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today, we said, “I do.” And we still do!
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Emerging from the Dark
Have you ever had the feeling of being hungry, but you don’t know what you want? Maybe you open the cupboard or the refrigerator and look at what’s on the shelves, hoping to see something and say, “That’s it, I’ll have that!” But, you don’t find anything you really want to eat.
That’s how I have been about writing this blog post. I am hungry to communicate with you and let you know what’s been going on, yet I hardly know where to begin. Each time over the last several weeks that I have started something, I end up deleting it with the judgment that it’s just too trite or pedestrian for you to bother reading.
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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
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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 »
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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.
Community Meal at the Center
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.
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Layne & Paul in Namale, Fiji
While we were safely tucked inside our chrysalis we found access to a spiritual presence of wisdom, knowledge and peace that guides us to this day. As we communed with this presence we learned many new things.
We can share a few here now. For one, without our knowing it our egos had extended themselves to include our students, and we unconsciously had been attaching a meaning about ourselves, relative to how quickly or deftly our students responded to our work. In other words, we had been unconsciously “proving our value” with our students. It’s hard to be unattached to the results when that link is there.
Now, we strive to remember that our value as teachers and contributors to life is not something we need to prove to ourselves. We are free to allow our students to learn from their own choices without any attachment. Well, maybe a little attachment – - some of the time. Remember, we’re not perfect. We still like it best when we can facilitate those one minute miracles.
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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.
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In 1981 we went alone, just the two of us, on a spiritual pilgrimage to Greece, the Holy Land and Egypt. The trip was planned so that we would be at certain temples at astrologically auspicious times.
July found us at the Temple of Athena, a beautiful Greek temple in the mountains of Delphi. We slipped past the guards and spent the night under the full moon, surrounded by the spirits of ancient Greeks. We prayed and napped till dawn.
We followed in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples as we traveled from sacred sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem to the Sea of Galilee. We visited the most holy sites of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
In blazing hot August we visited sacred sites up and down the Nile in daytime temperatures of 120 degrees. We rode horses at dusk through the burning Sahara sands to an oasis where we drank warm Coca-Cola in bottles. Later, we meditated on the paws of the Sphinx in the moonlight at midnight.
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As you may have read in the previous six posts in this series we met and fell in love in San Francisco in 1976. Within one year we were travelling the USA leading weekend relationship trainings.
Paul & Layne - Hawaii 1980
We then settled in Hawaii for a seven year experiment in dramatic personal transformation with a group of kindred spirits.
We were the leaders of the Empyrean Community where everyone was consciously using their relationships as a path of personal evolution and spiritual awakening.
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The production of Celebration! used the best parts of all of us. We slept less and loved harder and longer than we knew we could.
At the end of each event everyone felt completely used up, in the best kind of way. The team meeting at the end of each event always took place in our hotel sleeping room.
Exhausted and blissed out, we gathered on the floor propped up against a wall or compatriot, as we each shared our personal highlights from the weekend. Gales of laughter, tears of happiness and friendships that last till this day, fed our souls.
Half of the students from Celebration! joined us in the next IPEP. Somehow, the word had spread and we were getting inquiries from all over the USA, Australia, and New Zealand. People were moving to Hawaii to study with us.
