The Conscious Heart (2 page)

We have two main goals in this book. We want to help create a world of relationships in which the essence and creativity of each person is nurtured and brought to full flower. Second, we want to show how the evolutionary speed bumps of close relationships can be dealt with in a new way that allows for maximum growth in each person.

Let’s put our conviction squarely on the line here at the outset: The purpose of revealing essence is to produce a certain body-feeling, not a set of abstractions. If this path of the conscious heart is worthwhile, you will feel an easeful streaming feeling of well-being in your body, accompanied by a sense of connection to other people and the universe around you. This is what essence is all about, and don’t let anyone talk you out of it. Many of us have been brainwashed to think this feeling is unobtainable or that it must come from outside ourselves by the power of some authority. We hope to show you otherwise. Particularly we will ask you to reclaim your natural birthright—your own organic essence-feelings in your body—and to see that they are produced when you follow certain guideposts on the path.

All relationships are sacred. Relationships are the sacred space in which we live out our full development. Essence lives in the spaces between us, as well as in ourselves and in the universe at large. If essence does not live in our relations with others, it does not live at all. A thousand sermons or a hundred meditations lose all their meaning when the preacher or the meditator utters an abusive word to a loved one. The way we treat others is the measure of how conscious our hearts have become. It cannot be otherwise.

In this book we will ask you to set aside your psychological theories and religious beliefs and instead focus on your actual body-sense of essence. We do this for a particular reason. Beliefs occur in the mind—they are cognitive, abstract, and arguable. Beliefs divide. In some places in the world, people have been fighting for hundreds of years simply over their beliefs.

We seek an experience that unifies rather than divides. What unifies us, what lets us know we are deeply, consciously well, are our body-feelings. Our body-sense of our essence occurs at a level deeper than our beliefs. We can celebrate an authentic, organic feeling of resonance in the body at every moment; there we can actually celebrate the unity of humanity. Relationship—the practice of the conscious heart—is the best way we have found to produce and keep that feeling. In our own daily lives, we meditate every day, get frequent exercise, and do our best to eat fresh, healthy food. All these things are important, even crucial. But relationships are in a class by themselves. If essence does not live in our relationships, it does not live at all.

In our work with several thousand couples, we have discovered a set of attitudes and simple skills that allow all our relationships to deepen essence-contact with ourselves and the universe. If we know these skills, we can enjoy our close relationships and employ them to bring us deeper into unity with ourselves, our loved ones, our community, and the universe itself. If you embrace essence with a conscious heart, you can tap a transcendental energy-source through the vehicle of your everyday experiences with people. This transcendental energy can bring you into a rich embrace of your own nature and that of your partner, and an appreciation of the essence of the universe. This is the possibility of the conscious heart.

Speaking personally, our own relationship brings us joy and rich learnings every day because we treat it as our main evolutionary path. We did not always see it this way. In fact, nearly two decades ago we came into the relationship with about as much unconscious baggage as everyone else. But as we worked through
the deep fears and conflicts that divided us from true intimacy, we discovered that embracing and supporting essence in our relationship gave us a large enough context to handle all the exhilarating highs and soul-despairing lows that came our way as our relationship matured.

Close relationships are the greatest source of pain that most of us ever feel in our lives. When people are on their deathbeds, they do not regret the mansions not lived in or the cars not driven. Instead, they weep for love not given or received. They regret the unspoken words of love and forgiveness to the people closest to them. People who have endured the pain of difficult childbirth or the crushing grip of a heart attack have told us that these pains, awful as they are, are not equal to watching a beloved child make a destructive life decision or to feeling contempt pouring from eyes that once beheld us with love. Physical pain has a focal point, and it usually has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But the pain of a close relationship often expands in waves and spirals that seem to have no end.

At the same time close relationships are our greatest source of joy. Most of us have felt the deep soul-connection with a new baby or a new romantic partner: This is life on earth at its finest. We melt into union with another person, and we feel real, complete, whole. In transcendent relationship moments we do not merely understand the meaning of life—we feel it. We know deep in our cells that the whole purpose of the universe is served through surrendering to the resonant union with ourselves, others, and the universe itself.

Our view of relationship is very different now from what it was twenty years ago. Our book
Conscious Loving
was our own Relationships 101. We wrote it because we were interested in finding answers to common problems that we and our clients experienced in close relationships. Now we are interested in moving to a deeper level. Our clients and workshop participants come up with magnificent questions: “How will I know if I’m seeing what’s real or just what I’m imagining or want to see?” “Is it possible to live in
a new way, a way that honors who each of us really is?” “My habits are so strong—they just seem to take over. Is fundamental change really possible?” The exploration seemed to point to another dimension, one that had more to do with subtle, profound corrections that can have huge positive effects. We became very interested in underlying shifts of attitude that affect being and, through being, actions.

Conscious Loving
talked about doing things differently. We have sometimes referred to it as practical magic—the openings that occur when we change patterns or communicate differently. We could almost say that in that book we worked from outside relationship patterns into the core. By changing practices, we changed the fundamental quality of relationship. In this book, however, we are moving from the inside out. By shifting our deepest intentions, attitudes, and purposes, we are shifting the emerging choices and actions that shape the flow and future of a relationship.

Readers of
Conscious Loving
consistently told us that four principles stood out: the six co-commitments, telling the microscopic truth, taking 100 percent responsibility, and the Upper Limits Problem.

The six co-commitments
provide a solid, safe foundation for change. They also expose the counter-commitments, or barriers that aren’t apparent prior to stepping into commitment. Our readers have also used the co-commitments to
re
commit when they got stuck, rather than give up or struggle to do it perfectly the first time. We have changed the wording in the years since we published
Conscious Loving
. Here is our current version of the co-commitments, with their counter-commitments (we think humor is an important part of conscious relationships):

•
I commit to being close, and I commit to clearing up anything in the way of doing so
.

Counter-commitment: I commit to holding back and to keeping hidden my barriers to closeness.

•
I commit to my own complete development as an individual
.

Counter-commitment: I commit to holding back from expressing my full development as an individual.

•
I commit to the full empowerment of people around me
.

Counter-commitment: I commit to holding back those around me, so they won’t leave, so they’ll need me, because I’m comfortable.

•
I commit to taking full, healthy responsibility in my close relationships
.

Counter-commitment: I commit to a lifelong search to find who’s to blame for this fix I’m in.

•
I commit to revealing rather than concealing
.

Counter-commitment: I commit to hiding.

•
I commit to having a good time in my close relationships
.

Counter-commitment: I commit to suffering, to finding out how much pain I can endure without flinching.

These commitments have been used in wedding ceremonies, and even in business contracts and organizational design.

The principle of
telling the microscopic truth
has embroiled us in more controversy than any other aspect of
Conscious Loving
. People either expand with joy or explode in outrage at the suggestion that they tell their partner the truth about everything. We recommend telling the truth about facts, such as affairs and broken agreements; about fantasies, such as imagining a different partner during sex; and about feelings, such as fear or anger. We have been encouraged by the number of readers who have contacted us to tell us that the truth really has set them free from jealousy, competition, and power struggles. Renewed passion and creative juice seem to flow for those courageous enough to practice our definition of the truth:
that which cannot be argued about
.

Most people associate
responsibility
with blame or burden. They either take it on as duty, or they point the finger of blame at their partner, themselves, or the world. We have learned from our readers and clients that the moment either partner steps out of 100
percent responsibility and makes a run for the victim position, power struggles begin. They end only when each person chooses to take full, healthy responsibility for creating the conflict. The heart of responsibility is genuine wondering, and we’ve witnessed thousands of people reap the benefits of making the shift from blame to wonder. We got so much feedback about the importance of this principle that we have expanded our exploration of responsibility in this book.

The Upper Limits Problem
strikes people as
obvious
, both literally and metaphorically, once they understand the dynamics. Here is the Upper Limits Problem in brief: We each have a thermostat setting for how much love and positive energy our nervous system can handle. When we exceed that limit, our unconscious patterns and behaviors bring us back to a more familiar, safe level. Readers have documented Upper Limits vignettes for us, some hilarious and some poignant. Some people have Friday-night fights on the verge of an intimate weekend. Others worry, get busy, or wreck their car. Sometimes whole families participate in Upper Limits patterns: When one member gets really successful, someone else gets very ill, starts a fight at school, or loses the dog.

We began to see that the Upper Limits Problem is actually about our relationship with essence. Will something bad happen if I feel too good? Is it selfish or immoral to be happy? Can I actually expand into a larger version of myself? How? Can I express my essence fully and still be in a relationship, and can being in relationship accelerate that process? We began to explore the possibility that relationship itself is a medium to grow an expanded sense of purpose and contribution in the world.

Enhanced creativity is the ultimate reward for choosing the path of the conscious heart. Both of us came into our relationship as creative people, but our relationship has liberated unimaginably greater creativity than either of us could have attained on our own. Embracing essence has opened a deeper collaborative exchange between us, as you will see in this book. We have each brought our individual experiences to certain parts but have written much of
the book together. Many of the ideas came effortlessly while we were riding bikes or conducting seminars together. As we encountered differences in our growth and interests, we solved them using principles that we’ll suggest to you.

For many years our conscious intention was to create “one voice,” to speak from a unified experience. Now our intention is to speak as two full voices in complete harmony, honoring and supporting each other’s contribution. So you will sometimes hear us speaking together and sometimes hear our individual perspectives woven throughout the book.

The issues we address in this book seem to be timeless. Human beings seem to have been struggling with intimacy since the beginning of recorded time. If you are reading these words a thousand years from now, perhaps on the other side of a dark age, you are likely to have exactly the same issues as we face now: how to live in authenticity, equality, and appreciation. You may have possibilities and challenges that are undreamed of now, but you will surely have the most awesome task of all still at hand: You will still be learning to live in a way that honors your own essence and honors the essence of those around you.

As these words are being created on the computer screen, the soaring depths of Gorecki’s Third Symphony are in the background, and the writer is crying tears of grief and joy. The tears are for what has been seen, for what has been felt, for the losses endured and the glories attained in this quest. Whether you stand facing the twenty-first century or the thirty-first, we ask you to pause for a moment to honor yourself for keeping the spark of awareness alive, to honor the lineage of those wonderers who have come before you, and to honor the quest of human spirit to live in harmony and celebration of itself and our creator.

Although we have stood together atop Himalayan peaks, strolled the Taj Mahal at sunset, and tasted many of the world’s glories, we can say without hesitation that relationship itself—opening the conscious heart—is the ultimate adventure. It is a journey that truly contains infinity: Every moment is
charged with the potential for learning and transcendence. If you are drawn to this journey, you know deep in your heart that you will never be satisfied with anything else. For this we salute you, as partners and equals in the quest, and we welcome you to share our journey.