by Donna Eden
The microscopic truth, the description of your inner experience, might be a straightforward report of something that occurred. For example, as a husband, you might say to your wife, regarding your son: “I heard Billy swearing at you.” It might describe your sensations: “My neck tightened when I heard Billy swearing at you, and my heart started to race.” It might name your feelings: “I’m angry with Billy and feeling protective of you.” It might describe an image or thought or desire: “I want to ground Billy for the rest of the week.” It might portray an anticipation or internal conflict: “I’m afraid that you are going to disagree about grounding Billy.” As you develop your ability to tell the microscopic truth with your partner, you may find it amazing how much can be communicated by limiting yourself to the truth of your immediate experience and how that discipline can make your communications so much more pristine and effective.
In developing this discipline, keep in mind also what microscopic communication is not. It does not include slipping in a disguised judgment, justification, explanation of cause-and-effect relationships, or a bit of self-righteousness, as in: “I want to ground Billy for the rest of the week because you haven’t managed to teach him an ounce of respect.” It is not even about the outside world. It is, rather, about “the deepest and most subtle truth you can see and feel inside yourself.”21 You are telling the truth for one purpose and one purpose only: to communicate your internal experience. Telling the truth for its own sake rather than to justify or manipulate is what conscious partners do. At the energetic level, the Hendrickses explain, “hiding the truth blocks energy at a very fundamental, cellular level.” Telling the microscopic truth “liberates energy that has been trapped [leading to] the clear, high feeling that is the payoff” for telling the truth at the deepest levels of which you are capable.22
One of the great things about telling the microscopic truth is that conveying your inner experience instead of indulging in judgment produces empathy rather than defensiveness in your partner. However, there are some topics where extra sensitivity is required.
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Telling the Microscopic Truth
When tension emerges, energies become blocked within each partner and in the flow between the partners. Triple Warmer (here) is activated. When you begin to tell the microscopic truth, the blocks are still there and Triple Warmer may even become more active. But as the process brings you into deeper touch with your own truth and your partner receives you, those blocks begin to melt away, the energy becomes transparent, and Triple Warmer backs off. Safety is in the air, and a deep connection becomes possible, which allows the original source of difficulty to be addressed effectively.
“DO I LOOK FAT?”
These four words can infuse terror into the heart of the strongest of men, and replies like “Do I look stupid?” do not tend to set the conversation onto a positive course. If the microscopic truth for these men be told, however, it might begin with something as transparent as, “I feel nervous hearing that question.” So far, you’ve told your inner truth and she’s interested but wary and perhaps expecting the worst. While you are certainly not off the hook, you are paving the way for an interchange that brings you closer to one another rather than to where it might have been headed. The next step involves where you direct your consciousness. Your first statement came, honestly and openly, out of your negative anticipation and sense that there is no right answer here. If you continue down that path, however, your knee-jerk negative anticipations are likely to become self-fulfilling.
The act of consciousness that is required at this moment is to call up your empathy and your love and speak from that “sweet truth” (here). This is not your enemy poised to create havoc in your life after you give the wrong answer. This is your life partner in a vulnerable moment. This is where David might use the brief, practical, heart-centering meditation, “notice breath; soften belly; open heart” (here). The microscopic truth emerging from this awareness might be, “I care that you are concerned about how you look right now.” You are not passing a judgment, you are affirming your collaborative alliance. Suppose the situation is that she is getting ready for an important meeting, has just put on an outfit she is thinking of wearing, and you feel it really isn’t very flattering. Your next statement might continue to confirm your collaborative alliance (“You know I wouldn’t hurt you for anything”) and could at the same time respond to the original question (“but I don’t think this is the outfit for you”). This is also an opportunity to stay constructively engaged in the tenderness of having just moved through a possible rupture: “I’d like you to feel you are looking your best for this meeting. How about if we go back to your closet and pick out something that makes you look great?”
Weight is a particularly delicate topic.23 Research on couples where one partner is obese and the other is not (“mixed-weight” couples) has found that these marriages have greater conflict than “matched-weight” couples.24 This conflict was mediated, however, when the “healthy-weight” partner provided support rather than judgment, nagging, or teasing. With your collaborative alliance as the bedrock, your partner can feel and deeply know that you are on the same team, rooting for your partner’s well-being in all ways. Beyond weight, another touchy area involves permanent flaws. Learning to love your partner’s physical imperfections or character foibles is part of learning to love your partner, and it may be as challenging as learning to accept your own flaws. You can accomplish both. While energy psychology tapping can push you through some of the challenges in accepting your partner’s flaws as well as your own, telling the microscopic truth can build your collaborative alliance to give you a stronger foundation for addressing even the most delicate areas of your partnership.
A few caveats beyond weight and permanent flaws are also in order. As powerful and constructive as you may find it to tell the microscopic truth, it does not mean that you should volunteer every thought that occurs to you, particularly if it might be hurtful to your partner. The seven qualities of conscious partnering (here) offer guidelines for processing your inner experiences in a manner that is supportive of your relationship. Each individual and each couple must find their own way of addressing issues that are particularly tender.
Cultivate Your Curiosity About One Another
When David was in high school, he began to drive and to date at about the same time. One of his nightmares was taking the hourlong drive into Los Angeles to see a play and discovering that the radio wouldn’t work after he had run out of conversation. He has since learned that it is not that hard to cross the silence barrier by cultivating his curiosity about what is going on in Donna. “What were your favorite parts of the conference?” “What did you feel when Joan told you she was resigning?” “It’s your dad’s birthday—what are you remembering about him?” “Are you missing Tiernan?” These openers can lead to discussions that reach deeper and deeper levels. If your partner is appreciating the invitations, keep asking questions: “I’m surprised you feel that way. Tell me more about it.” “I’m wondering how that feels.”
It is easy to begin to take for granted that you know your partner well enough. Successful couples, however, take an active, ongoing interest in learning more about one another’s history, preferences, friends, stresses, aspirations, activities, injuries, triumphs, and dreams. This may seem like an obvious feature of conscious partnering, but having someone express genuine curiosity about you is a gift from the soul. In an ongoing partnership, it keeps the relationship fresh when you are continually adding greater detail to the knowledge you have about one another. With each new discovery, your bond deepens. Conscious partnership is a moment-to-moment adventure, but it is far more than that. You each become a wellspring of information about the other, deepening your connection. Be curious about your partner and pursue that curiosity.
And, Finally, “Make Not a Bond of Love”
“Let there be spaces in y
our togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you,” advises Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet: “make not a bond of love.”25 We, Donna and David, are both strongly conditioned for independence. Since independence is the easier part for each of us in the dependence/independence/interdependence dance of relationships, we have placed less emphasis on it than perhaps we should have. Retaining your autonomy and freedom no matter how close you grow to another is critical if both partners and the relationship are to stay vital over the years.
Energetically, this means that in addition to the words and hugs and intimate contact that allow the energies to build over time and become a palpable, lasting force between you, there is also space for your own sense of connection with others, with the universe, and with the path of your soul. Gibran’s passage on marriage ends, “the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”
Psychologically, retaining your freedom and individuality within the most intimate relationship of which you are capable means many things, from pursuing the callings of your heart to taking time for personal reflection and renewal. It can begin with fairly mundane considerations. In cross-cultural interviews with couples from more than twenty different countries, Esther Perel asked people what was occurring when they felt the most drawn to their partner. The answers were uniform in that it was not when they were eyeball-to-eyeball close to one another but when there was some degree of distance. For instance, people felt strong desire when the partner was away or when they were observing their partner with other people or in a setting where the partner was radiant and confident, such as when giving a performance. People were also more drawn to their partner when there was novelty, such as when a dormant part of the partner would emerge or when both would go to an edge, which was often reflected in laughter.26 Again, integrating the parts of yourself you have developed independently back into your relationship makes your relationship richer.
At its core, healthy autonomy within an intimate relationship emerges from developing a well-grounded sense of self that gradually replaces one that is based on reflections from others. The reflected sense of self is defined by others beginning in infancy, and it continues to be defined by your partner. David Schnarch explains that a solid sense of self “develops from confronting yourself, challenging yourself to do what’s right, and earning your own self-respect. It develops from inside you, rather than from internalizing what’s around you.”27 Living from a wholesome identity requires self-reflection and a level of maturity that is hard-won. It is not just granted with age, and without a healthy sense of self in both partners, marriages tend to become stagnant and rigid. For a marriage to stay passionate—sexually and otherwise—an essential ingredient is that each partner takes a journey from a reflected sense of self into one that retains its own psychological “shape” no matter how physically and emotionally close to one another the two of you become.
On to Chapter 10
Conscious partnering involves using your mental and emotional capacities to keep your relationship fresh and vital, day by day. Spiritual partnering brings your awareness into the eternal realms of soul and spirit. Chapter 10 explores what that might be about.
10
The Beckoning of the Possible
Your Evolving Relationship Is a Spiritual Journey
We have entered a new kind of spiritual partnership where we are being asked by the universe to create a whole new form of relationship and possibility.
—JEAN HOUSTON
As we begin this chapter, more than three-and-a-half decades into our partnership, we are sitting in our home, which was built in 1896, looking out a window at the rafters. Donna mentions that whenever she sits in this spot, she is for a moment drawn into a reverie about the people who built those rafters, sensing where their souls must have traveled by this time, and then thinking of the destinies of all the other people who might have sat in this spot and rested their eyes on these same rafters. This brings her into the realm where imagination meets spirit, and her soul is uplifted. David looks at the rafters and wonders how long it will be before they need to be painted again. All couples have areas in which one partner’s proclivities and aptitudes are different from the other’s. It is good that David is in charge of maintenance and Donna is in charge of woo-woo.
Despite these clearly defined roles, long-term relationships create an alchemy that changes each partner. Donna can now WD-40 a squeaky hinge with the best of them, and David can gaze at a quartz crystal and get lost in the ways it reflects the patterns of the universe. As you become deeply involved with another person, the energy field that was established when you first connected emotionally takes on greater texture, nuance, and complexity. This energy matrix not only expands each of you, it can also be a bridge into the invisible world of spirit that surrounds your relationship. Topics that are even further from the reports of your senses than the energies that have so far been the domain of this book are difficult to convey with words, yet the elusive realms of soul and spirit are always involved when creating the deepest, most loving, long-term partnership possible.
While we were reflecting on how to open the chapter, David had a dream. It seemed quite mundane. We were both in the dream and had a list of tasks we needed to complete. We had ample time to complete them. But we kept getting caught up in other activities until we suddenly realized that we had only half an hour to finish what would require far more than that. The meaning of the dream seemed obvious. We do have a deadline to finish this closing chapter and send in the completed manuscript—that deadline is approaching quickly. Other projects have indeed been getting in the way, and David woke with his motivation redoubled to keep our focus on completing the chapter. But in the brief journey from bedroom to computer, he realized that the dream had a deeper message than just being about pedestrian deadlines and distractions.
David had just turned sixty-seven, and he was continually being pulled away from the richness of his inner life by the demands of his outer life. This was not new. For years, if not decades, he had been promising himself and Donna that he would soon shift his priorities toward a much more soulful existence. Now that he was about to embark on writing a chapter telling others how to do this, the dream was urging him to reckon with his own lapses as the clock ticked on. He was not following the urging of his deepest wisdom.
The dream, in its own metaphoric way, had also perfectly laid out the theme and challenges of this chapter. So many of us live our lives always intending to come into greater spiritual fullness within ourselves and our relationship—but always a bit later—when we are better prepared, or when we have the time, or when conditions are right. If you don’t start now, however . . . well, tomorrow is always a day away. After reflecting on these deeper meanings of the dream, David realized that it was also letting him know that a way to enter the topic of the eternal realms of soul and spirit is to speak of dreams. While some of you reading this will be highly skeptical about concepts such as an immortal spirit, dreams are a familiar (if mysterious) experience for most people.
Somehow, in dreams, “the average sleeping brain becomes massively creative [so] the dreamer with no prior experience or education becomes a script writer, actor, director, costume and set designer, prop maker, lighting expert, and many other things to produce a complex dream.”1 Even “neuroscientists who insist the mind is identical with the brain will generally acknowledge that the waking brain has many limits on its creative capacity,” and dreams far exceed those limits.2 People who systematically work with their dreams know that often enough dreams will provide a solution or a more useful perspective for life’s dilemmas than the mind had been able to reach. Dreams let you peek around a corner that shows there is much more to your psyche than what you identify with during your typical waking hours. There is also much more to your relationship than it might seem. That is the topic of this chapter.
A Shared Spiritual Journey
About the time w
e were beginning to envision the chapter, we were off to the Omega Institute in upstate New York to teach workshops on energy medicine and energy psychology. We had been very pleased with the way that our interview with Ann and Paul set the tone for chapter 9 and were wondering about taking a similar approach in opening this chapter. As synchronicity would have it, also teaching at Omega at the same time were Alberto Villoldo and Marcela Lobos, an inspiring couple we’d long known about as two of the most grounded and effective voices bringing ancient shamanic wisdom to the contemporary Western world. We had only gotten to know them personally the previous year when we had them as featured speakers at our first annual convention on Donna’s approach to energy medicine. They made a profound impression on our community, and we were delighted to see them again. As we spoke with them, it dawned on us that they were exactly the couple we were looking for. While we will be suggesting that all couples, whether or not they realize it, are on a shared spiritual journey, Alberto and Marcela are extraordinarily conscious about it. They draw on ancient illumination techniques such as shamanic ceremonies and vision quests in regularly creating “sacred space” for themselves and their relationship. They graciously agreed to allow us to interview them about their personal relationship as a spiritual journey.