The Conscious Heart (16 page)

Like the sun peeking through clouds as they break up, essence grows as the partners choose the relationship over conflict time and again. Essence becomes the field in which relationship dramas unfold. You begin to see that you are bigger than your dramas: You have dramas, but they no longer have you. You see that you are making all these dramas up, that you are the source of them. As you claim responsibility for them, you also open up your ability to create freely, to choose what you really want.

In one of our group workshops, one coupled experience taught the rest of the group the major principles of the fourth wave. We call their conflict
The Cheese Drama
, and like most conflicts it was based on a superficially trivial issue. It seems that she had fed
his
cheese to
her
cat the day before, and they were still upset when they came back to the workshop the next day.

They agreed to work with us in front of the entire group, and we invited them to stand several feet apart within the circle of participants. Our exchange was videotaped, and we so appreciated the dynamics of their conflict that we transcribed their ride on the fourth wave.

H
IS
P
ART

HE: We had a fight.

US: What was the nature of the fight, in a sentence?

HE: I was fighting about whether I could have as much cheese on my hamburger as I want. (
He gestures to his stomach
.)

US: Since that’s the area of the body that’s usually connected to fear, ask yourself what you are afraid of.

HE (
after a pause
): I’m afraid it’ll never work out.

US: What is your unenlightened view of the situation?

HE: I was out running around getting the french fries for lunch, and she gave
my
cheese to her cat. It means she’s selfish, and because she’s that way, I’ll never have the relationship I want, I’ll never get my needs met.

US: Are you willing to take 100 percent responsibility for clearing up this issue?

HE: Yes.

US: Take a moment to love and accept the way you created this drama.

HE: I feel sadness welling up.

US: Love the sadness just as it is.

HE (
sighs and tears up and, after a moment, takes a deeper breath and looks up
).

US: Would you be willing to take complete responsibility for having a relationship with your wife that completely meets your needs?

HE: Yes (
smiling
).

H
ER
P
ART

US: What is your unenlightened view of this situation?

SHE: I want to be in control. The cheese was for the cat. He’s said he doesn’t like cheese, so I just buy cheese for the cat, who loves it.

US: How is this situation familiar?

SHE: No matter what I did in my family, it wasn’t appreciated.

US: So you spend the time and creative energy to design this
lunch, and he walks in and complains about no cheese, not noticing the array of tasty items decoratively arranged.

SHE: Yes.

US: What persona does all that designing?

SHE: The person who arranges it so everyone gets their needs met.

US: And in return are you supposed to get appreciated?

SHE: Yes (
starting to cry
), but I never did.

This is an amazing example of a perfect persona interlock: A guy who never gets his needs met gets together with a woman whose idea of relating is to arrange it so everyone gets their needs met. So why do they both require the very behaviors that make it impossible to be satisfied? Both of them adopted those personas to mask deeper feelings and issues when their authentic selves, their essences, didn’t work.

H
E AND
S
HE
T
OGETHER

US: What feeling is under the attempt to control?

SHE: I’m sad and afraid that I’m worthless, broken.

HE: I’m afraid I’ll be alone and isolated.

US: Come into the middle of the circle for a moment. (
They sit knee to knee
)

US (
to her
): Can you love him for feeling alone and isolated?

SHE: Yes, easily.

US (
to him
): Can you love her for feeling worthless?

HE: Yes. (
He beams at her
.)

US: Take a moment to love each other now.

(
They gaze at each other as the other participants become very still
.)

US: Would you be willing to have a relationship where you see and support each other’s essence, where you look for wholeness and keep choosing to express all of who you are?

BOTH: Yes, (
They’re giggling now, and their radiance lights up the whole group, who are also beaming
.)

Through making the courageous choice of having relationship harmony over being right, and making this choice repeatedly until it becomes second nature, the personal experience of essence takes hold. A feeling of warmth and space, usually felt in the chest, grows in the fourth wave. It comes and goes, and sometimes it feels like it has been lost altogether. It can be a frustrating wave because the partners often feel so stuck, yet clarity feels so close at hand. The contrast feels nearly unbearable between the way it is at the moment and the way they sense it could be.

In the fourth wave you often feel the rapid flip between making assumptions and judgments and seeing the world as it is. One moment, when you are asleep to your own essence, your partner may look like the enemy. The next moment, when your own sense of essence is restored, you see your partner’s essence. You remember why you chose the other person, and the floodgates of love open again.

People in successful long-term relationships tend to develop an ability to let go of attachment to their own points of view. In other words, they learn to handle the universal addiction to being right. Many couples founder in the fourth wave because they do not develop this ability. When the pressure is on, each of them chooses being right over seeing and supporting essence. A great deal of the work in the fourth wave involves the partners making graceful exits from the points of view in which they are stuck. As one couple put it, “What saved our marriage was learning that there was life beyond being right. We were both so attached to
making each other wrong that it seemed like a life-and-death struggle. What a relief when we found that it was entirely unnecessary.”

As couples drop their power struggle and begin to address the issues that each partner needs to resolve, they can become allies and learn from each other. One practice that allows both of them to expand their daily experience of essence is the skill we call interrupting routines. That human beings are all creatures of habit has been elaborately demonstrated by philosophers and animal trainers alike. But there is one major difference between us and our animal friends. A dolphin who fails to get the fish from the trainer’s hand will eventually stop doing its crowd-pleasing leap. A rat who runs down the tunnel that has the cheese in it will choose another tunnel if it stops finding cheese at the end. But human beings are different. We will keep going down a cheeseless tunnel for years. Why? Because we believe in it. We think it’s right, even though it doesn’t have any cheese anymore. We’ll defend it until the end, even discarding friends of many years who suggest that there’s no payoff for our efforts.

The practice of interrupting routines helps you let go of your repetitive patterns that no longer work and make choices that develop essence. Sometimes it’s a simple change, like unplugging the TV for a week. Other times it’s a more complex practice, such as finding a way to interrupt an argument that tends to repeat itself. The point is to do something that interrupts your routine. One couple, when they felt their arguments becoming repetitive, would interrupt that routine by falling silent and shifting to nonverbal communication. In another couple a passive sexual partner learned to initiate sex at an unexpected time. A procrastinator made a short list and completed one thing each day. An organizer learned to drift in the hammock, starting with ten minutes each day. A shy partner took a public-speaking class. An adventurous couple in their fifties interrupted their television-watching habit by taking an African-dance class together one evening a week.

The Fifth Wave
Essence Becomes Permanent

In this wave you no longer take struggles as seriously as you once did, because you are identified more with your own essence than with the part of you that is addicted to struggle. Also, you can see your partner’s essence clearly, even when you are struggling together. Conflict does not disappear in this wave; it simply becomes absorbed in a larger version of yourselves.

One workshop participant said that early in his relationship conflict with his partner felt like being in a small pen with an angry bull. As he became grounded in the experience of essence, however, the bull was still there, but now it had a vast pasture to roam in. His personal feeling of essence and space had developed to the extent that conflict was not overwhelming.

One buoy in this fifth wave is ease: Partners shift readily from fear to essence. They develop a real skill at surfing. They choose bigger waves to ride, and they turn fear into excitement with breath and truth. Compassion blooms. Each of them sees through the survival filters that the other has erected, and they appreciate each other’s essence qualities.

In one couple the fifth wave rolled organically into the sixth, the birth of co-creation. Says Laura: “Tom would often come home from work exhausted and retreat to the den. He wouldn’t be interested in what the kids had done that day or the graphics project I was working on. I used to get so frightened when he would withdraw, and I couldn’t seem to get through to him at all. I’d get frantic and scurry around trying to engage him.”

Tom remembers: “Laura looked like a madwoman, and I really curled up like an armadillo until she’d go away. It took several months for us to learn to let go of being right and trying to get each other to change. I realized that I had been repeating my father’s role of the reluctant provider, toiling away at a job I hated because it paid well, then coming home with no energy left for me, let alone the family.”

Laura recalls: “I began to see that I had inherited so many expectations from my parents’ rigid roles that I hadn’t really gotten to know Tom and his wants. I was afraid that if we didn’t keep the picture-perfect household, we’d fall into a void. It took a while for me to realize that my parents’ roles covered the void in their marriage, and that Tom and I could create our own relationship based on what
we
wanted.”

Tom adds: “You know what it came down to, over and over? I’d realize I was afraid and would say so. Then Laura would look really different, softer and calmer. Or she’d say, ‘Tom, I just noticed I’m doing my mother’s make-nice thing again,’ and
I’d
relax. That seemed to make room for love to grow. I started noticing how talented Laura is—not just in her design work, but in encouraging the kids’ creativity and making our home an oasis of color and tranquility.”

Says Laura: “I began to focus more on supporting Tom in expressing himself rather than on requiring him to be like my dad. I got really interested in what he wanted to do, and I listened more to his daydreams and the articles he’d bring home about building. He’d built things since he was really little but had gone into engineering because his dad told him over and over how he needed a reliable profession. Tom took several months to get his contractor’s license and is now full of energy when he comes home from his latest project. We’ve even started to work together sometimes on the computer designing an interior. Jenny, our sixth-grader, helps out when we get stuck on the computer program.”

The Sixth Wave
The Birth of Co-Creation