in motion. Yet no one wants to be dismantled. So there are two main ways that people
try to abort this process: running away and spiritual bypassing.
The problem with running away when a relationship becomes difficult is that it’s
also turning away from ourselves and our potential breakthroughs. Fleeing the raw,
wounded places in ourselves because we don't think we can handle them is a form ofself-rejection and self-abandonment that turns our feeling body into an abandoned,
haunted house. The more we flee our shadowy places, the more they fester in the dark,
and the more haunted this house becomes. And the more haunted it becomes, the more
it terrifies us. This is a vicious circle that keeps us cut off from and afraid of ourselves.
One of the scariest places we encounter in relationship is a deep inner sense of
unlove, where we don’t know we’re truly lovable just for being who we are, where we
feel deficient and don’t know our value. This is the raw wound of the heart, where
we’re disconnected from our true nature, our inner perfection. Naturally we want to do everything we can to avoid this place, fix it, or neutralize it, so we’ll never have to experience such pain again.
A second way to flee from the challenges of relationship is through spiritual
bypassing— using spiritual ideas or practices to avoid or prematurely transcend
relative human needs, feelings, personal issues, and developmental tasks. For example,a certain segment of the contemporary spiritual scene has become infected with a facile brand of “advaita-speak” — a one-sided transcendentalism that uses nondual terms and ideas to bypass the challenging work of alchemical transformation.
Advaita-speak can be very tricky, for it uses absolute truth to disparage relative
truth, emptiness to devalue form, oneness to belittle individuality. The following quotes from two popular contemporary teachers illustrate this tendency: “Know that what appears to be love for another is really love of Self, because other doesn’t exist…The other’s ‘otherness’ stands revealed as an illusion pertaining to the purely human realm,the realm of form.” Notice the devaluation of form and the human realm in the latter statement. By suggesting that only absolute love or being-to-being union is real, these teachers equate the person-to-person element necessary for a transformative love bond with mere ego or illusion.
Yet personal intimacy is a spark flashing out across the divide between self and
other. It depends on strong individuals making warm, personal contact, mutually
sparking and enriching each other with complementary qualities and energies. This is
the meeting of I and Thou, which Martin Buber understood not as an impersonal
spiritual union, but as a personal communion rooted in deep appreciation of the other’s otherness.
A deep intimate connection inevitably brings up all our love wounds from the
past. This is why many spiritual practitioners try to remain above the fray and
impersonal in their relationships— so as not to face and deal with their own unhealed
relational wounds. But this keeps the wounding unconscious, causing it to emerge as
compulsive shadowy behavior or to dry up passion and juice. Intimate personal
connecting cannot evolve unless the old love wounds that block it are faced,
acknowledged, and freed up.
As wonderful as moments of being-to-being union can be, the alchemical play of
joining heaven and earth in a relationship involves a more subtle and beautiful dance: not losing our twoness in the oneness, while also not losing our oneness in the twoness. Personal intimacy evolves out of the dancing-ground of dualities: personal and transpersonal, known and unknown, death and birth, openness and karmic limitation, clarity and chaos, hellish clashes and heavenly bliss. The clash and interplay of these polarities, with all their shocks and surprises, provides a ferment that allows for deep transformation, through forcing us to keep waking up, dropping preconceptions,expanding our sense of who we are, and learning to work with all the different elements of our humanity.
When we’re in the midst of this ferment, it may seem like some kind of fiendish
plot. Here we finally find someone we really love and then the most difficult things
start emerging: fear, distrust, unlove, disillusion, resentment, blame, confusion. Yet this is a form of love’s grace— that it brings our wounds and defenses forward into the light. For love can only heal what presents itself to be healed. If our woundedness remains hidden, it cannot be healed. The best in us cannot come out unless the worst comes out as well.
So instead of constructing a fancy hotel in the charnel ground, we must be
willing to come down and relate to the mess on the ground. We need to regard the
wounded heart as a place of spiritual practice. This kind of practice involves engaging with our relational fears and vulnerabilities in a deliberate, conscious way, like the yogis of old who faced down the goblins and demons in the charnel grounds.
The only way to be free of our conditioned patterns is through a full, conscious
experience of them. This might be called “ripening our karma,” what the Indian teacher Swami Prajnanpad1 described as bhoga, meaning “deliberate, conscious experience.” He said, “You can only dissolve karma through the bhoga of this karma.” We become free of what we’re stuck in only through meeting and experiencing it directly. Having the bhoga of your karma allows you to digest unresolved, undigested elements of your emotional experience from the past that are still affecting you: how you were hurt or overwhelmed, how you defended yourself against that by shutting down, how you constructed walls to keep people out. Swami Prajnanpad was an unusual and interesting Indian teacher who read Freud in the 1920s and developed his own version of psychotherapy for his students. He had a small ashram in Bengal and died in 1974. The quotes of his in this article come from letters and transcripts of
conversations he had with his French students. Another term for directly engaging our karma might be “conscious suffering”— which involves saying “yes” to your pain, opening yourself to it, as it is. This kind of yes doesn’t mean, “I like it, I’m glad it’s like this.” It just means, “Yes, this is what’s happening” Whatever comes up, you are willing to meet it and have a direct experience of it. For example, if you’re hard-hearted, you have a full experience of that. Then you see how that affects you and what comes from that.
Bhoga involves learning to ride the waves of our feelings rather than becoming
submerged in them This requires mindfulness of where we are in the cycle of emotional
experience. A skilled surfer is aware of exactly where he is on a wave, whereas an
unskilled surfer winds up getting creamed. By their very nature, waves are rising fifty percent of the time and falling the other fifty percent. Instead of fighting the downcycles of our emotional life, we need to learn to keep our seat on the surfboard and have a full, conscious experience of going down. Especially in a culture that is addicted to “up,” we especially need our yes when these down cycles unfold —to be willing to fall apart, to retreat, to slow down, to be patient, to let go. For it’s often at the bottom of a down-cycle, when everything looks totally bleak and miserable, that we finally receive a flash of insight that lets us see the hidden contours of some huge ego fixation in which we’ve been stuck all our life. Having a full, conscious experience of the down-cycle as it’s occurring, instead of fighting or transcending it, lets us be available for these moments of illumination.
While the highlands of absolute love are most beautiful, few but the saints can
spend all their time there. Relative human love is not a peak experience nor a steadystate. It wavers, fluctuates, waxes and wanes, comes and goes, changes shape and
intensity, soars and crashes. “This is the exalted melancholy of our fate,” writes Buber, describing how moments of I/Thou communion cannot last too very long. Yet though relationships participate fully in the law of impermanence, the good news is that this allows new surprises and revelations to endlessly keep arising.
RELATIONSHIP AS KOAN
Relating to the full spectrum of our experience in the relational charnel ground
leads to a self-acceptance that expands our capacity to embrace and accept others as
well. Usually our view of our partners is colored by what they do for us— how they
make us look or feel good, or not—and shaped by our internal movie about what we
want them to be. This of course makes it hard to see them for who they are in their own right.
Beyond our movie of the other is a much larger field of personal and spiritual
possibilities— what Walt Whitman referred to when he said, “ I contain multitudes.”
These “multitudes” are what keep a relationship fresh and interesting. But they can
only nourish a relationship if we can accept the ways those we love are different from us— in their background, values, perspectives, qualities, sensitivities, preferences, ways of doing things, and finally their destiny. In the words of Swami Prajnanpad, standing advaita-speak on its head: “To see fully that the other is not you is the way to realizing oneness... Nothing is separate, everything is different …Love is the appreciation of difference."
Two partners not holding themselves separate, while remaining totally distinct
— “not two, not one”— may seem like an impossible challenge in a relationship.
Bernard Phillips, an early student of East/West psychology, likens this impossibility of relationship to a Zen koan— a riddle that cannot be solved with the conceptual mind. After continually trying and failing to figure out the answer, Zen students arrive at a genuine solution only in the moment of finally giving up and giving in. In Phillips’words:"Every human being with whom we seek relatedness is a koan, that is to say, an impossibility. There is no formula for getting along with a human being. No technique will achieve relatedness. I am impossible to get along with; so is each one of you; all our friends are impossible; the members of our families are impossible. How then shall we get along with them?..If you are seeking a real encounter, then you must confront the koan represented by the other person. The koan is an invitation to enter into reality."
In the end, to love another requires dropping all our narcissistic agendas,
movies, hopes and fears, so that we may look freshly and see “the raw other, the sacred other” — just as he or she is. This involves a surrender or perhaps defeat, as in George Orwell’s words about being “defeated and broken up by life.” What is defeated here, of course, is the ego and its strategies, clearing the way for the genuine person to emerge,the person who is capable of real, full-spectrum contact. The nobility of this kind of defeat is portrayed by Rilke in four powerful lines describing Jacob’s wrestling match with the Angel: Winning does not tempt that man
For this is how he grows:By being defeated, decisively,By constantly greater beings.
In relationship, it is two partner’s greater beings, gradually freeing themselves
from the prison of conditioned patterns, that bring about this decisive defeat. And as this starts reverberating through their relationship, old expectations finally give way,old movies stop running, and a much larger acceptance than they believed possible can start opening up between them. As they become willing to face and embrace whatever stands between them— old relational wounds from the past, personal pathologies,difficulties hearing and understanding each other, different values and sensitivities—all in the name of loving and letting be, they are invited to “enter into reality.” Then it becomes possible to start encountering each other nakedly, in the open field of nowness, fresh and unfabricated, the field of love forever vibrating with unimagined possibilities.