The Yoga of Relationships PART I Kathleen E. Fimmel, LCSW, TEP
Some of the most intelligent and enlightened people I know have that same struggle in their intimate relationships that I see in my waiting room on a regular basis. In fact, some of those people are the most intelligent and enlightened people I know. It really doesn't matter how much yoga, how much meditation, how much individual therapy a person does. When faced with the prospect of opening body, mind and heart to another human being who, in some way, is as wounded and as wonderful as ourselves, we are faced with one of the most awesome yet difficult choices a person can make. To the eternal child in us who longs to be special and cared for in just the perfect way, the choice is wrought with high hopes at first, and always a sense of frustration and disappointment. He or she does not want to have to work so hard to feel safe and nurtured. To the spiritual being in us who is working at this challenge of being human, this choice presents as much a path of enlightenment as could be found anywhere on the planet. As Carolyn Myss says, "we are mystics without monasteries," and the walls of our sacred spaces are often the boundaries of relationship.
In his inspired book, Getting the Love You Want, Harville Hendrix explains how we are attracted to just the perfect person with the blend of positive and negative characteristics of our early caretakers, who triggers the primitive part our brain to long for merger, in the hope of at last feeling whole and healed. This first phase of relationship is the romantic love stage. It is a reactive and unconscious response to the expectation of need fulfillment, and is best described as eros, life energy seeking union with a gratifying object. It is of limited duration, however, and at some point in every relationship, the core conflict emerges in what is called the power struggle. Here, those negative characteristics that were hardly noticed during the romantic stage emerge in all their glory, once again triggering the primitive brain to react unconsciously with fear, anger, or numbness. You know you are there when one of you says, "You are just like my mother!"
Here is where taking more yoga classes or meditating more can only help you remain more in balance, but not to avoid the pain of the power struggle all together. In fact, feeling the pain and bringing to consciousness the old wounds in the safety of a committed partnership is the very way to balance. Individual therapy can keep a person stuck here if the issues that need to be brought to the partner are instead worked and reworked with the therapist. It is here that seeking a safe place to work as a couple is the most direct way to grow. It is here, at this edge of childhood pain and longing, that transformation occurs, and two people can enter into the next stage of relationship, and love becomes infused with consciousness and will. This love is best described as agape, where the life energy is intentionally directed toward the partner as an act of healing. As in yoga, when you come to this edge, you are asked to stretch even further than before, not pushing with force, not holding back in resistance, but releasing into a new space. My favorite word for what is needed here is to "allow."
There is yet more, according to Hendrix, when love takes on a quality of spontaneous oscillation,î which in quantum physics describes the way energy moves back and forth between particles. This is reality love, where partners learn to see each other without distortion, no longer as caretakers or enemies, but as passionate friends, who are as committed to the otherís pleasure and welfare as much as to their own.
Hendrix calls this philia, which means, love between friends.î It is the search for the beloved come to rest, and releases within each person a creative energy, which is free to move into the world, as each is no longer so consumed with the details of relationship. This is what it means to grow up in relationship. Most of us are still babies in this process much of the time. That is why, like a baby, we need safety and structure. The Imago process which Hendrix developed is a beautiful and powerful way to learn the yoga of relationship. Its integrity is that body, mind, and spirit must be involved, and realization of oneís original wholeness is where the process leads. In the next newsletter, my colleague Dianne Modell will write more specifically about how the process works.
As Angeles Arrien says, "The art and craft of relationship is a holy principle." In Egypt, the highest art form was the art of relationship, where two people attended to the invisible painting they were making between them. The hieroglyph for art could be pulled apart to see two people co-creating this energetic masterpiece.
Relationships are opportunities to embrace a very profound yoga. We can be inspired by the passionate Persian mystic, Rumi, who said, "Beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there."