The Conscious Heart (6 page)

“As we sat having tea in the English Tea House in Palo Alto, I heard that you were interested in a relationship that ran on continuous positive energy, no time wasted in conflict. All my carefully constructed patterns and familiar concepts about relationships just exploded out of my mind. I remember the thrill of a real adventure, of thinking, ‘I am launching the most powerful rocket I can imagine. This is my moon voyage, and I am ready.’

“It was dusk in the winter when we had tea. The shop had wrought-iron filigree on the windows and lots of English goodies like cookies and tea cozies. A fire was dancing behind you and framed a particularly animated, embracing gesture that I would come to see often. For the first time since I was six and tried to launch off the garage roof, I knew that flight was really possible. When you touched me, I knew you wanted nothing and everything, even those dusty aspects of me that I’d carefully folded up in my personal attic. When you first looked at me, just at me, the ocean in your eyes told me I was home. I’ve always loved water and feel right at home even in the deepest midnight-blue waves. I’ve dived in, swung on rope swings, and jumped in from parachutes. But your blue-green eyes with gold flecks of mischief beckoned me, with infinite peace and play, to a new ocean. Over the years of uncovering and healing old wounds and projections, the vista of space and the vision of wholeness has always held us.”

There were many details to sort out before we could be
together. We both had entanglements in other relationships, and Gay was just leaving for a two-month tour of Asia and Europe. But compared to the deep soul-satisfaction we felt inside, these details of time and space meant nothing. Within six months of meeting, we were settled into a rental house in Colorado, complete with children and cat. Then the real work began: turning our aspirations and intentions into real-world skills that would allow us to live in harmony in the hot moments of relationship.

A K
EY
D
ECISION

G
ay recalls a watershed moment during a lecture by J. Krishnamurti in 1973: “Sitting on a bare stage in a straight-backed chair, he addressed several thousand of us in his precise Oxford English. His message was radical, then and now: He invited us to do away with all teachers and gurus, himself included. He said that if we paid attention, life itself would teach us what we needed to know. At first this idea confused and disappointed me; I was in the stage of spiritual immaturity where I thought some magical guru out there could give me the keys to the kingdom. But the more I resonated with it, the idea of trusting myself and the universe as my teacher profoundly changed my life.

“One way of applying this idea is something I still do every day: When I felt unhappy or confused, I began to look for what I was thinking or doing just when I started experiencing the unpleasant feelings. It worked marvelously, teaching me the specific dynamics of how we go about making ourselves unhappy. For some reason, though, it never occurred to me to do this in relationship until I met Kathlyn.”

Soon, though, we caught on. We committed ourselves to learning from every issue and conflict, turning each moment, even the ones of deep stress, into learning opportunities. We found that if we accepted our relationship itself as a valid path to reveal and
embrace essence, we could make great advances in learning about ourselves and the life of the spirit even in the moments of conflict. As we embraced this commitment—what we call the master commitment in the
next chapter
—everything shifted. Moments of conflict, formerly dreaded, now became learning opportunities.

Both of us had a set of internal sensations that let us know we were operating in a state of clarity and integrity. For Kathlyn it was “a feeling of ease and comfort in my movements, a sense of being at home in myself. When I didn’t feel that, I knew I had done something to block it. I would turn my attention to finding out what I’d done to interfere with this feeling. Sometimes it was something I ate that messed up the feeling, other times it was some communication glitch. The important thing, though, was noticing that the feeling wasn’t there and sorting back through the preceding seconds or minutes until I could find where it had disappeared.”

Gay’s internal sense of well-being was “a streaming feeling of flow, mostly along the front of my body between my pelvis and my throat. It felt like a breeze blowing softly through my chest and belly. When I lost touch with that feeling, I would run a quick check: ‘What had I said just before it stopped? What had I thought? What had I done?’ I noticed that I often had a series of negative thoughts just before the flow-feeling disappeared. Mentally I had judged myself wrong or compared myself unfavorably with someone else. These thoughts, especially if I entertained them for a while, would stop the flow of pleasant sensations in my body.”

We began to apply this same principle to our relationship. We noticed that delight and wonder characterized the flow of feeling and communication when we were at our best with each other. It didn’t matter whether we were talking about the weather, a movie, or our income tax return: When that feeling of delight was there, we knew we were in harmony with each other. When it disappeared, we would look for what we had been doing, saying, or thinking just before it departed. This guidance system became a
powerful teacher for us, helping us develop the major commitments that we now teach.

For example, the sweet feeling disappeared if we did not consciously take space from each other now and then. If we didn’t spend alone-time on a regular basis, we could not enjoy our close-time. Perhaps like all human beings, we have needs for both closeness and autonomy. These deep drives for intimacy and separate development can take us through the gateway of relationship to great spiritual heights, but when denied or resisted, they can become the fuel for a great deal of dissatisfaction.

The sweet feeling disappeared in the wink of an eye if one of us hid some feeling from the other. When we were angry or scared or hurt, we learned to speak out clearly and quickly, because if we didn’t, the sweet feeling would be replaced with strain and distance. We discovered that the physical energy that one of us uses to withhold something separates us from a deep feeling of connectedness, both inside and with each other. Now we saw that even the subtlest, most trivial withheld feeling created static. This static-filled distance felt completely different from the easeful feeling of space that we experienced when we were close to ourselves and each other at the same time. When we spoke up about our feelings, we could feel close, even if we were engaged in different activities at opposite ends of the house and even if one of us was traveling.

We also found, to our great surprise and pleasure, that once we were in a relationship together, we had even more and stronger experiences of essence than we had had before we met. Both of us were accustomed to opening our hearts in solitary activities like meditation, yoga, breathwork, and dance. What we hadn’t known was that even greater essence-feelings are available through relationship, if we followed certain guideposts. That’s not to say we didn’t confront barriers galore. Both of us are very strong people, with strong opinions, and so our barriers had those same grandiose qualities at times.

T
HE
H
ARDEST
B
ARRIERS
W
E’VE
H
AD TO
C
ONFRONT

L
ooking back at the first few years of our relationship, it seems that life was administering us pop quizzes every week or two to find out if we were serious about our commitment. It was a time of rich learning, of being forged in the fire. In the long run it was an incredibly productive time because it gave us an unshakable sense of what is possible in close relationships. It also gave us a toolkit of reliable skills that we could use not only in our own lives but with the people who came to us for therapy. But in the short run the challenges of this period sometimes seemed overwhelming.

Letting Go of Controlling the Other Person

Gay comes from a wild and crazy creative family, where house-cleaning, dinnertime, and the routines of daily life were secondary to the whims and passions of his single-parent writer-mother. Kathlyn comes from a Betty Crocker family, with two parents, three kids, and a tidy house in the suburbs. Life was very predictable; Thursday was always Spanish rice night, with ice cream for dessert. As we were learning to live together, these two polar-opposite styles brought us into conflict frequently. “Do you have to be so messy?” was a question that frequently occupied Kathlyn’s mind, while “Couldn’t you focus more on your creativity and lighten up on polishing the kitchen counters?” occupied Gay’s. If only the other person could be more like us, we’d be happy!

Soon we became frustrated with our total lack of success in getting the other person to see we were right. Fortunately this frustration inspired us to give up on our improvement projects sooner rather than later. Kathlyn came to accept that Gay might live and die as a terminally untidy person, while Gay got used to Kathlyn’s desire to have the kitchen clean before she could start
work on her creative projects each day. As if by magic, when we let go of trying to control each other, we began to see evidence of change. Gay became tidier; Kathlyn put a higher priority on her creativity; and we both pitched in to do more housework. Letting go of trying to control and reshape each other gave us a lot more energy to spend on having a good time together.

Going Through Complete Cycles of Feeling

Early in our time together, we noticed that we each had our favorite ways of stopping the other from feeling things we didn’t want them to feel. Gay was very afraid of women getting angry at him, so if he saw Kathlyn starting to get angry, he would distract her by saying something complimentary or getting her to laugh. Kathlyn’s family was organized partly around keeping her father from going into rages, so she was a master of being hypervigilant to the early warning signs of Gay’s displeasure and finding some way to please him. As she describes it, “Often this involved getting very quiet and still, disappearing so as to make myself invisible. It took me a couple of years to separate Gay from my father. I laid an unconscious picture of my father’s face on him practically every day, but as I got more clear, I realized that I had nothing to fear from Gay’s feelings. If I didn’t stop him from feeling them, he would communicate them, usually in a straightforward way, and he would be done with it. I was afraid that he was going to be like my father, storming around the house, snorting like an enraged bull, and I danced around his feelings to keep this from happening. But in fifteen years I’ve never seen Gay do anything like that. My fears were something I made up out of unresolved feelings about my father.”

Once we caught on, we stopped interrupting each other’s feeling-cycles. If one of us saw the other getting upset, we would encourage them to feel and express the anger or whatever was in the air. We might say, “It looks like you’re mad. I’d like to hear
about it.” Then we would do our best not to interrupt until they had thoroughly aired their grievance. In order to do this, we found we had to be genuinely committed to helping each other be completely whole.

As we learned to be with and for each other’s feelings, our love and attention actually deepened our feelings and allowed us access to levels of emotion that wouldn’t have been possible on our own. Kathlyn, feeling into her anger, safely explored depths of rage that seemed to extend back into early childhood. Gay opened to feelings of sadness and loss that he had previously successfully channeled into work.

In those early days Kathlyn was terrified of flying. On milder occasions she would dream she had missed her flight or become very agitated about getting to the airport on time. On other occasions it was worse: She spent many flights with her head between her knees or holding the plane up with white knuckles and held breath. Before he got wise, Gay would try to talk her out of it by saying things like “It’s safer than driving” and “There’s nothing to be afraid of with flying; it’s falling you’ve got to be concerned with.” None of these ministrations helped. But later he learned to let her go through complete feeling-cycles, saying, “Go ahead and let yourself feel scared. There must be something to it, or it wouldn’t be an issue for you.” Kathlyn let herself feel it deeply, breathing with it and turning it into fear-dances in the living room. As she breathed and moved with her fear, she went through nausea, headache, dizziness, and several periods of unpleasantness. But when the cycle was complete, so was the fear. Fear of flying disappeared for her as an issue, and she has logged nearly a million miles since then, circling the globe to teach our work. The point is that resisting or interrupting feeling-cycles prolongs them; when we made a safe space for ourselves and each other to feel them completely, their unpleasantness disappeared.

Achieving Transparency

Although we are both deeply committed to revealing our feelings, the barriers to telling the truth about them sometimes seemed insurmountable. We both came from backgrounds where the last thing anyone would do was to say how they were actually feeling. Both of us can be great stonewallers, and from time to time we locked into a stubborn standoff where each of us thought the other should apologize for some inconsiderate act, like interrupting a phone conversation or lecturing. When we got stuck, it was often because there was some fact or feeling we weren’t sharing. Kathlyn has a great deal of difficulty saying when she’s angry, while Gay has trouble with fear and sadness. Many’s the time we got hopelessly mired in conflict, only to free ourselves with a ten-second burst of authenticity like “I’m scared you’re going to get mad and leave me.” We would create a whole drama on top of a simple truth like “I’m mad you didn’t pick up Chris on time yesterday.” And you know what? No matter how many thousands of times we’ve tasted the power of authenticity, and no matter how many times we’ve seen it work miracles in therapy, telling the truth is still a challenge. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t overlook some truth, usually a feeling, that we should be communicating to the other person. Practice has made us more nimble, though. We’ve cut down our stuck-time to a matter of seconds or minutes before we remember to tell the truth and get the flow going again.