“If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.”  ~Buddhist Proverb

Working as I have for decades on learning how to sustain and nourish lasting relationships has brought me continuously back to the same question of how to learn to stay both in my own relationships as well as in many others that I have counseled.   Usually the question is a reflection of the viability of the relationship itself.  We look at our partner and ask if they can change or whether the relationship will improve. Generally the question is provoked when we are in the midst of painful times.  We don’t wonder about staying when things are easy and predictable. It is when things fall apart that we doubt whether the work that our relationship or other life commitments is demanding is worth it.

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Relationship Bootcamp: Week Two

“Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.”  -Anonymous

Relationships require stretching. In fact there may be no more important place in life to practice and improve our flexibility than in our hearts. Getting over the belief that our own desires are the most important consideration at any given moment is a lifelong practice in flexibility. Realizing that our relationship is our most gentle and perfect teacher to get beyond our own individual desires is at once its purpose and its gift. Learning to show up for the people we love in ways that are meaningful is how you build safety into your loving relationships. Read the rest of this entry »

“Being listened to, is so close to being loved that most people cannot tell the difference.”  -David Oxberg

When I walked into Starbucks today for a late afternoon cup of tea to accompany me on my way home, I walked in on a young barista telling his invisible co-worker in the back room how tired he was of being told what to do. He said, “I don’t want you to give me advice, I just wanted someone to listen. I am sick of people telling me what to do.” I heard her voice coming from the back, “That’s ok. I am a good listener…” He didn’t see me at the counter until I said, “No one can really tell anybody else what to do. Although there are certainly people who think they can. I do it sometimes with my kids.”  It never really works though, not nearly as well as listening closely and deeply to what they are saying.

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“I like hugs and I like kisses, but what I really love is help with the dishes!” ~Author Unknown

For years the most significant and unresolved conflict that lived between my husband and I had to do with the division of labor in our home.  In fact, this is one of the top mechanisms of dissatisfaction and ultimate destruction of many long-term partnerships. For most couples, establishing a balance to working through life’s responsibilities and details is the single largest predictor of relationship success and the clearest reflection of the overall dynamics of the relationship. When daily workload does not feel equitable or fair, the trust and intimacy in the entire relationship is affected.

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“Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

-Anonymous

There are brief moments lately when I start to feel like I am returning to a normal routine after my son’s near miss with tragedy. He has also returned to his normal routines and is seemingly stronger than before. His recent fall feels more like a dream now and I am noticing how easy it is for the miracles that bless us to fade over time. The further I get from the experience, the more that I wonder about what happened, the more incredulous it seems that everything could just be as it was before. I want to hang onto the gratitude and faith that this experience has instilled in me.  I want to learn to live with the intention of taking nothing for granted.

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“We shall not cease from exploring, and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” ~T.S. Eliot

I am becoming reacquainted with the power of goal setting lately. I used to teach how the power of our written intentions can change your life, and for many years kept regular lists of what I was working to create. Even a to-do list carries some of the power of mapping your life through goals. The act of naming and writing down our goals creates structural tension that seeks resolution and motivates us to live differently, moving us closer to what we intend, often without our bearing witness. Claiming a life direction has boldness and magic in it and many studies demonstrate the success factor that results from envisioning, describing and choosing our personal life directions.

This same process energizes relationships with equal intensity. Two people who have a shared language of intention and vision for their days together are literally on the same map. Once the two people agree on their life direction, when one strays s/he can be pulled back by the other. Their shared goals not only add legitimacy to their commitment, but acts like the rudder, righting the ship that they both identify as a shared journey.

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“Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more.”- Anthony Robbins

The New Year began under the light of a blue moon, although I couldn’t see it as I drove down a dark freeway in the driving rain. I was trying to follow the lane markers when the car started to hydroplane. Then a light symbol showed up on my dash that was uncomfortably close to my warning lights. As I floated right looking for dryer road I was also checking my lights. Minutes later I look up to see flashing lights behind me.

My car clock struck midnight as the state trooper came to the window. After hearing about the hydroplaning and light problem, the officer took my license and asked for the insurance and registration, which I quickly learned was on my husband’s desk instead of in my glove compartment. The officer came back and told me I was ok to go. No ticket, ‘just be careful going home.’

Having a positive run-in with the law seems like a good portent to the New Year. Not only was I able to expand my idea of state troopers to include a helping aspect, but also I was able to reduce my fear of being seen by them. It was transformative and as I made my way through the pouring rain, I felt some mix of protection and luck lead me into the New Year.

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“Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment� only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for and then goes with you everywhere, like a shadow or a friend.’ -Naomi Shihab Nye

The Future feels like it is dissolving around me lately: dreams dissipating, relationships abruptly ending, and young people overcome by their possibilities, or lack of them, are taking their own lives. This is what my days have been full of. One has only to pick up his or her local paper to bear witness to the loss and struggle that characterizes the lives of so many. We are collectively awash in things lost and running as fast as we can to re-imagine a future, any future.

Loss and the stages of grief that accompany it are universal. Little by little, beneath the anger, denial and depression, our sorrow carves the unbelievable into our psyche, making the grooves in our brain expand to accommodate what our hearts cannot hold. This is the truth of deep sorrow; it changes us bodily if we allow it. Refusing is no good; although it is unfortunate no prizes are ever awarded for the mighty efforts made to resist our own pain. The resistance becomes its own storyline, which the Tibetans call ‘shenpa.’ This is the places where loss hooks us, and rather than actually experience the depth of our sorrow and pain, we devolve.

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‘Remember that the truth is in the details�Of course the devil’s there, too–everyone says so–but maybe truth and the devil are words for the same thing.’ -Stephen King

I have never been a detail-oriented person. I have always preferred big picture thinking and have enjoyed relishing visions of possibility without really grasping the zillions of details that would take me there. My husband continues to remind me that it is easy to have another great idea, but painful if you refuse to account for the tiny steps that make up the path to your dreams. I have been mostly cured of my wreck less creative dreaming by the daily work of raising our four children and the processes and procedures that build a business, brick by brick. In the process I have learned to embrace the details as the dream because ultimately they are inseparable.

Life is nothing if not the details of time and place that identify the work and relationships that define our existence. We reveal ourselves most honestly and intimately in the smallest of interactions and the tiny incidents of daily routines. When we ignore and become impatient with the details of our life we betray the dreams that created them in the first place. Learning to embrace the details of life and give ourselves to them with the same intentions we held for the dreams that they came from is what transforms our ordinary life to the extraordinary.

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‘To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.’ Emily Dickinson

If life on earth can be reduced to anything, it is the time we are given to inhabit it. Time is the one resource that is doled out to all of us equally and yet what we do with the hours of our lives determines not only the quality of our daily existence, but whether in the end, we have left behind anything that makes life more beautiful, more bearable, more true for those who remember us. Yet, time is also an elusive resource. Everything takes longer than we think, except for life itself, which the deeper you get into it, the faster it seems to go by. I recognize this in my own life by the way a new season still catches me off guard, letting go of summer takes me clear to the end of October. Every time I unpack the holiday ornaments, I am dumb founded by the spin of another year gone by.

Celebrating my silver anniversary this spring is yet another poignant reminder of the time of our lives. I can’t even believe that I am old enough to have a silver anniversary, let alone take stock of the thousands of days that I have spent alongside another person, who, even after all this time, remains a mystery. Mark Twain once said ‘Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.’ Still, even after all this time, I am not sure I would claim to know a perfect love, just one that I can keep turning to.

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