Chapter Eleven:

How to Live the New Paradigm: Part I

Authentic Presence and Learning to Say No

Let’s face it; our mostly well meaning but wounded parents wounded us. We in turn, can either repeat that same wounding with our children in a semi automatic manner, or we can use love as a guiding star to guide us in a growing awareness of how to love a partner and raise a healthy family. Most of us do manage to get a few things more right than our parents. I guess this is evolution in action. But, if we are so graced that we can actually choose to go beyond that, we can do even better. We might work at becoming respectful listeners for instance, or people who have learned to manage boundaries. Using becoming loving beings as our guiding light is a profound experience that looks like apprenticeship for sainthood but then turns into easier happiness for all.

This is a journey that takes a lifetime. And contrary to the emphasis on youth in our culture, loving keeps getting better as we age and mature because by putting less emphasis on the me-ness of life and more on the us-ness, we discover that our essential nature thrives in this environment. When serving love becomes our higher purpose, we find ourselves surrounded by love.

Time to be Practical

Even though the last chapter explained some lofty ideals, living them is neither esoteric nor impractical. This and the next chapter will teach the principles of living the new paradigm. Living this paradigm means we wish to live a life of growing as lovers in such a way that we gain fuller happiness for ourselves by becoming part of forces in life that are beyond our control. Those mysterious forces are often seeming contradictions about what we want and what our partner wants, or events and misfortunes in life that confront us with our own helplessness and frustration. At those times, we surrender to the force of being loving beings as the only thing we can hang onto. The principles of how to do that now follow.

Outer relationship issues reflect an inner break with ourselves

First of all, it’s important to understand that our outer relationship with our lover or our children is usually a reflection of our inner relationship to our self. By inner relationship to ourselves I mean our manner of holding all the fears, inadequacies, lost parts, overdeveloped parts, needs, and emotions that we struggle with from inside. John Welwood encourages us with these words:

If the bad news is that we can know another, and be known, only as deeply as we know ourselves -- and coming to know ourselves can be a long and arduous journey -- the good news is that love helps and inspires us to develop this deeper self-knowledge. How we relate to someone we love ... provides an extremely clear and accurate mirror of how we relate to ourselves. For this reason, relationships can help us face ourselves and understand ourselves more rapidly and profoundly than any other aspect of worldly life. Seen in this light, love becomes a path of awakening...."

You can’t escape this; know it or not, care about it or not, the way you live your relationship does reflect your relationship to self.

“You’ve so over the top now, Al,” I can hear some say, “All this psycho babel sounds fancy but I’m not buying that when I get angry because Ramona leaves dishes all over the counter and bark at her, that it has anything to do with how I relate to myself.” Well, Jordan, it does!

Of course we get to make the choice to use this knowledge or not. If you are from California, it’s easier to accept this concept. We are after all more influenced by the East, which is pretty convinced already that how we relate to ourselves does affect others. However in the West, we use words such as projection, projective identification, and disassociation to say some of the same things.

However, if you are going to stop blaming your partner or expect your partner to make life wonderful for you, you only have one place to turn: yourself. Hence, how we relate to ourselves does change how we relate to others. Hopefully this will become clearer as we go along in this chapter.

Servant of the Love Force: An Example

Since we all need to imagine something before we can act on it, I will start with a picture of a person who has chosen to align with the love force. This person is a person who flows with the forces of life. That means learning to flow with how the universe works rather than fighting it by trying to control it. The most common form of fighting it is using the word, “should.” As in, “I shouldn’t have to ask for what I want.” Or, “Women should learn to speak up, but be more gentle.”

Next, the servant of love places more value on being the lover than the one loved. In doing this, he or she must feel hurts and fears about not being loved, but at the same time place a great value on being able to give love to the other even in the hard times. But, he or she also never loses him- or herself in the process, rather staying authentically present. This is an essential change from earlier models of selfless giving. It isn’t about being nice or simply all giving. It is so much harder!

We recognize these people by their calm and gentle strength. They have learned and integrated a few important skills:

· Being able to say, "no" and at other times, "yes." Both with an authenticity that is striking.

· Caring for self and not tolerating being treated poorly.

· Not blaming ones partner for the struggles in the relationship.

· Allowing ones partner to be scared, feel bad, and at times flounder with life without rushing in to fix or try and make things peaceful.

· Knowing that life is painful at times, hard and cruel at others and cannot take that pain away from the beloved. This person learns to be compassionately present with the pain of the other. This replaces any attempt to fix what can't be fixed.

· Not attached to something personally precious if giving it up will help a loved one.

· But also knowing that they can’t “sell their soul” to make another happy.

· He or she knows that life is the real teacher and is much bigger and more effective than her efforts will ever be to create change.

· Being able to speak ones truth about the hard stuff of sex, giving, needs, and conflicts.

· Knowing that in order to do the above, he or she has learned emotional literacy and other tools of self–knowledge.

Most of all, being on the path of love means that the lover looks to a higher cause and a higher force than personal protection and gratification. This person finds meaning and direction from values that are larger than smooth sailing or feeling special.

From this picture, we can list a few of the essential elements:

· An ability to be present as one is and not as one wishes to be.

· An ability to be non attached to getting ones own way

· An ability to love self and the other, equally

· An ability to allow pain to be felt by one’s partner without trying to fix it

In the next chapter I explore the abilities to be non-attached and learning to love others while equally loving self. Therefore in this chapter I will explain the important and elusive quality of authentic presence and the almost mystical ability to sit with the pain of life. I will also add a few of the other essential elements of being servants of love in the final chapter called “Growing Love Rather than Reaping It.”

1. Authentic Presence

What the hell is this presence thing you keep talking about, you might be grumpily asking? First you need to know that being present with yourself is the first step and then being present with others is the second. You are authentically present with others when you stand for yourself and your higher vision in the face of shaming or indifference. You have it when you say your truth without stomping on others or watering it down out of politeness and fear. You are present when you fully hear the other while staying in your own feelings and values. You are truly present when you fearlessly and vulnerably speak your confusion, your hurt, your caring, your yearning, and your no when the yes will sell you out. But you have to be present to yourself in order to know most of these things.

The first Step

How about the first step of being present with ourselves? I used to try and therapize myself into being perfect. Sound familiar? I was going to take away the reactive, critical part of me. I was going to become pure love. At about forty, I realized I wasn’t going to make it. I was present in a phony way even though I didn’t know the difference at that time. I was “good” by willing to be good. Others didn’t really know what was going on inside of me.

Luckily I learned the true strength of just being who I was. In this way, I found myself running in the human race rather than simply watching and commenting on it. I became present with my judgments, my sadness, my hurt, my neediness, and whatever easier feelings were also available. John Welwood in Toward a Psychology of Awakening puts it this way:

Whenever we work on ourselves with a particular outcome or fix in mind, or strive to get somewhere different from where we are, we cut ourselves off from the immediacy of being – which is the only true agent of healing and transformation that there is. (p.133)

Therefore we are present when we admit to being at the level of spiritual development that we are truly at instead of pretending or putting on a persona.

Example of presence: “You know, honey, I would like to tell you that your going back to school, being rushed and busy with studying, not having time to have fun or even have a satisfying sex date is okay with me, because I am so supportive, but, I’m not there yet. I’m actually feeling hurt and angry about being abandoned by you.”

This is presence. From that statement something will happen that will be important to both of them. If she can respond by being present, they will grow into a new integration of what it means to love each other in their current situation. For instance, let’s say she was able to not be defensive.

She might say, “I hear you, babe, you have every right to feel that way. I know I’m obsessed with my courses. I’m scared all the time that I’m going to flunk out because I’m an older student. But, you’re right. We need time too. I’ll try, okay. That’s all I can honestly say, and, you can bring it up again if you see me going so far away.”

These two folks are being who they truly are. It’s probably not who they want to be, but it’s as good as it gets right now. Whenever we try to be one of our beliefs or fit the wonderful box or ideal mold of our parents or peers, we cut ourselves off from our own being. We become a managed persona, like a Hollywood western town set. There is nothing real behind it.

Welwood again:

What shuts down the heart more than anything is not letting ourselves have our own experience, but instead judging it, criticizing it, or trying to make it different from what it is. We often imagine there is something wrong with us if we feel angry, needy, dependent, lonely, confused, sad, or scared. We place conditions on ourselves and our experiences: “If I feel like this, there must be something wrong with me…. I can only accept myself if my experience conforms to my standard of how I should be. (p. 164)

In the above example of the man whose wife is going back to school, his being present with her and her with him isn’t going to create a solution to their time problem. She will still be preoccupied; he will still get lonely for her. But they have been totally present with each other, and that will go a long way in feeling connected. Therefore being able to speak your truth and be heard without defenses is a very intimate act, and both people will feel it. It might not feel as good as sex, but it is every bit as close.

Welwood pushes the concept a little further:

Of course we often don’t like what we discover when we see ourselves as we are. We come up against the pain of our karma – the tangled pattern of actions and reactions, accumulated conditioning, habit, unconsciousness, and fear. As one spiritual wag put it,‘Self-knowledge is always bad news,” at least initially. At this point it is not enough just to acknowledge what is; we need to make a fuller relationship with it. This means opening our heart to the situation we are in –feeling it, facing it squarely, and letting it touch us. This does not mean having to like what we find. If we hate certain parts of ourselves, we can also acknowledge and work with our self-hatred, as part of what is. Whatever arises, we can learn to face it directly and inquire more deeply into it. (p.31)

This is where most of us get into trouble. We don’t like parts of ourselves, and for good reasons: we’re afraid they make us unlovable or bad, crazy, stupid, or lazy. Being judged in the early growing-up years has wounded us and a part of us fears that what was said then is true about us today. We are stupid, not successful, lazy, or selfish. So we get defensive when someone triggers our fear about our self.

The myth of fixing ourselves

Your partner knows these defensive areas very well, and can use them against you. This contributes to the fact that oftentimes your fear of being found out makes you shy away from closeness or from doing a high profile job. What you are tempted to do when you get sick of this fear-and-reactive cycle is to get help with these attitudes or fears, and root them out. Therapy is seen as the great fixer; through it, you will become stronger, less afraid, not selfish, and see that you aren’t really stupid at all.

But it doesn’t work that way. You don’t root out these qualities or improve your self beyond them. They are fears not real qualities. You aren’t really stupid, just afraid that you are. And behind the fearful belief is a small childlike part of you cringing in some dark corner of your being afraid that it isn’t lovable and wanting desperately to be accepted and held. To make matters worse, if your relationship partner believes strongly in the shape-up-through-therapy approach, you will feel judged and in need of fixing. He treats you, in other words, as he treats himself: A problem to be fixed.

A Softer Approach

Another way to deal with these fears is to allow them to become part of you, accepted as part of your inner family but not controlling your behavior. Appendix A has an example of this under Healing the Relationship to Self #2 “A trip to the therapy office.” Essentially this approach asks you to feel the discomfort of your defensive feeling, allow it to be within you, and then simply listen to it and send it what I call mother love which is accepting, non-judgmental, warm holding. The example in the appendix is pretty clear. Check it out so you understand what I’m saying here.

We cannot be truly present until we can be present to ourselves. We can’t do that fully until we allow the dark fears to have their voice. In a strangely wonderful way a reciprocal cycle exists here. Healing our inner relationship is good for our outer relationships, and the struggles in the outer relationships can direct us to the fears we need to heal inside ourselves. The more we allow all the fears out, the less defensive we are and the more we can admit that we are not perfect, all good, or even as developed as we wish we were. We can then be authentically present, as the examples you’ve read above would indicate. Please read the Appendix example now so this concept has a little more meaning to you.

Men's Difficulty With Authentic Presence

During the second half of the twentieth century mothers raised the children including the boys. The fathers were at work doing their jobs of providing. When they came home tired, they were not very present.

As far as the marital relationship, these same fathers were very often running on automatic pilot. The men either shut down when confronted or, if of a different stripe, exploded. They careened around in a reactive fashion, or they hid out in their John Gray caves. They listened to the pervasive messages calling for duty, work, success, competition, and status. As a result of the fathers’ attention outside the home, their sons seldom saw a model of the best of the masculine at work with the feminine.

Now, the sons of these men are struggling to find a balance in their own lives. Most of them grew up vowing not to be an abusive mate. Many others vowed not to be taken over by their mate as their “wimpy” dad was. Unfortunately, no one gave them a model of holding on to their own best male self in the face of a partner's emotional splat.

They were not taught to listen to their inner male truth and at the same time listen and allow their partner to have separate feelings and reactions. This art, never experienced at home, is too hard for most men today. But it is the challenge for us men choosing a loving lifestyle.

Male servants of love in the new century will need to learn to hold onto cherished values, act with integrity, and also allow their mates to have their own feelings, even the negative ones aimed at them. The male will learn to be a self-defined person who is strong enough to be able to hear and validate emotional expression from his partner while still holding to his own truth.

You men may want to ask yourselves what you do now when your partner gets upset at you. Do you…

1. Get upset back?

2. Feel defensive and angry and shut down?

3. Let her or him know you hear the feelings and are willing to talk about the issues even though you may not change.

4. Repeat the feelings showing you heard them, say you are sorry that he or she is feeling so badly, and initiate a discussion to see what can be done. All without feeling or fearing being controlled.

Of course the enlightened man, which you may be in process of becoming but are not there yet will be able to listen, convey concern about the partner’s hurt or sad feelings and be able to talk about it calmly and openly because he does not feel controlled to have to do something to fix the situation other than listening and maybe giving a hug. This man will be open to talk and go from there. Who knows what may come from the discussion.

The rigid, defensive, and fearful man will either minimize his partner’s feelings or get angry and defensive, and control the outcome of a discussion before it even occurs.

Women's Struggle with Authentic Presence

Many girls grew up with mothers, who had to be tricky to get what they thought was right. Others grew up with mothers who had to take care of their children by their wits. These women learned to get cherished by using their feminine wiles. Many other girls had mothers who abandoned their job, and found solace in a bottle, a charity, or bridge club.

These mothers lived in fear of being abandoned especially later, when they were old and “used up.” Some showed their daughters a role model of a woman who was childishly dependent on their mate, and constantly fearful of his anger. Others modeled being a wife by controlling and plotting. Still others simply rolled over and became one of the children.

Their daughters never got the modeling of self-love, self-reliance, or the security of teamwork with a partner. Because they were in the war between the sexes, these girls grew up resisting being a pawn. Conflicted in their loyalty to one or both parents, they grew up afraid of entering deeply into a romantic partnership. Now they cannot envision a life balanced between taking care of another and being taken care of.

Many other women are tired after having taken care of other children including their own mother for so many years. They are also without hope for men after watching an ineffectual father helplessly going through the motions of his own life. These women are ever vigilant in relationships having never learned to relax and trust in their childhoods.

You women may want to ask yourselves what you do now when your partner is upset with you. Do you…

1. Get upset back using name-calling and a loud voice?

2. Cave in and do what your partner wants and resent it?

3. Analyze your partner to make his or her feelings look sick?

4. Let her or him know you hear the feelings and wish to discuss the issues without any fear of changing or not changing yourself?

5. Give your partner a hug, say how hard it must be to feel such things and offer a discussion to see if there is a way you both as partners can help the situation?

Being truly present in a relationship is hard for men and women. The men’s list and the women’s list are fairly interchangeable and learning the skills of being there for the other without fear of being controlled by the other’s feelings is a challenge for either sex.

The Tasks Involved

Growing beyond our limited backgrounds into more fully conscious beings takes commitment and work. In order to be authentically present, you will need the ability to

· Increase self-knowledge. (Chapter 6)

· Use feelings as a way to know yourself. (Chapter 6)

· Hold onto your values and behaviors that you respect. (Chapter 7)

· Grow in the strength to live them, even in the face of opposition. (Chapter 7)

· Become a good listener. (Chapter 8)

· Allow your partner to have feelings (even negative ones about you) without shutting him or her out. (Chapter 8 and this Chapter)

· Learn how to say no. (This Chapter)

You can see from this list that being fully present is a personal, custom-fit adventure. We humans come from different backgrounds and have different growth edges. Our personalities are the grist in the tumbler of relationship polishing. But, they are not the whole story. Sometimes you want to try and rise above what your personality wishes at the moment. “I wish I wouldn’t get so upset when he uses that tone with me, but I do.” But that is not cause for despair since being perfect is not the goal.

Don’t Get Hung up on Perfection

Having a perfectly polished personality is not the goal. It is instead a myth. Learning to be a loving man or woman even with, or sometimes in spite of, our personality is what we are aiming at. We stand above our personality as a soul. We can witness what our personality is doing. It’s running for cover, or striking out at times. In fact, once we separate ourselves from complete identification with our personality, we will experience a freedom and oneness with humanity that we couldn’t understand before. Learning to say: “I have a personality, but I am not my personality,” or “I have feelings, but I am not my feelings,” or “I have desires, but I am not my desires,” is an exercise to help separate or disidentify from complete union with those parts of yourself. Learning to make decisions that come from your authentic self is the next step in the growth process.

Learning this authentic presence thing is a life commitment. It gets easier and even natural as you acquire more self-knowledge and practice standing in your own truth. It also rewards you with greater self-respect and a deeper sense of meaning in your life.

2. Learning How to Say No

As love pushes our boundaries further into the uncharted, the path becomes harder to follow. You don't have a map or a manual, and you don't know whether to go up to the bright sun of giving generously, or down through the darker forest of holding onto self, and saying no. While saying no can be the greatest stimulus for growth for both people, that little two-letter word is also one of the hardest to have an easy relationship with. .

When to give and when to say no are really hard choices when they are done consciously. To start with, people usually err in one of two directions stemming from childhood conditioning.

1. Coming from a childhood that makes the child feel entitled to everything, a person has a hard time allowing others’ needs to be truly important.

2. Or coming from a childhood that makes the child feel undeserving of anything, a person gives everything to others and can’t be “selfish” by saying no.

Therefore you have to know from whence you came to start working on this skill. It's much harder than simply making up your mind to do it. We are complicated creatures and we don’t have an instruction manual, so we have to learn as we go.

Learning to Say, "No," to help us say, "Yes!"

If you have not developed the skill to say, “No, sweetie, I can’t do that,” you will live in fear of being controlled and losing your self in a relationship. After all, you are a sitting duck to any request, simple as it may be. Because of that fear of being at the beck and call of the other, you will hold back and not let yourself get too close. In this way you will never have to disappoint another by saying no, and you will thus deprive yourself of being deeply loved in your life. This is often the source of the dread commitment problems that many men dragged into my office by their too-long-term-girlfriends-not-yet fiancé’s have.

Healthy love lives are always a balancing act between taking care of self and taking care of other. It’s a continuum that can leave you judging yourself as selfish at one end, or fearing being taken advantage of and controlled at the other. The trick of course is to avoid getting to either end. If you come from the entitled childhood, you will fear being controlled; if from the undeserving childhood, you will fear being selfish and unlovable.

Learning to say, “No,” is the most useful skill to help you grow beyond these childhood dilemmas. When we fear saying no, we can't really say yes. Think about that for yourself, and see the truth around the powerful skill of learning to say no.

Let’s look at those men dragged into my office by their frustrated girlfriends. The girlfriend wants her man to commit. After all, he does love her, and her clock is ticking. These men are really suffering from the exact opposite of what their partner thinks. The problem is not that they can’t give; the problem is that they don’t feel good about themselves when they don’t want to do what their girlfriend wants. The solution for avoiding this internal war, they think, is to not get in that position in the first place. They hold a pose of distance, not caring, or not being ready for marriage. In this way, they have an out if they don’t want to do everything their partner wants them to do, and they don’t have to feel bad about it either.

Of course, everything I’ve just said also applies to many women. I do see it more in men however when commitment is involved. However, women who have this problem find their partners accusing them of being flaky or evasive. The same dilemma exists for them. A direct, “No, I don’t like that and don’t want to do it,” is too scary, so they fudge and procrastinate decisions which makes their partner frustrated about getting a solid commitment. Therefore, not wanting to incur the wrath of their partner, or compulsively wanting to please him or her, they end up with this wishy-washy strategy of looking much weaker than they are.

Some men especially who come for couples therapy claim to have no trouble saying no. When their partner looks at them and then at me with head-nodding agreement, I know they have the same problem as above but handle it differently. They simply say no to everything so they don’t have time to feel guilty about it and say yes out of fear. They need to work on the same issue using some of the ideas below. This version should be called knee-jerk “No” to avoid the bad feeling of consciously saying, “No.”

Some Helpful Experiments to Learn to say, “No”

To help you learn this skill, here are a few things to practice:

· Never agree to or refuse something without taking a pause. “I’ll get back to you on that,” is a wise strategy.

· Before you agree to do something, ask yourself if you really want to do it.

· Ask yourself if you will resent doing it or will want something done back for you in return? These are not good reasons for doing anything.

· Are you willing instead to make a deal so your agenda of wanting something back is clearly in the open? This avoids hidden agendas and resentments even though it may not look generous. It’s honest and that’s good.

· Find something that you can say no to in order to have some practice.

These exercises will help you develop this skill of saying no. They will help you get used to the feeling of not being the nice guy or gal all the time too. You will learn that your partner can take it, doesn’t die or throw skillets at you when you say no, and when the day is done, all works out for the best.

A few examples:

Example 1: “You know babe, I really don’t want to go to that company picnic with you, but I also see that it is real important for you, I’ll go for that reason and trust that you do that for me occasionally also.”

“Well, if that is how you feel, then I can truthfully say that this isn’t one of those times for me. I can go with Jill and Bob and be just fine. Stay home and relax.”

Example 2: “Honey, I told you I would get back to you about the movie with Cheryl and Donis this Friday, and I decided it would be great.”

Example 3: “I feel terrible about this, love bug, but I really hate the idea of that dance thing you want to go to. Would you really want me to go if I feel I would hate it?”

“Yes, pumpkin, because I want you to try it and maybe we can learn to like it together. I will make a deal that I’ll do something for you that I don’t want in the future, Okay?”

Example 4: “Hey doll, do me the favor of inviting me to three things you’ll know I will hate doing so I can practice saying, “No.”

“Okay, I want you to go surfing with me this Saturday.”

“No, I hate the cold water.”

“Let’s go to the new action movie.”

“No, I hate all the explosions, and man as machine bullshit.”

“How about inviting your girlfriend to join us in bed sometime?”

“No, but how about your best friend?”


3. Allowing the Pain of Life

Even though this concept about pain seems odd here and might even seem abrupt as it appears in this chapter, the ability to allow pain is one of the most critical elements of creating loving relationships.

But what do we have to do with the pain of life you might ask? We can’t control it anyway? Actually that’s my point. We may dismiss this issue because we feel so out of control with it. But there is an enormous amount of pain in life – as the eastern teachers say, “Life is suffering --” and learning to live with it is not easy. “Obvious,” you might say. But I have worked with couples long enough to know that the attempt to avoid painful feelings in self or the other is central to many problems.

Men

You may see a brave fireman comforting a woman who has lost her son in a fire, but most men at home with their partners cannot easily sit with someone in pain. They are trained from childhood to get up after falling, quit crying, and get on with what they were doing. The army takes this further in encouraging the man to suffer bodily pain and keep running, keep marching with wet, swollen feet, and keep killing no matter how they feel.

We men usually feel compulsive about wanting to fix painful things. We are the great solvers of problems, masters of the undoable, and fixers of cars and computers. Therefore, when we run into something not fixable, we hate it. We can also in our anxiety about the problem become angry, negative, or aloof. This best describes a man’s reaction to his partner’s emotional pain about an unfixable condition.

Women too

You might think women are better. Maybe they are but they are not immune from this problem either. They have a hard time allowing pain to be, that is, simply feeling it and not being able to heal it or talk it away. I have seen many women when their husbands have finally learned to talk about their feelings have an impossibly hard time restraining themselves from offering advice and solutions to alleviate his suffering. For most of us, sitting with pain in a supportive and compassionate way is hard.

The “It Will Break My Heart” Myth

I have received the most useful insight about this from John Welwood talking about our broken hearts. We often want to protect our heart he says. We are afraid it will break. “It breaks my heart to hear about Alice’s cancer.” However, he assures us that our heart is very rubbery and flexible and can’t break. However, what can break is the shell that we have placed around our heart. But once that shell is broken open, our heart can feel compassion for many forms of pain. In fact, it seems to be limitless in that ability.

Working with this concept took time for me. I would often want to shut down when hearing the pain of friends’ “heart breaking” news. But once I started visualizing my heart being flexible and able to handle pain, I became more open to allow myself to sit with the painful feelings of others.

Over time, I could feel the pain in an observer position and not shut down. Gradually, I got used to allowing the pain into my heart and not being overcome by it. This allows me now to hear my partner in pain and not want to fix it or shut her down just so I don’t have to suffer with her. It also allows me to read the newspaper and feel the grief, terror, and sadness of people throughout the world, suffer with them as part of the human family, and also live my own life -- which isn’t in pain most of the time.

Tonglen Buddhist Practices for Compassion

I have also used Tonglen Buddhist practices to develop compassion. These are a series of breathing exercises to develop compassion. They help to allow us to feel all the pain of the world in our heart and still function well – indeed, even better.

Here’s an example: Remember something you have done in your life that you feel very bad about and are embarrassed by, something that few if any know about you. Next develop a rhythm of breathing slow breaths in and out. Hold the ending of the inhale just a little and then hold the end of the exhale just a little. Get in the rhythm of this, and here comes the exercise: on the exhale, breathe out to the world the thought of your having done the shameful deed you are remembering. Then with the inhale, breathe in compassion and forgiveness for yourself. Thinking the whole time that you do this (try five minutes at first) that you are fallible and make mistakes like everyone else in the world. Find your way to forgive yourself while not excusing yourself.

In this way and others like it, you practice developing forgiveness and compassion for yourself. I have found that as I develop compassion for my own wounded human nature -- which is not fixable by the way -- I develop the equal amount of compassion for others.

Adding the thought of a flexible and non-breakable heart to my life and practicing the Tonglen breathing exercises allowed me to hold painful feelings in my heart. When I grew in this practice in my own life, I could then sit with someone in pain without doing that person the disservice of trying to fix him. You can imagine how useful this is to a therapist not to mention a romantic partner and father.

If life isn’t exactly suffering, it sure does have its share of pain. We are often called upon to be with someone in small or large pain. The very next chapter has many of these painful life transitions to deal with. As we learn that our heart will not break, but instead has a vast capacity for feeling compassion for the pain of others, we find that life is full of opportunities to simply sit with another in their pain. People feel very loved when that happens.

This act of simply sitting with another would look like this:

“Honey you look so sad, what’s happened?”

“My boss again. She fried me for something I had absolutely no control over and wouldn’t even let me explain.”

Quietly and slowly, “I’m sorry, honey,” pause, “I sure would hate that,” putting a hand on her shoulder and simply standing next to her, and then feeling her body shift, “would you like a hug?”

“That would be nice.”

Staying in a calm place with someone you love is a great gift. And you would be amazed at how few people receive this gift.

I know this because I lost a son a number of years ago and was on the receiving end of many people struggling to know how to deal with me. Most avoided me, many tried to say the right thing, some tried to feel as much as I felt, and others were able to simply be with me in a caring way. I appreciated the ones best who were able to simply be with me, calmly, and with few words. I didn’t feel any need to take care of them, as I did the ones who were trying to feel so much with me. And since I was at the end of my ability to care for others, the calm ones were the ones I wanted to be around.

I believe that to the extent that we can allow our own pain to exist in our hearts is the extent that we can be present to our loved ones in their pain. Trying to avoid pain, trying to fix pain, trying to help our lovers to not have pain are all losing efforts. We are up against odds that are way too big for us. Better to learn to accept and grow with the lessons that sitting with pain have to offer us.

What About Commitment in This Paradigm?

If we are following our soul, our own integrity, listening to our feelings and trying to be authentically present, the question of commitment must be addressed. I want to be a committed being, but I feel pretty stifled being a lawyer, or I feel like I am dying in this relationship with a partner who is depressed, watches tons of TV, and passively avoids all my attempts to discuss or improve our marriage. What do I do? This becomes a serious question when you depart from the roles-and-duties approach to being married.

In the early centuries before there were marriage registries, men and women had children, tried to make a life together, and if unable, parted. The parting wasn’t always mutual either with women and children often starving, selling themselves, or being abused by those taking advantage of their desperate condition.

To prevent these abuses, the Church set up a registry of who married whom in order to stop men leaving women and children with no support. Later, the state took over this job to protect itself from orphans and mothers who required public assistance, creating unpredictable suffering and social havoc. This created the indissoluble marriage.

However, centuries later, marriage-for-life proved to be another kind of cruelty, and legal divorce broke onto the scene. (It was, most agreed, better than Henry VIII’s solution.) Now people can divorce and leave what they consider to be an intolerable situation and still care for their children. Laws are made to try to protect the innocent in these situations with fair settlements. (Many people having divorced might wince at the word fair here.)

But enforcing even this level of commitment to the welfare of each family member is a struggle. The struggle continues in the United States and much more in places where divorce is new as in Mexico and Ireland.

Today we have both options of staying together or getting divorced. Back to the same question, can we be faithful if we divorce? Could we consider ourselves committed and still get divorced? And remember how many people got married for life and are divorced at least once. We don't want to just play with words here.

The essential question to ask is, "What are we committed to?" Am I committed to marriage? Am I committed to being my essential self? Am I committed to being a servant of love? The answer does affect our thinking about the serious matter of commitment.

Committed to Being Truly Present

The easiest way for a society to operate is to have everyone accept and live by one set of rules. Many societies have tried this approach and have failed. Today’s societies are a mix of cultures, abilities, appetites, and religions. There is no way that everyone will accept the same rules about everything in life. The best we strive for are certain fundamental agreements; about driving our vehicles for instance and the way we try to protect people’s safety.

However, the rules about staying married have broken down and will not be put back together again. Nor do we yet possess the skills demanded to choose wisely and live long-term relationships. Therefore the question arises what we might be committed to if it isn’t the form of married-for-life.

Committed to being authentically present to our values and our partner is one attempt at finding a norm. For instance, it may be faithful to stay in a bad marriage if that is how you are authentically present. Or, you may be the healer of a dysfunctional situation by leaving it. True faithfulness is a very personal matter. This may sound scary to many because it replaces outside rules governing our behavior and instead urges us to use our own inner consciousness. However this isn’t so novel since many religions already teach that the law of God is in our heart, and learning to be authentically present is simply the nuts and bolts of the skill of finding our inner truth.

Divorce is not easy. It is not what most people want, and it leaves scars on anyone's self esteem. Judith Wallerstein has researched the effects of divorce on children and it is not a pretty picture in the vast majority of cases. Divorce is generally viewed as a broken commitment, but I ask again – commitment to what?

Couldn't people who get divorced and people who work at the marriage and succeed be committed to the same thing? Couldn't they both be committed to love -- love of self, love of each other, and love of their children and the extended family?

Sometimes people are in the wrong relationship with each other. They discover that they aren’t romantic partners really even though they are good friends and householders. Over several years they have discovered that they yearn for the more complete relationship of sexual passion and romance and cannot find it with each other. They decide to separate and discovered their true love for each other again in their new relationship of being happy co parents. Because they have worked this out over time and with help to commit themselves to fully talk the issues out, they also don’t allow their children to be caught in any cross fire, they never put each other down, and they are responsible about money and support. These people would be poster examples of being faithful to loving but not marriage.

To me, this approach seems more loving than either a long time smoldering and fighting relationship or a passively withdrawn and dead suffering together for the sake of religion, mom and dad, the children, or a fear of having failed.

You can’t truly love your self and allow your self to be abused or lost. Allowing your children to grow up in a joyless marriage is not loving your children, allowing your partner to stay conveniently stuck in an addiction and abusing the children is not loving your partner to say nothing of the children.

To be servants of love, we must be present authentically in each of these situations. The decision about staying, confronting, or finally leaving is still going to depend on each person's sense of truth and what each effort yields.

Being faithful is a value we hold dear. Our job is to determine for ourselves what we wish to be faithful to.

Further Help

John Welwood's, Journey of the Heart and Love and Awakening are inspiring and practical. He bridges Eastern thought with Western psychology which makes loving a passionate journey.

His new book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening is an excellent read for the serious reader interested in understanding the value and integration between Eastern and Western thought on growth and consciousness. While it is aimed at the therapist market, it is readable for a dedicated layperson.

Intimate Communion: Awakening your Sexual Essence by David Deida is a striking work about the new male and female. Men who wish to work on authentic presence and holding onto self while loving their partner fully will enjoy this book. Here’s a teaser sample: “ Sexually, the basic desire of most women with a feminine sexual essence is to be overwhelmed by love, but few men can match their power, their sexual capacity, their emotional force. A woman whose intimate partner can match her is a happy woman.” P.258

The Future of Love by Kingma is a visionary treatise on future forms of relationships that are more inclusive, less possessive, and more in tune with the evolution of love. Also, her book, The Men We Never Knew is an excellent understanding of how men work.

Another book by Stephen Levine, Gradual Awakening, is excellent on becoming more mindful and aware of the struggles of personality as seen by soul.

Along with these books, I strongly recommend a meditation practice of your choosing. A practice such as this, done on a daily basis becomes a great opportunity to look within. Meditation is a way of tuning into something that is greater than you and also a way of getting to know yourself at a deeper level than hectic, action-oriented ordinary life will allow. Even if you stop your busy pace for only ten or fifteen minutes, it will be worth it to you.

However, having said that, I also want to add that using your relationship issues, as grist for polishing your self-knowledge and evolution is profound if you know how to do it. Certainly, the books recommended in this and other chapters, and a meditation practice will help you along that path.

Finally, I recommend you read the second part of this chapter as a continuation of these thoughts. It explains much more fully the idea of loving self as you love others and the idea of non-attachment.

Remember the five-to-one ratio of happy relationships.

Five positive interactions to each negative one.

How To Live The New Paradigm: Part II

Loving Self and Non-Attachment

Our grandparents might have said, "Honey, just give and give, and you'll feel the love come back." And even though the advice is sound, we can’t follow it so simply. And we shouldn’t. Even though we may say we want to be great lovers, if we simply give ourselves to the other without regard for the other being in the relationship – ourselves – we do a disservice to both parties. Having already read about being authentically present, you know some of the reason for this. This chapter will stress the idea of self-love as a necessary part of a healthy relationship. Then I will add a balance to that by explaining another vital issue called non-attachment. It too is a beneficial tool to happy relating.

1. Loving Others and Ourselves

Why It’s Too Simple to Just Give to the Other.

Some people come into my office as professional good guys (men or women). They are polite, reserved, caring, and hidden. They try and change in the way their partner asks, and they don’t usually lose their temper except under exceptionally trying circumstances. Problem is they aren’t very interesting, they are not a great source of comfort in a tragedy, and their partner usually feels unconnected, bored or lonely. What’s wrong here?

There is no real person there. That’s the problem. It feels more like someone on automatic pilot. It’s like relating to an actor trying to be what you want. Does anybody know what I mean? Now picture a person who gets hurt easily. They become blaming and reactive frequently and over many things. They too are not all there. Something is going on inside of them that is out of control. You can feel that and are careful around them least you trigger something and they unload on you.

The problem with the automatic pilot person and the reactive person is the same: they are disconnected from their own self. And that is what this section of the book is about. When you are disconnected from yourself, you blame easily, you pretend in ways you might not even know, and you feel out of touch to others, a little brittle, and often not fully human.

The Failure of Will Power

The reason that is so is because if you are that person, you are using will power to try and wrench yourself into being a loving person. There are at least two problems with this approach. The first is that will power often breaks down and then you will explode or withdraw and isolate, and the other problem is that a truly compassionate nature cannot be achieved by will power alone. You see, this is a relationship problem not a mechanical engineering problem. That person has yet to learn to relate in a loving way to all the people present. And this cannot be achieved without relating to the complex being that is oneself.

I think the measure of whether a person who others would say “has it together,” and a person who hasn’t is the level of comfort and acceptance of self that person exhibits. We simply trust people more who have accepted themselves more fully.

An Old Ideal with Holes in It

Even though I think we should concentrate on giving love rather than trying to get it (the last chapter of this book is even named that) I recognize that for us post-modern, psychologically adept beings, this is anything but simple advice. Look at an ideal of loving that many people I respect offer as an excellent description of love from I Corinthians 13:

Love is patient; love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects. It always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

While most of us think this is a beautiful ideal, it misses a whole part of the struggle in loving. Notice the emphasis of this ideal on will power and making yourself into an all-loving being. I believe the problem of attempting to live up to this ideal is that the self is ignored. It is seen as only good to the degree it loves others. In a way, the I Corinthians ideal is a self-sacrificial concept. No one wants to be sacrificed. And it isn’t a compassionate ideal either.

Holding the hand of your lover is you. When you hold a mirror up to the journey of your life, the woman or man you see isn't just a mule to carry the burdens, or a giving machine to serve others. You're looking in the eyes of a real being struggling to have an authentic expression.

You are a special part of creation. Your coming into full expression of your uniqueness is part of the universe’s song. The problem is you and most others don't always act that way. For today’s relationship demands, learning only to give to others is just too simple a formula.

Instead I am proposing an ideal and a method of learning to love your own complicated self as much as you attempt to learn to love your partner. We cannot give to others what we don’t give to ourselves and we can’t enjoy the love others have for us until we can give love to ourselves. That’s just the way it is.

I Am a We: It’s Complicated

First there are sub personalities

You see I am not a singular. I am made up of parts. "Sub personalities" is a good name for these parts. Part of me wants to take off and go to the beach this afternoon, while another part of me knows I need to get this project done in order to look good for my review.

Let’s say a man works long hours at the office and his partner is feeling abandoned and fed up. Let’s say John, who is the hard worker, wants to take more time off, but he gets so conflicted around it and so anxious that the work usually wins out over a fun weekend at the river. If he did some guided imagery work from a workshop or a book I will refer to later, he would discover that he has two parts of himself that are not speaking to each other.

One is the fun, free-for-all young teenager, and the other is a stern father figure wanting his son to produce and be successful. Problem is the father is the one in control. If John would discover this and work with it, he would allow those two energies or parts of himself to start a relationship. The result of that work would be a more even method of deciding about the work/fun issue in his life. The two parts would begin to do time-sharing. “You get John for the afternoon after five, and I get him all the day. Something like that.

Let’s look at other sub personalities for a minute. There might be a lost kid, a rebellious adolescent girl, a scared-of-the-world little boy, and a taskmaster father. They are all there on the stage of your psyche. The ideal would be to have an easy relationship with each of these parts and use each when that particular energy is needed. Use the task master to get the report done, use the rebellious teen to have fun at the beach, use the shy, vulnerable child to pay attention to the baby, and use the brainy nerd part to analyze the news. A good conductor would come in handy once we had established the relationship with all these parts. We would become a symphony, a harmonious and powerful whole. The conductor can be seen as our witness self, the part that is able to stand above and observe what emotions we are feeling but not be dominated by them.

The main point here is that these parts work well when incorporated in us and they rebel and cause trouble for us when they are not. The law of projection, which I discussed in the chapter, “Loose Canons” states that what we blame or attack in others is really something about ourselves that we are not in full relationship to. Therefore in the example above, the unenlightened John would have a hard time with his partner wanting to play so much. That’s how he would judge it, and if he were in really an aware guy, he would know that he was projecting onto his partner and that there was something for him to learn about his own relationship to fun.

Now some people -- very intelligent people at that -- think that John’s solution would come from learning to work more efficiently and then play at the appropriate time. In general, these people would urge us to root out those behaviors in self that get projected onto the other. Will power again, as in, “Don’t allow yourself to be so blaming or critical,” “Don’t get stuck in feeling depressed,” “Don’t be so anxious and panicky about being called lazy, in fact stop being so lazy.” And why don’t I believe in this approach?

I don’t see it working, and even if the person does modify his behavior, he has not become a more loving person. He has simply become a person who has tried harder to be nice. Then it either doesn’t last or it feels a bit fake and forced and not loving.

What is really going on inside of us? It’s our parts again! Some of these parts, energies, or sub personalities are deliberately buried out of view. The unconscious knows full well how painful they are to us, and wants to protect us from the pain that knowing them would bring.

But these hidden parts are usually controlling our reaction to things. You probably have already guessed that these parts have been created and splintered off of our psyche as we were being shaped in childhood. We have taken on characteristics of our parents, we have hidden parts of our own self that were not acceptable to our parents, siblings, or other important people, and which created fears about our selves through the shaming of them as we grew up.

Roberto Assagioli, a contemporary of Freud, conceived of this picture of our makeup that I have presented so far. He called his study Psychosynthesis. Another group that has emerged more recently call this work Voice Dialogue. It is powerful work and I recommend it.

Then There Are Fears

But it gets more complicated because we also have fears that run us. While I might look very confident, a part of me is scared I'm not making a big enough mark in the world. And while I don’t even want to acknowledge that part of me, it runs me when it gets triggered. The fear that I am not enough, I am too sexual, I am too needy, I am not good with people all cause havoc in me if left ignored. Not embracing them as parts of me makes me reactive to others when they trigger these land mines within.

New brain research is discovering that our brain contains neural networks that hold different experiences we have had and our reaction to those experiences. Therefore, you would be literally correct in saying, "A part of me is terrified of singing in front of others,” when that neural network within you is triggered by the group around the piano wanting a song from you.

So, there you are in relationship, standing between two beings that require your care and love: your partner and your own complicated and wounded self. Two wounded people made up of wounded selves and each with a witness self. Even though it often seems easier to forget about our self and be a giving, caring, all-patient lover; we aren't able to get away with that co-dependent behavior as much these days. Obviously, it's time to re-evaluate the simpler premise.

Healthy Self Love is Good Too

Self-sacrifice is no longer seen as a superior virtue to self-awareness and care. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead jolted generations into realizing that being selfish is also a virtue. People are openly touting service to self as equal to service to others. Jesus also made a strong case by teaching, "Love others as you love yourself." Healthy self-love is perhaps the most difficult love of all and it even has to fight a fear of being selfish and self-centered.

But what does it mean to love one self? Does it mean taking hot baths while sipping herb tea? Or perhaps getting adequate recreation? Yes and no. If any of the above provides a balance for you as opposed to the task master part of you that has been dominating your life for years now, I would say yes the bath and the time for recreation would be a way to love your self.

However the essence of loving self is self-acceptance. Self-acceptance means all of you; even the part that is afraid you will never be loved and you aren’t loveable. You can’t leave that part out of your inner family and still be loving yourself. I will speak more about how to do this in a few pages below.

Here are more ideas of loving yourself:

· As mentioned above, taking care to get some regular recreation,

· Not allowing our partner to abuse us, or to crash our boundaries on a regular basis

· Not pushing a part of our self that is afraid, but instead respecting a gentler approach to the task at hand. Many people absolutely override their need for rest or calm or space and thereby fail to love themselves.

· Love yourself enough that you no longer give into the part that is out of control and needs endless stimulation or danger in order to feel alive.

Changes are brewing: All Giving Isn’t All Loving

In recent decades, we have expanded our understanding of loving behavior. For instance, the all-sacrificing mother who has no life of her own, giving all to her children; cleaning their messes, making their beds, making their lunches, hauling them from school, to soccer game, to piano lesson, doing homework with them, comforting their every hurt, and sitting with them as they fall asleep, is no longer the image of the most loving or healthy mother.

We now know to ask whether she is loving or stunting her children. In this environment, children do not grow up to be self-determining, generous little beings. They often grow out of extremely doting parenting into entitled, angry persons wanting their way and manipulating to get it.

But you might think that mother looked very much like the ideal of all giving that we associate with the loving Christ figure. We can get confused here.

In the same way, the man who is totally patient and swallows the shaming put-downs from his anxious wife without defending himself, is not being loving. If his intention is to patiently bear all suffering like Jesus, he will soon drive his wife to feel like a sicko, (and pissed). Imagine how it feels to live with a “saint.” We become the poor sinner who must be indulged by his goodness. No one likes being a “charity case” or always the student in a relationship.

Similarly the woman who cleans up after her man, suffers his bouts of drunken rages, protects the children from him, (or feels helpless to protect them) and avoids naming the disease is no longer called loving. We call her co-dependent. This means she is running away from her own self-development by allowing herself to be consumed by her problematical spouse. She is now recognized as an active part of the problem in the family.

This evolved thinking is good but it also demands new information about what loving really means today. My premise is that it means loving our self as much as loving the other, while all the time learning to be fully present. In this way we find that we need to take care of our self and how we are treated as much as we care for the other.

Learning to Love Oneself

Learning to love your self is much more complicated than taking hot baths with candles flickering against the walls – even thought that’s a start for some. The self-love I am proposing means learning to truly accept all of you into the family.

It includes

Using your defenses as windows into the unexplored and unaccepted you

Facing your hidden parts and your fears

Allowing these parts and fears into your life

Growing in full knowledge of your wounded humanness

Being compassionate with your self,

Allowing that healed self-relationship to help be less critical of others

Joining yourself to the human condition

You may be strong and smart and also afraid of being unlikable to others. You might be enormously competent and also afraid that you are too needy, or too sexual, or too desirous of change and variety, a flake, a control freak, a failure. You will first have to discover that it is these fears that are running so much of your life. Next learn to accept them and live with them. Often if you are trying to fix these parts or fears, or to improve yourself to never have them, and you use therapy to do this, therapy can become an attempted act of killing part of your self, all in the name of self-perfection of course.

Success Would Look Like This

Let me try to convince you of this approach by letting you see what would happen if you were successful in achieving it. First, you would be more present to your partner and others because you will be quite human in admitting your own fears and complexity, “I want to try that experience with you, but I am also afraid of being unskilled and not respected by you.” Or “I wish I were able to just go on and not feel hurt by those remarks, but I get triggered by that kind of judgment.” In this way, we are more fully there as a fellow wounded human beings.

The second thing that would happen is that you would allow more love in because you have paved the way by loving and accepting yourself. “I know I have a part that is needy and fears being alone and I accept that as part of me.” In embracing that part instead of shying away from it at every reminder of your need for others, you come home to yourself. We are like a remote wilderness that is inaccessible until we make the first road into ourselves. Once that has been established with self-acceptance, others can come and visit us too. I usually get frustrated being with people who love themselves too little and therefore can’t ever feel my loving actions or remarks. Don’t you? It’s like giving gifts that are never opened.

A Hard Relationship Fact

The fact about relationships is that when you are bothered by something in the other, the issue is usually more complex than it seems and is usually about your own relationship to self. To heal that, you we will have to go down the path that I am showing you here.

We cannot be differentiated as I have described in Chapters Two and Seven without coming face to face with these parts of ourselves that control so much of our relational behavior. When we stop blaming the other in our life and start looking to ourselves for the solution to the relationship unhappiness, we will encounter our own divorce from parts of ourselves.

An Example

I was reactive and defensive when I felt criticized (much more than I am now). I did some introspective work and learned that I wasn’t as confident as I thought I was. Since I hated this idea, I avoided any exploration or reminder of it and instead used will power to work hard at trying to gain self-confidence. I was in reality tying to keep this feared part of me locked away in a dark dungeon deep inside of me. “I will kill the fear by growing into what I am afraid I am not,” would have been an apt expression had I been making any.

However I am happy to say that I was helped to explore this fear, learn what it was about, and then try to relate to it. I learned a part of me was afraid that I was not making enough difference in the world. The next step was to learn to simply allow that fear to exist within me as part of my inner family. It would neither run me or be ignored by me. In other words, I formed a relationship to it. After all, it was only one fear that I had.

As I did the accepting and allowing I felt a physical release of a burden. I can now honestly say that the fear stopped running my reactivity. Also in this way, I felt more in touch with others who all had their own fears. This last event could happen because I had finally accepted my wounded nature and stopped trying to fix the defect. I saw clearly that I was not going to be able to get rid of this fear in me and I learned to live with it and even give it some love.

No matter how many books I wrote, how many clients I saw, or surfing contests I won (in my dreams), or rousing lectures I gave, I was still going to have this fear that I might not be enough. All my trying to rise above it was an act to try and kill it out of my life. My will power was going to snuff it out.

Of course the fearful part didn’t like all that hostile activity and responded by making itself heard every time I felt threatened by a remark or accusation. When I gave it what I term maternal caring, it calmed down, relaxed, and allowed me to do the same. Maternal loving is simply sitting with the other, much like a mother might quietly hold a child who hurt her finger. I give another example of this type of work in Appendix A under “A Trip to the Therapy Office.” While this is not familiar to a lot of people, it is extremely powerful work.

How to Do It
1. First study these two extremes and see which you tend toward.

a) Protectionism: You love yourself in a way that turns out to be protective and avoiding. You might find yourself shriveling because you hold others off least they find out who you are. You live in fear of being taken over, found out, or not liked.

In this way, you deprive yourself of the warmth that others can give you. Or, you are outside in the cold as you try and cocoon yourself with making money and having the good things in life, well not really out in the cold, more like alone surrounded by your warm THINGS. It begins to feel flat nevertheless. Or

b) Compulsive love: You love others out of your need to be loved. You do anything for the other so as never to be found inadequate. This leaves you disappointed and angry when you aren't loved back the way you think you deserve. You give so much caring, attention, and help that you are shocked that loving adoring fans do not surround you.

The problem is that you have lost yourself along the way. Your identity has been subsumed under the needs of others. Thus, your giving turns out to be your need. People see that, and don't take you seriously -- because you haven't taken yourself seriously.

2. Finding these inner parts is pretty simple: Just pay attention to your problems with others or your projections onto them. If you get irked by people who are “know it alls” for instance, you can be assured that some part of you is not being accepted that pertains to this issue of being a know it all. Listen to what issues you have with others to find what you need to address in your own relationship to your own self. (Debbie Ford’s book The Dark Side of the Light Chasers is very helpful in this.)

3. Now you can either make yourself stop acting like a know it all which is the old fix-yourself approach requiring will power and a spine of steel, or you can learn about a part of you that doesn’t feel it belongs. Remember that the unaccepted part or fear was instilled in you in your formative years possibly, as one example, by parents who were afraid of themselves and because of that, couldn't allow all of you to live either.

Those parts scared them too much, like a child being a daydreamer might scare his engineer parent about his future ability to make a living. Or a child's fascination with her genitals might threaten her religiously devoted and sexually repressed parents.

From this background, you are afraid to be yourself. You fear many parts of yourself. You’re afraid of being unlovable if you are just you. All your internal myths and prohibitions warn you not to get too excited, too angry, too expressive, too permissive, too sexy, too verbal, too vulnerable, you see how this list can go on and on. Therefore people handle these fears by hiding out and protecting themselves from too much closeness or they go the other route and surrender all the time and become passive about their own needs. Either direction is a way of avoiding loving your self.

John Welwood’s book, Love and Awakening, is good for looking at relationship issues as personal interior relating issues.

Resentment Tests the Theory

Now we come to the crossroads of loving self and loving other. If I say, “You should stretch to accommodate your partner as much as you can, but you must also love that unique being that is you and not allow it to get lost,” you will run into some of the hurdles below:

· Being yourself even when your partner is angry with you

· Giving only what you can without resenting.

· Stop doing certain things that you don’t want to but usually do out of guilt or fear

· Do what you value even if you are afraid of your partner's anger.

· Stop blaming others and take hard looks at yourself

· Do what you think is right even if your partner disagrees

· Stopping trying to change your partner and working more to love yourself

· Learning to accept difficult parts of yourself

· Standing up to being treated poorly.

I have learned that it doesn't work for me to give something that I will later resent. I like what my good friend Pete says, “If I’m not able to give something without feeling resentful, I probably shouldn't give it.” Otherwise your "self-sacrifice" always seems to show up later as resentment, at which point your partner may say, "Why didn't you just tell me you didn’t want to do it? I don’t like it when you give in to me and then ruin it with a pissy attitude." You’ll probably then get embarrassed by the truth of her statement, hang your head in shame and slink away.

The reason we might give and then resent later is that we forgot about our self. We didn’t love our self when we did whatever we did and resented it later. It isn’t easy to learn to care for our self as well as we say we want to care for others. But we must love our self even if we are the hardest person to accept fully.

Over time I've learned that it's better to be realistic about my own state of development and say, "You know, sweet buns, I just don't think I can give you that right now." This doesn’t always create happiness, but it is a truthful place to begin with.

Giving of Self and Loving Self, huh?

But this approach can also be confusing because giving of our self and loving our self can seem contradictory. The simple rule is give of yourself as long as you are loving yourself, and never give in any way that doesn’t love your self. Whether we eat out or in, whether you made a sharp remark to me tonight, whether I feel taken care of today, whether you want to go play golf and I have to find my own activity, are not taking something away from me. However, allowing you to call me names, cleaning up your messes out of fear of your anger, always staying in because you are afraid to go out, not getting my advanced degree because it threatens you, and holding my sexual desires to plain vanilla because you don’t want to discuss it, may very well be a form of not loving my self.

Nature, God, or the One, seems to want us to expand into greater wholeness. Life presents us with several workout gyms to help us, indeed propel us, into wholeness. The majority of these gyms are our relationships. Our relationships help us learn greater love for all of our wounded parts and fears and also learn to be more loving of others. Let us now study what this non-attachment business is all about.

2. The Virtue of Non-Attachment:

So Much of our Unhappiness Comes from Wants

Let’s be honest, trying to get what we want, and dealing with not getting what we want is a huge relationship sport. Learning to handle the issues that arise around our wants and preferences is truly a relationship art. And after all the talk above, that may have made you squirm uncomfortably about loving yourself, here is another relationship secret: If we make our happiness depend on whether we get loved or cared for by others, we will condemn ourselves to a form of hell.

It is true that to a certain degree, we human beings all live in a state of longing; we all have unfulfilled needs and desires, which originated long ago, and we still want to fulfill. We can't give them up, but neither can we depend on their satisfaction for our happiness. Gees that eliminates a lot of possibilities you might say.

We Aren’t Talking about Detached

Here is an important distinction: the opposite of attached is not detached. No, don’t go passive on me. If you are detached, you simply may not care. That is something completely different from non-attached. Detached is a form of giving up or more often it is a symptom of depression. “Hey, I don’t care about what food we eat or movie we see. I’m practicing being detached, man.” If you thought you were easy to live with because you really didn’t care about how things were done, you may not be as enlightened as depressed.

Being non-attached, on the other hand, is a discipline. It is made up of watching how our fears want to control every situation we are in. It involves looking out for the other person also. Non-attachment involves loving both the other and our self freely -- not out of fear.

For instance I'm not attached to being happy, having sex, or wanting enough money to retire. Wrong! Tricked you! Let’s be honest, you and I are attached to a lot of things, and it's okay. Many things are really important to us. But hopefully you see the issue is the boundary between other and self, the balance between the other and me. I love you and I love me; what we do together should take both of us into consideration and shouldn’t be run by either. And sometimes, it won’t be easy and one of us will have to give in, fine as long as we trade off doing the giving in.

No short cuts either

To make matters harder, trying the simplistic “enlightened” approach of just being loving will come crashing down fairly soon also. Let’s face it; we are stuck in the human condition. By that I mean we want for ourselves, AND we want to be generous. Walking the thin line between these two worlds is a life's worth of growing. How can we give to our partner and not feel like we are missing out ourselves? But, a little compassion here: your attachments come out of your fears. People who want things a certain way and/or obsess over having it that way, have been deeply hurt in early life, and are trying to control that it never happens to them again. Even if you know you are really very afraid inside, you might still come across on the outside as pushy. Our fears come across even if we think we are hiding them. Slowly working on this section will yield results for those of you who find yourself in this category.

Developing the awareness and discipline that I have described above is mysterious and difficult; it’s also a refined skill. To give and not resent is a demanding school that takes time. To set the stage for this discussion, let’s revisit intention since our actions should flow from our intention.

Intention, Intention, Intention

Even though most of us have intentions we are attached to, we also are not always aware of what they are. Consider these two intentions: "I want to be loved for who I am." And “I want to have a smooth and secure life.” Two very different intentions, eh! Achieving the first one would require you to be honest about who you are, what you feel, and what you want. Only in this way, will you be loved for who you are. But, for the second intention of a smooth life and security, you may want to keep secrets in order to not rock the boat, and also put on a strong front to insure the other feels confident about your dependability. In this way the intention determines how you act in the relationship.

Similarly if you want fun and good sex, but don't treat your partner generously and warmly, you probably will get negative results in your sex life. We have a part in creating what we want in our lives.

Our conscious growth only begins when we identify our intentions. We can then start the process of being successful in living them out.

Another interesting thing about intentions is how we deal with our partner’s as opposed to our own. To our partner we say, "You don't care." "You're just trying to confuse things." "If you cared, you would..." "You don't listen." "You only care about what you want," and the famous, "You want me to fail." We can see our partner's wicked intentions more easily than our own. We basically have only good intentions.

The embarrassing thing is that we can't recognize an intention in another unless we are familiar with it in ourselves. If you are afraid your partner will tire of you and leave in a few years, it's because you could see yourself doing that. Wow, gotta be careful of those judgments now! They say more about you than about the other.

When you start checking your intentions as carefully as you check to see if you have gas in your car, you start becoming aware of yourself in new ways. One thing you run into -- almost immediately -- is your attachments. Most of us are attached to having something done a certain way. We are often convinced that our way is the superior way, and of course this is one of the biggest enemies of growing love in a relationship.

A Simple Maxim

Great lovers hang on loosely to having things their way. They are acutely aware of the other person present also. "Hello, I'm the other person in your relationship. Remember me? I don't work the same way you do, and we have to make room for both of us." The other person involved with you will not feel loved if your primary drive is to get what you want. "What am I, chopped liver?" was probably started as an expression over this very thing. But it gets tricky from here out.

Finding the Joys of Non-Attachment

Non-attachment doesn't mean giving yourself up. That road to martyrdom usually leads to sanctimonious frauds that are convinced they are good and generous. They are so convinced of it that they make the people around them nauseous if you know what I mean. Getting the balance right about taking care of yourself and the other is mighty tricky business. It takes discipline rather than being as simple as a simple decision or just being a flexible person.

The difficult thing about loving is that no one has been able to make it a paint-by-number thing. Remember those paint sets? As children, I was given a set with paint tubes and a canvas that had a segmented drawing on it. The segments were all labeled with numbers. I applied the paint from the tube with the corresponding number for each segment, and voila! I had a Monet. Except that it looked a little stilted and like… paint-by-number. When people try to find formulas for loving each other, it feels and looks like these pictures.

One of the love secrets successful partners learn is that you can't just give yourself up and love the other. If you try, as millions have, the result is weird stuff sneaking out of your past, your emotions, your memories, and your dreams. For example, the all-patient hubby becomes passive aggressive, and mean things slip out occasionally. Or, consider the wife who every Thanksgiving manages to “accidentally” spill hot coffee on her husband's lap. (A respected scientist claimed this was a true family story.) Headline: Repressed, selfless, all- giving wife seeks revenge for not feeling wanted as a woman.

The only way out of this is to find a way to love both of you, and to make the relationship large enough for both of you. Different couples have different ways of doing this.

How to Do It

Let's start by taking stock of how attached you are to doing things your way or having things the way you want? That includes your way of viewing the world, relationships, parenting, or your way of getting things done.

Partnership is what most people want in their relationships, and trying to have your way goes in the exact opposite direction. Think of boss, slave owner, master; those are the words that are used in situations where people want things their way and think others should obey. Men, be honest in this evaluation about your controlling of the car and driving habits, and women be honest in your evaluation about your controlling the house and kitchen. These are usual areas of dominance by one or the other. Women micro managing the childcare is another and men with the finances still another. We all have our little kingdoms.

Self Reflection to Start: First, you have to find out two things:

1) What are the important things to you in life and love?

2) What can you be less attached to?

Here are some examples of the piddley stuff we all seem to get attached to even though it is embarrassing to look back on a fight and see that the actual thing we wanted so badly at the time seems damn small now.

"We have to take Route 95 to get there quickest."

"I want to see a romantic movie tonight."

"I want to talk about our relationship issues -- now!"

"I have to play golf or I'll go crazy."

"I have to go surfing today or I'll go crazy."

"We've had too much meat this week, so we're having vegetables tonight."

"I want to watch TV."

“I want to watch sports.”

Do you see how the "I want" and the "I have to" is the clue to the attachment?

Try this for comparison: "I would really like to...how about you?" That is a more open-ended way to begin making a plan. It involves a partner! Try the, “…and how about you?” next time you want to change plans or make a decision.

The Heart of the process:

1. First, learn to listen to how important something is to your sweetheart.

2. Wonder if you can give it.

a. Can you freely give it, or does it perhaps go against something really important to you?

b. Knowing that both you and your partner are equally important, you will need to be honest.

3. See why you can't give her what she wants. You will learn two things out of this. One is that you are attached to having things your way. OR, you have values that are going to be violated if you give in.

4. Accept that you may be attached but wish to grow in non-attachment. Do your best in the present and forgive yourself for being human and attached and keep working on it.

In times of conflict, the spirit of this section encourages you to give only what you feel at peace giving; it does not encourage you to give in any way that feels like selling your soul. Now selling your soul doesn’t mean you experience some discomfort. It’s a lot more serious than that. It means that a core value is at risk. You are being asked to do something that offends your sense of ethics or personal identity. (And I hope this goes well beyond whether to air dry or towel dry the dishes.)

Going against your own values to give something to your partner is a mistake. It will make you feel guilty. That's what the healthy emotion of guilt is for: to warn you against violating your values. It won't serve you, your partner, your parents, or your children to walk around feeling sacrificial and guilty, let alone blaming them for making you do something that you think is wrong.

However, be careful about being attached to certain values that are really old habits, ingrained prejudices, and family of origin customs. Dishes have to be wiped clean not air-dried. Food must be wrapped in plastic wrap when put in the refrigerator. You must get the car’s oil changed every 5,000 miles. Never throw food away. You can immediately see that being non-attached to certain ideas and biases is tricky to figure out. That’s the self-awareness work of this process.

Exercise:

Go to the process above and use the first statement about listening to how important something is to your partner and then honestly ask yourself why you can’t give it. See if your answer makes sense. If this issue is one of those struggles that lasts months or years, ask friends to be honest with you about how they see your “values.” In other words, check our your reasons for not giving. You may be missing something.

I once tried an experiment to say, “That’s a good idea, let’s try it,” to everything my wife offered. It worked really well I must humbly admit. I learned two important lessons. First: her ideas worked out remarkably well a lot of the time, and second: she was quick to change things she saw weren’t working. It was an experiment started in arrogance but ending in humility.

Two struggles with non-attachment

Practicing being non-attached can take many forms.

1. Stretching to give more: If you say, "I want to be together, but I don’t feel like talking too much. How about seeing a movie this afternoon?" Try being non-attached and see if you could sit in the park and talk something out, which is what she wants to do.

2. Wanting to give what you can’t: In another vein, you may want to please him because he has been so great while you were finishing your thesis, but you may need to be even non-attached to your own desire to give. You might have to say, "I would really like to be there for you this afternoon, and I just can't do it. I'm sorry I don't have the energy." You are being non-attached to even how you want to give.

You get the idea? It's a very compassionate way to live with your self and with others. Non-attachment lets you take things as they come. You don't hold yourself strictly to an agenda, nor do you hold others strictly to theirs. You let go often but not because you need to be seen as all generous. In a loving relationship, holding onto things lightly is a virtue.

Try to love yourself and your partner equally. That is so easy to say and yet so complicated to live out. If you start now with your own non-attachment program you will increase the joy in your relationship. I guarantee. First observe your attachments, then question if you need to hang on to them. Try and give when you aren’t selling your soul out, and finally be compassionate to your own state of growth. This is true even when your desire to see yourself as generous doesn’t match your abilities. This involves continuing to try and live up to your intentions while also realizing that you aren’t perfect.

The Great Mystery of Holding Lightly

I learned the truth of holding onto things lightly from an issue raised by Robert Stein in an article about the problem with the human desire to bond with another, and have freedom also. Many people wish to be close to their mate, and have freedom to be close to others also. This conundrum of simultaneously bonding and wanting to be free seems contradictory. Many societies have attempted solutions with ritual celebrations like Tantric pujas, Solstice rituals, Carnival, and Mardi gras.

Freedom and the desire for variety pull some people so strongly that they break their bond with their partner and go out and find another person. But then, they begin to get bonded to the new person, and they are back where they started: bonded verses freedom.

If you decide to have the freedom of variety by having a number of lovers, you might feel spread too thin, and not bonded enough. So how can anyone achieve a balance? It seems like an impossible thing.

Robert Stein's article in Challenge of the Heart entitled “Coupling/Uncoupling” has an interesting answer to this conundrum. He says we need to hold lightly onto both ends of the needs: lightly to bonding and lightly to freedom. In this way we dance between them. We aren't attached in the moment to having our freedom and at the same time we aren't attached to bonding in a fearful way that would make us sell our soul to hang onto it.

At first, this answer seemed like a Zen koan to me. It sounded like it evaded the issue. But, slowly it sank in -- like any good koan -- and I found myself thinking about it over the next few days. In time it began to seem like the only answer to many of life's mysteries.

Holding lightly to outcomes is the way to keep us happy and not attached to the security of having things work out as we think they should. We become more in tune with the universe being in charge. We become happy passengers.

Being a passenger in life by being less attached to our outcomes allows for the spontaneity of the accidental surprise. It opens the way for life to reveal itself like a poem that unfolds line by line. It increases our happiness to do this because we flow with the mysterious workings of the universe. Learning we aren't in charge of everything is freeing.

For men, there is an obvious example: our penis, the great teacher. We can't think it erect. We sometimes can't rub it erect. Even our partner can't always get it erect. Sometimes it just doesn't want to stick its neck out. We can get mad at it, feel shamed by it, and it just lies there limply secure in its own wisdom. Then, if we can laugh, we flow with the mystery of this moment in our life. The laugh might have been what we needed rather than the nerve ending pleasure of orgasm. And don't tell me laughing together doesn’t create great connection.

Holding lightly to desires and agendas is an elegant key to happiness and good relationships. However, it's important to think of it as a practice, not a destination. There is no finished product here. It becomes a way of life, which you can enjoy for a long time and never get bored with.

Many books

Among them are Start Where You Are, by P. Chodron; The Sacred Path of the Warrior, by C. Trungpa; Journey of the Heart, and Love and Awakening by John Welwood, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche, and Debbie Ford’s The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, and The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle..

Remember the five-to-one ratio of happy relationships.

Five positive interactions to each negative one.

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