and destruction dance ceaselessly together, as love gives birth, gives death, gives birth again.

        Time and space are born.  As the original burst of energy slows and cools, at precisely the right rate, it becomes the universe we see – the stars and planets, the rocks and trees, the animals and humans, like you and me.

        The universe is growing and alive.  It’s very intelligent and, I think, wise.  Because its essence is love, it is not neutral (as some people think), and it certainly is not malevolent.

        In this story, love and everything in the universe is trinitarian in nature.  Uniqueness, oneness and relatedness are fundamental to all that is.  Every person and every blade of grass is one of a kind (unique and individual), one with the universe (all originating in the singularity of sacred emptiness) and forever connected in a web of relationship with everything else (the ultimate internet). 

        Relationship is a never-ending dance of uniqueness and oneness.  We are each so different and yet have so much in common.  We are one and we are two.  Whether we care to or not, we are all dancing with the paradoxical mystery of oneness in two-ness and two-ness in oneness.  We dance, not just with our partners, but with everyone and everything. 

        How often do we open our hearts to the music and soften to the rhythm?

        So, in this story of cosmos, Pure Being (the Nameless No-Thing) becomes Love, which becomes the beloved.  All creation, including each of us, is the offspring of Love.

Growth

        Human growth mirrors, in reverse image, the path of the universe.  In this story, our growth has three stages, each wonderful in its own way.  And naturally, since it’s human, our growth is not particularly tidy or orderly.  We move back and forth among the stages, willy-nilly, true to our nature. 

        The stages are really tasks.  The first task is softening to love – letting ourselves be loved.  When we soften and open to the ever-present energy of love, we are healed and made whole.  Like daisies basking in sunshine, we blossom, each in our own unique way.  For a long time, as a psychotherapist, I thought this was the whole story. 

        The next stage is the movement from being loved to being love.  While the first stage heals the wounded ego, the second stage expresses soul.  It’s not about “me” anymore.  It’s about becoming light – shining, radiating, warming.  Naturally and effortlessly, a healed presence becomes a healing presence.  The light of love flickers at first, then grows more steady.  Have you noticed how some people seem to glow?

        Surely, I thought, this must be the end of the story.  It can’t get any better than this.  But no, like in the late night commercial, there’s more!

        The third growth movement is toward the experience of pure being, a movement from being love to being no-thing.  Mystical traditions in all religions speak of a silence, a sacred emptiness, where separation from God ceases.  All attachment and ego identity disappear.  Every thing is gone, and all things are possible.  The universe blossomed from this profound peace.  It’s where all miracles originate.

        At first, during times of meditation, I had only glimpses of this quiet place.  At some point, I can’t pinpoint just when, glimpses became visits.  Never boring, visits now are irregular and unpredictable, and usually don’t last long. (How good can I stand it, after all?) 

        We are the visited, not the visitor.  More than we seek, we are sought.  Sacred silence finds us, and we remember.  We never return from such encounters unchanged.  We may seem the same, but we’re not.

        Some people spend a lot of time in no-time, unself-consciously one with God in the silence of pure being.   It’s become home for them.  Eventually, in this story, it becomes home for all of us.

        Alpha meets Omega.  The end and the beginning are one.

A Cosmos Story

       In dealing with mysteries like the nature of the universe, most spiritual traditions resort to story, which is my favorite way to speak about that which can't be defined.  In group Thursday night, we played with cosmological stories.  Here's one I like.  As with all big stories, it is, at best, a partial truth.

       Once there was no time, no space, no thing – only Sacred Silence, an intelligent, fertile, creative emptiness.  Suddenly, from this deep quiet, there emerged an explosion of LOVE.  This explosion marked the beginning of time and space and led to the creation of matter and all things. 

       In this story, LOVE is the first expression of Sacred Silence.  Everything in the universe is an expression and manifestation of LOVE.  And the intelligence of Sacred Silence permeates it all.

       Eventually, humans arrived on the scene – bringing curiosity, the capacity for awe and an inclination to wonder.  We humans yearn for the unseen within the seen.  Restless at heart, we search – hungry to know the LOVE we express.

       We create meaning and share stories.  We melt into quiet and remember.

Lent

       On the Ash Wednesdays of my childhood, I remember receiving an ashen cross on my forehead as somber words were spoken:  "Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return."  It was a powerful ritual that stayed with me all day long, as did the ashes.

       Since then, I've come to see Lent as a time of remembering and a time for preparation – preparation for resurrection. And I've come to see resurrection as an uplifting, a lifting of the veil that tricks us into feeling separate.  Resurrection transforms us.  It returns us to oneness – and to the spaciousness from which we came. 

       Honoring the season in group Thursday night, we gathered in a circle and anointed each forehead with a fragrant oil and these words: 

       "Remember, you are a unique and beautiful word in the vocabulary of God.  You are, already, that which you seek.  Whatever you hunger for is within you now.  Prepare for resurrection."

       Remember?