Relationship- Bridge to the Soul

by Chris G Moon

  The relationship process brings you to a confrontation with that smallness, and calls on you to know the Truth about yourself. Nowhere is this more intense than in the Introspection stage; for although it is the most difficult level of relationship to deal with, what it offers is invaluable: Soul. Having immersed itself in the concrete reality of ego, Soul begins in earnest to shed its skin and make its true power known at this stage. Now you would imagine that something this momentous would be hard to conceal, with the soul’s radiance dramatically piercing through the darkness in a way that would make the most beautiful sunrise look like a dull flashlight in comparison. In fact the typical human experience at this stage is almost the opposite. This is why it is often the most difficult of relationship experiences.

  There are more traps in the Introspection Stage than in any of the other levels. That may not sound very encouraging, especially when you consider that we probably still have a lot of work to do in the Glamour and Disillusionment stages. I want to assure the reader (and myself) that Introspection is not meant to be the end of the line for your relationship—unless you want it to be, of course. Sometimes relationships must end because they are too abusive, or because the couple has been stuck for too long. Or maybe both have come to the peaceful resolution that it is time to move forward, but not together. In no way do I want to suggest that any or all relationships should stay together for life. But if you feel in your heart that you want to keep going in your present relationship or life situation, maybe what is offered in this chapter can give you some inspiration.

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  THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY…AND THE SACRED

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  “To love is to love it all.”

  —Anonymous

  Let us once more review the process of relationship in the form of a simple model that delineates the stages an individual passes through as s/he comes closer to her or his partner:

  THE GOOD

  Glamour, Sentiment, Romance,

  Excitement Caused by the Need for Love

  Soul level: A gift / lesson offered; Recognizing an Old Friend

  THE BAD

  Disillusionment, Power Struggle, Control,

  Manipulation, Old Pain Surfaces

  Soul level: Communication, Acceptance, Commitment to Accountability

  THE UGLY

  Introspection, Shadow Figures, Sacrifice Patterns,

  Fatigue, Malaise, Nostalgia for the Glamour of Romance,

  Repulsion Towards Mate or Vice Versa, Death Temptations

  Soul level: Awakening to One’s Direction,

  Uncovering the Ego Conspiracy, Birth of Commitment

  SOUL—CENTERED RELATIONSHIP

  Revelation, The First Guardian on the Threshold, Discernment,

  Beginning of Emotional, Mental and Personality Integrations,

  Conscious Loving Relationship, Purpose Life Work, Vision

  Of course it is possible that a person could go through the first three levels of relationship without being aware of the actual progress that takes place on a Soul level—I know this from first-hand experience. You can endure most of the harmful aspects, while enjoying very few loving ones, should you be unwilling to take responsibility for your life. And even if you take advantage of the opportunities in the previous stages, this does not guarantee that you will make it successfully through the next one—although it does increase your chances.46 The maturity and awareness you gain by mastering communication and responding to your pain peacefully in the Disillusionment Stage will be of immeasurable assistance to you in the Introspection Stage, but there are elements of Introspection that are unique to this stage alone, for here the internal life of relationship begins in earnest.

  As difficult as it was for me to change my old mindsets—from the idea that there were good guys and bad guys,47 that there was an absolute right and absolute wrong,48 and that marriage was a fifty-fifty proposition49—I became convinced that there was no way I could be happy in my relationships unless I committed to being 100% accountable for everything I perceived in them. And I could not fulfill that commitment to accountability if I were unwilling to face everything that was inside me.

  Introspection is the act of looking inward to examine all of one’s thoughts and feelings with the ultimate goal of being at peace with—and loving—everything inside you. In the process you also discover the roadblocks to happiness, such as the good guy/bad guy, right/wrong, and fifty/fifty modes of thinking. Without a commitment to Introspection, the negative aspects of your split mind will be thrown outside into the realm of relationship. Your partner inevitably assumes the facets of your “ugliness.” Your choice then becomes whether you will avoid that ugliness, attempt to destroy it, or remove it from your life (by removing you-know-who!). One thing is certain—it will be very hard to truly love the ugliness without accepting it as yours, for you cannot love anything while keeping it separate from you.

  The honest examination of your inner reality you see reflected in your partner will help you to come to a true and peaceful understanding of yourself. Although what you find within you may at first be terribly unattractive, you will also be blessed with the opportunity to see that there is nothing within you that cannot be accepted. And in the acceptance, what you once saw as ugly will itself become love. 100% personal accountability will not only help resurrect a dead relationship, it will resurrect the parts of you that you thought were dead, or never realized had existed.

  Let’s get back to the old myth that relationships are a fifty/fifty proposition. You cannot have a fifty/fifty relationship, because it implies only a fifty percent commitment on your part, meaning you are committed to the relationship half of the time. You cannot be completely committed fifty percent of the time. If you believe that you are only responsible for fifty percent of the relationship, you will only be giving half of what you are capable of giving. Since everything you see is a projection, you will perceive that your partner is only giving half of what s/he can give, while both of you simultaneously insist that you are doing your share and accuse the other of holding back.

  At the Introspection Stage, an opportunity surfaces for you to realize that you and your partner are connected on a fundamental level of being, and you can understand that the manner in which you treat your partner is actually how you are treating yourself. Thus an imperative emerges, requiring you to accept and integrate your shadow side, give up competition and offer support, give sincere encouragement when your mate is feeling inadequate, become a discerning influence rather than a prosecutorial or indiscriminate one, choose empowerment over pity, and join your partner in the emptiness that is at the center of the human condition. The Introspection stage brings home the message, in words made from stardust,50 that whatever you give to your partner you are giving to yourself. Once you have entered this stage, it is likely that your entrance will be heralded by the experience of the most debilitating form of misguided behaviours...

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  ASSUMED INADEQUACY

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  “Nobody minds. Nobody cares. Pathetic, that’s what it is.”

  —Eeyore, when everyone forgot his birthday. “Winnie-the-Pooh,” by A. A. Milne

  There are two basic ways to travel the path of relationship. We can either (1) pursue our needs endlessly, manipulating others when we have to, taking what we can get when we can get it, and compromising when all else fails, or (2) we can learn about who we are by letting go of expectations, communicating to reach a mutually fulfilling resolution, and constantly choosing happiness for our partners and ourselves equally. Most of us move back and forth between these approaches. If, however, we get caught on the downward-spiralling path of a relationship oriented towards personal need—creating demands on our partners, fighting, manipulating, etc.—the need wi
ll not be satisfied, and a sense of discouragement is bound to grow. Ultimately this leads to the pattern of behaviour known as Assumed Inadequacy.

  If, in your childhood, you faced so much discouragement that you decided it was no use trying to get your needs met from the person or people around you, you might have chosen to simply give up. From that point on you assumed that all your efforts would ultimately come to naught, so why bother trying to get attention, recognition, invitations to join in...why bother trying to be loved? Might as well give up and hope that everyone will just leave you alone. How much Assumed Inadequacy you had to deal with all depends on the type of person you are.

  Naturally you developed coping mechanisms to deal with this heartbreak, or else you probably would have succumbed to some debilitating mental, emotional, or physical sickness. By emotionally distancing yourself from the people who did not meet your needs, you managed to survive. Paving over the traumas with denial and forgetfulness, you picked yourself up and adjusted to a world that seemed to promise that you could have what you needed if you found the right person or people to give it to you. Perhaps you tried to earn it through some astounding achievement, or worked really, really hard for it. When you transitioned into adolescence, you may have turned to your peer group for a sense of significance. As a young adult perhaps you sought importance and belonging in a romantic relationship with a potential life partner, or sought for your importance in a career.

  Whatever avenue you chose, there is a good chance that sooner or later, you found yourself on the verge of facing that old experience of wanting to give up on your chosen source of love altogether. Almost all people see terminating a physical situation as a wise, even life-saving, approach when the overwhelming sense of inadequacy threatens to drown them. Nowhere is this idea more powerful than in the area of intimate relationships. This is because such relationships always have the tendency to draw you back to the deepest life experiences available to you at the time. The closer you get to your partner, the greater the potential to awaken the feelings of inadequacy you experienced as a child when you came to believe that you were not important enough to be loved by Mom, Dad, or other family members.

  In many relationships, the attempts to reach fulfilment through the significant other are ultimately met with a sense of failure, and with it a feeling of supreme discouragement. The warmth of love and acceptance is perhaps lacking. Words that are exchanged—even by those who practice heartfelt communication—might seem lifeless and ineffectual. A fog of confusion permeates the air, and a sense of direction is lost or confounded. At such times, a thought could sneak into your mind that you might have never really believed you would hear yourself saying: “Maybe it’s over.”

  I have heard that disheartening voice a number of times when my wife and I hit a seemingly impermeable wall. Sooner or later we were led through it to a better place, but the next time we hit that wall, the voice sounded even more convincing and the supreme discouragement and inadequacy felt more real. That is because every time one clears a level of inadequacy and discouragement, one is better prepared to face the next, even deeper and more hurtful one a little further down the road.51

  The experience of wanting to give up due to a sense of failure and inadequacy in your relationship is a strong indicator that the phase of Introspection has begun. It is a time of great unraveling, where idols and ideals fall, doubts increase, and fantasies dissolve. The degree to which you made your partner your personal supplier of need fulfillment is the degree to which you will be tempted to come to the conclusion that you either chose the wrong partner, or the flame is simply out—and that either way, it’s time to go somewhere else.

  The degree to which you have chosen to see your relationship as a learning path to unconditional love is the degree to which the grace that follows such commitments can support you through the “impossible situations,” to an experience of greater joy and intimacy. And some of the situations at this point will seem impossible. The subconscious traps may seem endless, and all your efforts futile. To get through these seemingly impenetrable blocks, one must learn the art of....

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  WALKING THROUGH WALLS

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  “Stone walls do not a prison make, / nor iron bars a cage.”

  —From the poem “To Althea in Prison,” by Richard Lovelace

  The first time my marriage hit this stage, I began to seriously question whether relationships were purposely designed to fail. Despite the remarkable strides Su Mei and I had made in love, intimacy, trust, and respect, tendency for the relationship to become static seemed to keep creeping back. Routines and subconscious habits, along with the predisposition to avoid uncomfortable confrontations, kept attempting to drive a wedge of separation between us (at the time I knew many couples that did not avoid the uncomfortable confrontations, but engaged in them because a Power Struggle had more life to it than the deadly stagnation of the wall). Finally I found my face pressed so tightly up against this seemingly immovable barrier of separation between myself and my partner that I had to consider the possibilities that either relationships just weren’t meant to last forever, I was with the wrong person, or else there was something I had better learn—and quick!

  It was no use looking to my parents’ relationship for guidance. They did their best considering the poverty, the eight kids to take care of, the physical separation of World War 2, the social and religious pressures of the time, and the problems around alcoholism. Taking all these factors into account, my parents did an incredible job of staying together, but I wonder if they ever made it past the wall. I do recall that there came a time when they hardly spoke to each other, and no longer slept in the same room.

  A few years back I read a newspaper article which stated that the greatest secret shame in North American marriages was how many married couples slept in different rooms.52 I took some perverse comfort from that article, grateful that, although my wife and I had problems, we weren’t that badly off. This small comfort did not last long, when I realized that unless I somehow overcame the inertia, and the desire to give up, my pride would not save our relationship. I had to answer some very important questions. Why is it so difficult to keep growing closer in a relationship? Why do I keep getting stuck, with the accompanying feeling of failure? How do I break through, past the wall?

  You might experience the stagnation of this relationship stage in any number of ways in your personal relationships, as well as in your work, creative endeavours, spiritual practice, or general sense of yourself. Some of the symptoms of “life at the wall” are:53

  • an intangible malaise

  • boredom

  • tiredness: emotional, mental, or physical.

  • illness

  • confusion or lack of focus

  • disinterest in most things, especially each other

  • a tendency to overindulge in mindless entertainment or pleasuring of the body

  • advanced addictive behaviour

  • extensive fantasizing or daydreaming

  • deadness in your sexual life54 (including sexual dysfunctions)

  • a depressing sense of unworthiness

  • a repulsion towards your partner or a feeling that your partner finds you repulsive

  • an affair or a triangle relationship

  • a desire to quit, give up, or even die

  • depression, loss of passion for life, the sense that you or the relationship are burnt out

  • busyness—your partner’s or your own, which allows both of you to conveniently avoid spending time together

  • a sense of Assumed Inadequacy—that nothing you do will make any difference

  • one of you files for divorce

  • one of you tries to kill the other

  There is no doubt about it—life can become very difficult at the wall stage of Introspecti
on, but it seems that we human beings have a propensity for further aggravating the discomfort by reacting to what is happening in the most unhealthy way. One of the key reasons for this unhealthy reaction is that, when someone runs up against the wall, they tend to believe there is something incurably wrong with the relationship. It is usually at this time that a client will tell me s/he made a mistake in marrying his/her partner in the first place. Some of the explanations that come out are:

  • “I never really loved him, not even when we first met.”

  • “I just married her because I was tired of the dating scene.”

  • “I thought he was more passionate than he actually is.”

  • “We got married for all the wrong reasons.”

  • “She caught me on the rebound; I’m still in love with someone else.”

  • “I thought he would change once he settled down with me.”

  • “She tricked me into marrying her.”

  • “We were too young to get married.”

  • “Our parents pushed us into it.”

  • “Nobody else wanted me—she was the best I could do.”

  • “I just wanted to get away from my family—I didn’t care who got me out.”

  However the retrospectives are worded, the message is always the same, i.e.: it was a mistake—we really shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. Of course not everyone second-guesses their motives for getting involved with a significant other. Other people do not regret getting married, but are simply dissatisfied with the state of the present relationship, their complaints sounding more like this: