February 2013 - Conscious Couples ConversationsConscious Couples Conversations

26Feb

A Christian Pornographic Perspective

Guest Post from Marshall Weil

The Christian view of pornography has always been the same, it is bad. However, the views of why it is bad, and the bad effects of it have been changed, or at least added to, a few times over the years. One of the more recent arguments against pornography, from the Christian perspective, is that we shouldn’t watch it because it is unattainable, and unrealistic. My problem exists with this specific argument. I think that when we tell people that it is unattainable we do two things.

First we put the people in the videos and pictures on a pedestal as people who can do things that nobody else can do, and thus can enjoy a higher level of sexual satisfaction than any Christian ever could. WHAT!?! Of course there are sexual acts that exist in pornography that are not biblical even within the confines of marriage, but those are not the things I am referring to. The notion that a Christian man or woman is unable to enjoy the highest level of satisfaction with their spouse is ludicrous and relatively disappointing.

The second thing I believe we do by making pornography unattainable, is we take the focus off the real problem that exists with it. Pornography is addictive and destructive. It takes men and women who are real people, many of whom were abused and neglected as children, and it makes them objects. It dehumanizes sex, and makes it purely an act of satisfaction rather than an intimate act of love and commitment. It destroys marriages, perverts the minds of young, and otherwise innocent, children, and fills a void in the hearts and minds of its viewers that was created to be filled by a very different kind of satisfaction.

If you are reading this and have never watched pornography, good for you. I pray that you would continue in your steadfast pureness in this area, you don’t need to know what I am talking about. I wish I could say that I lived my life that way, but I didn’t. I stumbled and fell deep into a world that brought nothing but addiction and false satisfaction, and I thank that Lord that I have been brought out of that.

This is the reality that ought to exist in the minds and teachings of any Christian in regards to pornography: Pornography is not something that we should view as unattainable, rather it should simply be undesirable. Our desire should be to reach out and grab any person caught up in pornography; viewer, participant, producer, or distributor.

The hard truth is that lust and sexual perversion lead to spiritual death. The beautiful truth is that that death occurred on a cross 2,000 years ago, and our sinful follies are atoned for. There is no place too deep or too dark to come out of. There is no sin that is unforgivable. Repent, pray, and realize that no matter how far into spiritual death you have fallen there is an escape, and his name is Jesus.

24Feb

Get Off It

The obtaining of one’s quest for authenticity, wholeness and enlightenment, does not require lightning flashes or the discovery of some holy grail. It simply requires a slight shift in position, namely, “getting off of” whatever point of view one is rigidly attached to, and usually “being right” about.

If you feel that your partner (or any person or situation) is the cause of your unhappiness, it is possible to relinquish that point of view, even if you are “right,” even if someone did something objectionable to you. Regardless of the circumstances, you can let go of being right about your position and point of view. Instead, you can choose to be “at cause” in the matter, rather than “at the effect of,” and thus be fully responsible, moment to moment, for the quality of your experience of living.

The eigo hates this. The eigo wants to be right. The eigo enjoys being a victim and justifying one’s victimhood. If you look at the Eigo Chart, our thrown, automatic pull to being right, justifying and being a victim, takes us into darkness. “Getting off of it” opens the pathway to the light.

The mind is receiving and reviewing many hundreds of negative thoughts each day, and will continue to do so for the rest of your life. The challenge isn’t in not having these thoughts – that’s impossible. The challenge is in:

having the consciousness to recognize that you are having these thoughts, and
choosing to own these as thoughts you do not wish to empower. You simply acknowledge their presence, thank the mind for “sharing,” and choose to allow in divine guidance.

There is something even bigger at stake than one’s relationship, and that is one’s relationship to all of life. Because God, or the Universe or Something is constantly streaming us love, guidance and wisdom. It’s in and around us all of the time. And our negative thoughts act as a force field preventing us from allowing these streamings to enter our consciousness. When we “get off it,” we empower our relationships and ourselves.

When we own our negative thinking, we instantly (at least momentarily), dissolve this force field and allow the wonderful streamings to enter – at least until the next negative thought enters. The game is to get better and better at quickly identifying, owning and releasing these negative thoughts.

Our experience of living, especially in our western materialistic culture, is a tiny fraction of what is available to us – the tip of the iceberg. When you repeatedly dissolve the negative energy force field, over time what you will experience is an amazing abundance of love, energy, wisdom and joy. You and your partner have the ability to conspire to bring this about. To constantly practice “getting off of it” with each other. To constantly remind each other that owning, vs. empowering, negative thinking is the gateway to a wonderful, abundant, miraculous experience of living.

20Feb

The Tao of the Conscious Couple

Your relationship is a miracle, or a miracle waiting to happen.

William Weil

In a Nutshell

Here’s the premise. I’ll break it down twitter-style, and then provide the meat.

You were born, happy, trusting, fully connected to the world. #love
You were hungry and didn’t get fed right away. #fear
You cried and got served and started to think of yourself as the center of everything. #i
Other damage occurred and you reinforced your separateness. #defense
You attracted the perfect partner who would force you to overcome your brokenness. #helpmate
Unfortunately, that included reactivating old wounds. #sink-or-swim
Even if you were lucky, there’s work to do. #settle-or-thrive

The Full Monte

Childhood – The Silent Killer

We’re born into this world happy, trusting, connected to the “all.” We love and are loved. Then things happen, traumatic, primal things, typically in the first four years of our lives, which leave us scared, scarred, defensive, angry, sad and humiliated.

Because of early developments when you didn’t know any better, you started to think of yourself as the center of everything. For example, if your pet died or your parents divorced, at least a part of you believed it was because of you.

Our solution is automatic. We dislike ourselves and unconsciously project that dislike to others, often those dearest to us. We develop defenses. The healthy ego devolves into what we call the eigo, with a compulsive, almost pathological self-centeredness. This includes our identity – how we define ourselves. Any threat to our identity occurs as a threat to our very being. Our survival seems to depend on protecting ourselves.

We do this unconsciously. We are compelled to be right and win for the cheap emotional lift it provides us, but more importantly, we are overly afraid to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, wrong or to lose. We justify our behavior, no matter how bad. We’ll do for others, as long as we think we’ll get something out of it. And worst of all, we’ll withhold love and forgiveness from those around us (and ourselves!), the withholding of which occurs like a cancer to our soul that slowly takes us over. The result is fear, isolation, loneliness, anger, separatation, distrust and resentment. We develop narratives about how we’re the victim, it wasn’t our fault, no one understands us, and the more we repeat these stories to ourselves, the more we believe them.

Ultimately this leaves us no condition for meaningful relationships.

This is the course that most of us take, because it’s the automatic social and psychological response to the world into which we were born.

Fortunately, there is a way out.

In fact, the way in is the way out. Because you have to actually confront your brokenness, pettiness, selfishness, defensiveness and so on, if you want to transform it.

Consciousness – the Penicillin of the Soul

The solution starts with a commitment (you can declare it right now!) to raise your level of consciousness. Once you have that commitment, there are actions to take. Some are easy. For example, often just one conscious breath can diffuse a tense situation. For others, you may be best served by having a teacher, guide, support system. Actions include getting out of the “Right/Wrong” game and actively looking to appreciate and validate others; identifying all the upsets you’re carrying around and making a list of the people you need to forgive or request forgiveness from, and then doing it; practicing gratitude; being unselfish; expressing your love; and so on.

The Power of Conscious Relationships

So, what does all this have to do with relationships?

“I love you because you suffer. I want you to love me because you know I suffer.”

We believe that the purpose of relationships is to provide a space for each partner to raise their consciousness, ease their suffering and find peace.

It may seem ironic that we often attract the very person that reactivates our pathology. For example, in many ways JoAnn resembles my stepmother, a woman who was horrible to me in my formative years. Now, I could have found a woman who had none of those qualities, but then I never would have had to confront my past, identify my defenses, and heal my wounds. Because JoAnn and I trigger each other’s pathologies, we’re forced to do the work. We went from fighting viciously every week for four years to rarely fighting and truly and deeply reveling in each other’s presence.

Not that we don’t have a lot more work to do. Consciousness is a lifelong commitment. One is always increasing her consciousness, or by default, devolving. There is no idle.

A New Earth

According to spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle, ultimately, the future of the world depends on how much we can raise the collective consciousness. We’ll either evolve together or poison our environment and destroy humankind. And that’s the motivation for JoAnn and I in leading this workshop. Gandhi said “The future depends on what we do in the present.” Mother Theresa said, “We can do no great things, just small things with great love.” This is our small gift to the planet. We hope that in one of our future courses, you’ll accept it.

16Feb

What’s So Good About Breathing?

From the moment we’re born, while we are healthy, we take our breath for granted. While we successfully breathe unconsciously our entire lives, bringing consciousness to breath has an extraordinary effect.

When we’re upset with our partners (friends, family, co-workers), both psychological and biological things are happening. The fight or flight part of the brain takes over, and that clogs our thinking and can cause us to react in ways we might regret.

Simply taking one conscious breath can make all the difference. Some people spend a tremendous amount of time learning to breath consciously. Here’s a quick primer.

Focus on inhaling through your nose (breathing from the nose filters, moisturizes, dehumidifies and warms the air, produces helpful nitric oxide, increases oxygen absorption, slows down breathing and reduces hypertension and stress).
See if you can experience the oxygen moving into your blood cells, and spreading out from your heart and through your chest, arms and legs.
Exhale (very important step).

The mind cannot focus on two things at once. When you focus on your breath, you break the brain’s fight or flight response, and it allows you to choose another way forward.

Whenever you find yourself or your partner stressed, irritable, frustrated, confused, etc., try a conscious breath.

We can achieve higher awareness simply by taking two or three conscious breaths a few times throughout the day. Conscious breathing slows down the mind, allowing you to get into a space of inner peace and awareness. It allows you to reduce your focus on the ego and feel the life presence within your body and all around you. It allows you to think better, and be a better coach, partner or friend.

In our Conscious Couples Workshop (there’s one coming March 8-10, 2013) we don’t spend a lot of time on breathing, but we spend a few minutes a few times each day. You can feel the shift in the room when everyone goes from unconscious cyclical thinking to a simple conscious breath. It works. Every time.

11Feb

Just Say No to Unromantic Comedies

Guest post by Jonathan Cohen

There was a time when the movies provided many Americans with the story lines for our love lives, as well as a place to make out. An entire film genre, the romantic comedy, was designed to assist people in this way. These love stories would follow heroine and hero through amusing conflicts and misunderstandings, then bring them together for a happy ending that was also a beginning—possibly a marriage or reconciliation, or at least a long kiss.

If you’re a film buff, and at all a Romantic, you probably have your favorites. The Shop Around the Corner, A Holiday Affair and Philadelphia Story are just a few of mine. I don’t know why Hollywood seemed to make so many great films of this kind between 1940 and 1965, but today the good ones are much more rare. As part of the downward slide toward vulgarity and immaturity in American pop culture, we now have a whole new genre of unromantic comedy designed not to encourage intimacy between partners, but to defend against it, besmirch it and expunge it from the world.

Today we learn about love from Judd Apatow, the Farrely brothers and their endless imitators—all stuck in a mindset that was once associated with twelve-year-old boys. In place of mystery and romance, we get diarrhea and vomiting. Instead of subtle feelings, we get sadism and humiliation, spilled semen and all manner of bungled sex acts. I know I am hopelessly old-fashioned, but I can’t understand how this kind of crudeness and coarseness has become part of mainstream entertainment, or how seemingly normal people continue to pay for this stuff.

Even more mind-boggling is to imagine younger people today, from teenagers on up, who have only unromantic comedies to guide them through love relationships. Picture some teenaged boy nervously applying too much cologne, getting ready for his big date with some mysterious, fluffy-haired female he hopes to woo. All so they can sit together for two hours of Judd Apatow? I have to wonder: what is the desired aftermath to this kind of date? Let’s go park someplace so I can ejaculate on your face?

Fortunately, people with a different vision of romance can still say not to unromantic comedies and stream old movies together. The world may be getting colder and uglier, but we will always have Hepburn and Tracy, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck and so many others to teach us about love.

06Feb

Sometimes Love Needs a Schedule

Guest post by Jonathan Cohen

Scheduling is not sexy. If you’ve ever tried to arrange a business meeting, or even a social get-together with another couple, you know how tedious and frustrating it can be to find a time and a place that works for everybody. Maybe that’s why we resist some of the scheduling we need to do to keep marriages and other personal relationships healthy. But if we don’t block out some time “just for the two of us, including time for intimacy, we risk losing connection with our significant others and growing apart.

This is all the more important when you’ve got young kids. Family time is not the same as couples time and getting kids fed, bathed and off to sleep can be exhausting, especially for people who spend the first 8-12 hours per day at work. In my experience, it’s crucial while your kids are growing up to schedule a regular date night with your spouse or domestic partner. Was it Tolstoy who said “All happy families have a baby sitter they can trust?” The point is that you and your partner need regular time to be alone together. And once you’ve set a schedule, stick with it.

Waiting for the Planets to Align

The same goes for sex. I’ve made the mistake in the past of taking the “bicycle lock” approach to sexual relationships. In other words, all the tumblers needed to be perfectly aligned for my spouse and I to ever find intimate time together. Kids asleep or out of the house. Both partners in good energy. No chores, errands and previous engagements to get in the way.

The problem is that these rare harmonic convergences are too few and far between to keep most people satisfied. And when one or both partners start feeling deprived, resentment and tension can start creeping into your relationship.

Making love on schedule sounds unromantic. But you might discover something deeply sexy about knowing that you and your partner are both fully committed to what is about to take place. And putting your love life on schedule might just help you uncover issues—such as withholding sex to punish or control your partner– that could be keeping you apart.

I remember a passage from the memoirs of Garcia Marquez about Sunday afternoons in his home town in Colombia when most married couples, by tradition, would follow the siesta by making love. I think now that the people in that little town were wise in making a time and a place for what was most important to them.

Turning Valentine’s Day on Its Side

Image

I’m not a fan of “special days” like birthdays, anniversaries, New Year’s, Christmas and Valentine’s because they focus into one day what wants to be shared all year. Why should we only have that wonderful “Christmas spirit” around Christmas? Why do some folks only tell me they love me on my birthday?

But the biggest offender is Valentine’s Day. It’s a double whammy. It’s the day of romantic love. If you’re not in love, this day is not only not special, it’s a crummy reminder that you’re not in a relationship, or not in a loving one.

All forms of love, whether romantic or otherwise, are all in the mind of the beholder. You.

Suppose you are a lover of nature and you go for a walk in the woods. It’s a beautiful day and a lush time of year. As you relax your breathing and become increasingly present, you allow yourself to fall more and more in love with your surroundings. It’s breathtaking. Almost nirvana. Even the broken, “ugly” tree with fungus has a magic, beautiful quality.

This is how it’s supposed to be all the time, with everyone in your life. You’re not supposed to love just one tree. If you go into the woods just seeking out your favorite tree, you’ll miss a lot of beauty. Note: I am not advocating having more than one romantic partner; I’ve never seen that work. I’m advocating having one romantic partner and still being in (non-romantic) love with everyone.

Further, suppose on your walk in the woods your mind is full of crap from the day. The unhappy boss or client. Something negative someone said about you. Bills you can’t pay. A dent in the car. All this negativity swimming around that you just can’t get out of your head. If you don’t take a moment to be present, you won’t see any of the beauty. However, if you can take a few conscious breaths, let it go, focus on the reality that is the present moment, you can let go of all the mind baloney and be. Then you can be moved by the beauty around you.

What do you need to take care of to be present to the amazing people in your life? What are the things you need to handle in yourself, in order to let go of your judgments about other people? Like the broken tree with fungus in the forest, there is beauty in everyone if we just get ourselves out of the way. You can do this in an instant, by taking a conscious breath.

And we can work on this for a lifetime, and would be well served to do so – to get better and better at putting our ego/unconscious/lower selves in perspective, and allowing the natural love within us to be expressed.

You did it naturally when you were a baby. It’s the natural state of humanity. You just got some gunk in the way on the bumpy road of life. Solutions include meditating, getting exercise, therapy, body work, talking openly with wise friends, journaling, listening/reading spiritually awakening books like Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, taking conscious walks in nature, and much more.

I’ve been working on myself on and off for 35 years. Because of the work, I have an amazing relationship… head-over-heals with my partner, JoAnn, for nine years. And I’m so much more open and available and loving to everyone in my life than I was 35 years ago. That said, I still have a long way to go. And, there’s nowhere to get. Love is a journey, not a destination. Enjoy every second of it.

William Weil

William Weil is a marketing/communication coach, inventor of www.LovePong.com (a tool for romantic couples) and author of two books, New Earth Relationships and From Intuition to Entrepreneurship.

Monthly Archives: February 2013