The Present:
Our Only Route to Freedom and Love
Our Only Route to Freedom and Love
Here’s the
deal:
One: If you
had perfect parents AND
Your partner
had perfect parents , THEN
You can have a
grand relationship and be mindless
Two: We are
either mindful or mindless
Three: If we
did NOT both have perfect parents, things are always going to get awful unless
we are mindful.
This isn’t to
say they will always be awful.
In
mindlessness, we can coast through good times, or stay busy enough to be out of
each other’s hair, but there will be times when one or the other (or both, as
often happens) have stressful/ bad/ shitty days.
When that
happens, and we are mindless, guess what?
Not being
mindful, we don’t get to chose what our reactions are going to be?
Who does?
Our
programming.
Where does
most of our heavy duty programming come from: our parents.
So, that’s the
formula: stress, plus mindlessness equals we fall back on the rather funky
examples and programming of our parents and act them out on our poor mate.
And our poor
selves, because we aren’t really home when we are acting out the mindless game.
We are a pawn
of our programming.
This would be
bad, bad awful news, if we didn’t have an alternative to being mindless.
But we do.
To be mindful.
Remember
number two at the start of this chapter: we can be mindful, or we can be
mindless..
Mindful, we
can notice:
Oh, darn, my
buttons are being pushed. Better say something about that.
Or, wow, look
at the way my words have caused my loved one to tense their breathing and look
hurt in their face.
Maybe those
weren’t the words I really wanted to say.
So, that’s
that deal: Mindful we have choices. We can notice our own reactiveness.
We can notice
the effects of our words and actions.
We aren’t lost
in our own little world, but are paying attention to reality.
We notice the
birds and our breathing and our skeletons holding us up in gravity and the look
on our loved one’s face and the tone of our voice and the feelings that are
coming up in us.
The world is
new and fresh when we are mindful and if things aren’t “going right,” we can
notice this, and say something about it and get curious.
And make
suggestions.
Or requests.
All that, the
making requests, the diffusing our own reactivity will come later in the book.
For now, we
are going to practice pointing our attention to what we like in life.
What we are
aware of in the present and what we like in life.
In couples, so
much conversation is either planning out the business of what to next or later.
And a lot is complaining about what happened in the past.
And the lovely
blaming the other for when we feel bad.
So, let’s get
our attention on what we like muscles build up and spend three days talking
about what turns us on in life, what we like in life, what we are aware of in
the present.
Like this…
The Liking
Game
In some
religions they lay it out like this: Two biggie commandments, Love God. Love
your neighbor as yourself.
Check that out
closely and it’s three rules for the good life:
Love God
Love others.
Love yourself.
And now,
gentle reader, we’re going to take a short cut, a short cut to happiness,
contentment and bliss.
A way out of a
bunch of conceptual tangling and fussing that has waylaid humanity for way too
long.
Instead of
God, we are going to say Life.
Capital L
Life.
The miracle of
the flowers and the creeks and the salmon and smiling children and tuba’s and
kissing and square dancing and redwood trees.
Life.
So the Big
Three rules become:
Love Life.
Love other
people.
Love yourself.
And guess
what?
You are your
partner are going to practice that for twenty minutes a day for at least three
days.
And you are
going to start by noticing the big three: yourself, another person, and Life.
Here’s the
game, sit as before in two chairs close to each other and look each other in
the eyes as one speaks and the other listen.
Be present to
your voice as you speak.
Both be
present to the voice and the breathing and the body, both your own and the
other’s.
And talk in
two turns of talking and two turns of listening like this.
For five
minutes cycle through these six sentence stems, finishing them as the words
come to you.
1.
I
notice in the present this about myself…
2.
I
notice in the present, this about you…
3.
I
notice, in the present, this about Life around us…
4.
I
like this about myself…
5.
I
like this about you…
6.
I
like this about Life…
Pause for a
couple of sweet breaths as you look each other in the eye, and then go back
through the six sentence stems again.
And again.
And again.
Until the five
minutes are up.
Notice the
delight in just talking about what you like.
Notice the
delight is just listening to your love talk about what they like.
Do this two
turns each.
See if it
changes how you talk in the rest of your life!!
