Radiant Joy Brilliant Love

by Clinton Callahan

  Get Intimacy Coaching: Join a men’s or women’s group. Repeatedly ask the group for coaching about ways that you could remove or transcend your personal barriers to letting yourself be intimately known. Trust your coaching even if you do not understand it. Bring the results of your experiments back to the group and ask for further refinements in coaching to take your next steps.

  Share from the Bottom: You probably already spend an evening now and then at the movies or the theater with your partner. This Edgework experiment is to spend an evening now and then at an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA) meeting with your partner. Even if alcohol was never a part of your family, it is definitely the drug of choice in Western civilization. Find what it means to hit bottom, i.e., to be so egoistically disassembled as to have no choice but to be completely vulnerable. Practice speaking out in the meetings at this level of radical vulnerability. Bring this ability to share into your relationship.

  Accept Your Partner’s Humanity: Invite your neighbors over for dinner. In your interactions, track how subtly and completely your Box seeks out the differences between itself and your neighbors’ Boxes and uses the differences to establish separation between you. Give majority vote in yourself to a different purpose than finding differences. Instead, make your purpose to find examples of your simple common humanity. Nothing special needs to come of the dinner. Do not expect that they invite you to their place in return. Leave the evening with a broader understanding of what it means to be human. Use that new level of acceptance with your partner.

  Find Your Break in Reality: Visit an old people’s home or a hospital for the mentally ill and find a way to listen to people’s stories. Just sit there making contact with patients. Your purpose is to listen to what they say and find how similar it is to the stories you tell yourself and others on a daily basis. Also listen for each person’s break with reality, the phrases or attitudes their Box uses to avoid taking responsibility for creating their life as it is. Notice this same tendency in yourself. Share what you notice about yourself with your partner.

  Fart in Public: A family doctor friend of mine, practicing in an area populated by gypsies, confided that more than one gypsy woman has come to him a neurotic wreck because her husband swore that if he ever heard her fart he would divorce her. Learn to fart in front of your partner. Play around with making basic mistakes in the presence of your partner. Let them make such mistakes in your presence. Take cha-cha, slow waltz and foxtrot dance lessons with your partner. Someone would have to totally love you to risk looking as stupid as one looks making mistakes in beginning foxtrot classes.

  Serve Something Greater: Together with your partner plant 1000 baby trees in an area that was deforested. While you carry seedlings, dig holes, mix fertilizer and pour water together, get a sense of how your relationship as a whole is being used to serve something greater than each of you individually and even greater than the relationship itself. Let that greater thing nourish your relationship in a reciprocal flow as you take action to serve that greater thing. Reciprocal exchange between your relationship and something greater can occur during other projects too, such as organizing a local or international “Intersection Conference” (my idea) that convenes diverse peoples for the purpose of having conversations that matter.

  Fight a Noble Battle: Work as a team. Attend your local town meetings and take a stand to pass the resolution that ends corporate personhood so that business leaders can no longer avoid responsibility by hiding behind the legal structure of a corporation. Then you have a noble battle to fight, an adventure to live, and (if you are a man) your woman has a hero to be rescued by.

  Honor a Tradition: Take your partner or your whole family to hike the Inca trail in Peru for two months. Dress as Incas. Live as much as you can with the local people as Incas. Of course you are not Incas, and pretending to be Incas looks sort of stupid, but do the whole thing with respect for yourselves and respect for the Inca tradition, and through this respect you will succeed. Sharing these experiences together will create moments of intimacy that will nurture your relationship for a long time.

  Express Your Partner As Art: Do a painting, sculpture or concerto inspired by your partner. Have them pose for you or sing for you numerous times over a three-month period. Develop a way to portray their inner radiance. Your work need not match the standards of Rembrandt or Botticelli. Forget that. Just do your best with expressing what you experience in them through your art, and be seriously intimate at the same time.

  Let Your Discipline Shine: Participate in a longterm yoga, tai-chi or aikido class together. Although such a commitment changes your daily schedule and may be inconvenient, discipline and development is also attractive. Enjoy the attractiveness of your discipline.

  Sing Your Quivering Heart: Find and share your wholly tender heart – share about how life is for you by speaking from a heart at risk of abuse and yet still daring to reveal itself. Create safe moments to speak privately together in the embrace of this heart, even if the space quivers. Sometimes sing or read poetry together from this quality of heart.

  Wash Your Fears: Risk sharing rarely admitted fears that you normally pass over and ignore. Let honesty become so delicate that even small background fears are sensed. For example, whenever you wash dishes together make it a time to acknowledge the tiniest of underlying fears.

  Reveal Your Vision: Allow your partner to see and feel your soul’s true vision of what is possible for yourself, your children, your family, your business, your neighborhood, your city, and the world. Take a walk or a drive and speak about these things before you know what you are going to say. Take turns writing down what the other person says and read it back to them. Do not defend what you say, and don’t make your partner defend what they say.

  Love All The Way: Let both yourself and your partner be ongoingly flooded with so much love. Live your love maximally, rather than restricting it to a civilized minimum. Give permission for your maximum love to show up in what you say, feel and do, without giving your center away or expecting anything in return.

  Just This Moment: Come into the same moment together with your partner without thinking or planning beyond that moment. Extend that moment beyond the limits where the mind would usually take back its grip of your daily To-Do list. Let something extraordinary and completely unpredicted come to pass between the both of you in that moment.

  Follow the Leader: Trust the leadership of your partner by accompanying them fluidly. Exhibit complete nonresistance to their moves, for example, when they are driving, when they are giving instructions to your children, or when they are being around the parents (yours or theirs). Participate in a public meeting or workshop with your partner and be a total yes for whatever they contribute at the meeting.

  Declare Perfection: Declare the perfection of the present circumstances several times a day by saying clearly out loud, “This is perfect.” Include all of the circumstances of your partner (their body shape, “Your butt is perfect,” their anger, “That anger is perfect,” their doubts, “Your doubts are perfect”) and the environment (“This morning is perfect,” “Those flowers are perfect,” “This music is perfect”), even though both of you know that there is only nonperfection at the level of material manifestation. Thoroughly enjoy together the utter satisfaction of the perfection that you have declared.

  Guard Your Attention: Practice with guarding your attention so that you are indistractible (not distracted by other men or women walking down the street, by pictures in magazines or billboards, by television). Particularly focus on not being distractible by problems and issues. There will always be problems and issues, especially from the perspective of your Box. If your Box, your partner’s Box, your mother-in-law’s Box, or your child’s Box can distract you from holding space for the sanctuary of intimate relationship with your partner, then the Box wins and you lose. Ongoingly demonstrate that being-with your partner has by far the highest priority, and prove this unwaveringly by where
you place your attention (i.e., not distracted by the problem), even when you are together in the shopping mall, having a conflict, visiting the relatives, or with your children.

  Play Space Together: Develop the ability to play “Space” with your partner. Playing Space is a mode of conversation where one person asks self-threatening questions and the other person answers those questions immediately, without forethought, without flinching, without protecting, but directly from truth. Then change roles. Write down what your partner says because, guaranteed, the Box will cause you to forget this stuff in the shortest time. Who is more qualified to give you oracle-quality information about yourself than your partner?

  Go With Them: Decide already beforehand, and permanently, to not move energetically away from your partner, even when “you” (your Box) have reasons to reject them because it is offended. Instead, put your emotional reaction on an internal shelf for storing emotional reactions, and move energetically toward your partner. Go with them, even if it means going with them on a journey into their underworld, or your underworld (or both). Do not object. Simply accompany them as if on a friendly museum tour, making no conclusions except to stay close to them.

  Minimize Now Together: Avoid “smearing” moments together. Time is quantized into moments. Each moment is unique. There are gaps between moments like the gaps between houses on a street or the gaps between cars of a freight train. If you minimize your now to a present that is smaller than the gap between moments, then you can move sideways through those gaps into possibilities that were previously hidden. It is the Box that smears moments together, motion picture like, so it can make generalizations such as “always,” “never,” “can’t” and “have to.” Whenever you hear yourself using those words, know that your Box is working overtime to smear moments together into a blob that blocks all the other possibilities that are actually available if you could pay closer attention to details. To get out of smearing moments, shift to the level of the details.

  An Intimacy Edgework Experiment About Expectations

  Write on a blank piece of paper the following words: “Expectations kill relationship.” Fold the paper and put it into an envelope. Bring the envelope with you when you meet with your partner to do this three-part Edgework experiment.

  Arrange to have an hour of private time with your partner. Sit across from each other in a chair or on the floor, not touching, with no obstructions between you. Then start Part 1.

  Part 1: You listen while your partner tells you everything that they expect of you in every aspect of your relationship. They should begin each sentence with, “I expect that…” or, “I expect that you…” Ten minutes is long enough.

  Then switch roles. Your partner listens while you tell them everything that you expect of them in detail, using the form, “I expect that…” or, “I expect that you…” Another ten minutes should be enough time. Stop for a moment of silence. Then begin Part 2.

  Part 2: Have your partner open the envelope. Have them read out loud what the paper says: “Expectations kill relationship.” This is bad news. Nobody ever told us this before so we bury our partner in a mountain of righteous expectations. We wonder why they are suffocating in our company. Expectations kill relationship because expectations are a fantasy picture of what your partner is supposed to be like. When you have an expectation about your partner, you do not have your partner. Instead, you have an empty fantasy of your expectation about your partner. When the horror of the situation that you have created for each other to live in starts to gnaw at your guts, then do Part 3.

  Part 3: Your partner listens while you do the Edgework experiment to withdraw one of your expectations of them. The form of the withdrawal is precise. You choose one specific expectation that you have been holding over your partner’s head, for example, that they should not do any work emails at home. Then, in a strong clear voice, you formally say, “(Partner’s name), I withdraw my expectation that you should never do any work emails at home, forever.” Then stay silent and do not move for one full minute. Watch what happens to your partner’s energetic body.

  Then switch roles. You listen while your partner does the same Edgework experiment to withdraw one of their expectations of you. In a strong clear formal voice, they say, “(Partner’s name), I withdraw my expectation that you should pay more attention to me and not just to the children, forever.” Again, both of you stay silent and do not move for one full minute so the communication can land in your body and not just in your mind.

  Repeat Part 3 as long and as often as you both wish. Expectations are relationship killers. Nobody can force you to start an expectation. Nobody can force you to remove an expectation. No one else can be responsible for your relationship suffering under an expectation that you have made. Removing forever an expectation that you held about your partner can cause quite a bit of ecstasy. How much ecstasy can you stand?

  Excrete Your Conclusions: Each time you sit on the toilet, do the intimacy Edgework experiment to erase all the conclusions that your Box has ever established about your partner. While moving your bowels, also make a detailed mental deposit into the toilet. Identify and release any conclusions that you have established about what your partner wants or does not want, who they are or who they are not, what they can or cannot do, what is next or not next for them. When you are finished, flush everything away. Step out of the bathroom completely cleansed and excited by what you might discover in the person you are with. Catch your Box if it ever tries to bring back any conclusions that are already flushed down the toilet.

  Applaud Their Characters: Just like you, your partner has Shadow characters and Bright characters of immense variety, depth and diversity – the artist, the hypochondriac, the healer, the professor, the thug, the thief, the nun, the barmaid, the dungeon master, the hopeless ghost. Do the experiment to have no fear, no judgment, and no hatred of the characters that you find in your partner. They are just characters, even if your partner is completely identified with them as if they were real. Enjoy the richness of your partner’s versatility and play a variety of roles in return, weaving pathways toward extraordinary human relationship. Avoid requiring your partner to be one of the few characters with whom your Box can do its familiar dance of ordinary human relationship.

  Tolerate Their Discontinuities: Extend the limits of what you can tolerate in terms of your partner’s insanity. Understand that in order for them to learn and grow they must go through liquid state periods where they do not have their act or their life together. Expand your capacity for accepting your partner, until it greatly exceeds your partner’s previous experiences of being accepted. Stop requiring your partner to continue their standard show of being sane for you. Instead, become a safe space in which they can experiment in their own disassembly. Tolerate discontinuities so they can reorder. Clearly distinguish in your own heart the difference between loving your partner as a being, and loving their Box’s behavior. Continue loving them. Let their Box fade into background importance.

  Let Kindness Prevail for No Reason: Do the intimacy Edgework experiment of discovering kindness without measure. Drop the necessity to have reasons for expressing kindness toward beings, spaces or objects, including every aspect of your partner and their life. Let kindness prevail as your predominant moment-to-moment experience as expressed by your thoughts, words and actions. See how long you can do this. When you find that the kindness has been replaced by something else, avoid all analysis and shift back into the kindness to try again. Sometimes make extraordinary bursts of effort to extend your capacity for reasonless kindness beyond all previous exceptions. Sometimes create kindness reminding factors for yourself, like carrying a flower all day, or wearing a heart necklace to keep you tuned into your kindness experiment. Sometimes apply surprise guerilla kindness when it is least expected. Then, also apply this kindness to yourself.

  PART IV

  The Archetypal

  WARNING: Now Leaving Kansas

  Having been born in Kansas m
yself I have a fond appreciation for the astute observation made by a pretty young farm girl named Dorothy Gale when she wakes up “over the rainbow” in the film version of L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. After looking around and seeing strange vegetation, midget Munchkin people, wicked witches, and red ruby shoes, Dorothy somewhat nervously says to her little dog, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  You too are about to exit Kansas. We leave behind us discussions of ordinary and extraordinary human relationship and cross over into Archetypal domains where we will find our own varieties of strange vegetation and interesting elements, including underworlds, upperworlds, the Archetypal Masculine and Feminine, longing, Archetypal Love, and the possibility of what I have named “Countenance”: elements that come into play as we build substance into the realization of radiant joy and brilliant Love.

  Definitely not Kansas anymore.

  CHAPTER 8

  Archetypal Relationship / Archetypal Love

  As exciting as this new Archetypal domain may be, the direct physical connection to an unlimited abundance of unconditional Love and joy may threaten the foundations of your reality construct, changing your worldview and your concept of who you are, drastically and irreversibly.

  This connection to radiant joy and brilliant Love may irrefutably confirm the existence of a reality that you may have only glimpsed before. Part of you already knows it exists, while another part has been avoiding it with a vengeance. And this denying part will attempt to keep you unaware of what it has been doing.

  The experience of radiant joy and brilliant Love is undeniable because it is physical. Yet, you cannot “adapt” to this experience. Instead, it uncompromisingly adapts you. You also cannot include the full experience of radiant joy and brilliant Love in your present way of being because it will not fit. It is too vast and too different.