True love – or the thing about God
Maybe you have read this far and are now feeling anything but optimistic in regard to your relationship. Maybe you have struggled dutifully through the last few chapters, with their countless attempts to make you feel grateful for all your partner’s gloomy and energy-draining qualities, but without any real enthusiasm. Maybe those equally frequent admonitions that it is only down to you how your life pans out simply made you feel like giving up. Maybe you feel like the man who was dragged into my office one day by his wife. He explained his reluctance with the words: ‘I’ve been to couples therapy with my wife before. Now I know everything there is to know about me, and about her. And I know even more clearly why I want to divorce her.’
Everything I have written about relationships so far might sound like a tunnel without an exit to you. There are so many painful issues from the past that we can hardly hope to track down them all. And as no one else is faring any better, we’d better stop hoping for a prince or princess to turn up. All we can be certain of is that we are all carrying a whole bundle of hurts around with us, that we hardly know our partner, that we are all more or less commitment-phobic and that complete happiness is a mirage.
There’s no hope in sight. Love and romance, a passionate affair, the dream woman, the ideal man, the secret lover, even a divorce – every option in a relationship sooner or later leads to the same problem: somebody else seems to be responsible for our happiness or unhappiness. When we feel attached, full of love and acceptance, it is only because we have found the right person. But when the relationship doesn’t work out, it is, of course, because that person didn’t turn out to be the right one. We feel bad because they did this or that. How perfect our lives would be if only they would change! How often have we come to that conclusion?
The truly bizarre thing in this very common thought process is that the other person seems to be lacking something that we need in order to feel better. We are afraid of it, we long for it, we miss it and need it – and it is our partner who is responsible or to blame. When arguments and attitudes start hardening, our view becomes even more distorted. Then we even claim that we are right and our partner is wrong. Their very existence becomes the reason for our suffering and our shortcomings. We believe firmly that they are guilty of everything. Their behaviour is what we have to challenge, confront and, if necessary, escape from.
Now this is really mad, but it is not only generally accepted as absolutely normal but also vehemently defended if it is ever questioned. So, a really important step towards personal peace is to learn to question our own thinking and to let the real truth seep in: no matter what we do in this world, there is nothing that can bring us peace and fulfilment. There is nothing out there that can free us from our unhappiness, our emptiness, our searching and our pain – no partner, no relationship, no success, no possessions. Any attempt to find Mr or Ms Right only leads us further away from our real opportunities to discover our true path. In the words of a wise man, all that we can find by searching is another search.
Remember the opening words of this book? ‘I know that it can work out. I know that your relationship can be just what you want it to be.’ I still claim that’s true. It can work out. Of course it can. But in all probability not in the way you imagine it. It will require a complete reversal of your usual view of the world – which means a kind of quantum leap.
There is this thing about God. I can’t keep it from you, even though I know from many talks with clients how confusing and how loaded with fear and shame this issue is. In our society, faith, prayer and God seem to be taboo for a great number of people. It seems too dangerous to risk losing your foothold in the realm of the undefined, the unknowable, the scientifically unproven. But could you try it just for a moment…?
With my background I have not exactly been God’s PR manager from birth. In my family there were, however, numerous discussions about faith and the church. At one point, all my family left the church at once, even though it meant that within our provincial and strictly Catholic environment we were looked upon as pariahs. Later in life I was quite proud of this rebellious spirit in my genes and for a long time declared myself an atheist. Until one day the thing with God sneaked into my life again unexpectedly and spread in such a way that today I can claim that God is the solution to all my problems.
No matter how much I struggled against it at first, in my search towards fulfilment I always ended up with God. However, I was able to realize that this was more of a conscious concept than the man with a long white beard of my childhood confessions. For me, God isn’t embodied in any specific religion and I won’t necessarily meet him in church rather than at the hairdresser’s. But the power God represents is, for me, the answer to the whole question of relationships.
I have come to the conclusion that when we really want to enjoy an honest and fulfilling relationship, we have to be willing to delve down into the very depths of our being. There, at our innermost core, we are all ultimately spiritual beings, even though society persists in calling us consumers first and foremost. Looking at the people who come to me in their search and at society as a whole, I believe that our personal and collective evolution is inevitably moving towards realization of this insight, in spite – or even because – of our rapidly increasing information and communication overload.
C. G. Jung said that of all his patients who were past their midlife, that is, older than 35, there was not a single one whose ultimate problem was not one of religious belief. Everybody was ultimately suffering from having lost what living religions had always given their followers. And no one could really be healed if they couldn’t regain their religious belief.1
My clients have taught me that faith is the greatest healer of them all. Most people who come to me are between their mid-thirties and mid-forties – people on the cusp of their lives. Fewer and fewer of them find fulfilment in the ‘normal’ concept of life based on external things. Most of my clients have had a good education, years of personal development, a career and worldly success. Many of them have achieved a great deal but not found what they have been looking for – meaning and fulfilment. They have walked the path which in our society is signposted at every corner: the path to self-realization via status, career, knowledge, wealth and success. But none of their attempts to be acknowledged just as they were has given them lasting fulfilment.
Once they escape from this cul-de-sac and end up with me – often involuntarily – those people often feel a diffuse and inexplicable fear. They are anxious because they have not managed to make their life really meaningful. They feel helpless because nothing that they have achieved or acquired has given them real contentment. Nothing has supported their sense of self-worth. Quite the opposite – many describe feeling under constant pressure, perpetually driven and unable to get absorbed in anything or to find peace anywhere. Everything seems to be constantly changing and, worse, more and more demands are being made all the time.
We have hardly pulled ourselves up to the next rung of the career ladder when the next challenge is waiting for us. We have barely completed a marathon before we want to improve our record. As soon as the latest software has been installed on our computer, there is an update with even more features. As soon we have starved ourselves to a size 12, we meet a friend who is a size 10. We have reached management level, but then there is the board, and anyhow the banks make the decisions now. We have finally amassed enough property and possessions, but then we start worrying that we might lose them all again.
Everywhere new dangers are lurking and new improvements can be made, there are always people who are more important and more powerful than we are, and something bigger and more beautiful keeps turning up, either in our imagination or right in front of our eyes. Nothing ever seems enough to give us lasting contentment. Not even our latest husband, our new mistress or our secret affair. There seem to be more and more opportunities to satisfy our desires, but they turn out to be as tasteless as tinned tomatoes.
Many people feel completely drained by this chase for fulfilment, this feeling of being constantly driven, always having to do something in order to be or to get something. If we let religion back into our lives, it gets a lot easier. Then we don’t have to do everything ourselves. We don’t have to overburden our partner with our needs either. No matter whether we adhere to a particular faith or assume a divine, complete, peaceful and spiritual core as the centre of our being, we can rely on the fact that there is something beyond us, that we are connected to a higher power and a higher force, that something is flowing towards us and guiding us, and that there is something that is giving to us. This concept brings us immediate relief and takes a large burden off our partner’s shoulders.
If we expect to get everything from our lover, we should turn towards faith. The best thing religion is capable of is reconnecting us to love – and thereby to God. God is not an abstract concept but a loving presence. If we believe in God, we are connected to a loving force that holds us in its embrace. The concept of God is all-embracing. God is all-embracing love. If we are connected to God, we are part of a universal higher entirety. The laws of the universe say that macrocosms are like microcosms. The whole, in its being, corresponds to the smallest part. The smallest part, in its being, corresponds to the whole. If we are connected to God, our inner core is divine. If we are connected to a divine presence by religion or spirituality, our core being is constantly receiving and we can in turn pass this on and give to others.
This is not simply a theory, a church doctrine for Sunday mass; it’s more of a deepening connection to God that brings about real changes in everyday life. If God is not a separate almighty figurehead who judges or praises us, who makes us confess to our sins and suffer for them or who generously absolves us, if it is rather the basic essence of being, if it is an all-embracing and ubiquitous loving presence and we are part of it, then it follows that our core being is wonderful and divine too. Then there must be something in us, underneath all our pain, our confusions and tribulations, that is utterly beautiful and loveable. Then in our lives there will also be things that are beautiful and loveable. Then every moment in our life is only about one thing: do we want to acknowledge this eternal power in us or not? Do we turn to the divine presence inherent in us or not?
If we do allow ourselves to open up to this concept – even if at first with doubt and a lot of rational analysis – it could revolutionize our sense of ourselves, our relationships and our lives. Searching for this all-embracing love, we begin to look at ourselves and begin to be gentler with ourselves. We want to understand ourselves. We become more attentive and aware of our heart’s desires and dreams. We take our own needs more seriously. We begin to think that maybe we’re fine after all, just as we are. We don’t have to rush around any more in a constant search for someone or something that will give us whatever fills our aching emptiness. We learn to accept ourselves and, step by step, can fall back on ourselves, delve deeply into our innermost selves and give to others, just because we enjoy doing it. We can rest in ourselves. We can become authentic.
When she was young my daughter always wanted a prayer before going to bed at night. Sometimes I pinched her little finger, saying, ‘This is you – and God is your whole body. If He moves, you move too.’ Later we tried pinching all her toes, her hair, her navel, her earlobes and her nose to see whether they were parts of God. Yes, even her raised middle finger – she found that one particularly amusing. In a way it all boils down to one thing: if we allow a loving divine presence to enter us, we allow ourselves to receive. We don’t have to do anything for this – we are just like a little cell. We are part of this body, we live in it and are nurtured by it.
Just stop for a moment. Let yourself absorb this image of a little cell which is part of a greater whole. Take a deep breath and try to feel your body from the inside out. Imagine you are this small cell. Pay attention to how your breath is flowing in and out of your chest and your abdomen. Be aware that your breath is always flowing, whether you pay attention to it or not. It comes and goes, in and out, as reliably as the ocean waves washing around your toes on the beach. In truth, your breathing breathes you. And it doesn’t only breathe you, but everything else that is alive at this moment. The same air that is entering you right now also enters me. At this moment we are connected. You are a little cell. I am a little cell. Every time I consciously pay attention to my breath I am fascinated by this image. What if we really are only a tiny cell of the liver, bone or skin of the universe? What if we are suffering from amnesia and have forgotten this universal connection? What if we only think that we are lonely, separate beings? What if we are a part of everything that is?
Pay attention to your breath. It is flowing. Whether you are aware of it or not, it is flowing. All the time. It is moving your body, opening and closing it. It is nurturing you. It is keeping you alive. Try to stop it. You will only manage for a short time. Then it will penetrate even more deeply into your lungs.
Breathing is such a normal activity that we are hardly ever conscious of it, but it is one of the great mysteries of life. It is life. And in my view it is our divine connection. But in order to be aware of this constant source of life and movement in our body, to recognize its true divine presence, we have to allow ourselves a moment of silent contemplation.
If we allow ourselves to experience this silence, we will experience the loving creature that we are deep inside. If we nurture this truth for a while, it will also manifest itself clearly in the rest of our lives. Once we are more at ease with ourselves and start to sense our own authority, we can let go of our roles, our addictions and social demands. We can slowly become more authentic. We can simply allow ourselves to be the way we are. We can allow ourselves to express what we feel. We can trust in the abundance of life and respond to our true calling.
The more deeply we go back to our own roots, the more clearly we can sense how deeply connected we are to others. The more we are at ease in ourselves, the more we become aware that we only fight, complain, reject, desire and crave in those places where we can’t be ourselves any more. Only when the connection to our inner greatness has been lost are we in conflict with or in need of others around us. We learn that it is we who need to pay attention to all the places that are hurting inside. Whenever we approach something with such an attitude, we can give and receive love and support without hesitation. We don’t have to reject other people’s weakness resentfully, but can see behind it their search for love, for their own divine core, their connection to a greater power.
With time, our whole sense of being will change. We will experience self-worth. We will realize that we need less and have more to give. The more we are involved with ourselves, the more we will be aware of this all-embracing divine presence. The more we trust in this inner connectedness, the more we will find that the love flows from inside us. The more we understand that every one of our actions, our thoughts, our words, is invigorated by this presence, the more we will go through life with trust. I call this feeling ‘It’ll be OK!’
Maybe you have felt touched by the last few paragraphs. Maybe something inside you has remembered the truth in those words. Maybe you are just shrugging them off with the thought: ‘Sounds quite convincing… She puts it quite nicely – but I don’t sense anything like that in myself.’ What I am talking about is a path. Even though at the moment you might not feel like taking it, it will unfold in front of you if you are willing to take the first small step. You just have to be willing to walk forward, even though you don’t know how. The rest happens automatically. This might sound really strange, but it’s true. As a former atheist, always searching and full of doubt, I could never grasp this logically. But one day I simply experienced it.
If at the moment you don’t believe in any gods in this world, if you don’t think there’s anything to what I’ve just described, if you doubt whether your life could ever develop in this way, but if from the bottom of your heart you want to belong and to feel alive, then all you have to do is to say ‘yes’ to yourself. I assure you that if you do, your life will change and your relationship will heal. Maybe it will happen in an obvious and dramatic way, maybe gently and quietly, but you can be sure that nothing will ever be the same again.
This path is nothing you can prepare for and has nothing to do with theories, methods and approaches. Those things may give us an idea or point us in a certain direction, but in the end the path leads to our own personal ‘It’ll be OK’ feeling. It is a path that life places us on quite naturally. Everything that happens to us, everything that touches us, everything that we encounter, is exactly what we need on our journey. No matter what your life looks like at the moment, it is the best it can be for your growth. It is tailor-made just for you. I don’t know how often I have heard a person say, after the deep and painful process of working through a relationship: ‘If he hadn’t cheated on me I would never have learned…’ or ‘If she hadn’t chucked me out I would never have woken up…’ At the moment of crisis everything seems wrong, but in hindsight those deep wounds were the best thing that could have happened to us.
Every journey is unique. It is never the same for any two people. Everybody meets their own challenges, obstacles and bottlenecks on the way. And, paradoxically, they are the things pointing us in the right direction. Each of our problems has a hidden gift for us. Every time we conquer an addiction, challenge a fear, heal a disease, master a crisis, survive an accident, forgive our partner or our parents, we immediately gain new strength. No authority, no leader can show us how to do this or supply us with this strength. If we are really looking for fulfilment, we have to trust in our own leadership. We have to trust in the fact that we are fine as we are, no matter how painful or difficult our life is at the moment. We need those obstacles and hindrances in order to realize that we possess the resources necessary to overcome them. We have to learn that we have more power than our fear has made us believe. We have to discover that miracles can happen and that in utterly bleak situations the universe will come to our aid. We have to know that our prayers are being heard.
But no church, no temple, no seminar, no missionary and no book on relationships will be able to connect us to this faith in God and our own divine core unless we are willing to enter into it. When we are ready, we don’t actually need any mediators or persuasion. Mostly, though, we are only truly willing when we have lost all faith in mediation, lost all our convictions and aren’t listening to anybody any more. For the most part, our life has to be skirting the abyss of complete meaninglessness and despondency before we are able to truly open up and ask for help. It is usually only when we’re in a complete crisis, when we feel we’ve lost all control over our life and are questioning our strengths and beliefs, that we are finally able to surrender ourselves.
Even when we don’t want to see God, He can show Himself to us. Personally, I never wanted to be involved with God. That is why it took a long time and some dramatic events before I recognized God for what He really is. Before that, I had caught a glimpse of Him several times. Each time involved a confrontation with death. Once I was caught in a shoot-out in South Africa and a bullet only missed me because a black stranger pulled me under a car and saved me. I have also survived three car crashes in miraculous ways. Each time I was sure I was going to die, only to crawl out from under the wreck a few minutes later. Every time I experienced the same phenomenon. When I thought it was all over, for a brief moment I was flooded with a sense of incredible peace. Then as soon as I realized that I was going to get out of it alive, it disappeared and was replaced by great anxiety.
My last experience of being at death’s door took place in slow motion. I had been on a skiing holiday. On the way home our bus took the high and winding roads through the Swiss Alps. Suddenly there was a smell of burning rubber. Somebody was just cracking a joke about the brakes failing and us all crashing down into the ravine when one of the drivers jumped up, pulled on the handbrake and shouted: ‘Everybody down!’The brakes were indeed failing.
The bus was going faster and faster, and panic spread among the 40 or so passengers. Some shrieked, others whimpered, some threw themselves on the floor, others froze. I couldn’t move and remained in my seat as if glued to it. I saw cars coming towards us, trying to veer around the bus. It was like a James Bond movie. I watched, completely paralyzed, but in my head there were a clarity and calmness I had never felt before in my life. We tackled two minor bends and then raced towards a hairpin bend that we would never manage to get round. It was as if everything inside me was relaxing, well, dissolving, while I was waiting for death, that deep ravine still visible out of the corner of my eye. Then there was a bump, a crash and a dull thud. Inside my head there was an incredible peace and a silence I had never experienced before.
A short time later it came to me, as though through a soft-focus lens, that things around me were chaotic. Everybody was trying to escape from the smouldering wreck. The bus had come to a standstill only a few inches in front of a house, and none of the passengers had suffered serious injury. It was a miracle. On the side of the bend which we would not have been able to corner was a low wall that had broken the speed of the bus. Behind the wall was a woodshed, which again had slowed the vehicle down, but which had disintegrated in the process. Behind the woodshed was a house, the first floor of which was projecting at head height. This had caught the top of the bus and brought it to a standstill.
Under normal circumstances I can’t bear the sight of blood, but for a long while, as if in a trance, I busied myself helping the injured in a quiet and unthinking manner. It was as if I was walking on clouds and I had a sense of infinite strength and compassion. Eventually, though, I looked down my body and saw blood everywhere. Abruptly I awoke from my trance-like state. It was like suddenly being defrosted in a microwave. Tears came streaming down. I was frightened, my teeth were chattering and I collapsed with exhaustion.
I have never been able to forget that feeling of absolute peace that ended so abruptly. But at the time I never connected it to God or anything else. Every time I remember it now I feel deeply grateful. What also remained with me was a newly won certainty that even the most unimaginable is indeed possible.
It’s only today that I know that at that moment – and also at the other times of crisis – I met God. In the face of death I could let go of everything, could abandon myself completely and relax to such a degree that I was able to feel the deep peace, the indescribable compassion and the love filling my innermost core. I could experience the certainty that miracles can happen and that help can come in the bleakest situations. It took a few more extreme situations in my life before I could really take it on board, though. Only with patient and relentless support from the universe was God slowly able to sneak into my life.
Some years later I was in a really bad state both professionally and privately. I had had a nervous breakdown and withdrawn from everybody. A friend of mine had sent me an English book with a fitting title about some messengers of dusk. When I opened the parcel I thought, ‘Bound to be some spiritual nonsense… I wish she would stop bothering me with stuff like this.’ Apart from that, I found reading it in English too demanding at the time, and so it ended up in a corner. Within the next two weeks, for inexplicable reasons it dropped on my toes three times. The third time I cursed, opened it and said grumpily, ‘What the hell do you want from me?’ Hours later, after reading about fate, guidance and universal laws, I was left with the strange feeling of not having understood a thing, but somehow having known it all already. It was as if I had found something I’d lost or forgotten a long time ago. I suddenly had an inkling that there was something higher, something greater, something more than there was in my fairly empty life.
But my real baptism of fire came years later. My baby didn’t want to be born – even though I was incredibly well prepared for it. The birth of my child was to be the most gentle, baby-friendly experience ever. I had everything prepared like a military exercise. I had read everything that could possibly be found in the bookshops nearby. I had done relaxation and breathing exercises with the baby inside me. I had played music and found a wonderful doctor and a gentle midwife. But my baby didn’t want to be born. The date had long gone, but I was determined to leave it to nature. The doctor urged me to have it induced. I refused, but one day the monitor showed signs of complications for the baby. The labour was induced and it overwhelmed me with the force of an earthquake. For a day and a night I had the strongest contractions, but still my baby didn’t want to come out. By then I was only a shadow of my former self, so the doctors recommended a Caesarean. But I had been so determined to do it all naturally…
I had rejected an epidural several times – also because of wanting it all to happen naturally – but by noon the next day I was crying out for one. But by now my body was in such a state that the anaesthetic wouldn’t work. Eventually the doctor refused to take responsibility if I wouldn’t agree to a Caesarean. With my last bit of strength I consented and surrendered to fate. For the first time I truly did let nature take its course. And again something happened which had happened so often before in my life. Something inside me relaxed. I became calm and just let things happen. And in the cold, tiled and clinical operating theatre, the last place I would’ve expected it, I met with so much love. Lying on the operating table in the knowledge that my baby would not enter this world ‘naturally’, another little miracle happened. One doctor held my hand while my husband stroked my forehead, another doctor gently talked to me and the nurses smiled until I cried tears of happiness, and said, ‘It’ll all be OK.’ Then I passed out.
When I came round again, the doctors and nurses were standing around my bed and my husband was holding our daughter, blissfully smiling. They all stared at me silently, while I heard myself saying over and over again, ‘I am dead. I am dead.’ It took another hour before I had my baby at my breast and finally realized that I was alive and so was my daughter. My husband and the nurses told me later that while I had still been under the anaesthetic, I had been smiling and telling the most astounding stories about being dead, about light and peace and love.
Again I had had to surrender completely. I had had to give up every one of my plans, had had to die in order to give birth. I had been determined to let things take their natural course, but further ultrasound investigations revealed that my lovely daughter’s thick skull would never have passed through the birth canal. A so-called ‘natural birth’ would have meant serious complications. Nature, and my baby, had been much cleverer than me and all my plans. Once more I was filled with deep gratitude. For the first time I tentatively asked myself whether there might be something like a divine force in my life. But this time the feeling wasn’t to last either. I quickly forgot the thought.
It took one more serious crisis before my first inklings that there was a higher force worth believing in turned into a feeling of trust that my life was protected by God. I owe my final and greatest change to the bleak state of my marriage. It was my loneliness and the desolation of my relationship that threw me back onto myself and, through that, towards God. There was nothing spectacular about it, no great shock, no sudden encounter with death. It was a slow sickness that ate me up inside, a silent, gnawing feeling that something was lacking in my life. Week after week, month after month, loneliness settled in me and made me feel very uneasy. But I didn’t dare to talk about it to other people. I was newly married and had a baby – I should have been happy. But I wasn’t happy – I was terribly unhappy! Then one evening I was standing on our patio and I began to pray. I was actually quite shocked when I heard myself praying loudly to God. I asked for help and cried quietly. Then I went to bed on my own, because my husband was away again. But I didn’t feel as lonely as I had the night before. And so I prayed more often.
What my prayers led to would take up the last hundred pages or so of this book. I won’t go into all that here. However, it is my hope and belief that the things I’m saying in this book will touch some people deeply enough to inspire them to get in touch with their own spiritual core. I hope that you will also leave behind the loneliness of your relationship or the desolation of your life and dare to enter into this strange and powerful process which I dived into as if into a maelstrom. By opening yourself to the truth described here, you will find the truth will come to you too. It is nothing that you can make happen. But it may disclose itself to you while reading this, and then you will simply know it. And eventually you might just begin to feel that things will work out. Maybe…
Let me tell you my favourite story. A man had a dream. He dreamed that he was walking along a beach with God. In the sky, scenes from his life were being played back. And for each scene from his life there were footprints in the sand. When he looked back on the tracks, sometimes he saw two sets of prints, then only one. In times of great need and grief, he noticed there was only one. So he said to the Lord, ‘Lord, I have noticed that during the sad times in my life only one set of footprints is visible. But you promised to be always with me. I don’t understand why you left me on my own when I needed you most.’
And the Lord answered, ‘My dear friend, I love you and would never leave you. During the days when you suffered most and needed me most and where there is only one set of footprints, I carried you.’
1. C. G. Jung, Zur Psychologie westlicher und östlicher Religionen (Vol. II), Olten, 1971