Conscious Relationship: The Hero’s Journey
A “conscious relationship” means to enter into an overt agreement with another person to practice embodying love together, and to have the humility and honesty to recognize the habits of not-love, which we have all inherited from previous generations. A conscious relationship means to cultivate new habits together: like appreciation, gratitude, authenticity, commitment and responsibility, and to recognize and disrupt (often with playful humor) their opposites: criticism, contempt, dishonesty, withdrawal and blame. These are the habits which most of us had demonstrated to us in early childhood, and often still perpetuate as knee jerk automated responses.
The notion of a conscious relationship in this way is relatively new. Dr. Eli J Finkel, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, has written a definitive and scholarly work titled The All or Nothing Marriage. He traces the history of marriage and long term intimate relationships as far back as we have recorded history through multiple cultures. Long term unions of this kind have been primarily understood in terms of ownership and property: a form of legal contract: created by the mindset of patriarchy. A man defined his identity through wielding power. As the head of the family, he owned properties, a businesses, livestock, horses, as well a wife and children. The more he had of all of all this, the more power he had, which would often be used to prop up his sometimes fragile connection with his essential goodness and with sacredness. Dr. Finkel points out that all this began to change soon after The Second World War.
One of the most beautiful books about the possibility of intimate relationship is Embracing the Beloved by Stephen and Andrea Levine. While the Levines painted an inspiring, moving picture of what a conscious relationship could look and feel like, it was Conscious Loving, by Drs Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, first published in 1990 which created the first clear map of how to shift the terrain. I was lucky enough to get a pre-publication spiral bound copy of that book in 1988, when I took a Conscious Loving worksop with Dr Richard Beyer. The Hendricks have been my mentors and friends ever since, and I am certified by them as a Big Leap coach, specializing in Conscious Loving coaching. I’ve been practicing these methods and passing them on to clients for nearly four decades. If one thing has revealed itself, again and again, as true beyond the shadow of a doubt, it’s this.
It ain’t easy.
Twice in my life I’ve climbed Mount Shasta all the way to the peak. You park your car down at Bunny Flap Trail head, hike a little way and then you begin the long ascent to Lake Helen, about half way up the mountain. The entire ascent involves climbing up a pile of rubble. You’re constantly digging your toe into a massive pile of tiny stones no more than an inch in diameter. Consequently, for every upward step you take, you’re going to slip back almost the same distance. Progress is frustratingly slow, but if you keep doggedly pursuing, one foot after another, eventually you reach the midway point and you can pitch your tent. The next morning comes the climb from where you’ve been camping to the summit, which is equally difficult. There are no big boulders to climb, so it’s not like rock climbing. Progress is extremely slow and requires a lot of patience, but when you finally make it to the summit, around midday, the rewards are out of this world. Literally. The top of Mount Shasta has a completely different ecosystem than everything below. It is usually above the clouds you have just climbed through. I think my few hours spent on the top of Shasta were the closest I’ve got to ascending beyond the mortal world and reaching heaven.
Climbing Shasta is one of the most difficult, painstaking things I’ve ever done in my life, but creating conscious relationship is even more difficult, and it requires even more patience. When you have those moments of breakthrough and triumph at the peak of love ecstatic love, it catapults you directly into the heart of everything you have ever longed for.
