Conscious Couples Conversations - Page 9 of 13 - Couples Advice from Relationship ExpertsConscious Couples Conversations | Couples Advice from Relationship Experts

01Jun

The Rope Swing

On vacation in Costa Rica, my teenage son dragged me to a locally famous place where there was a rope swing into a river. The starting point was on a rocky cliff, maybe 25 feet high, with rocks on the bottom for about 15 feet. That is, if you let go too soon, you’d likely die or become crippled. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to do it.

On the cliff with me was a young woman, roughly 20 years old, that for a half hour, tried to screw up her courage (as did I), to go off. After speaking with her, I learned she’d been there for three hours that afternoon, and most of the day before, and still hadn’t gotten the nerve. People, including my son, tried to pressure her, but that wasn’t working.

An idea came to me. There were five of us on the cliff. I said, here’s what going to happen. All of us are going to count down from 10, and then you’re going to jump. She agreed to try.

At the top of our lungs we all shouted down from 10 and when we got to one, much to everyone’s amazement, she went! I realized I needed the same level of encouragement, and got everyone to count down for me, and, much to my amazement, I went!

There’s something about power in numbers, and about support, verses pressure. What if we all had that kind of support for our relationships – what do you imagine that would do to the divorce rate? What, instead of women getting together to complain, and go into agreement, about their husbands’ bad manners, callous ways, lack of listening skills, etc., the women supported each other? What if men, instead of complaining about their about their wives’ honey-do lists, nit-picking or whatever, really shared constructively?

Relationships don’t exist in a vacuum, but in an environment. With every relationship you encounter, you have the ability to help it slide down into a black hole, or lift up into a deeper connection.

A taller tree blocks the light, killing off some types of trees, while providing the necessary shade for other types of trees to flourish. But trees don’t have choice consciousness, and we do. Without consciousness, we kill off relationships; with consciousness, we help them prosper and grow.

What can you do to come up under the relationships in your world?

31May

It’s Not About the Nail

First of all, kudos to Jason Headley and crew for making another brilliantly funny short video.

Here’s the thing about this. You’ll watch this and think the woman is ridiculous, and, to be fair, she is. But too often we think our partner is being ridiculous, and rather than go with it and validate our partner’s experience, we fight it, to our own detriment. Next time you have the urge to fix your partner’s problem, and you KNOW you are right, see if you can put aside being right and just really hear your partner, and see what happens when you do!

25May

My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech

In my 57 years, I’ve seen a lot of inspiring things. I can’t think of anything more inspiring that this. It speaks to love. It speaks to living. It speaks to eternity.

I particularity love Zach’s notion that most of us live like we’re invincible. He says, “It’s not the kind of invincible like Superman; it’s the kind of invincible like, ‘I’ll see you in five months.'”

Enjoy!

11May

The Problem with Positive Thinking (and an Alternative)

It’s more common than not for people, and I count myself among them, to feel unloved and unworthy – not necessarily from moment to moment, but, perhaps, as a sinking feeling ever looming in the background.

Related to an issue I was having feeling appreciated at work, a business coach (who is peerless in his field) gave me an exercise to look in the mirror and say “I love you.” His reasoning was simply that no one can love you like you can love yourself. I thought that was pretty sound. In fact, I still do. However, this exercise wasn’t working for me, so I explored a bit further.

You see, when I look in the mirror and say “I love you,” there’s a part of me that doesn’t believe it – that doesn’t trust myself. Others might have a congruous reaction, and I might at some time, but not at this point in my evolution. There’s work we can do around that.

Let me paraphrase, with liberties, what our Pathwork Helper, Pnina, said on this topic.

When I have attempted to work with a daily mantra in the past, often it didn’t resonate in the moment. Rather, it touched into the internal split I was feeling – and the mantra didn’t feel true, or I couldn’t connect with it in a genuine way. There is an exercise we do where you get to connect with three different aspects of yourself we call the Child Consciousness, the Healthy Adult Ego (or Caretaker) and the Higher Consciousness. When you process from the point of view of your Child Consciousness, you will connect with the consciousness and experience of your Child (a profoundly amazing teacher) and come to truly know that the Child you are wants to feel safe and trusting of the moment and of others, especially the Caretaker.

So, it’s essential for the Child to feel safe with, and trust, the Caretaker. The way we create internal safety and trust is to be in truth with our self – to the best of our ability in the moment – and of course to be in truth as we grow and change.

So, when you say to yourself ‘I love you’ and you don’t truly feel or believe this in the moment, you are creating a split between what you are really feeling and what you think you should be feeling. Said another way, you are trying to superimpose an artificial feeling on your experience in the moment. It won’t feel right if it doesn’t feel true; and if it doesn’t feel right, it reinforces the negative feeling rather than the positive one.

Another approach, more Pathwork oriented, is to take a moment and assess what you are feeling toward yourself in the present. For example, you might say: ‘I don’t feel so good about myself right now because: _________. I would truly like to feel more loving and accepting of myself, and I’m not sure how to get there.’

This type of approach helps you align with positive intention (vs. traditional positive thinking which tries to build a positive feeling on top of a negative foundation) and places no demands on you to be where you are not. From my perspective, I always prefer to feel authentic with myself in the moment and give myself space to be as I am, while aligning with my most caring intention toward myself, even if I’m not there yet.

Authenticity leads to truth; truth leads to trust; trust leads to love.

What things do you tell yourself, and don’t believe? Can you find a way to be in truth with yourself in a way that allows for greater guidance and love to flow into your consciousness?

08May

Life-changing Commencement Speech on Awareness – with Video

Just finished watching this wonderful excerpt of a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace with a terrifically-done video. And I could not wait to share it! It’s really about how consciousness and awareness are the secret to our experience of life, no matter what you do for a living. Watch it. I can all but promise you this will be the best spent nine minutes of your day.

23Apr

The Dance We Do in Relationships

Those of us who suffered emotional trauma as children (OK, we all did, but at different degrees), developed attachment issues. For the healthier child, mom walks out of the room, child feels a moderate amount of stress, mom reenters, child experiences joy, and child learns that simple separation is OK. For the rest of us, we may become clingy, insecure, avoidant, confused and/or disoriented. We make fundamental decisions at an early age and develop patterns of reaction which we carry into adulthood.

Then we grow up and get into relationships. There, many of us do a dance with our partners, which tends to exacerbate, rather than heal, the attachment issues.

The opportunity is to identify the dance and name it. So the dance, and not the partner, becomes the common enemy, if you will, around which the partners can unite. And by understanding that my partner has attachment issues, I can cut her more slack. I realize she’s avoiding or clinging, say, because of her trauma, not because I did something bad or wrong. And by being gracious with my partner, and giving her space, I’m more likely to bring about healing for her attachment issues, whereby she’ll ultimately be less clingy, avoidant or whatever. And, of course, vice versa.

But first you have to recognize the dance. One of us has to be big enough to say something. For example, “I just noticed we are in one of our downward spiraling arguments and I don’t want us to do that and I’ll bet you don’t either. I love you. I’m not committed to defeating you, I’m committed loving you. The dance has got us. Let’s not let it win. What do you say?” The more you can recognize and defeat the dance, the easier it gets to recognize it and nip it in the bud before you go off to the races.

It helps to recognize your, and your partner’s, type of attachment, and call yourself (and your partner, however gently) on it when you realize it, and communicate responsibly and request anything you need. For example, I might say, “I just noticed when you rolled over, that I felt kind of rejected. Would you mind coming over here, or just reminding me that you love me?”

It’s important to note that healing does not come quickly, like a cure. It’s more like rehabilitating a bad knee injury, where you have to do the right things for a long period of time before the joint can heal. JoAnn and I spent a few years exacerbating each other’s wounds before we got on a path of healing. Today, we’re both responsible for our own attachment issues, and, moreover, these issues have vastly been lessened over the years. In the first few years of our relationship, if I didn’t call JoAnn eight or more times a day at work, she would have a pretty severe reaction. And her reaction would trigger my fear of abandonment, and we would both suffer mightily.

These days, if we’re both busy at work, we might not speak all day, and it doesn’t raise any reactions for either of us. Compared to where we started, this feels like nothing short of a miracle.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your

heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you

want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your

heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully

round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all

entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of

your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark,

motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it

will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

-C.S. Lewis

11Mar

It’s Not Just Yoga that Requires Flexibility

Guest post from Jonathan Cohen

There is a psychological equivalent to the physical flexibility that allows us to dance the Limbo or twist ourselves into human animal balloons in Yoga class. As we journey through life together, we sometimes need the emotional flexibility to change plans, jump at new opportunities and laugh when things go wrong.

Being flexible requires us to re-set our expectations. If we expect our plans to proceed perfectly, exactly the way we imagined, we are going to be disappointed. And if we expect our spouse or partner to make things perfect for us, we make it impossible for them to please us and will probably piss them off.

Being flexible is especially important when we venture out into the world as a couple – whether taking a vacation or just dating. We look forward to these adventures and the wonderful time we are going to have, and then – to use the G-rated version of a popular phrase – stuff happens.

For example, there might be no place to park near the restaurant. Or the service turns out to be lousy. Or our plane is delayed, so we miss the connector flight, and then the hotel gets our reservation wrong, even though they’ve already charged us for the room in advance (after promising they wouldn’t).

Taking Things Too Personally

To make things worse, we men often experience poor service like this as an affront to our status and masculinity. I’m not just being treated like a schmuck, so our reasoning goes, but also being made to look inept and insignificant in front of my woman. If a woman plays on this kind of insecurity and begins blaming her male partner for the fouled-up situation, he may well react by turning his anger on her. Instead of an opportunity for renewed closeness, the trip or date turns into a sad disappointment that drives the two partners further apart.

The remedy for this is the flexibility to roll with the negative stuff that happens on any journey, to maintain our perspective and sense of humor. Does it really matter if it takes too long to park, or if we have to settle for our second-choice room in a hotel dedicated to pampering us? And isn’t an inept waiter kind of funny to watch as he gets cork in your wine, like a free Charlie Chaplin movie? After all, this trip through life is about sharing experiences together – not just buying things or being served.

When we’re flexible, we can enjoy one another without the extra pressure of meeting impossible expectations. And when we stop expecting too much, we open ourselves to the possibility of experiencing something new. As any experienced traveler knows, switching to Plan B often brings us down that hidden little lane we didn’t plan to visit, where we find this amazing hole-in-the wall bistro and meet wonderful people.

All the best memories start with things going wrong.

07Mar

Relationships are Hard – Deal with It

It seems like it should be easy. Man is a social animal. Relationships should be natural.

We’ll they’re not, and the sooner you can let go of that, the happier you’ll be.

People who work on their relationships, especially when they are extremely difficult, are heroes. When relationships are difficult, when two egos with overlapping pathologies are constantly mud-wrestling, it’s either going to be ugly or incredible. Because when you survive a battle like that, and come to embrace your opponent (with or without makeup sex), you both grow.

Fighting is typically very healthy, especially if you are both learning and growing from it. In contrast, avoidance is fertile soil for resentment.

You are either in the ring or in the stands. And no one gives a hoot about the people in the stands.

I just love this quote from President Teddy Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

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.

Latest Tweets

Newsletter Signup