Words from the Author

Throughout this lifetime, I’ve had many glimpses of great love coming my way. I didn’t see a face, or hear a voice, but I felt it there, tugging at me, waiting ahead or behind me on the path, a karmic bonfire with my name on it. Somehow I knew I had to wait for this love above all else—to polish me, to cleanse me, to stretch me so wide open that I could not help but transform. And so it did.

Before my first great love arrived, I had spent many years on the lone wolf male warrior spiritual path. Unity consciousness was primarily an isolationist endeavor. If I was going to touch God, it was going to be with my mind, or in the heart of a solo meditation journey, or at the tail end of an emotional healing process. It wasn’t going to be in the presence of a woman. It wasn’t going to be while having intercourse with my beloved. It wasn’t going to be in the heart of vulnerability. It wasn’t going to be on the wings of a love.

I met her magnificence when I was 36 years old. After twelve years of personal healing work, I was just ready to receive love’s blessings. Not comfortably, not peacefully, but with a genuine hunger for the expansion at its heart. If I had consciously known what would be required of me, I would surely have declined. Great love is tricky like that. It shows you why it came long after you are so deep in the adventure that you can’t turn back. At the least, I would have packed the ghost of Rumi in my travel bag, just to keep me hopeful on those deep dark dives into the mystery. There were so many of those.

It wasn’t the first time I had loved, but it was the first time I had explored the universe through the portal of connection. It was the first time I had melted into longing in love’s cosmic kiln. It was the first time I had touched divinity in the heart of intimacy. It was the first time I had loved as God loves. I will never be the same. The call of the beloved always comes with the promise of expansion, and seldom in ways we plan or imagine. If you want to know what’s coming, choose a more practical love. But if you want to grow toward God, let your soul do the picking.

With her—and this was even true in the suffering—I touched a magical universe, one I didn’t know existed. It was like our love was a portal to another dimension altogether, a magic carpet ride of trans-ordinary delight. There is the head-centered non-duality and there is the heart-nest of wholeness. And they are simply not the same worlds. How to hearticulate the splendor?

Although the love between us ran ocean-deep, the intensity of our connection—mixed with our present levels of spiritual and emotional maturity—made the relationship unsustainable. By the time all was said and done, our relationship was in ruins, and I lay crumpled on the ground like a kite struck down by lightning. If shattered was what I needed to grow in karmic stature, then I got just what the soul doctor ordered. If ever there was a time I wanted to go back to a head-tripping path, it was then. But it was too late for dissociation. With my emotional armor long gone, I had no choice but to get inside of my heart and weave it back together with whatever thread of hope I could find. It was no easy feat.

In the heart of that process, I stumbled upon the work of Jeanne Achterberg, a mind-body healing pioneer and brilliant academic. I was a Masters of Psychology student at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco, when I noticed that she was teaching a seminar on ‘Uncommon Bonds’ at the next conference. Divine timing. Building upon cultural anthropologist Virginia Hine’s work with ‘bonded couples’—a particular kind of spiritual love relationship—Jeanne later coined the term “Uncommon Bonds” (see page 274 of this book) to describe such couples. When I heard her describe them at the conference, a light went on in my consciousness, suddenly illuminating a journey that was far beyond my understanding. Finally some clarity as to what I had experienced. Finally.

Soon thereafter, with Jeanne as my chair, I wrote my Master’s thesis on my uncommon bond experience. I was so delighted to have a framework of understanding that it poured from me seamlessly: over a hundred pages in 31 hours. After it was approved, Jeanne offered to chair my PhD dissertation on the same topic. I was tempted, since crafting a map of relational consciousness felt deeply valuable, and, I suspected, part of my life-calling. But something else called me first. I wanted to write for the world, but I needed to write my autobiography first—Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation. Love and relationship writing would have to wait.

That was more than 14 years ago. Since then, not a day has gone by when I didn’t think of writing an uncommon bond love story. It nagged at me relentlessly, often waking me up in the middle of night to jot down a paragraph, or to call my ideas into my home answering machine while I was at work. One time, I was so immersed in writing notes for it that I didn’t notice the parking dude writing me a ticket while I was sitting in the car—and I always notice those characters!

By the time I actually sat down to begin writing it in 2011, I already had a 55,000 word document filled with notes, sentences and complete paragraphs. Not exactly starting with a blank slate. Instead, I began with a treasure trove of ideas, insights and personal reflections, all ripe and ready to be shared. The call to write this book was that alive, that pressing, that personally imperative. An essential step on my soul’s journey.

Long ago, I spent time with a group of male meditators. Despite admitting that many of their love experiences had a mystical and divine quality, they kept reiterating the contention that it was meditation—not love—that would take them to God. Despite acknowledging a profound experience of unity through the horizontal heart portal, they kept returning to their vertical head channel. For them, the kingdom of consciousness was reached through the inner road, with meditation as their primary vehicle.

I related to this perspective. But I no longer do. Yes, meditation is one path to a more expanded consciousness, but it’s only one path—it is not the path. And, it may not even be a path that goes anywhere near as deep or as high as a relational path, as a horizontal path, as a path dripping with love-soaked connectiveness. Perhaps our experience of the ‘kingdom of heaven’ when we are alone with God is just the first step for humanity. Perhaps our experience of unity consciousness—a relative term if ever there was one—expands boundlessly as we deepen in intimacy. With profound love relationship as our vessel, we are catapulted to a vaster and more fertile universe, one where we are both witness and participant, one where we actually transform the cosmos with every kiss, with every touch, with every shared breath-stroke.

I am tired of hearing what God is from head-tripping men. I am tired of hearing what God is from isolationists on a spiritual quest. I am tired of hearing what God is from lovers of detachment. I want to hear about a juicy God, a creative God, a relational God, a God that arises when we jump into life and stop playing it safe, watching life race by like a passing train. It’s time for the dancers to tell us what God is. It’s time for the artists to tell us what God is. It’s time for the lovers to tell us what God is. We are not here to watch God from afar. We are here to live God from the inside out.

At the same time, I understand some of what has sourced the overemphasis on meditation, detachment and contemplation as the path. Patriarchal control systems have been put in place since time immemorial, keeping us looking to the General, or the Despot, or the Wealthy Man, for our answers. If we begin to find our answers in each other, those systems fall apart. When you add in religious control—they can’t control you if you go to the love-making temple to find God—you can see that in our history, we have not had the freedom nor the invitation to explore human relationships as a pipeline to divinity.

In the words of systems theorist Dr. Kathia Laszlo “Everything feminine has been suppressed in patriarchy for so many centuries. Earth based spirituality, natural healing and childbirth, and anything that empowers women has been eliminated by men in power and presented as evil. The same is true for relationship as spiritual path. That would have made men and women equal partners, and it would have given too much power to the feminine if it recognized the uncontrollable, volatile, chaotic nature of emotional connection as valid, natural, healthy and helpful.”

And perhaps we just haven’t been ready. In the world I grew up in, many of us were ruled by survivalism as a way of being. We organized our personalities and chose our life path based on whatever masks were needed to get food on the table and otherwise manage reality. Since our quest for survival defined us, we picked partners who reflected that pragmatism. Love was another venue for our security issues. And in the heart of such a harsh world, the subtleties of great love simply had no place.

In the next step of our world—one that is organized around authenticity—we will choose our partners based solely on soul-sourced love. We will choose our partners from the heart outward. Soul-centered love demands that we find our nourishment in the lover’s gaze, the opening heart, the deep breath of union. Our identity will be sourced in the rhythms and tides of the heart ocean, not the adaptations and disguises of the marketplace. Another planet altogether. The ultimate answer is to raise the vibration of the world so that it can meet great love heart-on.

The simple truth is that we have historically been at a very individualized stage in human development, one where it’s all many of us can do to manage and heal our own emotional material and figure out who we are. To attempt to mix one as-yet unhealed being with another has been particularly challenging and exacting, especially if the relationship is more soulful than practical. This isn’t to say that relationship isn’t essential to our healing and expansion, but sometimes it’s just been too much at once. When soulmates come together, they often excavate more than their individual pain. They also bring the pain of the collective to the surface. It’s all there, in the heart of the mine. That’s a lot of dynamite going off at once!

At last, something is changing, as the quest for a conscious relationship is becoming a priority for many. Whether it’s because the structures of society are evolving to support it, or because we have matured individually to the point of readiness, we are more open to the possibility that love connection—in both its light and its shadow—is intended as a vehicle for transformation and divine interfacing.

With that in mind, I want to invite others to share their stories. We need to hear what you have experienced, where love has taken you, what has gotten in the way. We need to hear your reports from love’s sacred battlefields. We don’t need to hear any more fantasies about love—we need to hear the truth—each person’s individual truth.

Once we have learned enough, we can construct a new kind of language, one that is rooted in the yearning, the wisdom, the compassion, the softening of the receptive heart. The language of the mind can be very clever, but the language of the heart has a brilliance all its own. When we hearticulate, we speak from a place of essence, the place where the divine lives. What a bountiful dictionary, with such rich and subtle textures and tones. This is the language of love.

I also invite others to craft relational models of consciousness for the world to consider. I may not have a chance to get to that work this time around, but perhaps you can. We have far too many individually-centered models and so few relational ones. We need maps, frameworks, and holarchies that speak to the stages of consciousness that arise at different stages of heart connection.

I’m not just talking about sexual relationships between heterosexuals, like the one portrayed in this book. I am talking about all forms of relationship, including platonic ones, and all forms of human sexuality—heterosexual, homosexual, transgendered. It’s the heart that God is interested in, not body parts. It’s what we learn within the heart that lasts for all eternity. In other words, everyone’s experience is welcome, and everyone’s experience will help us to more fully understand the landscape that awaits us as we de-armor and ride our love for each other into divinity. The portal is each other. So many universes await.

Imagine the next step, where we don’t see relationship endings as defeats, but as victories and necessary openings—lessons on the path to wholeness. Imagine the next step, where we honor the courage it took to open to the possibility of love, where we see intimacy as a wondrous opportunity to deepen in cosmic stature. How can any failed relationship ever be a complete defeat? It took such courage to brave it all, to make love with the divine, to touch God through our vulnerable heart. This is not to say that we don’t grieve loss; it is only to remind us of the opportunity that lives at the heart of every farewell. A little scar tissue can go a long way on the path to presence.

As relational models are developed, we will need individuals who can support love’s travelers and shepherd them through perilous terrain. After all, the journey will take them through all kinds of vast and unfamiliar soulscapes. The further they go, the less it is about the couple alone, and the more it is about the collective. With their love as rocket-fuel, they will be catapulted right into the heart of Providence. There they become one with all that is, the light and the shadow, the healed and the unresolved, the glory and the gory. There they become more than two branches of the human tree—they become the entire forest.

This is why traditional psychotherapy often fails soul connections. Early childhood issues don’t even begin to cover the vast array of triggers and shadow-material that come up when souls merge with the divine. We have to be very careful not to pathologize the challenges that arise when great love comes, or else we will miss the gifts such challenges offer. With this in mind, we need to cultivate a community of ‘Love Elders,’ those who have ridden love’s highways into eternity. We need to commune with those who have been there before us. A definition of Love Elders can be read on page 272.

In an effort to protect love journeyers from being led astray, it would be helpful if protocols and guidelines are immediately established to ensure that those who come to call themselves Love Elders are acting from a place of genuine wisdom and integrity. We have seen what happens when confused path travelers end up in the hands of ungrounded healers with questionable depth and integrity. The path becomes muddied, and damage can be done. We don’t want to see Love Elders becoming another term that’s distorted and watered down by the new (C)age movement. Because of the deeply vulnerable nature of awakening love experiences, we want to be sure that those who support the process are healthily egoic, sturdily grounded, appropriately boundaried—and living with full integrity. In other words, individuals who have been down many roads and come through the other side intact, clarified and wiser.

Before Jeanne died in 2012, I had some email correspondence with her. In one email, she indicated that she intended to write a book about uncommon bonds, so much so that she was carrying the materials around with her. I remember her telling me that she had submitted the idea to some publishers long ago, but they felt that the world wasn’t ready to consider uncommon bonds as a relational construct.

Perhaps they are now, for soul-sourced relationships may well be an essential step for this sinking earth ship. Jeanne surely understood their significance:

The telling of the story of uncommon bonds creates a new myth for relationships that involves the evolution and transformation of our being. The bonds may well be the threads in the matrix of humanity, and in the final analysis, the only thing that endures. We who have bonded experiences can see ourselves as two of the many lights in the inter-connected web of all life, and as these lights burn brighter in synchrony, we shake and move and transduce the filaments of the web so that the material universe is changed, subtly perhaps, but changed, nonetheless.

Although I have certainly not written the book Jeanne would have written, I hope that I have written something that honors her highest vision. She knew I was going to write this book and gave me her blessings. Some of her inspiring words to me were taped to the wall in my primary writing space throughout the process, inviting me to venture a little further than I might have otherwise gone. Although the story does not factually replicate the journey I took—the characters are constructs, the details are different—it does capture many of the elements of my inner experience throughout my uncommon bond journey. As it is with many individuals who have had an uncommon bond experience, that process was more like karmic boot camp than any idealized version of love relationship. I wanted many times to soft-touch the story I was writing, both for the sake of my reader and, frankly, to make this book a breezier write. Yet I kept feeling the need to share the authentic truth of my inner journey—however excruciating it may be: darkness, challenges, warts and all. Having said this, I recognize I still don’t know a thing about love. If you want to discover how little you know about love, try writing a book about it. Its unfathomable mysteries are always a little beyond reach.

And when it comes down to it, aren’t we all virgins when it comes to love? One surprise after another after another. Just when we think we’ve found our footing, the universe sends a soulnami our way, reminding us that we were always lost at sea. Love is both our life preserver, and our sinking ship. It is an oceanic mystery, one that gives up its secrets one drop at a time.

As part of my creative process, I made a conscious decision not to spend any real time comparing types of love connection. I play a bit with definition in the Love Dictionary, but I sidestep the question of how, for example, ‘twin flames’ are different from ‘soulmates’ and ‘uncommon bonds.’ I have known too many people who wear their relationship characterization as a badge of honor (not unlike those who wear the tags ‘spiritual,’ ‘yogi,’ ‘guru’ and ‘spiritual master’), and I feel it is important we avoid comparisons at this stage of understanding. It really is such a delicate art to intimately hearticulate the experiences we have, without muddying the waters by placing them in a hierarchical framework characterized by greater or lesser loves. Even when we do reach a stage where distinctions can be clearly made, it is best we view them not from a place of superiority, but see them in their inherent perfection, with tremendous gratitude. Many never taste great love in their lives. If you have, then get down on your knees and give thanks.

It is my hope that we never forget the relational and co-transformative nature of human expansion. Although the ultimate romance is with your own soul, it is our experiences together that give birth to the essential lessons. We are each here to participate in this dance of sacred imagination, stepping on each other’s toes and turning each other toward God one clumsy step after another. We trip, then get back up with greater awareness. With this in heart, I’m hopeful we can learn to accept one another in our humanness. We are going to continue to make mistakes, but there is grace in that if we see our errors through to the lessons they contain.

One of the most important benefits of honoring relationship as a spiritual path is that it reminds us that we can’t rise alone, that there is a perpetual linkage between ourselves and others. There’s no question that the patriarchal emphasis on individual spiritual path has contributed to selfishness and even destructive behavior—particularly in unawakened men, who see advancement as something that exists independent of their connection to anyone or anything outside themselves. We need accomplishment to become a relational construct; that is, we co-create together, with mutual benefit as our shared goal. I do know one thing with certainty—if my male brethren don’t de-armor their hearts soon, then much of the work that has been done by the divine feminine and awakening men to enhearten the culture will be lost. We must climb Heart Mountain together.

I often try to picture a humanity that loves freely and fully. Just imagine that phenomena. We would become a divine symphony, with the sound of our shared song reaching to the heavens to pull God right down to earth where we can see Her up close and personal. If we can touch something we call God alone, just imagine how much vaster that experience will be if we can touch Her as a chorus.

May we meet Her with our hands held together and our hearts intertwined. Grateful and gracious, forever more.

—JEFF BROWN
TORONTO, CANADA
MARCH 9, 2015