Relationship Savvy Dialogues

Online learning! The Internet! Teaching over the phone in something called teleclasses. Modern technology was opening a whole new way for us to teach and share.

The Internet was still in its infancy when we started exploring it as a new venue for education. We started our research and it became clearer and clearer how we could help people turn their computers into a relationship learning and resource center. Our first website was called The Center for Enlightened Partnership.

It solved some of the old problems with doing live seminars. It was more convenient for our students, no travel expenses and no more childcare challenges. But there was a steep learning curve. It was like going back to college. All of the sudden there were lots of new things to do and learn

Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne

We were ready for a new way of working.

The question was how. We were living in this question with no clear answer. In other words we had again jumped into the void with only our spiritual guidance as a safety net.

Have you been there before? We imagine you have. It seems no matter how practiced any of us get at trusting the process of change and evolution there can still be the occasional sense of trepidation and second guessing.

There is a metaphor that has served us well. Picture yourself as a trapeze artist swinging from one bar to another. There is a point in time where you aren’t holding onto anything. You are mid flight for awhile before you can grasp the bar before you. Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: change, letting go, Paul and Layne Cutright, trust, uncertainty

From the humble beginnings teaching a relationships course in our little tract home in San Diego grew what was to become the fourth era in our career together. This next phase as transformational teachers and relationship educators lasted about twelve years, from 1987 to 1999.

Once again, we found community growing up around us, much as it had in Hawaii ten years earlier. This time, however, it was also about refining and documenting a systems based relationship curriculum to help people in their relationships at home, work and in community.

The eight week course we started in our living room became a 72 hour, three weekend workshop called Secrets for Successful Relationships. It was taught one weekend a month for three months.

From this course there were students who wanted to go deeper and asked if there were other programs available.

We wanted a way to accelerate our students’ progress with less stress, both on us and on our students. Emotional, psychic and physical stress is a predictable side affect of deep transformational work. The powerful shifts that occur in a person’s core sense of self, while also clearing deep emotional patterns, can be unsettling and periodically stressful, to say the least.

We were able to achieve this with the new and improved six-month program called the Accelerated Personal Evolution Program or APEP. This time, rather than meeting 20 hours a week we were able to accomplish the same and often superior results, in about 20 hours a month.

The accelerated nature of our work was due largely to implementing many of the tools and techniques we learned from the field of Energy Psychology.

We facilitated ten APEPs, a Teachers Training and we maintained a full time private practice while we were in San Diego. In practical terms, that looked like leading some kind of weekend workshop every weekend and seeing clients Tuesday through Thursday with Mondays and Fridays off, sometimes!

Oh, and we started writing books during this time, too

Again, the community that gathered around our work proved to be a vital part of our students’ integration. Having people to practice new relationship skills with is essential to developing the skills.

Book knowledge alone doesn’t transform people’s relationships, new practices, new skills, new knowledge and deep self awareness does.

Community can provide the caring feedback that kindles a deeper awareness of self and how ones words and behavior affects others.

In so many ways, learning to relate better with others is like learning a new kind of dance. First you become aware that there are new moves that look different and feel good, and then you find others who want to dance the same kind of dance with you.

If you’re learning the samba and all the people you know only want to dance the waltz, it’s not going to be very fulfilling. It’s pretty much a formula for frustration.

But, when everybody knows the same moves and they keep getting better at them together, it brings a whole new meaning to the word THRILL!!

Over time we coined the term “evolutionary relationships” to clarify how what we were teaching was different from the usual relationship support out there. Evolutionary relationships are about more than simply getting your needs met and getting along better with others.

Evolutionary relationships are committed to personal and spiritual evolution, for both the individual, the community in which they live and our species as a whole. We are talking about conscious evolution for people and the societies they create.

People who create evolutionary relationships are focused on purposeful action rooted in love and growing wisdom. These are people who want to bring forth the best in themselves and others. They are also people who value beauty as an important spiritual quality for living well.

Evolutionary relationships require a commitment to an awareness that comes from deep self-reflection and transformational experiences. When you put that together with the body of knowledge we now offer through our online curriculum, there is a profound level of insight that opens new possibilities for your life and relationships.

There are specific practices required to grow beyond the common understanding of relationships. In our view, these practices involve authentic, heart-centered communication, enlightened conflict resolution and problem solving, emotional clearing and well-being techniques and belief change tools, just to name a few.

Evolutionary relationships represent another octave of personal development that is fundamentally grounded in specific values, spiritual attunement and pragmatic application of embodied skills and behaviors.

Simply put, evolutionary relationships lead to relational and spiritual maturity and a life that is deeply fulfilling and filled with magic.

Now, that may all sound wonderful and high minded, and in fact, it is. But, remember the part above where we talked about the number of days we worked every week? Well, you can’t work that much for several years on end without something having to give.

Even though we were passionate about our work, a demanding schedule of 60 to 80 hours a week, month after month, year after year began to have some undesirable side effects.

Our relationship had slowly and imperceptibly become more about our work than our marriage. We had been so deeply absorbed that neither of us noticed.

If you’re familiar with the Roadrunner cartoons, you will recall that Wile E. Coyote was always trying to catch the speedy and faster roadrunner.

Sometimes in the exaggeration that makes for good comedy, Wile E. Coyote would find himself having run far beyond the edge of a desert cliff and hanging for a brief and terrifying moment in open space before plummeting to the canyon floor far below.

Well, we woke up one day only to realize that we were like Wile E. Coyote. Without realizing it, we were beyond the edge of the cliff and about to fall.

 

 

 

We were burned out, crispy critters and we knew we couldn’t continue working the way we had been. Something had to be done right away.

It was time to press the pause button and get a new perspective on our personal life and how to balance it with our fervent passion to help people transform their lives and relationships

And so the metaphorical curtains closed, we took our bows and quietly left the stage . . .

                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Of course, we welcome your comments. And, if you are someone who happened to be in one of those trainings or knew us way back then, we would especially like to hear from you.

Please click the  ‘Add Comments’ link just to the right above this post to leave your comments here on the blog. Also, if you have a Twitter account please consider “retweeting” this by clicking the retweet button below or the “share” button next to it for posting on Facebook or other sites.

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: Accelerated Personal Evolution Program, APEP, conscious community, evolutionary relationships, Heart to Heart, Paul and Layne, San Diego

Warning!!!

We are ordinary people with a passion for solving relationship difficulties. We are curious people who have done our best to live full out and to help others along the way.

We reserve the right to be “imperfect” according to others’ standards, so that we may continue our personal exploration of the Great Mystery.

We have discussed with one another the merits of revealing the next part of our development as people and as teachers. It feels a little risky because it is deeply private. But, we think if you want to know us, it’s an important piece.

Our hope is that it may somehow be helpful for you as you travel your own road toward being all that you want to be. If you have followed this series to this point, we imagine that you are kindred spirits on a similar and yet unique path of discovery.

Personal development, spiritual growth, conscious evolution – or whatever name you choose to call it, is not easy. It is demanding, serious work.

The very process of transformation is disquieting. Being undone and remade at a higher level of awareness is disorienting. It’s usually laden with self doubt and an uneasiness that can seem to last entirely too long.  We have laughingly come to call this experience “the green slime stage.”

The caterpillar transforming into a butterfly has become a widely accepted metaphor for the human transformational journey. Most people focus on the beauty of the butterfly emerging from the cocoon and fluttering majestically into the breeze.

Little is said about what is happening inside the chrysalis as all the cells of the caterpillar are reorganizing themselves into a new body. If you open that cocoon too soon what you will see is neither a caterpillar nor a butterfly – it’s a bunch of green slime. And when we were undergoing our evolutionary process, that’s pretty much how we felt. Slimy and green – YUCK!

Our life as we had known it was being systematically dismantled. No one had told us about this part.

Empyrean began to unravel and the whole split into parts. The centers disaffiliated and became independent organizations. Our vision was crumbling and we didn’t know why and we couldn’t stop it. In many ways it was like watching a beloved child dying.

Something you may not know about us is that we had been serious students of esoteric spirituality since 1976 – and we still are. The metaphysical teachings we studied were gleaned from the esoteric teaching of Christianity, Buddhism and Sufism.

We may also have had a little genetics going for us, too.

Layne’s father was gifted with powerful healing and psychic abilities. Paul’s father had advanced through the Masonic Order, and later studied privately under an Archbishop for the Episcopal priesthood, becoming a Biblical scholar in the process, and then emerging later as a mystically oriented spiritual teacher.

So, both of us had an ingrained inclination for deeper truths and pushing the envelope of consciousness.

Confronting the limits of our expanding consciousness was startling. We were victims of a “New Age” social mythology; a mindset that said we could intentionally create our own reality, through the power of prayer, visualization and affirmation.

We could build wealth, spiritual power and all the goodies we could conceive of. The unspoken promise was that we would be invincible and in control.

These ideas had served us well on the early legs of our journey, but a greater truth was waiting in the unseen mists ahead.

We learned that in this three dimensional realm of time and space, conscious thought is creative – BUT, it doesn’t create absolutely. Absolute thought creates. Absolute thought issues from the ten dimensional Being that is our soul.

Learning the deeper workings of the co-creative relationship between our soul and our conscious mind was significant for us, especially as teachers of radical personal responsibility. Knowing the limits of what you can take responsibility for seems important to know.

It is more true to say, we as individuals have the power of consciousness to influence our reality and to interpret events. We also have the power to create the quality of our relationships and a variety of wonderful experiences, from businesses to communities. But, we do not create in a void.

We alone are not the cause of every event in our life. No matter how pure our consciousness, our conscious mind would never (and should never) be running the whole show. There is an Unseen Intelligence behind many of the events of our life and the world. None of us are the puppet masters of the Creative Intelligence of the universe.

At this point, we believe that after we have learned to observe the power of our consciousness to create, we then get to learn to co-create with a higher power than ourselves. Now, we thought that’s what we were doing all along, but what we painfully discovered was there is a whole lot more to it than we ever imagined.

We live in an evolving universe. No matter where we are on the evolutionary spiral there is an infinite stretch of knowledge and understanding before all of us. That means no matter how much we think we know about the Great Mystery, we always only know a part. There is a kernel of truth inside all of the sacred myths of our world cultures. But none of them could possibly tell the whole story.

Outgrowing the sacred myths we live in is painful for any of us. Kahlil Gibran wrote, “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

Our prayers for spiritual wisdom were working, but not in the way we had imagined they would.

We needed to confront the big gap between our spiritual ideals and our true capacities and it hurt. We had become arrogant without even noticing we had. Arrogance doesn’t feel arrogant – it just feels right.

We imagined we knew the whole Truth with a capital “T”. Yet, Spirit was determined to show us our limitations, so we could grow beyond them. Ouch! Triple big OUCH!!!

In hindsight, it makes perfect sense that if we pray for wisdom, it is inevitable that we will outgrow our current understandings. But, what we were finding out was that the “ultimate truths” we had believed in, taught and had worked so well for us, up until now, were flawed. And it brought us to our knees.

We tried to look with new eyes at ideas and beliefs we had taken for granted. We had to find a way to sort out the valuable from the valueless and the partial truths from the greater truths.

We withdrew from public life to take stock of our spiritual life. Paul got a job with an international corporation and Layne stayed at home and saw a few occasional clients. We yielded to our “undoing” and quietly entered our metaphorical chrysalis.

Would our relationship survive or would it be part of what was lost in our undoing? We really didn’t know. We couldn’t know. We knew we still loved one another, but we were visionaries without vision and nothing was for certain anymore.

                                                                                                                                                                                          

Your comments, thoughts, feelings and questions about anything we share here is important to us. Just click on the Comments link to the top right of this post to participate. We have very much appreciated all the comments many of you have been kind enough to share in previous posts.

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: conscious evolution, great undoing, Paul and Layne Cutright, personal development, spiritual growth