Relationship- Bridge to the Soul

by Chris G Moon

  With some shame, I admit that there were times when I was seized by the Lobster Effect, a term that was inspired by seeing lobsters in a pail in a restaurant kitchen. Every time one tried to climb out of the pail, the others would grab its legs and pull it back in.84 I found myself hoping that my friends would fail—or at least, not completely succeed—in their pursuit of happiness, whether that happiness involved money, work, relationship, creativity, spiritual pursuits, or any other goals they might set their sights on. The fear that I would be left behind if my friends started to “get away,” caused me to use manipulation, gossip, and sabotage to try to undo their attempts to become greater people. Fear of being left behind leads to a sense of scarcity—the conviction that you are not good enough to go forward toward success as well.

  It was not hard for me to see my competitive compulsions when I examined most of my life, but when it came to my relationship I couldn’t really believe it. I mean, why would I want to compete with my own wife? I’m supposed to love her, aren’t I? Why would I want to win any contest at her expense, and what contests would we ever get involved in in the first place? When I posed these questions to myself, I soon became painfully aware of the answers. I competed with Su Mei over who was more liked by our friends and more loved by our children, who was right about any given disagreement, who was more independent than the other, and who was a better person in general. When I thought about it, I realized the competition came down to a battle that would determine who was more special.

  When you bring competition into your relationship, your drive to be special and your fear of abandonment can keep both of you struggling in battle while your true giftedness and purpose remain quietly hidden. Competition can be found in many negative experiences such as jealousy, comparison, envy, the need to be right, Power Struggle, and holding your partner back.

  The voice of the soul is so quiet that only a tranquil mind can hear it. But the mind will never be quiet so long as the drive to compete holds sway. Ending the competition involves waking up and honestly confronting your attitude in the relationship. Some people are like me: in such great denial that they simply do not wish to admit the existence of competition with their partner. It is not a thing that someone else can prove to us, for we can easily rationalize away the proof. It’s up to us to acknowledge it and admit to ourselves, our partners and our friends. Sure we will feel great discomfort exposing it. Competition always works best when done in secrecy; exposing it to the world is no easy task, as we will likely be confronted by our shame or guilt.

  To take the risk of bringing my competition out in the open, I must ask myself three questions: 1) Is my partner valuable enough to me that I would be willing to risk facing my guilt and shame, in order to admit my competition with her? 2) Am I—that is, is my uniquely gifted self—worth taking this risk for? 3) Do I value the Truth enough to do this? If I can answer “yes” to these, I will find the strength to choose an end to the competition. Then I can start giving my beloved lobster a boost to freedom. Who knows? Maybe when my arms are stretched up in order to give her a last push over the top, I’ll find a claw reaching down to lift me out.

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  DEATH, WHERE IS THY STING?

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  “Those who aren’t busy being born are busy dying.”

  —Bob Dylan,

  “There are a lot of things worth dying for, but love is the only thing worth living for.”

  —Anonymous

  Sylavano, an old high school friend of mine, once told me his experience of being taken rock climbing for the first time. He said that he was halfway up the rock face when he was gripped by an overwhelming fear. He could not find a reliable hand hold within reach, and suddenly became terrified. He knew he couldn’t go down, and could see no way up either, even though his experienced friend was ahead of him, directing his progress. The fear had simply paralyzed Sylvano. “At that point” he said, “I wanted to throw myself off the rock face, just to kill the fear.”85 Years later I began to see that such a “death temptation” is much more typical than I imagined.

  Sometimes during the Introspection stage, your relationship experience can be too difficult to bear, and the wish that it would all be over can creep in. The absolute discouragement of Assumed Inadequacy can make you feel there’s no point in going on. You may not express it as a desire to die, but the dread of having to go on facing a seemingly unchangeable reality is very close to a death wish. Whenever life presents us with such a challenge, if we reject the feelings that this situation makes us aware of, we are rejecting life. It is like saying, “I never want to feel like that again—I’d rather die.”86 If that statement becomes our motto, whether we choose to leave or stay, we will likely approach relationships more cautiously, and our sense of faith and trust in life will be diminished. In effect, we are expecting death to erase our pain, and looking at life as the enemy.

  There is a powerful momentum to the death direction, and so it is only by a very sincere choice for life that these death desires can truly be overcome. Whatever you decide to do in your situation, it is important that your decision be made from a life-affirming intention. If your choice is made out of fear, anger, or hatred, recognize that those feelings point you in a death direction. If you choose with an intention to do what you sincerely believe is best for all involved, you are choosing a life direction. There is an amazing boost of support that comes with choosing life. With that choice comes hope, wisdom, and clarity of purpose. The more you choose it, the more is inspired in you a sense of wonder and awe. Gradually you begin to see what an awesome gift and opportunity life has given you. Even when in pain that wonder can still be felt, offering you comfort and inspiration. The power of life will re-enter, resurrecting what you thought had died and left forever, and instilling in you a sense of hope and strength to fully face your process with trust and love.

  When you find yourself paralyzed in your relationship, either unable or unwilling to move closer to your partner, be aware of what force is behind that paralysis. Is it a loving power that is holding you back, or is it a fear-based force that is at work here?87 If it is fear-based, it is harmful to you, as well as your partner, and not life-enhancing. When tempted by one of death’s many facets, choose life with all your heart. Your commitment to life will lift the veil, revealing one of the ego’s greatest secrets....

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  THE CONSPIRACY OF DOUBT

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  “Thinking comes from personality, and doubt is the epitome of thinking.”

  —Chuck Spezzano

  At last we come to the purpose of the introspection stage, which is to reveal to us the ultimate problem creator in our lives. Through introspection you are offered the opportunity to look within, and uncover an insidious conspiracy created by your “egoic mind” to stop you from knowing your true nature. Using doubt as its favoured weapon, your mind tries to keep you trapped in a complex maze: preoccupying you with problems of a small or gargantuan nature, waylaying you with tempting distractions and confusing you with faulty memories of your past. Its goal is to ensure that you do not perceive the truly gifted person that you are. At the heart of the conspiracy is the fear of stepping towards your essence.

  Before you take an important step in your life, you will be besieged by voices of doubt. They will torment you with fear, anxiety, and dread, and attempt to convince you that you are in no way equipped to do what you are about to do. Before you take the step, doubt will tell you that you can’t do it. You are not good enough, not prepared enough, not strong enough, or not deserving enough. I slowly became aware of the nature of doubt over the course of my career as a workshop facilitator and public speaker. The effectiveness of my work depends on my willingness to trust and follow my intuition. Listening to my intuition means paying attention to the voice of my soul. In order to do this I do not prepare speeches, or set agendas
for the workshop, but instead simply speak and act according to the direction that’s given to me on a moment-to-moment basis. This involves spontaneity, and relying on the inspiration and creativity of my soul.

  When I started this work I felt that I was not very creative or inspired, and wasn’t confident of my connection to soul. Thus I would rely on the methods of other great teachers and more or less do it their way. Before my first workshop, I prepared the program so I would know what to do on an hourly basis. I was terrified at the thought of standing in front of a group of people and not knowing what to do next. When a participant presented an issue, I would think back to the way a teacher had responded to a similar issue and repeat what he or she had said and done. All in all it worked pretty well—for about one day. After that I was bored with the work, and embarrassed to find myself repeating other teachers’ words and philosophies. Somebody pointed out that I was even standing and walking like one of those teachers. All the things I was doing just weren’t me. When I realized that I was being strongly urged from within to be myself, the doubt set in with its favourite mantra: “I can’t.”

  As time went on I continued to experience inner disruptions while my heart gently encouraged me to be true to myself, to be more spontaneous, to trust my creative genius, and to give the gifts I was born to give. Meanwhile my doubt screamed back that I didn’t know how to do any of those things, that I was going to fail miserably and publicly embarrass myself. My need for approval from the participants was attacking my heart’s call to “be myself.” What good would being myself do? I can’t just stand there and “be,” silently waiting for some creative idea to come in. What if nothing comes into my mind? People will get impatient—they’ll walk out! What if there’s a limit to what I have to give, and I’ve already reached that limit?

  I remember one particular workshop during which my doubts assailed me relentlessly for five days straight. Throughout the first day I was constantly being told that I would never make it. That I had run out of material and reached the limits of my creativity. That there was nothing new I could give people, and everyone would leave by day three. Over the next few days the voice kept telling me that everything I was doing was wrong, insufficient, or phoney. On the fifth day when the workshop ended, my voice of doubt was mercilessly informing me that I had failed; that I should start looking through the newspapers for a different job—I was washed up as a facilitator. Maybe I could get my old job back as an office manager, because the word would soon get out that I had flopped as a workshop leader. It did not matter that over half of the participants were approaching me with enthusiasm and gratitude for a wonderful five-day experience. My doubt told me these people were just being kind or patronizing—or worse, that I had actually fooled them.88

  For some reason I did not give up on my career, and within a month I was enjoying new heights of creativity, inspiration, and fun in my work. But often I would be revisited by my doubts and go through the same torment all over again. It was through these processes that I began to understand the nature of doubt. What I discovered was:

  1) Doubt is always present in your mind. Since all these thoughts are ego-thoughts their purpose, with doubt at their roots, is to reinforce your ego’s control over your perceptions, thereby blocking out your soul’s influence. In your relationship, this means that you will look at your partner with doubting eyes. How close can you get to someone when you are looking at them in that way?

  2) The voice of doubt gets louder as you approach an important point of transformation. For example, you may want to break through some personal barrier that keeps you from being more sexually intimate in your primary relationship. Doubt has the ability to handcuff you—or inhibit some other part of your body from being able to move—in response to your soul’s encouragement to step closer.

  3) Doubt projects trauma from your past into your future. If you fall off a horse, doubt will assure you that you are going to fall off every time you try to ride one for the rest of your life. If you failed in some area of a previous relationship, doubt will try to convince you that you will fail this time as well.

  4) Doubt is used by the ego to maintain a limiting perception of yourself, and block out awareness of your essential nature. Often this is blamed on the partner, but it is really doubt that blocks a person’s essential nature.

  5) Doubt often uses facts to increase a sense of fear in you. If you want to leave your job to pursue your calling, doubt will remind you that unemployment is high in this country, you do not have enough money to support yourself, and there are not many opportunities for success in the field you want to enter. Statistics are very often the ego’s favourite source of factual evidence to discourage you from taking risks. In relationships, doubt will use the other person’s behaviour, body language, or facial expressions as evidence that there is no hope of getting closer.

  6) All doubt is self-doubt. In other words, if you were to say “I can’t trust my mate to love me; I keep thinking that s/he will hurt me sooner or later,” you are actually saying that you cannot trust yourself. What you call “trusting” your mate is really the expectation that she/he will behave a certain way that does not threaten you, or bring up old pain in you. In fact, you are not trusting that you have the strength within you to handle the pain, or the sense of self value that would allow you to love yourself.

  7) Self-doubt is the glue that binds you to your Family Loyalties. Because doubting who you truly are leads to insecurity, you will find it much easier to use the security of belonging to your family in order to reinforce the identity you have assumed. Any time you wish to grow beyond that identity, your doubt will be waiting at the threshold, trying its best to keep you contained within the boundaries of the identity you had moulded yourself to in your family.

  8) When you succumb to doubt, you stop trusting life. When you stop trusting life, you start trusting death. This leads to the desire to simply give up on yourself and your life (death temptation).

  9) Doubt supports the scarcity conviction: that you are not valuable enough to be loved or to succeed in your life. This scarcity leads to competitive instincts and compulsions, dilemmas, fear of risk, and utter discouragement—all because of the voice of doubt stating that you do not have enough of what it takes to love or to be loved.

  10) When doubt is integrated with love, it becomes the seed of discernment. At that point, doubt becomes innocent questioning, which allows you to perceive the nature of all things and choose what is most appropriate for you. Before doubt is merged with the light of your Soul, you can often make choices from a sense of false loyalty, self-deceit, naïveté, weakness of habit, or fear, all of which increase your doubt’s power over you. When the soul transforms doubt, whatever you are presented meets the scrutiny of one who is innocent, and therefore cannot be deceived or misled. Doubt, then, can also be seen as a teacher of discernment.

  If you can remember that doubt always manifests itself most strongly at times when you are called to take a big step in your life, it will make doubt less intimidating. By restating your commitment to the Truth, you will find the strength to step through your doubts into a more expansive sense of who you are. Remember that doubt will use the traumas and mistakes (which it will call “failures”) of your past and project them onto your future. This will tempt you to shy away from what’s ahead of you, and have you running back to something in your past that typically offers an illusory sense of security.

  When applying this understanding of doubt to your relationship, you will know that your doubts are trying to keep you from greater depths of love when you become aware of one or more of the following:

  1. You experience the temptation to move away from your partner and toward a stronger romantic interest, or begin to fantasize about having a “better” partner.

  2. You sense that you are unable to go any further in the partnership, because you doubt your or your partner’s willingness to change (all doub
t is self-doubt).

  3. You perceive that your future with your mate holds more of the same difficulties you’ve been dealing with, and you don’t think you can handle any more hardships (Assumed Inadequacy).

  4. You begin to recognize a pattern of personal “failures” that you have followed in all your relationships, and a thought is triggered that this is as far as you’ll ever get in your life, so why not just give up (death temptation)?

  Doubt is the main instigator of the idea that there is no point in going on in the present relationship, that you don’t really love each other, and, come to think of it, you got together for all the wrong reasons, so you might as well give up, because there’s no hope in this relationship. Best to leave and find somebody else—somebody who really loves you. Doubt reminds us of how beautiful the Glamour Stage is, and resurrects our fantasy partner in our minds. It will either superimpose that fantasy onto someone outside the relationship, or tell us that the fantasy person is out there somewhere, waiting.

  When talking about this point in the Introspection Stage, the question is often raised “But what if the right thing to do is to leave the relationship? How can you tell when you are listening to your heart, and when it is the voice of doubt talking to you?” The best answer I can come up with is “listen closely.” Is the voice a loving one or is it coming from fear?

  The heart is very discerning, and only directs you toward what will enhance your awareness of your soul. Doubt is not concerned with the choice you make (no matter what you decide, it’ll tell you that you were wrong), so long as the choice is made from fear. Keep your mind focused on your heart’s love of the Truth, and no matter what you are faced with in your relationship, your heart will guide you to the best possible direction for everyone involved. You will then see that doubt is not your enemy. Like the “Dweller on the Threshold,” it waits for you to reach a crucial stage in your life where you are being called to grow beyond the limits of your preconceived identity. It steps forward and challenges you to turn back to the “safety” of your independence, for it is the ego’s nature to preserve itself in separation, and thus it craves independence from the intimacy of love and true, conscious partnership.