in Relationships in RelationshipsIt snowed again last night. A heavy drift blew up the Locust tree, nearly covering the little Buddha at its base. Only his head pokes out of the snow bank this morning, like some crowning newborn. His topknot and curls stand out regally. He looks especially content there so alone.
He’s always alone, now that I think of it. You never see “Buddha and Wife.” You never see him in a group.89 St. Francis is always shown alone with his birds, though I hear that as a youth he was quite a flirt. Sikh founder Guru Nanak is always painted alone, even though he was married to Sulakhani and was the father of two. Why is the spiritual journey always taken alone?
Is this really such a good idea? Think about a fellow like Ramana Maharshi. At the age of 16 he laid himself down on the floor of his bedroom, crossed his arms in the death pose, held his breath, and pretended to have died. “If my body dies,” he says to himself in a fit of astonishingly bad metaphorical reasoning, “something remains.” So to find “that which remains” he grabbed the few Rupees he had, hopped a train to Mt. Tiruvanamalai, and found a secluded meditation spot in the shade of a Hindu temple. There he remained for months on end, clad only in a loin cloth, deeply alone.
He survived by India’s custom: passers-by respectfully left bowls of food and water for the nearly naked holy boy. He remained within a few miles of that temple for the rest of his life, living on India’s veneration of its silent sages, and eventually came to be regarded as a mahapurusha, a “great being.” I have no doubt that he found the Self beyond the self, the formless Brahman, and that he became a great guru.
Yet despite the progress he made as a silent sage-boy and later as a guru, because of his life choices he missed some enormous spiritual opportunities, I think. He never held a job, so he never had to learn to answer an angry boss. Once the ashram grew up around him, he became its absolute dictator. (Nice gig!) He had “devotees,” but no peers. That means that not one person ever really questioned, doubted, squabbled with, or even gently confronted him. He never had to work out a difference with a wife or even a college dormmate, not once. He never negotiated a deal or even decided on a room layout with somebody else. His opinion was never questioned.
It was a charmed life. But such charm leaves some huge lacunae. When I lived for half a year in Benares, India, I was befriended by a “mahant,” the spiritual leader of a Hindu Temple, a role much like a guru. Except for foreigners, he once confided to me, there was no one with whom he could have a personal relationship. Every seeming friendship was shot-through with status differences and implicit requests. Only with foreigners like me could he just talk or think aloud, he said, and not have to worry about consequences. He could only be himself with someone outside his system.
A guru like Ramana lived in even more of a bubble. Even the outsiders who came to visit him were potential devotees. That means that he probably never had a single peer to peer friendship.
Nor did he ever marry. He no doubt died a virgin. No one ever asked him to articulate a feeling he did not know he felt or make himself even slightly vulnerable. No lover ever jilted him. And no one, not one person, would dare to even hint that he might be wrong or foolish or just the teeniest bit blind to his own motivations.
Ditto for the great Christian mystics. Once Athanasius, St. Benedict, St. Frances, St. Theresa, Meister Eckhart or even Mother Theresa of Calcutta had become renowned saints, people tended to look at them fairly doe eyed, and to hang on every word. Their decisions, wise or foolish, and their blindnesses also went largely unchallenged.
What would such a context do to a psyche? How would one learn to be intimate, to deal with conflict, to confront adversity? What or who would challenge such a person to keep stretching beyond his or her comfort zone or cultural assumptions? How might he or she learn to deal with some catty office mate or with a challenging budget (here think Rajneesh)? As Pir Vilayat Kahn, head of the Sufi order in the West, once put it:
of so many great teachers I’ve met in India and Asia, if you were to bring them to America, get them a house, two cars, a spouse, three kids, a job, insurance, and taxes…they would all have a hard time.90
Modern lives are just complicated! Though we live in apartments and houses right next to each other, we neither dress, believe nor think alike. We talk every day with people of the opposite sex, who may disagree with us, and they may (occasionally) be right! If we live in a big city, we talk every day with people whose native language is Spanish, Swedish, Japanese or English. We hang out with Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and with folks who are lapsed from each. On the bus we stand very close to, and are jostled up against, lots of others, some of whom are our spiritual path-mates, most of whom are not.
When you and I meditate, alas, no one puts bowls of food in front of us. So we have to get up from our cushions and go earn a living. In ancient times we’d have to plow the fields or tan the hides. Today we have to commute to the office, fix the car and pay the gas bill. Some of us have to wake up night after night to rock a colicky baby. We all get called on our foolishness and, if we’re smart, grow from it. Even if we’re CEO’s and in charge, our decisions rarely go unchallenged. And we often do have to work out with others what color to paint the bedroom, where to spend the income, and maybe which religion in which we’ll enroll the children.
Many spiritual seekers and teachers long ago and today have been married or in seriously committed relationships. And as it turns out, we’re not especially good at it. Virtually every spiritual teacher that I know personally—and I know quite a few—has gotten at least one divorce. That’s in America, Canada, England and Sweden. There is no study yet, but my sense is that the odds for staying happily married are no better among serious spiritual teachers and seekers than average. Very possibly worse!
I’m thinking of this today because my friend Jen, who leads wonderful retreats to Egypt and India, emailed me yesterday that she just left her husband of 15 years. “Honestly,” she emailed simply, “he could never understand me.” Nikki, college botany professor, just left my spiritual facilitator friend Tom and their 18 month old child. Since their separation four months ago, my spiritual psychologist friend Rita hasn’t been able to say anything nice about Teddy, her husband of 18 years and father of her three. Nathan, a spiritually oriented professor, was married for one very intense year and a half: “too many energy clashes” was his phrase. And I think of Ethan, a wise Presbyterian minister and a dear friend who’s still married after two decades. But he and his wife neither really talk nor have sex, and he complains to me often about it all.
Wonderful people, excellent facilitators, yoga teachers and preachers all. But when I think about the spiritual goal that’s right for today, surely this can’t be it!
Psychiatrist and student of mysticism Arthur Deikman offers what he half jokingly calls his “spiritual leaders’ test.” It has only one question: “How are they with their spouse?” As a group we are failing.
Gautama Buddha faced the challenge of freeing himself and escaping the clutches of the demon, Mara, with inspiring courage. But let’s face it, he summarily left Yasodhara, his wife, and Rahula, his son, thereby committing history’s first recorded spousal abandonment. Never again would he face the spiritual challenge that is intimacy. What would he have done—no really, what would he have done—if Yasodhara, or any Mrs. Buddha, asked him,
“Where do you really hurt inside, Gautama dear?”
Honestly, I can’t imagine what he would say. In all the Pali Buddhist literature, I don’t know a single passage that describes how, after his night of enlightenment, he had an honest-to-goodness moment of doubt or even a regular old human emotion. Or where he acknowledged even the teensiest shortcoming. 91
“Tell me, dear Sakyamuni, where you are tender? Do you have even a vague feeling?” Could he name even a single second in which he felt inadequate—to himself, to her, to his people’s yearnings? Universal love is nice and all, but could he name a specific moment of enjoyment? Did he ever dance?
And what would he say if she asked, as Yasodhara very well might have, “You love all people, Gautama dear. Do you love me in any special way?”92
Conversely, what would some modern Yasodhara say if he told her, as the tradition had it, that she could only gain the exalted state of Nirvana by becoming a male? Would she calmly accept it, and with it his barely concealed claim to marital dominance? What self-respecting woman of today would stay? And if she walked out in fury, would his hands stay folded so primly?
And if they did, would that be such a good thing? Given what we know today about human emotion, is such invulnerability really what we want? To be able to sit in detached and preternatural calm, with love for all beings, may be an escape from the real challenge.
Real everyday life, especially life in relationship, is just more complicated, and more interesting. Jack Kornfield, in his wonderfully self-critical A Path with Heart, describes coming back from his years in an Asian Buddhist monastery. Although he returned from the monastery, he says,
clear, spacious and high, in short order I discovered, through my relationship, in the communal household where I lived, and in my graduate work, that my meditation had helped me very little with my human relationships. I was still emotionally immature.93
Me too. By the early nineties I had come to understand silence and had woven much of it into my own personal psyche. But doing so was not enough. I was still too cut off, too introvertive within myself. Only if I could somehow learn to live the ease of enlightenment within and through my marriage, my friendships and all my relationships, I thought, might it be enough. But what would it mean to live enlightenment plus within relationships?
This question was in the back of my mind in 1995, when I arranged a meeting of “spiritual activists” in St. John the Baptist Retreat Center, Mendham, NJ. I had invited a dozen spiritual leaders and teachers from around the US and Canada to a weekend of “Exploration across our Differences.” We had invited the proverbial rabbi, priest and minister, plus a Vajrayana Buddhist teacher, a Siddha Yoga chant leader, a transpersonal psychologist, another TM teacher and so on to explore not our well-known differences but what we might all have in common.
I had planned the weekend in typical academic conference style: 20 minute papers and 10 minutes of Q & A. Susan read hers first. We applauded politely.
Then Rachel, our resident transpersonal psychologist, got up. She looked at her paper. She looked at us. Then she said, “you’re such wonderful people. I don’t want to read you a paper. I just want to tell you my story.”
And she did. She told us about her spiritual breakthroughs at Eselen. She cooed over what she’d been learning from her daughter. She wondered aloud about how to bring more spiritual depth to her therapy clients.
It was just right! So we all tossed our papers and with our half hours slots, told one another who we were. We shared about our spiritual lives. We talked about where we each felt confident and where uncertain.
And we described what it was like for us to find the divine. When Marius told us of his birding walks in Northern California, we could almost feel his tentative footfalls on the forest floor, hear the Towhees calling from deep in the woods and sense the sacred in the pine needles. When Nancy told us of her first experience with Jesus in the Cathedral of St. Paul, I could swear I smelled frankincense. Tim described an evening when, at seven, the stars and the sky overhead swirled into a great cosmic unity, and how’s he’s struggled to paint it ever since.94 Many had never before known anyone with whom they could share these stories, and they were grateful. We laughed. A few of us cried. Sometimes it felt as if the walls and floorboards had fallen away.
Saturday evening came. Howard was the last to share. He told us how he hoped to live up to the example of his Tibetan guru and his struggles to make his Texas Vajrayana Buddhist center financially viable.
Dusk was settling in as he finished. We placed a few votive candles around the room. I whispered, “I have something to say.”
I didn’t know quite what I wanted to say. But I knew that something was bubbling up. Some important doorway had been opened. With a little time in stillness with those people, I could feel, whatever needed to be said would come through.
Everyone waited. No one giggled. No one fidgeted; no coughing. Twelve people in a circle, poised in the kind of patient respectfulness that comes only after real truths have been shared. Three, maybe five minutes …
It didn’t matter that we hailed from different paths. It didn’t matter that some of us were secular and some religious. The only thing that mattered was that we had come to trust one another and become simple together, and that we had found each another in the space beneath our brokenness.
“I have never had the privilege,” I whispered, “of being in silence with people who are on different paths than mine, yet who value quiet as much as I do.”
Nods.
More silence.
Rachel appreciated how honest we had all been. Bill noted that over the years we had all struggled, and yet had kept the faith.
More nods.
Quiet again.
It was only a few moments, the shadows of the forest settling deeper into our little room. Yet to be in that circle was to be surrounded by mystery, and to open out past our walls towards the pond below the hillside and beyond towards the ocean to the East. It was to sit together in deep mutuality, eyes open, and hardly to breathe …
We had each encountered the infinite in our lives, whether we had called it God, Brahman or the Mystery. We were all spiritual ministers or writers or teachers. But these encounters had generally been private affairs, even when surrounded by church or temple throngs.95 Robert, our resident Zen Buddhist, thought of these moments as satoris, breakthrough experiences, and they always came to him alone on his zafu cushion. To Jesuit Father Richard, such life shattering “experiences of the Divine” had come while in chapel with other people, but always within his own breast, he said. To Andy, our resident Taoist, the opening came with downcast eyes while doing his slow moving Tai Chi katas.
But the opening that happened that Saturday evening at Mendham was in no one of us. This came to us together, eyes open, in and through all of us, collectively. We had talked. We had laughed. And together, with love and respect, we had a mutual mystical moment.
Even today, describing that time, I am struck with how much we broke through that weekend. We stopped our habitual theorizing about the sacred. We dropped beneath our customary posings and spoke real truths about who we were. Most of all, we broke through the ancient pattern of encountering the mystical only alone. We pushed through to the liminal as a group.
Since that weekend I have heard of others who have encountered the mystical in mutual moments. Many speak of finding it in relationship96. But to every one of us, what happened that evening at Mendham was something new.
The next day we offered different descriptions of what we’d fallen into together. To Rachel it was the “transpersonal reality.” To Rabbi Harold it was the shechina, the female divine principle. It was Christ consciousness. It was shunyata, the Buddhist emptiness. It was Atman.
Different words splaying back to different whole traditions. But what was below was the same felt vastness. It was as if we had each wandered down from our respective mountains and splashed together into the same wide and still valley waters.
Just for those few moments we broke through to the sacred in a whole new domain: the mutual, the interpersonal. The sacred had emerged into our midst.
Since those days, we have coined the term “trans-traditional” for such mutual mystical contact. That is, what we encountered together was the “transcendent.” Yet we hailed from different traditions: thus “trans-traditional.” Right there, across history’s most ancient divisions, the transcendent revealed itself to us collectively. The late Wayne Teasedale called it the “Interspiritual.”
For all their brilliance, Ramana Maharshi, St. Benedict or the Buddhist Nagarjuna simply could not be aware of such a possibility. They did not have access to the full range of the world’s religions. And given their more stratified societies, few had occasion to sit in a circle of their peers, much less peers from other religious systems. Even Meister Eckhart, who had considerable mastery of Jewish and Arabic philosophies, probably never chatted with a living Muslim or sat down with many actual Jews in his native Cologne. Nor did any of them leave behind a single sentence about a struggle or a confusion they may have had (and it’s hard to believe that not one of them never had, even if only subconsciously, a teeny-weeny conflict or doubt).97 And certainly no tradition has left us descriptions of a comparable out-loud, trans-traditional mystical moment.98 As a scholar I have read and heard endless accounts of religious or spiritual experiences; to me this was new.
We came together again six months later, this time to Kathy’s rambling ranch house near San Antonio, Texas. Again the sharing of struggles. Again the whispering of secrets. Again mutual explorations.
Sarah stole the show this time, mulling aloud whether she should fly to Italy to become mistress to her sexy Italian boyfriend or to Seattle to become a full time minister. Really! (I was rooting for the boyfriend. She went for the collar.)
And just as we had at Mendham, sometimes during prayers, after someone dropped into some new discovery, or when Jonas blew his breathily mysterious Shakuhachi flute, we found ourselves together again in that deliciously effortless spaciousness. Again, mutual mysticism.
This was the same divine openness that had found me many years before. Of this I had no doubt. I believe that it was the same spaciousness to which we had all dedicated our lives. But again this wasn’t within any of our breasts or from any one of our traditions but in and through us all. And it took nary a hint of effort to fall into it.
I’m not sure why our little circle was able to open this particular sluice-gate. Being on our respective paths for 20 or 30 years no doubt helped. So did our personal acquaintance with such a space. Sharing our confusions and our secrets, letting down our defenses, all must have helped set the stage.
But other groups did these things too, I knew. I could only think that some sort of grace was involved here as well, though I still can’t say just what that means. All I can say is that, in some way well beyond our control, we dropped together into that space of “a wholly different order.” And then we did it again.
This was so much fun and so important that at the end of the San Antonio weekend, folks said they wanted to help shape the Forge Institute, the organization that we had by then incorporated to promote whatever had manifested in our midst. So six months later we flew to a retreat center outside New Orleans.
The question for the weekend was, what should the Forge become? We began by opening the floor to suggestions.
“Let’s host more retreats like these,” said one, excitedly.
“Let’s develop a new theology to account for all this,” offered our theologian.
“How about buying a piece of land and building a ‘trans-traditional’ retreat center?”
“A network of small groups?”
“Write a book... “
“Start a journal…”
“Host dialogues on TV…”
All sincere suggestions. All interesting ideas. But all different. And soon it was,
“Retreat center?? You’ve gotta be crazy to think we have that kind of money!”
“A new theology? Get off it! Who reads theology books anymore? You’re stuck in old Catholic thinking!”
“Oh come on! Conferences every six months are just too infrequent. They won’t open people deeply enough.”
“Who the hell needs another book??”
And with furrowed brows and rising voices, we were eviscerating the very miracle that was our reason for being.
We were all a little stunned that we’d gotten so bollixed up. After all, we’d each been on our paths for decades. We’d all let go our cravings and unhooked our stuck places. We’d even taught meditation and helped others let go of their stuck places. We were spiritual teachers, for god’s sake!
But there it was, or rather wasn’t. Despite our best attempts at reconciliation, by the end of the weekend we were working to paste over our differences, and our effortless openness was nowhere to be found. Beneath the clashing opinions and interpersonal tensions, we had destroyed the very trans-traditional magic for which we were together.
We knew how to look each other in the eye. We knew how to tell deep truths and open our hearts. But when resources and money and time were at stake, apparently we had no idea how to disagree and remain that open.
This turns out to be more common than I knew. I’ve told this story a few times since those days, and I’ve often heard another tale just like it: the church that’s dedicated to love and brotherhood but whose board members cannot stand each other. The spiritual group that teaches about cooperation, but whose members can’t come to a simple decision. The Zendo that has ossified in power struggles.
No matter how advance is our inner development, when there’s money and resources and time at stake, we spiritual and religious adepts seem to be rank beginners. Either we tend to suppress discussion in paroxysms of obedience to the guru, into painfully inefficient attempts at consensus, or we just don’t get along.
This is one of the dirty little secrets of the spiritual and religious worlds. Though our paths and teachers offer profound teachings and tools, few of us know how to work well with others, unless we ourselves are in charge. Masters we may be, but masters of mutual cooperation we are not.
The depths of silence, the wonders of openness, do not teach us to play well with others.
Well why? Ken Wilber distinguishes three domains in which we live and do our work: the I, the We and the World (or the personal, the collective and the external).99 To bring about a change in one realm, he suggests, does not necessarily bring about a change in the others. You can discover a profound connection with God but still remain shy, tongue tied or bossy with others. Conversely, you may be friendly or a hellova listener, yet never introspect to your hidden impulses or discover the expanse of silence. And many of us ruminative types have terrible antennae for the emotional tone of a group. The I and the We require different skill sets.
The folks that came to Mendham were masters, more or less, of the I, of the solo spiritual path. We were a pack of lone wolves, if you will, leading our respective flocks into our respective wildernesses.
We were specialists in the solo because it’s what we learned from our traditions. The St. Bonaventures and Ramana Maharshis of the world left us tools and guidance to discover God solo , not in groups, and certainly not in diverse groups. And so we have worked towards, and found, our illuminations solo.
But this is no longer enough for us. When we see people from other traditions in every bus and restaurant, we know in our bones that we must learn to live and work across sometimes difficult divides. We know that to be fully open today, in our multi-cultural world, we must learn to love, work and to make decisions with folks like and unlike us as effortlessly as we do anything else.
As Martin Buber said, the inability to encounter each other as truly autonomous others, and to develop answers in the spirit of genuine contact even with folks who are different,
is not only the most acute symptom of the pathology of our time, it is also that which most urgently makes a demand of us. I believe, despite all, that the peoples in this hour can enter into … genuine dialogue [where] each of the partners, even when he stands in opposition to the other, heeds, affirms and confirms his opponent as an existing other. Only so can conflict certainly not be eliminated from the world, but be humanely arbitrated and led toward its overcoming.
How to play will with (diverse) others is the spiritual question, if not the primary question, for our era. And it doesn’t come from the silent vastness. Somehow the telos for our era, the complete enough enlightenment, will have to include playing well, working well, living well, with others.
As I drove away from that disappointing New Orleans weekend, I found myself wondering if it was even possible. We can meditate and find God within. We can tell each other real truths. We may even be able to find an effortless vastness in our midst for a few precious moments. But to be open with other people, even when there’s skin in the game and decisions to be made—is this even possible?
We spiritual types are very good at alone. Alone is, like the little Buddha outside my hermitage, where we untangle some of our confusions and drop into depth.
But alone, down in our Buddha-bellies, is also a hellova place to hide.
Those moments of mutual mysticism, drew me on like a perfume. I didn’t know why back then. Perhaps I sensed in them part of an answer to my own longstanding fears and loneliness. Perhaps bringing spiritual leaders and teachers together seemed like part of the answer to our centuries of religious misunderstanding and conflict. Perhaps I was expressing something of our times. But I think those magical seconds offered another promise as well, deeper and to me more surprising: another domain for enlightenment to flow into, a whole new form of awakening. Whatever it was, there was something here; I could smell it.
Thus began The Forge Institute, a community whose calling was to tease out this new level of Being, to learn and perhaps to teach how to be together in deep truth across traditions. We cooked up a Board. We introduced it to interested folks through a series of one on one phone calls.
That’s how I was introduced to Corena, a high spirited and insightful psychologist, facilitator and meditation teacher from Washington, DC. Within the first five minutes of our introductory conversation, we found ourselves laughing giddily over how many people we knew in common. Then, as if we’d both flipped a switch, we suddenly went serious. I told her about the grace of those moments at Mendham. She told me of a similar connection beneath words that she’d found with some of her therapy clients. I shared a dream. Then laughter again. It was deep and insightful and funny and surprising in a way that had us both a little off balance.
Two months later, in Washington on other business, we actually met, sitting on the terrace outside an Indian restaurant, watching people window shop on DuPont Circle. She told me how excited Eve, her four year old, had been about frying up her first potato pancakes. I told her about making matzo balls with Hannah, my niece. She reflected on her longings as a mother. I wondered aloud about my confusion about being The Forge’s founder, a paradox which I had not been consciously aware. We shivered in the evening chill. We laughed. And we filled napkins with kitchen layouts and recipes and a diagram of Beck and Cowan’s spiral of human development.
We met again a few months later in New York. She named tensions with her sister she hadn’t understood. I got to rethinking my own jealousies and wondered aloud about the spiritual goal. She spoke of how she sometimes hid behind her role as a psychologist. We could explore anything, feel anything, without resistance. There openness between us was remarkable, like a heart beating from beneath the table between our elbows.
When I’d tell her something I hadn’t realized before, she’d whisper “wow,” and I’d feel utterly seen. When I fed her back to her, she told me, she saw herself as more intelligent than she knew. I offered her her, and she me.
To sit across from Corena, or to watch tears well up in her eyes, was to be more awake than I was used to. And the feeling was mutual. Bumping into each other as we walked down Connecticut Ave., ducking into a Buddhist antique shop, laughing at the ridiculous giddy irony of it all: for the first time I knew what it is to be with another human being with virtually no friction. It was a gift.
Our circle at Mendham had alerted me to the possibility of being in a vastness together. That was a few minutes, a weekend. But here was effortlessness, mutual, fresh and unprocessed, week after week. It happened through some miracle of personal chemistry, spiritual training and good luck. But whatever the cause, this was an effortless spaciousness that was mutual, out loud, between, and for months. Flowing with her was more like ice skating than ice skating.
It was platonic love and loss and laughter and frustration and depth and non resistance at 200 miles. Freedom here came through the quality of our being together. It wasn’t inside either of us but between, in the relationship itself.
The sacred was now erupting into real life, out loud, with words and tears and can’t-catch-breath laughter.
But it had to end. Such a relationship was as impossible as two otherly-married people can be. More deeply though, it had to end because neither of us had any idea how to keep the openness, the non-resistance, from evaporating when things got dicey, as they would, inevitably, and did.
The key that opened the door to long term effortless came from one Douglas Kruschke. An energetic, fast talking and thoughtful Los Angeles corporate consultant, Doug was as interested in mutual mysticism as I was. But his years as a corporate facilitator has taught him how to make relationships themselves part of the path.
Even long term, and even when there’s a hard decision to be made, he claimed, relationships can give rise to the kind of spaciousness we had found at Mendham. The trick is to make the way we are together as deeply straight, above board and open as is the Vastness itself.
I doubted it. I’d seen some pretty decent relationships in my life, especially recently, but I had never known one with the kind of ongoing, unhesitant trust and openness he was describing. It was no doubt due to my own limitations, but all my friendships and even my love relationships had always ended up in some degree of self protection and distancing. Despite moments of openness, I’d never known a long term relationship that had remained truly spacious.
Yet as Doug and I talked Saturdays week after week, literally hundreds of hours of conversation, it was striking how effortless it was becoming. We both remarked how easy it was to flow from the Forge to football games to spiritual wisdom to investment strategies to foolishness and then back again. It was surprisingly effortless. We wondered, we argued, we pondered — about God, life, gender, mysticism and the Lakers versus the Bulls. Perhaps others are more used to this sort of free connection, but I for one had never seen conversation after conversation with so few walls.
On and on we went, month after month of conversations. This mutual openness was truly long lived in a way those wonderful moments in Mendham or with Corena could not be. Here, long term, was exploration with almost no forbidden territories. And we laughed a lot.
A year after we’d first talked, Doug told me he wanted to “bump our relationship to the next level.” Clearly enjoying the mystery of whatever that meant, he flew to New York for the weekend.
For three days we told each other where our connection had been easy and where it had been hard. We named where we had spoken complete truths and where we had hidden something. Little by little, we talked through our purpose in being together, and typed out something about “the largeness of Being that inspires us each to grow” and “the fun of stimulating each other’s ideas and of creating something together.”
We soon found ourselves talking about where things went well and where not in our and other relationships. I told him about a friend who often made promises that he didn’t keep. It was trivial stuff mostly, showing up 15 minutes late for meetings, not calling when he said he would, not responding carefully to drafts. Such little acts mess up my schedule and together become irritating as hell. Every time he breaks a promise, I said, I have to work it through. I can handle any of them, I told Doug. The problem is, I have to. So we agreed that that we would make clear promises and keep them meticulously. (It’s helped!)
Then we got to discussing what we wanted to do when we got stuck, upset with each other or all jammed up. I still like what we wrote:
At times of stuckness, I will:
go beneath the initial level of my understanding of my motivations and feelings to discover things that free us.
Let you know what I agree with and appreciate about your point before focusing on what I disagree with, or going on to make my own point.
Act as if I am 100% responsible in this stuckness.
Look for how I contributed to things being where they are and how I am responsible for my reactions to what has occurred, especially in regard to any upsets I experience.
We talked through every hard issue we could think of, how we’d try to make decisions, that we’d celebrate our little successes, anything that might help our being together. When we were done we lit a fire in my fireplace and read them out loud to each other like we meant it, lending it a formal flourish I liked.
I must say, that weekend, those agreements, have helped us remain clear, close and open, now more than a decade and a half of wondering, disagreeing, arguing, pondering and laughing.
There is a kind of corporate feel to writing down such rules; Doug was, after all, corporate. Nonetheless co-creating this document and witnessing its effect has been a revelation. We transformed a friendship that had serendipitously manifested the sacred into one whose mutual flow we could count on. We hashed out tools and agreements that actually helped maintain the sacred flow between us. We created a friendship whose flow we could depend on, even when we got jammed up, a relationship that was itself sacred. And long term.
I had known those short-lived “peak” moments of openness or pure consciousness in the early days. I had seen it aloud with others at Mendham and recently with Corena.
But in writing down these agreements, in making it conscious and intentional, we made it possible to live and work and laugh in openness with something approaching permanence, just as the silence inside had become permanent. We created something like an enlightened relationship, a friendship and colleagueship whose very process is consistently free, pretty undefensive and open.
Interestingly our agreements weren’t about us as individuals. None of our agreements focused on inner feelings, the personal or even spiritual states. The openness we protected that weekend had to do with telling truths, taking responsibility aloud for our role in upsets, keeping whatever is between us clean. Sacred experiences may be, but sacred relationships aren’t about what we feel inside. They have to do with how we act and talk and dance together. The sacredness of a relationship is between, not within. What happens inside, inner feelings or silence or whatever, are always in there, of course. But in this domain enlightenment is expressed in how we are together, in the inter-personal.
We’d found another way for enlightenment to “jam” in the world, and important one. It’s not within us but manifests in the in-between, in how clean are the interactions themselves. Enlightenment plus in an us.
It’s mastery of a different color.
Ok, the obvious issue. I had tried to be spiritual with Yvonne. I had worked to let my openness have its effect on her. I had tried to drop into that space of deep connection with her, as I had at Mendham and the ballet. I had tried to accept her, to be tolerant of who she was. When we’d argue, I’d work to find the spaciousness and to include her in it. But frankly, we weren’t doing very well.
We’d certainly had our good times—kids, trips, vacations, discussions. But during 25 years of marriage Yvonne and I had never stopped struggling: about theology, about cleaning the counters, about who would pick up the kids. We tangled over investments, bedroom colors, which house to buy. And in comparison to what I had worked through with Doug, we were lousy at resolving our issues, much less “kicking it up to the next level.” We had compromised, we had coped (which meant that neither of us got what we really wanted) and we had learned to not express our unresolved issues, systematically turning them into buttons too hot to touch.
Then there was the personal stuff. She felt excluded. I felt judged. She wanted respect, I wanted to be seen for who I was. And we had cleaned up little of it.
As Issue after issue got consigned to relationship purgatory, we had pretty well lopped everything out of our relationship but politics, the children and food. (And god forbid I should take the wrong political stance!) The rest of our lives were ruled out. I felt like a twelve cylinder car firing on three. I’m sure she did too.
“My life is dedicated to spiritual discovery,” I found myself muttering over and over. “If I’m not able to keep deepening within my marriage, why am I in it?”
Though it never got physical with Corena, I knew I’d have to tell Yvonne about her. That was a hell of a painful night.
Doug happened to be in town that evening, so he put on his facilitator’s hat and listened to us talk about what wasn’t working in our marriage.
She asked me the where’s and when’s with Corena.
I told her my three cylinder car image and asked her about her anger about the Forge. We were not getting very far.
Then I asked her,
“Remember when I told you about the openness I found at Mendham and with my Forge friends?” I knew this would be hard for her, but I had to go on. “It was really important to me. But when you got upset that it was with other people, not you, I just stopped telling you about what I was discovering. I cut it all off from you, even my excitements. But exploring this new way to be with people has been the most important thing in my life. I’ve been learning a ton but I can’t share any of it with you.”
“Yeah, and over the years you’ve tended to ridicule the things I’ve cared about,” she responded, her voice as snappy and as angry as mine must have sounded. “I’ve stopped talking with you about some of the things that are important to me too.”
Hearing this, I tried to apply what I’d been learning. I dropped down to feel her, belly to belly. In that space I said, deep and present, “I understand...I really do.”
“And your interest in other people – Doug, Corena, your Forge friends – left me feeling cut out. I felt like I wasn’t attractive.”
Now centered even more deeply in my abdomen and hers, I nodded.
Just then Doug chimed in. “Can you feel the feelings she just shared with you? Of being rejected? Of being unattractive?”
“Of course,” I told him, “I feel her right here, belly to belly,” I said, motioning between both bellies. “Honest I’m feeling her right here.” The Buddha himself would have been proud.
“That’s nice,” he said, unconvinced. “But honestly Bob, I can’t feel you. She’s telling you about where she hurts. And I’d have to say that frankly you look, well, kind of impassive.
“Let me ask you, have you ever felt rejected?”
“Oh sure,” I answered, with energy.
“Well, how did that make you feel?”
“I hate it!” I said without thinking. “It was terrible when Carol rejected me and when Lisa pulled away. I hate it when Yvonne cocks her head back. I feel like I’m disappearing, like I don’t exist. It’s awful!”
“That’s what she’s probably feeling” Doug pointed out. “It’s different than this quiet spiritual belly thing.”
Long pause. This was registering.
“Is that what you’re feeling,” I asked her tentatively. “Do you feel like I’ve been rejecting you?”
“Yeah! Damn straight!”
“Oh...” Another pause. “Really?”
She nodded. I could see tears welling up.
“How awful!” I told her. “And are you feeling it even now?”
“Yessss,” she said, in a hiss of anger and loneliness and betrayal and hurt.
“Oh, God” was the only thing I could say. “Have I been making you feel like that? Rejected? Disappeared, like I felt? I am so sorry!”
And the river blockage let loose a little. “How brutal I’ve been! I’m so sorry I’ve hurt you.”
I really had been trying to tune into her. I really had been feeling her in my belly, centering into her with the kind of dropping down that had been so meaningful at Mendham. I really had been reaching for that trans-traditional spiritual connection, openness to openness. But I had missed who she was, her way. She didn’t go into deep silence when she was feeling rejected. (Few of us do, frankly.) She felt hurt and angry, and that’s a different place altogether.
She didn’t need some abstract Buddha belly. She needed me to be with her, to feel her feelings, to know where I had hurt her. I’d been looking for that abstract, loving spiritual presence. And in the process I had missed her.
“Yeah, I feel totally cut out sometimes,” she said, still angry. “And it hurts!”
Doug now turned to her. “Yvonne, he just acknowledged something that was hard for him. He just handed you a gift. That took a good bit of risk. But listening to you, it’s as if nothing just happened. I don’t see you acknowledging what he just offered you.”
That seemed to register. She took a breath. And then she smiled, still clearly wary, and thanked me for acknowledging her pain.
As I had missed her in her terms, she had missed me in mine. “Yeah, it was a gift,” she offered, a little more graciously now. “And yeah, I guess I missed you there. You did own up to some of your unconsciousness. I appreciate it. I really do.”
And we had begun.
I’m pretty good at silence. I’m pretty good at opening inside or to trees or to ballet dancers. But to let go of my way of being spiritual, to open to her in her very different, very female, way called for a whole new way to be present. She was calling me to feel her loneliness—to which I myself had contributed.
I had to stop listening inside for my own spaciousness, step outside my own spiritual frame, and shift over to her way of being and feeling. I had to empathize in ways I wasn’t used to. And frankly I wasn’t particularly good at.
It was humbling as hell. Still is. I had to own up to my own defensiveness and the role my own spiritual commitments had played in keeping her at bay. I had to let go of my pretensions of being the poor but holy martyr. I had to own up that I, spiritual I, had helped create the distance between us. And she had to do something similar.
The very silence which had helped me emerge from a difficult youth, the open belly that had given me so much strength and on which I had based so much of my life, was now standing in the way of making contact with this woman I loved. My Buddha belly had become a Buddha wall.
Over the next few months piece after piece slowly drifted back into our marriage. Yes, she had resented my excitement about the Forge groups. Yes, I had snubbed her day care work. Yes we had stopped talking about her moral principles and about my writing. Yes she could be judgmental sometimes. Yes, so could I.
I had made her into a thing, an obstacle to be avoided or worked around, I told her, and she me. Gradually she was becoming a fully-fledged, real human being again. And someone I care deeply about.
Perhaps my divorced spiritual friends — Jane and Tom and Ethan — really did own up to how they themselves had helped shut out their spouses. Perhaps they were too ashamed to tell me. Maybe their partners really were as bad as they said. But my sense is that the fault has been at least partly theirs, not only their partners’. No one ever gets divorced because they themselves are part of the problem.
The freedom in a relationship, or lack of same, is always mutual, I suspect. I can’t imagine someone closing off to me if I wasn’t at the same time shutting them out a little. Nor can I imagine making myself vulnerable too often if the other won’t, at least a little, reciprocate. Only a masochist exposes their tender underbelly over and over if their partner doesn’t, in rough parity, return the favor. Had Yvonne closed down or denied that she had missed me, I would have soon stopped. Had I begrudged her response, and raised my hand up against her again, she too would have closed down.
My sense though is that most people are indeed willing to tell real truth if it’s safe enough, i.e. mutual enough. Generally, risk begets risk.
That evening, now eight years ago, was the beginning of my — our — education in building effortlessness into a long term relationship. I must say, opening to this woman since then, with whom I’ve cooked, laughed, raised kids, argued and had sex, this woman who just will not play by my rules, has been one of the most ego-challenging elements of my spiritual path. I’ve been meditating for four decades and carried silence for three and a half. Yet I had closed her out. Not intentionally, but I did, and I sometimes still do. I hurt someone I care about deeply. I am ashamed even now.
To love another human being, to be free long term with them, calls us to own up to the effects of our choices — beyond our own point of view. She has invited me outside the safety of my own conclusions and brings me face to face with the unintended consequences of my spiritual commitments. The very search for enlightenment to which I have dedicated my life, noble though it may be, has created distance from her and from others. Even my longings for a spiritual relationship probably got in the way, and may have hurt both of us. Long term openness calls us to look beyond the limits of what we believe.
Love, long term, real and open, is as damnable as it is wonderful. To acknowledge real truth about who I have and haven’t been, to face my own contributions to another’s pain, to own the disowned, is downright sobering. But even a relationship deeply scarred by our own neurotic limitations can become a home of grace.
God knows they discovered a lot. But it is here, in going solo, that Ramana Maharshi, St. Theresa and Rabia al-Adawiyya100 gave up an enormous spiritual opportunity. Real intimacy offers up a spiritual challenge of the first order. It brings us nose to glass against the difference between our theory and real life, between universal love and the love of a real human being. To be with a soul who is unlike us can show us how our very aspirations, life commitments and certainties can not only save but entrap us. Long term intimacy teaches that spiritual progress, even the unmingling of consciousness from its content, can be defense as well as salvation.
It is this damnable and humbling gift that the celibate monk forsakes with his solitude. Did Ramana’s silence cut him off, as it did me, even as it opened him up? Did Rabi’a too find it hard to acknowledge the distance she and her marvelous settledness may have created? The married life is not everyone’s path, but for those of us who dare to undertake it seriously, a thoughtful, independent partner can call us at a level of honesty beyond any other I know, beyond all our elegant theories. No matter how wise we become, to love someone who refuses to be taken in by the hype of our own self talk is to be challenged, and then be challenged some more. Intimacy is a profound gift towards spiritual freedom.
And the sex is better.
Speaking of sex, I wonder how many of our “celibate” gurus, ministers, roshis or priests would be driven to promiscuity or pedophilia if they had put themselves in the salvific cauldron of long term intimacy? Would they have remained quite so unconscious of the effects of their actions?
Despite that breakthrough evening with Doug, over the next few years Yvonne and I managed to keep tangling an awful lot: arguments about child rearing, about car cleaning and about how to make pancakes. During one of them, piqued with anger, she tossed a zinger at me: “whenever you talk about our relationship there’s always a ‘but’ in it. You’ll say, ‘We’re becoming more open together,” and then you’ll add a ‘but…’ “Or you’ll tell me you love me ‘but…’
Just once I’d like to hear you say something about me or our marriage without a but.”
I denied it of course. But the truth was, she was right. I did tend to name what she was but add what she wasn’t. I did say where our marriage was good but also where it was flawed.
Later that night I decided to play a game with myself. Just to see what would happen, I would pretend for one year that there was no “but” in our relationship. Whenever I talked or thought about her or us, I vowed to myself, I’d make believe that our relationship was an “enlightened relationship,” and that she had no flaws. I would reevaluate my game the next January first.
Over the first few days of playing this game with myself, I did indeed catch myself thinking, “this is ok, but...” “she’s cool but…” And every time I did, I told myself, “Nuh uh. You’re not going there. No buts.” And I would break the thought chain.
Within three weeks, oddly enough, something had shifted. I had stopped wondering whether the relationship was “enlightened” enough or if she was “open” enough. I had stopped comparing our marriage to anything else.
The marriage didn’t suddenly become some la-la fantasy. Nor did it seem particularly awful. In fact emotionally it felt somewhat neutral. We just were what we were.
It is easy to understand why I kept adding that but, why I was so invested in my fantasies for our marriage. After all I’d found those amazingly open moments at Mendham and San Antonio. I’d learned a whole new way to be with some of my Forge friends. I’d even written about and run workshops on effortless or “sacred” relationships, for God’s sake! (I’m writing about them here!) These are just the kind of relationships, I believed, that mirror and expand on enlightenment. No wonder I so wanted my marriage to live up to my picture!
But once again, I had to admit, I myself was a good bit of the problem. In holding out for “the enlightened partner,” in clinging to my picture of “the sacred relationship”, my own aspirations were blocking the very flow I was after. These were my pictures, my longings, not hers. And certainly not ours.
When I stop asking the questions—is this good enough? enlightened enough? – then all I have is wanting what is. As Jack Kornfield put this,
to want what you have and to not want what you don’t have is the beginning of wisdom.101
Only when I abandoned the search for the “infinite flow in relationship” could I find the flow in this one.
I wonder how many divorces have to do with some such longings—for the more perfect, sexier, more empathetic partner? I wonder how many divorces come from our own fantasies—how it’s all supposed to be, feel, look, or make us feel? I wonder how many of us run away from our own buts?
The secret to bringing the freedom of the infinite into a long term relationship is, I think, to accept that every marriage is, in some sense, a disappointment.102 And then face that.
The monk Ryokan said, “when you have a problem, face it; when you are sick, face it; when death stalks you, face it.” To Ryokan it seemed obvious that when we face our difficulties we realize for the first time the shallowness of our complaints. Inner peace results from accepting one’s limits and finding satisfaction within the incomplete.103
There are limits to how much disappointment we should bear, of course. If your partner beats you, that’s clearly more disappointment than is good for you. If your partner is over-the-top verbally abusive or really, really, can’t connect, well, maybe that too is more disappointment than is healthy. We all need to respect our limits.
But despite what we like to tell ourselves after the divorce, most people, even most ex’s, are not sociopaths! Most are reasonably decent partner material.
In the end, what more can we ask for than decent partner material? Yvonne is actually damn decent partner material, now that I think about it. She and we have created a welcoming house. We have a sweet way of cuddling on the couch and we have a few dear friends. We have two fine and productive kids who occasionally call us to think out a problem or to celebrate a victory. I am satisfied with her indeed.
And I am dissatisfied with this woman. She can be stubborn and stuck and obsessive and she doesn’t generally like to dialogue in the ways that I have found to work well. And I must admit I still don’t clean the counters in the way she likes, nor hold up my end sometimes. Neither of us fulfills the other’s fantasies.
Yet without the but, both disappointed and satisfied, I have been discovering the very relationship I was looking for! There is an ease to a non-judged marriage I did not expect. There is a readiness to flow into laughter or boredom or satisfaction or disappointment and even occasionally into magic. It’s not like a wondrously peak meditation moment. It’s rarely a moment of mutual mysticism. But we live and grow in intimacy every day, much as the silence grows quietly day after day.
The flow here involves moods, hers and mine. When holidays come and the children show up, she can get busy with cookies and wrapping, and we sometimes lose each other. When I get preoccupied with writing or worrying, I pull into my tortoise shell. My coming here to sink into the peculiar mystery of my life was a pulling away, and despite the nightly calls, we’ll have to repair the distance I have unintentionally created. We will have to re-invent the openness with each other again, and it’s always harder to recover than to lose. But at least it’s no longer mine to do alone.
Love, real and long term, comes at you sideways. It comes in counting on someone to buy groceries or botch a good joke or just to be there year after year in all their obnoxiously unknowable Otherness, the ancient floodgates of wariness and distance worn through without noticing in a connection that is damn near unbearable.
To live and struggle with another human being for decades is to engage another’s soul without resisting, and to grow towards a freedom I could not otherwise imagine. In its quiet profundity I am overwhelmed sometimes with feelings of “being with” so intense that I cannot speak without weeping.
If I tell the real truth, I was holding out for the perfect, neon light, “joy, eternal joy” relationship in part because I am afraid. Once I drop the fantasy, once I let down the crumbly old walls behind which I have been hiding my whole life, I come face to face with the inescapable fact that I will die first or she will, I will become disabled or demented first, or she will. I will lose her. And I do not know how I will bear it. The more you love, the more you become vulnerable. And I am afraid
No, I am not truly effortless yet in the face of real love. I don’t know if I ever will be.
What calls me here is again the vastness. It’s the same vastness that flowed into those tiny tubes in the back of my skull, grew in my life and wafted between mountains in the great cloud of unknowing. It’s the same stuff.
What calls here, as there, is the same effortlessness, silent and real. Of this I am sure. This one is in the world, lived between more than felt, but it’s the same stuff. It calls us to be here without holding back, to live its terrifying grace in the messiness of everyday connectedness.
“Do not settle,” it whispers always. “Do not be content with partial love. Be open here too. Be so open with this other that there is nothing left to close.”
Freedom beckons and beckons again. In relationship it calls us beyond our fantasies or of the perfect partner. “This may not be what you fantasized,” it whispers. “This may not be not what you dreamed of. But she is a good soul, as are you. However humble and imperfect, be open, be truthful, together.”
Learning to live jazz in the soul at this level of vulnerability has got to be part of today’s spiritual goal.
If we cannot learn to live it, out loud, day after day, with another, if we cannot bring grace into our everyday, flawed, stinky old mutuality, it is not yet complete enough.
I wept when I wrote those last paragraphs. Sometimes the depth of all this is more than I can handle.
So after writing it I took a walk. Well, the dogs and I took a walk. Patch and Lil’ Girl, the indefatigable pups from down the way, have been coming with me on my walks recently. I’ve been glad for their company.
For some reason tonight’s evening air struck me as particularly sharp. The snow was almost crystalline in the cold, the light bright and vivid. The ice boughs overhead shimmered in the dusk like starlight chandeliers.
Off the lowest field, the three of us stumbled onto a new path that led mysteriously into the darkening woods. I had no idea where it was heading. If I tell the truth, I was a little afraid … of getting lost perhaps? Or of some unexpected forest beast? (There are bears around, I’ve heard.) Yet, even so, there was a magic in walking into the unknown. The only sound was the snap of boots and paws breaking through frozen sheen. Even the dogs went quiet.
Yvonne and I had a few moments like this a couple of weeks ago. We were on a long drive and she was wondering aloud what she might want to do if she quits her job. I can probably count on one hand the times that this competent woman really didn’t know where she was going. We were both, I think, a little afraid. And enchanted. I wanted to hold my breath.
We didn’t come up with an answer that day. I didn’t actually care. What I liked was being with her in not knowing.
I think this is part of what I loved at Mendham and with Doug: being with others where we do not yet know. I treasured my hours with Corena in part because we were so not in charge. I tried not to breathe those moments with Yvonne because they were so mysterious, so alive.
Eventually the dogs and I found our way through the frozen marsh into an unnoticed corner of a cornfield. We were just below my hermitage, back to the everyday. So too Yvonne and I soon found our way back to the already-known.
I’d like to live in the unknowing more. But maybe this is just the deal: even undergirded by stillness, you only get a few minutes of mystery. And then you’re back again to old cornfields and hay mows.
Mystery comes, almost always, in brief flashes. But it’s out there, and it keeps beckoning. We stumble unexpectedly into the magic, we take one more step into what we don’t yet know. And then we pull back. Sometimes we forget what we discovered, sometimes it becomes the new ordinary.
And then after awhile, we stumble again into the not-yet-known, and feel our way to the next new norm. The magic is brief but never quite forgotten. It quiets down, but it never quite lets up, or at least I hope not. Newness, order, chaos, then new order again. Repeat.
It was good to have Patch and Lil Girl with me tonight. And it was good to be with Yvonne that afternoon in the car. Being with fellow pilgrims seems to help somehow. Holding another’s hand in the face of the tsunami of what cannot be known is one of the kinder gifts that come with being human.