The Conscious Heart (18 page)

In our office we get to observe the physical changes that occur when people make the soul-choice of generosity. The skin glows with an unmistakable vibrant coloring, and a sparkle springs from the eyes when people deeply connect, when they go from scarcity to generosity. Another place where it shows is in listening. Thousands
of times in therapy we have seen people shift from listening-to-make-the-other-wrong to listening-to-understand. This move requires a choice for generosity.

Being generous with yourself deepens your connection to the well of wholeness in and around you. Generosity with money allows the resources of the universe to flow through you. Buckminster Fuller once said that there are enough resources on the planet for everyone to be a billionaire. Generosity sows brilliant seeds into the future that draw you forward into flow. Generosity allows the future to gently tug you into your vision rather than having the past push you forward while loading your back pockets with lead.

Ultimately generosity heals by revealing essence. True generosity means giving yourself what you most want, not a temporary pacifier. In relationships people repeatedly identify their wish to be loved for who they are, to be seen and appreciated for their deepest being. We can be generous in seeing and receiving our partner’s actions and words, and in allowing differences and changes.

As an experiment, here are some questions that evoke conversations about generosity and essence. Try asking your partner:

• What do you want that’s really important to you?

• If anything were possible, what would you like to be doing? To learn? To explore? To create?

• What do you experience when you’re deeply connected to yourself and the world around you?

• What do you most love to do that would get you out of bed in the morning without an alarm clock?

• What qualities do you have, without whose presence you wouldn’t recognize yourself?

The Second Soul-Choice
Authenticity

Imagine how useless prayer would be if you lied to your God. The same authenticity is needed for intimacy: Relationship lives in truth and dies in lies. Truth is the safest place to stand in relationship. If we have learned one thing in our lives, both as lovers and as healers, it’s that truth heals.

While growing up, we often heard that “truth hurts,” but this is a falsehood whose purpose is to justify withholding the truth. We have seen thousands of people tell the truth about something they’ve been withholding, but we have yet to hear any one of them say later that they regretted it. What hurts is the pain of lying and being lied to. What hurts is when people bluntly say something that is arguable (and therefore not true) and call it the truth. In our culture truth has gotten such a dangerous name that when we talk about it on television shows, it sometimes produces outraged reactions in the audience. We were surprised until we realized sadly how many people’s lives are based on carefully constructed webs of deceit.

In one of the most memorable experiences of our public lives, we appeared on a late-night talk show; shortly afterward we got a call from one of the producers of the CBS show
48 Hours
. He wanted to make sure he had heard us clearly: Were we really suggesting that people in close relationships make a practice of telling each other the truth? Absolutely, we said. If you tell the truth, you have a relationship. If you don’t, you have an entanglement. It’s as simple as that. “Wow,” he said, “that’s radical.” Really?

He went further. Could he send a camera crew to follow us around the house for a couple of days? The producers were doing a show on truth and wanted to show the extreme uses to which people might put it. They would document how we told the truth in our relationship and would eavesdrop on a couple of therapy sessions with willing clients. Eager to put the issue of authenticity before thirty million people, we agreed, and soon a squadron of
producers, technicians, and helpers arrived, led by a smooth, articulate, and well-informed anchorman.

The first question he asked us was: Weren’t we afraid that if people told each other the truth, it would trigger a national wave of “spontaneous combustion”? No, we replied, we have more to fear from the cancer of lies than from an outbreak of health. Would America be a worse place if Nixon had told the truth about Watergate? If all the smokers quit smoking, would they get sick from all that fresh air? Probably not. In both cases, we’d all just breathe a lot easier.

His second question (we’re not making this up): Were we at all concerned that this practice might fall into the hands of children? As talk-show veterans, we are accustomed to answering all manner of off-the-wall questions, but this one truly stumped us. We looked at him in amazement for a few long seconds while our minds grappled with the assumptions upon which this question was based. No! we sputtered finally. As adults, most of our problems come from learning, when we’re kids, that we have to lie. It
should
fall into the hands of children! Our anchorman knitted his eyebrows to indicate he was skeptical, but the interview continued: Would we demonstrate an example of truth-telling in our own relationship?

Gay tells the story: “Kathlyn had been in Berlin for the previous week, conducting a workshop. I’d just picked her up from the airport the night before their camera crew arrived. We really hadn’t had a chance to have any intimate conversations. One of the things I’d wanted to talk to her about was some sexual fantasies I’d had during her absence, about a girlfriend of mine I’d known before I met Kathlyn. I hadn’t thought about her in years, and I had no idea why she was coming so strongly into my awareness now. With the cameras rolling, I launched into relating my experience. As I gave her the details about Nancy, our anchorman was virtually hyperventilating. When I finished, he asked in an outraged tone, ‘Now, Kathlyn, did you really need to hear that?’ ”

Kathlyn says: “I told him I was thoroughly glad Gay was
telling me the truth, although I also said that it triggered some fear in my stomach. I said that I’d much rather live in a world where people revealed themselves than in one where we concealed ourselves.”

So it went. When the show aired, we saw that they had contacted another relationship expert to offer a disclaimer. He came on at the end of our segment and said, in essence, “Truth
can
be dangerous. Kids, don’t try this at home.” Perhaps it’s our imagination, but he looked as if he were in a great deal of pain as he was saying it.

The path of the conscious heart is made real through authenticity. In other words, relationship does not live in essence unless you can reliably tell the truth without being prompted. Many of us will tell the truth when we’re asked or threatened, but fewer of us have such a powerful urge for authenticity that we will initiate telling the truth.

Three areas of ourselves call most urgently for the light of transparency: facts, feelings, and fantasies. We discovered that our spiritual path deepened significantly when we could become completely authentic in these three areas. Both of us entered our relationship with a strong pull toward hiding all three of them, so it took a lot of work to achieve transparency. We both came from families where we got punished for communicating the truth. Withdrawing into ourselves became a survival strategy.

First the partners in a relationship have to learn to be authentic with themselves. To do this they have to overcome the myth of blissful ignorance, which says that it is better to ignore the truth of experience than to feel and speak it. The idea is that if you do not feel or say certain truths, they will cease to be true. Countless relationships have been destroyed because one or both partners lied to themselves about something that was real.

An accompanying myth says that awareness is painful, but actually awareness is light and blissful. It is resistance to awareness that is painful. Gay recalls such an experience: “I was taking a shower when I found myself thinking a lot of scary thoughts about
a minor surgical procedure that I was scheduled to have the following week. I pictured myself having a bad reaction to the anesthetic, waking up feeling groggy, and having to be cared for in a way that inconvenienced Kathlyn. I realized that I was scared about something; I could feel the shivering ‘butterfly’ feeling in my belly. I let myself feel the fear, focusing my attention on it. As I did this, I first felt more fear, but as I watched my mind at work, I saw that part of me wanted to feel it and part of me was resisting it. I noted this and dismissed the resister part, thanking it for looking out for me but telling it to be quiet for a moment. With my full attention now on the fear, I realized I was afraid of dying. Without the resistance, though, the awareness of the fear felt delicious. Instead of pain, I felt waves of bliss in the same place the fear had been.

“Taking anesthesia is probably a trigger for the fear of dying, I thought, so I deliberately lingered on the fantasy of taking the drug and sliding into unconsciousness. Then I inserted a better idea into my thought-stream: a fantasy of waking up feeling hale, happy, and healed. That shift allowed me to go through the surgery with only minor discomfort and, more importantly, to let Kathlyn support me. Our essence-connection deepened through each of us sharing our fears and desires.”

In speaking the truth to someone else, most of us fear the other person will have a blowup or some other unpleasant reaction. We have surveyed many audiences over the years, asking them if they can remember being punished for telling the truth about something as children. Often half an audience can remember incidents of being hit or scolded, instead of celebrated, for telling the truth. No wonder “truth hurts.” In therapy, however, our experiences have been very different. We have been present on hundreds of occasions when people have said truths to each other that they had been hiding, truths such as:

• I’ve been having an affair for the past three years.

• I have a number of secret bank accounts.

• I have another family in another state.

• I feel angry at you for shunning your children.

• I hate your mother.

If “truth hurts,” then people should get very upset on hearing these confessions. But our experience is exactly the opposite. Nearly every time the listener greets the truth with relief or wonder—relief, when it is a truth that the listener has suspected, often unconsciously, but has not articulated; wonder, when it is something the listener has not thought of. Sometimes anger comes later, but it is a secondary emotion, born of the fear of life-changes that the revealed truth might cause. But when partners can speak the truth about these fears, very little anger rattles around in their relationship.

Intentions are very important when communicating a truth in a relationship. If my intention is to make you wrong or to dump something I’ve felt guilty about, I’ll get a troublesome reaction from you. But if my intention is to be transparent, to share everything with you, then your reaction, although sometimes intense, may well open more authenticity and respect. I’m actually letting you know that I consider you an equal and capable of hearing the truth.

Many of our clients and students have told us that their first-date policy now is to let the person know right off the bat that they are interested in developing an authentic relationship. Then they say something that is unarguably true, such as, “I’m afraid that you’ll think I’m pushy,” or “I’m experiencing waves of warmth up the center of my body.” They notice whether their date becomes excited by this authenticity and responds with interest. Starting a relationship with authenticity establishes safety for exploration.

Longer-term relationships, of course, have more baggage, more stashes of secrets, and more layers of withholding, so making a new commitment to authenticity may be more complicated for established couples. Hundreds of couples we know have navigated their relationships to greater transparency by sharing their fears first—such as acknowledging that their pile of baggage seems overwhelming, or that they don’t know who they really are under the
layers of trying to please or control. We recommend starting with simple truths like body-sensations. Get familiar with noticing your flow of feelings and sharing those. Establish a shared world of authenticity, then step into those secrets that linger in your dreams or dull your aliveness. Each choice to be authentic invites more essence into your relationship.

The Third Soul-Choice
Balance