The Conscious Heart (24 page)

Gay, meanwhile, was coming to his own realizations: “As I gave myself permission to feel all my feelings toward Kristin, I became clear that I did not really want a sexual relationship with her. Rather, part of me did, but most of me wanted to keep our relationship on a spiritual and friendship level. I got to this awareness by letting myself feel my sexual feelings for her without acting on them. After feeling them thoroughly over several weeks, they completely dissolved, replaced by an enthusiasm for her potential and a warm feeling of being a friend and supporter. I love her in some way that is unfamiliar to me. Now I can no longer imagine actually having physical sex with her, though I continue to find her radiantly beautiful and full of loving kindness.

“As I have gone deeper into all my feelings, I have discovered that this adventure was really about my relationship with my creativity. Kristin was a living representative of a young, wild, and free version of myself. Unconsciously, I felt this part of me was dying, replaced by the prosperous, worldly-wise father-figure who knew everything there was to know. In fact, during the peak of my sexual feelings for Kristin, I kept having a fantasy of driving off to California with her beside me in a VW bus, the same kind of bus I had sold shortly after I met Kathlyn. In the fantasy, loud music was throbbing through the speakers, and Kristin’s curls were streaming in the wind. We would be happy and free and out of range of the fax machine. Apparently the latter device had become my metaphor for all the pressures of prosperity and fame.

“My Kristin adventure was a wake-up call, an opportunity to claim that wild creative energy that I was in danger of submerging. The questions became: ‘Would I make a complete, turn-myself-inside-out commitment to the expression of my creativity? Or would I settle for the ease and comfort of resting on my laurels?’ As I settled into these questions, I realized I had little choice. Of course I had to open up to the full expression of my creativity. Anything less would mean stultification and slow rust.

“Sitting at home in my study late one night, I made a pact with myself and the universe. From now on creativity would be my highest priority. I decided to turn myself over to its full expression through me. If my relationship with Kathlyn was humming with love and good energy, I would assume that my relationship with my creativity was good. If my relationship with her was feeling disharmonious, I would regard it as a symptom that I was out of harmony with my creativity. Everything began to shift in my body and spirit. I could feel an actual different set of sensations emerging. A fresh new field of energy began to pulsate in me, a new and vaster spaciousness than I had felt before. It was something I could feel and see at the same time. I felt a benign breeze coursing through my body, and it felt like it was outside me at the same time. Along with the breeze I could see more radiance and light
inside me. Wherever I scanned, in my mind or body, I could see a backdrop of light. All the usual phenomena of my consciousness—my breathing, the beating of my heart, my thoughts—all took place against the screen of light and the sweet feeling of the breeze.”

Kathlyn’s journal reflects this growing sense of resolution: “What a day yesterday, wonderful play and making love with Gay for the first time in a couple of weeks, with feeling and contact and communication. ‘It’s so easy,’ I said, to which he replied, ‘Yes, when we’re not in a trance.’ That’s 10 percent—let’s go for 100 over the next five years or so. I can see the bass note that has been missing, why Gay would be so sexually frustrated and pulled to look elsewhere to open up to the sexuality that is a part of being human, that I had gotten jammed up and cross-wired.…

“At dinner last night Gay asked, ‘Do you think that you can maintain your creativity by yourself now that you have access to it, without the underlying anxiety, if I should choose not to have a sexual relationship outside ours?’ I said yes, that the anxiety had dropped off about two days ago. And I’m glad to have the opportunity, the timing, of going off to Europe for two weeks or so now to stabilize my own responsibility for my creativity.

“Actually turning my attention to supporting my life-energy stream has been like blowing up a marvelous new balloon that has pockets and turns I hadn’t seen until I blew energy into them. I’m being carried along under the iridescent puffs of a cosmic clown, bouncing lightly over the possible gulleys in my old psyche and gathering momentum for flight. To find my family has been a sigh of gratitude. To recognize that I have always seen the world as a poet, playing with the images and possible meanings, the sliding proportions of absurdity and clear abundance from source. I am full of the delight of the panorama, the continual play of humanity.

“I spoke with Gay last night (from Amsterdam), who said that he is getting clearer and deeper into both his creativity and his commitment to me. I am very glad for this time by myself to deeply
think and consider who I am and how to maintain and nurture my own creativity and still be with Gay. I don’t know yet if the dying process has completed. I haven’t burst into tears in about a week now. When I think of Gay, I’m aware of supporting and caring for him, and also supporting and caring for me, I am not pulled to let go of whatever I’m focused on when he comes through the room, and that is what I want to make unshakable during this period of time apart.

“I declare the end of focusing on dying, I want to focus on the beginning of things, the possibilities, listening for the creative urges as they occur to me and through me. I am now open for new business, I think I have drained the old anger and have no more that I can find now. I am available to know and express my anger as I feel it—to say, when I feel a blip, ‘Tell the truth about it.’ And I realize, as I become more and more grounded in telling the truth—catching the blip, and taking responsibility—that creativity is the natural result. Now there is the opportunity to create a new dance of absolute equality. What has replaced my devoted and chameleon personas is happiness and creativity. I appreciate Gay and what happens when we talk together and are together. The rest is waiting to be created over time.”

The happy outcome of this major event in our lives has surprised even us. Both of us feel a deeper commitment to each other than we have ever felt. Both of us also feel an enhanced connection to our source of creativity. We were creatively productive before, but what has poured out of us since it occurred has been truly astonishing to us. Kristin remains in our lives as a friend, coworker, and confidante.

Says Kristin: “I am grateful to have learned that when I consistently speak the unarguable truth, I release an abundance of creative energy. My creativity grows exponentially. In communicating the truth in the moment, I let go of agendas, assumptions, and the illusion of control. That lets me allow the perfection of the universe to unfold, I also saw where I resist my own uprising
energy, and that I had been requiring others to express less of their creative energy so that I could stay comfortable. I have now committed to being a space in which creativity blossoms in me and those around me.”

Gay concludes: “What I see now is that Kristin was a huge reminder to me to keep my deep creative connection alive. It wasn’t about sex or having a beautiful twenty-five-year-old attracted to me; it was about whether I was going to do whatever it took to keep the juicy, wild energy flowing through me. It was about whether I was going to be truly alive, or to cash in my chips and turn the rest of my life into a greatest hits album. I feel magnificently alive now, and I see Kathlyn surfing on the edge of that same wave of aliveness. To see the light of creativity and love flowing through her at a higher level, and to feel it in myself: That is the best of all possible outcomes.”

SEVEN

Consciously Creating Abundance: Dealing with Money Issues

Clay is molded to make a pot,
but it is in the space where there is nothing
that the usefulness of the clay pot lies
.

—
TAO TE CHING
(trans. VICTOR H. MAIR)

I
n our own relationship few things have created a bigger challenge than money. Neither of us comes from a wealthy family, and we were poor when we met. In the early days of our relationship, we struggled about money long and hard. Then we discovered a more enlightening way of approaching it, and our lives were changed for the better in a very short time. With some major shifts in our attitudes, plus some old-fashioned creativity and hard work, we went from poverty to financial independence in a fairly short time, by our standards.

When we first met, Kathlyn had about three thousand dollars in savings, most of which she used to move to Colorado. Gay was
close to the bone, the most broke he had ever been. He says: “I was changing my life from top to bottom, from getting out of the relationship I was in, to changing the nature of my income-stream. I was relying more on writing and speaking and giving seminars and less on university-professoring for my income. As a result, I was in debt. Although I had a good feeling about what I was doing, I definitely hadn’t begun to show any evidence that the new path worked. In fact, American Express had just repossessed my card because I had not paid them in two months.”

From this beginning, as you can see, we had to do a lot of work on creating financial abundance. Now, after years of working on this area of our relationship, we almost never have any disharmony about money. That is not because we have more of it, either. To our surprise, we found that creating harmony about money had to come first. Then, with the freed-up energy we had been wasting in conflict, we were able to generate financial independence in a remarkably short period of time. We got to that point by making several crucial discoveries and taking some even more crucial actions. Resolving our money struggles was nothing like we thought it was going to be.

We discovered the hard way, through much trial and error, that having a healthy money supply is as much about metaphysics as it is about financial savvy. There are learnings in the spiritual arena that will do as much to generate financial well-being as any technical information. We would like to tell how we transformed our money issues, in hopes that it will be helpful to you in transforming yours.

Gay tells the story: “I had never considered the subject of creating financial harmony in my life until the winter of 1978, when I was in my early thirties. Until then I was simply making a living, trying to pay my bills, sometimes having a little left over. As often as not, I fell short at the end of the month and had to do some creative shuffling to make it all come out. It had certainly never occurred to me that I might design my own life in regard to financial abundance. One day a friend of mine, another psychologist,
called to my attention that I had made a disparaging comment about wealthy people—I’d made a remark about how rich people were never happy. He pointed out that he had never heard me make such a comment before about any other category of people. It sounded odd to him, as if I were repeating some old family chestnut. I was definitely coming from a limiting point of view. He said that it might be keeping me poor, as well as limiting my effectiveness with my clients.

“I reflected on this feedback and concluded that I had a poverty mentality based on my past conditioning. I realized that I had never consciously chosen my own relationship with money. I had simply accepted the point of view of my family and their friends and was busily running my own life from a set of assumptions colored by the Roaring Twenties, the Crash of ’29, the Great Depression, and other cataclysms that I had never experienced. For me, this realization was like the cartoon moment when a lightbulb flashes on above the hero’s head as he smacks himself on the forehead. I was on my exercise bike when this flash of enlightenment occurred, and my pulse rate and pedal speed probably doubled in the grip of my enthusiasm. I saw that I was free to choose my own money-consciousness, and that this choice might affect the outer circumstances of my life! I made a choice in that moment, to mount a deep inquiry into my money-attitudes and to select new ones that reflected my own values.

“The first thing I did was to confront my conditioning. What were my limiting beliefs about money and wealth? Where had they come from? There were several obvious sources. I was raised primarily by my grandmother, who placed great value on being poor but proud. It seemed likely that I had absorbed some of this attitude just from being around her. She came from an aristocratic southern family who had gotten on the wrong side of the Civil War. After the war they were penniless. My grandmother put a high value on security. My favorite story and hers, which she probably told me a hundred times as a child, was ‘The Three Little Pigs.’ ‘Build your house on solid ground’ was her great motto.
Looking back, I feel deep gratitude for this advice, which has kept me focused on the essentials in my career and personal relationships.