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

Teleclasses are typically an hour long, maybe 90 minutes. The shortest workshop we had offered was four hours. Most were at least a day or two and a half days. We were just getting warmed up at an hour and it seemed like a huge challenge to say everything we wanted to say in such a short time!

If we had a weekend with people we could quite effectively change the trajectory of their lives and relationships, saving them from years of needless confusion and suffering. How could we possibly do that without being in the same room? Okay it wasn’t very clear in the beginning, but we could sniff something delicious in the mists ahead and we trusted we would find new answers to all of our new questions. And we did.

And so began the current era of our work. In 1999, ten years ago, we built our very first website, called The Center for Enlightened Partnership. In the beginning, it was mind boggling, as we sat in our living room conducting teleclasses with people who were sitting in different parts of the world. We had people sitting in Canada, New York, Israel, England, San Francisco all in the same class

As our success with this new venue continued, we realized we could live wherever we wanted, as long as there was high speed internet service available.

We would often talk about how much we liked living in Santa Fe for the brief time we were there. And it occurred to us that maybe we could live there, again! In December 2003 we decided to scout the possibilities in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

We were still in love with the small town feel of Santa Fe, population 65,000. But, with the sophistication that comes from being the third largest art market in North America, after New York and Los Angeles. The adobe buildings seem to grow right out of the earth. It’s beautiful here. Lot’s of psychic quiet and clean air and the light is particularly beautiful, as we had heard it is in Paris.

Coincidently, Santa Fe had recently upgraded to high speed Internet access, which we needed to run our business. Plus, Layne found a new residential development called Aldea de Santa Fe which was touted as a “New Urbanist Village”.

A New Urbanist neighborhood resembles an old European village with homes and businesses clustered together. New Urbanist designers seek to solve the modern problems of social relating by intentionally designing the physical environment to enhance community connection. . Intrinsic to New Urbanism is the concept of mixed use and the concept of people living, working, shopping and recreation all in the same area.

It seemed to us that the New Urbanist philosophy was a perfect compliment to our work of helping people to relate in more fulfilling ways. It seemed New Urbanism was focused on the exterior environment, while our work focused on the interior landscape of the mind and heart. We were intrigued by all the possibilities when the two were combined.

New Urbanism seemed right up our alley and in keeping with our ongoing research into the potential of conscious community. That’s all it took; we made up our minds right then to move back to Santa Fe!

We kept experimenting with new ways of reorganizing our curriculum and soon it all settled into an easy smooth way of honoring our commitment to helping transform the way people relate with one another. Ten years before, we could never have predicted the radical shift our work had taken.

And now, ten years being on the Internet, touching and being touched by people all over the world, we have had this growing sense that something is still missing.

And now we know what it is . . .

Part of our work is knowledge transfer. We possess a rare body of knowledge about relationships. We can transfer that knowledge in writing or by talking.

Another part of our work is coaching people in developing new skills in self-awareness, communication, solving problems, clearing old emotional wounds and expanding their capacity for happiness and spiritual depth. We do that by talking, plus “quantum energy transmissions” that work over long distances.

OK, we could teach and coach over the phone quite effectively.

Another powerful aspect of our work is modeling. When people watch us teach and relate with one another they typically tell us they’ve never seen anything like it before. And seeing it makes all the difference in knowing they can do it too.

On the internet people “seeing” us is relatively new. Now we’ve got high definition video that streams into your computer and it’s reliable. Yay!! Okay, got the modeling piece happening.

But, the fourth and most significant part of our work is transformational. Transformation is a dramatic shift in a person’s sense of self while also seeing new and expanding possibilities for their life, both personally and professionally.

Transformation changes the way a person sees the world and how they can participate with it. Transformation is a thrilling, electrifying launch beyond ordinary life into the sublime. Transformation literally “rocks your world” and is a catalyst for deeper changes to come.

Could we really squeeze the depth and power we were used to facilitating in live groups through a phone line and into a picture on their TV or computer monitor? The answer is yes, with some slight changes. Our teaching and facilitating over the Internet is more intimate and less dramatic than presenting in front of a room full of people.

When people sit and listen to or watch us in the privacy of their own home, they don’t need to keep their guard up. The need to “look good” fades away and they are able to learn better. This translates into a more comfortable learning environment which fosters consistent and steady improvement.

Looking back we can see that we have indeed been able to squeeze transformation through a phone line. We’ve been doing it for ten years now. We experience it on a regular basis with out clients and students, all of whom live in far flung places around the globe.

The thing that is missing, which seems so obvious now, is a real sense of community.

For the last year, throughout 2009, we have been asking ourselves, what could an online community of support that is dedicated to developing and nurturing the highest quality relationships possible, look like, even though we are physically and geographically far apart?

A new vision for an online, global community of practice has filled our sails and we are ready for a thrilling new experiment made possible by modern technology. We now know this is the next era for our work, and it is beginning now.

Everything we have done before feels like it has been preparation for what we are about to do now.

For the past year we have been enthusiastically designing a workable structure for an online community of practice. What we mean by a community of practice is a group of people who are committed to developing the consciousness and acquiring the skillful means necessary to practice co-creating conscious, evolutionary relationships with one another.

That is what occurred with all of the other communities that developed organically around our work with the principles and practices we taught in our face-to-face programs. We see no reason why that can’t happen in the virtual environment also. All if takes is skillful means, intention, vision and other kindred spirits to join us.

We are ready to open the gates and you are among the first to be invited. We will be announcing it in the next few days, so keep an eye on your inbox. We believe it will rock your world (in a really good way) and the worlds of the people you love and care about the most!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

 We welcome and appreciate your comments.

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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.

You may have done it thousands and thousands of times and you’ve learned to trust the bar will always be there for you. Then, let’s pretend a thick fog comes in and you can’t see the bar. There are a few clues that it should be there, some familiar sounds perhaps, but you can’t see it.

It’s leap of faith time. A lot of people are going through this now with the challenges of the economy crisis, changing jobs, reorganizing domestic life to deal with all the rapid social changes, moving to a new city. People are having to feel into an unknown future for themselves, their families and the world.

In so many ways we are all trying to find a new and stable ground. Change, change and more change. Where do we put our trust when we don’t have the usual signals that predictability provides?

For us, it has been to calm our fears and tune into to the voice of Spirit. There is a homing beacon that can guide any of us, if or when the fog starts drifting in. Quieting the fearful mind is a skill set and we were well practiced. If we could allow our minds to relax and recall all the times life had turned out for us, even when we didn’t know how, it helped.

Life is full of unexpected twists and turns. Learning to adapt and go with a new flow is part of the journey. Although, sometimes the space and time between completions and new beginnings can be maddening.

Before there was a clear path and purposeful things to do, now there is this peculiar “slowness.” So, what are we to do without that focus to fill up our days? What is there to do, when there isn’t much to do?

Waiting and worrying just hurts. So, the best use of our time was to love. There are always new ways to choose love and frequently love is a choice. Many people wait for love “happen to” them. But, choosing to feel the presence of love, even in times of uncertainty, seems like a pretty good way to pass the time.

Some days were easier than others . . . and then, at last, the new beginning, began. The waiting was over and we were off on a new and exiting adventure!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

 We welcome and appreciate your comments.

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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.

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

 

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.

We learned that we can’t use our own will to push a student’s process. If we do, the changes are temporary and what we had thought was integrated transformation was not. We now believe that this kind of false responsibility is at the root of many spiritual teachers’ abuse of power. Hopefully as teachers, we can invite or inspire, but we can’t force the change.

We learned one of the shadow sides of community is peer pressure and a desire to be close to the people in power. These aspects were unintentionally brought to the mix of our success and we didn’t want to bring them into our future. In a way, they had become an accelerant that temporarily moved people, but didn’t truly illuminate their Being. “Let the teachings do their work and allow each student to grow at the pace they set,” was our new standard.

We learned to temper the ambition of our youth with more patience and compassion for ourselves and others.

We learned the skill set required to observe one’s own projections is essential to a wisdom culture.  Projection is when we see in others what we don’t want to see in ourselves. Teachers do it. Students do it. Groups do it.  People we think should be nominated for sainthood do it.

As far as we can tell, no one is immune from the insidious delusions of the ego, because the ego is so clever at masking itself in spiritual garb. We can learn to observe how our ego brings its own personal needs to various relationships, but when we think we are beyond all that – we are most likely being seduced by our “spiritualized ego.”

We learned we had underestimated the transforming power of our relationship itself. As much as we feel we are ordinary people, doing the best we can to learn and understand how life works, our relationship itself is quite extraordinary.

Without any false modesty, our relationship is a carrier wave of a new frequency of romantic love, a love that doesn’t compete for power, or needs to make oneself less so the other can be more, but a romantic relationship that shares power equally.

We think it is part of what explains a peculiar phenomena in our lives. It would appear that cupid lives at our house. At least, he spends so much time here he should have his own toothbrush in the medicine cabinet! We can’t count the number of couples who have met and fallen in love in our living room.

For example, we had gone to a financial planner for a consultation and she asked us some tough questions.  We (Paul and Layne) had a disagreement right there in her office because we had different priorities. We discussed things as we normally would, asking deep questions and listening to one another with quiet minds and worked the whole thing out in a couple of minutes.

We turned again to face the consultant, who sat there with her jaw dropped, “I have never seen any couple do what you just did. I am used to couples arguing in my consultations, but I have never seen the magic you just did with one another.” Later, when we started teaching again she was one of the first to enroll. She met her future life partner in our living room and they are still together.

The same thing happened with Paul’s boss at an international outplacement firm. Paul had been hired to help open an office in San Diego. As it happened Jan, the VP for the project, had heard of us before, because she had been through The Loving Relationships Training some years prior. As Paul’s role with the project drew to completion, she asked us if we would consider creating a new relationships course.

When we asked her why, she said she wanted to know how to create a relationship like ours! She wanted to be in a loving, caring relationship with a man whom she might marry.

After having been through trials that could have devastated our relationship, it was not only intact; it was flourishing and stronger than ever. We may not have been as certain about how “the great divine” worked, but we certainly had grown in our understanding about how love worked.

Through our difficult undoing, our attunement to Love made it possible for us to understand, forgive and care for one another. There were times, even when we were being evicted because we couldn’t pay the rent, or our house was robbed the month after we failed to make our insurance payment, or whatever allowed us to hold our heads up high was lost to us for awhile, that the pink corridor of light that gave birth to our relationship would visit us again. (pink corridor of light)

Even when we were in the green slime stage, the cradle of Love that held us in our chrysalis still knew who we were becoming. And she would visit to remind us, “All this shall pass, but your love will be eternal.”

And in that moment, we could feel Love and the cares of the world would evaporate like mists in the sunlight. The great elixir of life was poured out and we were renewed and made strong for the rest of our journey.

After Jan’s request, we got busy writing a course that we taught in the living room of our little tract house in Rancho Bernardo, CA one evening a week over eight weeks. Jan and about seven or eight others were in the course, including the man who eventually became Jan’s husband! Cupid was at it again.

Little did we know that these were the seeds from which would grow the next era of our work, the Heart to Heart Community in San Diego and The Secrets for Successful Relationships teaching.

We had emerged from our chamber of transformation as relationship educators. Though our work with people has a spiritual tenor to it, our spiritual understandings are more in the background than the foreground of our work.

We continue to be students of Love and to share whatever we learn is one of our greatest delights.

                                                                                                                                                                                          

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: extraordinary relationships, lessons learned, Paul and Layne, teachers