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.

As unusual as this feeling is for me, I think I know where it comes from. I feel a sense of being inwardly pushed to be more revealing and vulnerable with you than I usually am in writing. Somehow, what I want to say would be easier to communicate in person, in a group, much like we used to do in our seminars and trainings. Then we could look into and through the eyes of love and my authentic vulnerability charged the room with a kind of grace. Telling the whole truth about fears and feelings joined us through  the heart in our common humanity.

To set a little context for what I am about to share, let me say this up front. This year has been perhaps the most difficult year of our lives. Actually, it’s been going on for a couple of years.

Have you noticed that it is rare to hear teachers of higher consciousness, supposedly enlightened
individuals or modern wisdom givers, talk much about their current or very recent hard times? They
may talk about hard times at some distance in the past, after they have learned and integrated the
lessons and they’re back to being enlightened again. But, you don’t hear or read much from a closer
perspective when things are not yet so clear or when things are still in a state of unsettled chaos.

And that’swhat I want to write about now because that’s where we are. And we have been here
for longer than any previous period like this. I think that’s why it has been so difficult to get to
writing about this, because it is still so close and fresh for us.

So, life has been about acceptance of what’s happening in the moment to what has seemed like
an onslaught of one catastrophe after another, and before we can even catch our breath we find
another anvil falling from the sky! It’s been about being as present as possible to the feelings our
situation has brought up and using all the tools at our disposal for dealing with the ongoing stress
of uncertainty and the accompanying doubt and fear.

Our last posts back in July, August and September have been about my emergency open heart
surgery and early recovery period (http://bit.ly/open-heart-surgery). Thankfully, according to my
surgeon, my physical recovery proceeded ahead of schedule. Having had nothing to compare it to,
it still seemed to be taking entirely too long to suit me!

I was having to listen to my body much more than I was accustomed, causing me to confront my
habitual impatience and push to be productive and get on to the next thing. In the process of
confronting things about myself that had been pretty invisible to me (but not to Layne, of course!),
what emerged was an unexpected level of healing.

As my physical healing progressed and I could tell I was getting better, e.g., being off oxygen and
going for long walks. My stamina and strength was returning. But then I entered an unexpectedly
deep level of depression that caused me to question everything about my life, including why I had
survived in the first place.

Depression and thoughts that death would be a welcome relief startled me into the reality of my
depression and plunged me into deep self-reflection.  Yet, there was no sense in denying the truth
with positive thinking or affirmations. If I did not confront and accept the reality of my depression,
I ran the risk of driving it underground and making it worse through denial.

I noticed how the feelings would come and go, rising and falling in intensity, like large swells on the
ocean.  I became reclusive and did not respond to messages from friends for weeks as I burrowed
deeper into my dark silence.

Another thing that was happening, and still is, was a heightened emotionality. Since I have been on
a path of emotional healing for the last 35 years I have learned to know, respect and express my
feelings. But, this has been something of a different order. I can hear a song, watch scenes of love
and tenderness or violence in a movie or TV show and find myself crying or even sobbing deeply,
way out of proportion to the triggering stimulus.

And over the course of the last few months both Layne and I are aware of deep, personal inner
changes that we are still trying to make sense of. Things have changed, continue to change and so
are we. We have a sense that our work will be changing as a result of our experiences the last couple
of years.

Of all the spiritual studies in which we have engaged, the teaching that has always sustained us
through challenging times of chaos and uncertainty is A Course in Miracles, in particular the lessons
in the Workbook. A Course in Miracles is all about making the shift from ego identification to
identifying yourself as your Soul.

The ego is grounded in fear and is subject to all the conditions and circumstances I have been
talking about here. If we believe that is our reality, our only reality, then we are stuck in those
conditions.

When we can identify with our Soul, however, then a vast space of peace and calm can open up
for us. We believe what we have been going through (and so many others are also going through,
perhaps even you) has much less to do with processing the effects of our negative, limited ego
mind than it does with a Soul transition. I am certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that my
heart failure and three near death experiences (all on the same day) had to do with my Soul’s
influence over my life.

A Course in Miracles is a radical teaching that can be, and usually is, ego shattering. But, it also
can put you in direct contact with your own Soul or Higher Self. So, being forewarned, below are
the first dozen lessons that have been particularly apropos for us. Perhaps you will find them
helpful, as well.

For example, Lesson 1 says, “Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window,
in this place) means anything.”

Lesson 2 – “I have given everything I see in this room (on this street, from this window,
in this place) all the meaning it has for me.”

Lesson 3 – “I do not understand anything I see in this room (on this street, from this
window, in this place).”

Lesson 4 – “These thoughts do not mean anything. They are like the things I see in this
room (on this street, from this window, in this place).”

Lesson 5 – “I am never upset for the reason I think.”

Lesson 6 – “I am upset because I see something that is not there.”

Lesson 7 – “I see only the past.”

Lesson 8 – “My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts.”

Lesson 9 – “I see nothing as it is now.”

Lesson 10 – “My thoughts do not mean anything.”

Lesson 11 – “My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.”

Lesson 12 – “I am upset because I see a meaningless world.”

Lesson 13 – “A meaningless world engenders fear.”

Lesson 14 – “God did not make a meaningless world.”

A Course in Miracles also teaches that only Love is real and fear is an illusion. The one unchanging
constant through all of this has been and continues to be our love for each other. That is what has
always sustained us through any kind of trial or difficulty. That and the consciousness tools we
have learned and teach.

We will continue to share with you as these changes unfold. And, as always, we welcome your
comments and thoughts.

As this year draws to a close we are being presented with a wonderful opportunity. On January 1, 2012
we are catching a plane for Europe! We have been engaged by some clients to work with their entire
family of five in a six-day Private Intensive Retreat.
(http://paulandlayne.com/coaching-programs/exclusive-private-intensives)

We’ll be in Munich, Germany for about a week serving these courageous souls then we will fly to Turin,
Italy for a visit to the Federation of Damanhur, a conscious, eco-society and spiritual community that
has been in existence there for 30 years. (http://www.damanhur.org/)

In fact, Layne applied for and was accepted into a three month “temporary citizenship” program they
began last year. I will be with her for the first week or so to help her get settled, then I will return to
Santa Fe.

This is a HUGE change on many levels and portends wonderful new opportunities and
directions for our life. For one thing, we have never been apart for more than a week at a time
for the last 35 years! We don’t want to speculate too much right now about what those
opportunities and directions might be, but we will definitely keep you posted with more regular
blog posts, photos and possibly videos in the months ahead.

In the meantime, please know how much we appreciate you reading this and being a part of our
lives through this virtual connection. Your thoughts of love, healing and prayers are meaningful
to us beyond words.

We are wishing you and all those whom you love a most blessed holiday!

Three weeks ago today, on June 29, Paul underwent emergency open heart surgery.

Here’s what happened . . .

On Saturday, June 25, at about 9am Paul walked into the bedroom from outside and started to feel dizzy. Layne was lazily sleeping beneath the covers and raised her head to say “Good morning,” just as he suddenly fell to the floor. His body went into rigid convulsions in which he was unable to breathe as he turned blue.

Layne jumped out of bed and rushed to hold him and then quickly gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation. When he started taking faint breaths she reached for the phone and dialed 911. The woman’s voice at the end of the line coached Layne to keep Paul breathing until the ambulance arrived. Even though Paul’s eyes were open, it was clear he was not conscious of what was happening.

Within about fifteen minutes the paramedics arrived and revived Paul enough to speak. He was consciously aware for the first time since feeling dizzy and was surprised to find himself lying on the floor and at the paramedics hovering over him.

They quickly got Paul onto a gurney and into the ambulance on the way to St. Vincent’s Hospital Emergency Room.

Layne was beside herself with worry as she called a friend, Robin, to see if he could meet her at the hospital. Thankfully, he answered the phone and rushed to meet Layne and Paul at the emergency room where he remained with them all day.

After a full day of rigorous diagnostic testing, the cause of Paul’s collapse was clarified; he was diagnosed with a heart condition called severe aortic stenosis. This is a condition that can spontaneously close off the oxygen supply to the brain and body.  This is what happened to Paul in the bedroom.

They were told that Paul required open heart surgery to replace his aortal valve as soon as possible. Though both Paul and Layne were relieved to know what had caused the crisis of the morning, they were both reeling from the emotional aftermath of the day and the news of his impending surgery.

The closest hospital that could do the procedure was the New Mexico Heart Hospital in Albuquerque, fifty miles away. Paul’s condition was not sufficiently stable for the doctors to chance the trip that night, so they moved him to another area in the hospital to monitor him while he rested before the next day’s transfer.

As an aside, Paul was a little surprised to learn from Layne and Robin that he was talking and joking with the doctors, nurses and hospital personnel during all this. For the most part though, his memory of the day’s events are spotty and incomplete at best, probably due to traumatic amnesia.

Layne got him situated in his new room. He was hooked up to several IVs and looked exhausted, yet calm in his hospital bed. Layne stroked his brow tenderly and then gave him a teary kiss on his cheek before she went home to get some rest and prepare for the day ahead.

Then, close to midnight that evening Layne was awakened by a call from a doctor at St. Vincent’s hospital. The doctor explained Paul had had two more episodes and had been transferred to the Intensive Care Unit and asked her to return to the hospital as soon as she could.

She threw on some clothes then practically flew to the hospital to meet the doctor who had called. The doctor’s expression was solemn. He explained what had happened to Paul and that he was currently sedated and hooked up to a breathing machine because he couldn’t breathe on his own. He also added that Paul needed to be “stabilized” before he could be transferred to the other hospital that would do the surgery required. She asked if she could see Paul.

“Yes”, he answered.

“Is it possible he might die?”, she asked.

“Yes”, he responded.

“Will I see him awake before the surgery?”

“We don’t know that yet.”

Layne steeled herself for the moment ahead when she would see her beloved husband hooked up to an assortment of life support systems. The doctor guided her by several rooms of the ICU to be with Paul. Each room had a single patient in various levels of distress. There were lots of tubes and monitors and beeping sounds and nurses moving silently about.

She arrived at Paul’s bed and moved quickly to the head of it. His color was ashen and his face glistened with a thin film of perspiration. He was sedated and had no idea she was there. The intubation apparatus that held the tube down in his lungs was taped securely around his mouth. The breathing machine made a soft sound in the background.

Though this entire day was a blur, she stood there stunned, yet determined to stay calm. It seemed impossible to believe that she might never see his brilliant blue eyes smiling out at her again. She kept dozens of thoughts and fears at bay while she did her best to be as “awake and present” as she could manage.

This was time for “soul talk.” She remained silent as she reached out with her heart energy to touch his. Yes, she could feel him there. After awhile it was time to go. The doctor had been watching and simply nodded respectfully. He said he would call her if there was anything new to report.

*****

Layne called the hospital first thing in the morning. His condition had improved and he was off the breathing machine. He would be moved to the Heart Hospital on Monday to meet his surgeon and prepare for surgery.

In the meantime, Paul and Layne’s longtime friend, Pamela, had flown over from Honolulu to be with and support them during this time and remained with them through this ordeal until Paul was released from the hospital.

As it turns out, Paul’s condition was congenital because he was born with a bicuspid valve with two flaps instead of the normal three. Over time this condition produced a smaller opening for his aorta to provide the necessary oxygen for his body and brain.

The four hour operation was successful. The usual recovery time in the hospital is five to seven days, but Paul’s recovery was going so well, he was released only four days later, on Sunday July 3.

His full recovery will take three to five months for all the parts to heal from such an invasive procedure. He’s taking a ton of new and mysterious meds that have to be monitored weekly for their effect on his blood to avoid clotting.

Paul’s prognosis is great. The doctors say after his recovery he should be feeling fifteen years younger. The affects of his unknown heart condition have been taking its toll on him for several years.

*****

So, though this shocking and unexpected crisis scared the daylights out of both of us and there are yet many challenges ahead to navigate, we are optimistic about the future.

Some well-meaning folks have asked questions or made comments about the “meaning” of this event and the “lessons” to be learned from it.

Who knows? For us, this is not a time for idle or superficial metaphysical speculation. What we do know is that we are in a state of deep love and profound connection with each other in a state of wonder, curiosity and gratitude, perhaps best expressed in some of our early lessons from A Course in Miracles.

For example:

Lesson 2 - I have given everything I see . . . all the meaning that it has for me. Paying attention to our minds and any automatic fearful interpretations that arise and realizing it is safe to not know as we let them go.

Lesson 25 – I do not know what anything is for. Allowing this truth to sink in as we release any need to control or figure anything out.

Right now our time horizon is very close. Our focus is on getting through each day at hand with as much love and appreciation as we can muster. There are many new things to pay attention to; Paul’s new medications, various doctor’s appointments and new ways of being in the world as Paul recovers. Paul has been directed by his surgeon to not work for the next few months.

Some friends have graciously offered to “do anything they can” to help. Since Paul is not supposed to drive for four to six weeks, mostly this has been driving Paul to his appointments, cooking meals, shopping, picking up new prescriptions from the pharmacy and reminding him to take it easy and to allow himself to relax into occasional feelings of helplessness. The deep fatigue has passed and he is taking a little time to be off of his oxygen. Everyday there is improvement.

There are some people we would especially like to thank for their loving attention above and beyond anything expected:

• Robin Rider for being there from day one in the emergency room and throughout  this crisis.
• Ardyth Brock for fielding the many phone calls and e-mails from people all over the world expressing their concern and for keeping them posted on Paul’s condition and progress and letting us know about the flood of love pouring in.
• Pamela and William Noyes for flying in all the way from Hawaii to lovingly support Layne through the ordeal of Paul’s hospitalization and surgery.
• Jim Kinney and Jennifer Peters for showing up to share their love in the emergency room.
• Daniel Quat and Dawn Hamilton for generously and graciously driving all the way across town several times to pick up and deliver Paul to various appointments.
• Andrew Hogan for driving down from Denver to stay in our guest house for the next several weeks to help Layne take care of Paul, running errands, shopping and delivering Paul to appointments.

We are beyond blessed to have been the recipients of the love, blessings and healing intentions of many thousands of people around the world. We feel it deeply and for that we continue to be truly grateful.

Most of our plans for the future have been put on hold for now.

More to come . . .

It’s June 1 and this is our first blog post of the year! It’s not our usual style to have such a lapse in communication with our readers, but there’s a good reason for it that we’ll touch on briefly.

We find ourselves in the same place so many people are in now-a-days, looking at how to adapt to changing life conditions. For some people what has changed is their house blew away in a tornado. For others, they have lost their job and they have to find a new way of making an income. For some it’s just an eerie feeling outside their peripheral sensors that something needs to change because their life just doesn’t “feel right” anymore.

But, no matter what the changing life conditions are, the challenge is essentially the same. That is, “How can I/we make the best choices for everyone concerned while staying true to our Soul’s purpose?”

When we first took our work from seminar rooms to teleclasses on the Internet and from our consultation room to telephone coaching, we had the distinct pleasure and privilege of learning directly from “the father of modern professional coaching” himself, Thomas Leonard (http://www.bestofthomas.com/blog/).

We ran across an article he wrote about a decade ago, that speaks  to our current needs and it sparked some new thinking for us.

In this article he distinguishes the difference between living a life and having a lifestyle. He poses a key question worth asking ourselves, “How much of my life is being consumed by my lifestyle?”

Thomas suggests that “Lifestyles are expensive to support and can prevent you from evolving.”

He continues, “If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and supporting your lifestyle more than saving money, your lifestyle is too expensive. You’re trapped in it; you must keep working in the job you have, in order to afford your lifestyle. As long as you feel the pull to fund a lifestyle and you can’t afford to stop working, your rate of development/evolution will be much slower than it could be. Rapid personal development occurs when you have the time, space and reserves to afford to experiment with new ways of thinking, working and living. If you’re living wonderfully, yet close to the edge, you can’t really afford to progress in some very important ways, and you probably won’t be attractive. A lifestyle is generally seductive; a person is attractive. Take your pick. (Note: If you have plenty of reserves, enjoy your lifestyle completely! But if not, simplify.)”

To clarify the above, what Thomas means when he says “you probably won’t be attractive” doesn’t have anything to do with your physical attractiveness or the way you look. He’s referring to your capacity to attract what you want into your life.

Spoken like the true visionary financial planner he was!

The concern Thomas points out here is one that we are not only seeing in many of our friends, colleagues and clients of late, but we are also confronting this in our own life.

Sometimes we find ourselves in difficult circumstances due to our own shortsightedness, sometimes out of being thrust into unexpected life circumstances brought about by conditions totally outside of our control.

Who of us hasn’t witnessed the recent destruction wrought by the forces of nature? When events occur that are beyond our comprehension we usually are left to our automatic, reflexive interpretations, which isn’t usually the best approach!

It was about a year ago now that Paul experienced the aggravation of a hidden health condition that resulted in his not being able to work at his usual pace.

His health continued to be a problem throughout last summer and up to the present. One of the most frustrating things about that was the fact that not one doctor or health care practitioner could give us a definitive diagnosis.

One of the most alarming symptoms of Paul’s illness, besides the physical pain, was loss of memory and cognitive function, making it difficult to continue working in our business. Mounting medical expenses without positive results were also taking their toll.

Clearly, something had to give as this was (and continues) taking a toll on every part of our life — and our lifestyle. Only now are we in a place where we are beginning to have enough perspective to write about it.

It has long been our practice as teachers, coaches and authors to communicate as transparently as possible from our own experience. We are not academics or theoreticians, we are researchers, experimenters and practitioners, using our own lives and relationship, workshops and trainings, as our laboratory.

Having been in the public eye working face to face with groups large and small, our successes and failures, learning experiences all, were in plain sight for all to see. Everything became grist for the mill and real life teaching examples, all
gladly shared.

In short, Paul’s illness has brought both of us to the limit of our resources financially, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Over the last few months we have moved from living on the edge to falling off of it.

We have some tough choices to make. Choices become clearer by asking questions.

Our questions are:

Moving from Santa Fe? As it turns out, Santa Fe is not the best place for Paul to heal. Should
we rent our house or let it go?

Change our work in some way? Should Layne find some corporate work or should we both stay focused on our vision to bring affordable evolutionary relationship education to the global marketplace via the Internet? Can we do both at the same time?

Change our lifestyle in some way? Well, that leads us to more questions. How? What could that look like? How can we stay true to our values of soulful relating, love and contribution to the greater whole, while we make some BIG changes in the way our life is designed?

Our question for you is:

How can you find the important choice points that will take you to a future of fulfillment AND also help you navigate the seas of change you find yourself in?

Even though it may feel like you’re on a big river as it accelerates directly into the rapids, and your adrenaline is high because there’s a lot at stake, it’s important to find the calm center inside of you and get some spiritual perspective. Clarify
your choice points by asking yourself and your loved ones some new, life changing questions. Be alert to the tendency to become gripped by any automatic, reflexive interpretations from your past that could limit your creativity and resourcefulness and could make things worse.

Here are a few questions you might consider to jump start your thinking:

• Am I working to maintain a lifestyle or am I truly living my life?
• Am I pushing myself so hard that it limits my ability to be present with the people and experiences I love – and that I say I am working hard for?
• What could I give up right now that is costing me too much, either financially or energetically?
• What couldhappen if I re-evaluated the choices that have brought me to this point?

Please share with us and our other readers some of the powerful questions you have asked yourself below.

And stay tuned for continued updates and new content . . .

Note: The following post is from a recent newsletter by David Spangler, a writer and spiritual teacher whose work we have followed from the beginning of our relationship. This piece is relevant to how communication and connection with one another is dramatically changing in the 21st century.

Facefields

by David Spangler – (c) 2010

My youngest daughter, Maryn, has been having a companionable summer palling about with her “posse” of girl friends. They spend most days together, and when they are apart, they are texting each other. One afternoon as she was sitting reading in our living room, her phone kept buzzing as one friend or another sent her a text message. Her own thumbs were in constant motion replying, giving new meaning to the phrase “she was all thumbs.”

I asked her, “Why don’t you and your friends just phone each other and talk. Wouldn’t that be faster and easier?”

Maryn sweetly answered what must have seemed an antediluvian question from her out-of-fashion Dad who doesn’t even own a cell phone, much less use one for texting. “If we called each other,” she said, “we’d have to have something to talk about.”

“But aren’t you talking to each other when you’re texting?”

“Oh, no,” she replied. “We not talking. We’re connecting.”

Growing up overseas in North Africa, we didn’t always have a phone, and when we did, using it was not something we took lightly. This was especially true for long distance calls. If we did call someone outside our local calling area, it was always a special occasion, and my Dad would hover with a watch making sure we didn’t talk longer than three minutes, after which the rates would go up dramatically. Phones were not social media in my family; they were instruments for conveying information quickly and succinctly. If you simply wanted to “connect,” you wrote a letter.

The kind of trivial, stream of consciousness chatter I can find on Facebook or Twitter would have been unimaginable for me as a child. Indiscriminately broadcasting your slightest activity, thought or feeling to the world anytime you felt like it was not only technically impossible when I was growing up, but it was also way beyond some cultural and psychological threshold for reasonable behavior. I still feel some of that; when I was introduced to Twitter, I found it difficult to imagine its value or why someone would want to spend their time sending and receiving tweets. But then, I have a hard time coming up with sound bites for interviews, too. I am not noted amongst my friends for succinctness.

But without overly romanticizing the phenomenon or making more of it than it may warrant, I do feel that the emerging and evolving arena of social media such as Facebook marks something significant going on in human consciousness. It has to do with the difference between communication for the purpose of conveying information and communication intended to create communion and to build connection. When I used a phone as a kid, it was for the former purpose; as my daughter informed me, when she uses her phone in texting mode, it’s for the latter.

Television, smart phones, and the Internet all bring instant news and data into my life. I can feel overwhelmed. But I also notice an interesting phenomenon: having information about something isn’t at all the same as knowing about it or feeling connected to it. Pure information—words, images, voices funneled into my awareness through electronic media—can be strangely distancing. It renders its subject abstract. I know about something but I don’t really know it. When I see on the nightly news villages in Pakistan ravaged by the monsoon floods, I have information about something that is happening in my world, but do I feel connected to it? Having the information can make me feel that I am participating in my world, but am I? I can feel like I’m part of my world when in fact I’m as separate from it as ever.

If we are awash in information, we are not necessarily equally deepened in our sense of connectedness. If I receive a tweet from someone that says he is having lunch or she is out shopping, do I feel I am really participating in that person’s life? Do I feel any more whole with him or with her? It can just be a modern version of voyeurism, knowledge without participation; it gives me information without connection.

What I realize when talking with my daughter is that she gets this distinction. She’s very clear that her texting, for example, is basically not about information but about connection. It’s more like reaching out in a dark, foggy night to touch a friend whom you cannot see and being reassured that they are there. And talking with others who are involved in social media, I find this is not an uncommon experience.

We human beings suffer from disconnectedness: we are disconnected from each other, we are disconnected from the natural world. The result is violence, a lack of wholeness, a piecemeal approach to life which at its most basic leads me to look out for number one and heaven help everyone or everything else. In Martin Buber’s wonderful imagery, lack of real connectedness leads us to transform a “thou,” a being to be treasured and communed with, into an “it,” something to be used and manipulated, then discarded when I’m finished.

I don’t pretend at all that phenomena like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or any other social media will solve this problem; in some ways, they aggravate the problem, substituting real connection with a kind of faux friendship and with information that conveys a false intimacy. They are like junk food for the soul, exciting but providing no lasting or real nourishment.

But, on the other hand, they also are providing a platform on which deeper connectedness can be built. They are seeds around which energetic fields can develop, linking and uniting people in ways that allow for a flow of subtle energy as well as of information. They are a training ground in making and exploring connections, allowing a growing interaction between people on a global level that nothing else in our culture is providing in the same way.

I have recently been reading an excellent book called The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness by Dr. Christopher M. Bache. In it he chronicles and explores his discovery of how fields of consciousness come into being amongst his students and himself. These fields represent a level of participation and shared awareness above and beyond the normal channels of everyday communication. I am aware of these fields myself in my own classes, and they play an important part of my teaching strategy. Unlike Dr. Bache who works in a university, I teach online most of the time. What has always been amazing and wonderful for me is that even though the participants in a class are separated, sometimes by thousands of miles, a field of collective consciousness still develops between us. We become connected in subtle, energetic ways as well as informationally.

These fields develop faster and more clearly when there is intent behind them, but this is not essential. They can emerge out of persistent and sustained acts of connection, such as happens between my daughter and her friends as they text together. And these fields can become means of transmission for any number of subtle energies and phenomena, such as love, blessing, even healing.

By many accounts, we are heading into a future dominated by climate change, environmental challenges, and social and economic vulnerability. It is a future that can be met and transformed drawing not only on our outer skills and efforts but on the power inherent in fields of subtle energy that can be created when human beings are in true connection with each other and with their world. Learning to create and use these fields as a form of subtle activism is, I feel, a vital skill to understand and develop.

And it begins with learning how to connect.

I believe there is an intuitive realization within our species that this is so, and this realization is giving birth to the many forms of social media emerging in our world which allow us to explore ways and forms of connection that have not been possible on such a scale or with such intimacy before. They are giving us tools which can in time enable us to form the energetic, participatory, shared fields of consciousness and subtle activism that can truly make a difference. If so, then one day, MySpace may become MyFields and Facebook will become…well, FaceFields, anyone?

Since 1964 David Spangler has been an author and teacher of spirituality. He began his career at nineteen as the keynote speaker at a national conference in Phoenix, Arizona, on “Youth and the New Age.”

In 1970 he visited the Findhorn Foundation community in Northern Scotland where he was invited to become its co-director and to be a teacher-in-residence. He lived and worked in the community until 1973, becoming the founder of its educational program.

His books include Emergence; The Call; Everyday Miracles; Parent as Mystic, Mystic as Parent; Blessing: The Art and the Practice; The Story Tree; Manifestation: Creating the Life You Love; and The Incarnation Card Deck.

You may learn more about David and his work at www.lorian.org

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

Our First Website - 1999

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.

Our First Home in Santa Fe - 2004

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.

New Possibilities for Connecting Around the World

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?

Our Home - Blue Marble Earth

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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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.

Releasing and Letting Go Into the Future

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?

Tuning in to the Guidance of Spirit

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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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.

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.

APEP Formal Graduation

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

New APEP Grads Show Off Their Certificates

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.

Couple Dancing at a Community Patio Party

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.

Evolutionary Relationships Diagram

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.

Wile E. Coyote & the Roadrunner

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.

Layne wondering, is it over, yet?

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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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.

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.

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.

Facing the Mountain of the Great Unknown

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.

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.

Paul & Layne on Top of the Great Pyramid

We climbed the Great Pyramid of Giza to watch the sunset at the exact time the full moon began to rise on the horizon behind us. We sat atop the Great Pyramid, entranced by the setting sun and then turned our heads to watch the full moon ascending into the twilight sky. We felt fixed on the same axis of those celestial bodies, a part of something greater than our earthly existence.

Climbing those four foot high stones, and occasionally leaping through open space to get to the next spot on the path upward, was an initiation in itself, especially if you have vertigo as Layne has.

The Great Pyramid is 42 stories high and made of granite blocks chest high. We had long since developed the habit of crossing the lines of safety in so many other areas of our life, and we were getting rather good at it. We had risked the comfortable for the sublime more times than we could count.

Our last night we spent alone, locked deep inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, before leaving Egypt early the next morning. It was a prayerful vigil invoking the powers of Christ Consciousness and dedicating our lives to the service of humanity.

It turned out to be a rather humorous experience, but that tale is for another post.

The point is we were relentless in our pursuit of evolving ourselves and being of greater service. We were as much in love with wisdom and the luminous intelligence of Spirit as we were with one another.

After two months we returned to our Empyrean Community and continued our work with the six-month Intensive Personal Evolution Program, Celebration! Workshops and Teacher Training Programs.

A couple of years later, in 1983, we were ordained as ministers in a large New Thought church, Science of Mind International, in which the minister had a thriving national television ministry. Science of Mind is the title of the philosophical text written by Ernest Holmes, the founder of Religious Science.

The New Thought movement emerged in the United States in New England in the mid-19th century and is generally attributed to Phineas Quimby.

Our ordination ceremony required us to declare our life vision for our “ministry” to a large congregation of two thousand people. We poured our deepest convictions and spiritual ideals into crafting our vision.

Reading our vision to this celebratory crowd was powerful, glamorous and fun! But, unbeknownst to us, it also triggered the tumultuous and transformative changes necessary to fulfill that vision.

We weren’t as far along as we imagined ourselves to be. There was deeper work to do.

Soon after this we created Empyrean Ministries. There were four centers throughout the USA and Canada offering six month programs. We turned the leadership of the Empyrean Community in Hawaii over to others to run. Then we moved from Hawaii to Santa Fe, New Mexico. We taught one IPEP in Santa Fe and set up a ministry there. 

We were riding high. Little did we know this was prelude to an evolutionary jump that shook the conceptual ground on which we stood.

What followed caught us completely by surprise.

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.

Also, there are more pictures to come for this post. We’ll probably create a gallery (like the Celebration! gallery a few posts back) because there are just so many pictures of this amazing journey!

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.

In the privacy of our coaching room and in groups where families, co-workers, lovers, ex-lovers and friends gathered to use their relationships to grow in wisdom and love, we had the extraordinary privilege of listening to all their secrets.

People were encouraged to be open and honest, to reveal their innermost thoughts, feelings, impulses, perceptions and opinions.

We were all intentionally using the energy of love and forgiveness to heal our individual pasts and create a future more to our liking.

Being that transparent was often very difficult. We had all developed masks that we had been hiding behind. To bring our true selves out of the shadows required an act of willingness and will.

It was a superb training ground for visionary relationship educators.

Our students had complex, intertwined relationships with one another. The intricate web of unconscious relationship patterns was fully illuminated for us to study. We were able to observe the invisible creative workings of the relationships of an entire community of several hundred people.

Hidden unconscious codes are the mysterious means that determine the quality of everyone’s relationships. And we got to observe those patterns from every imaginable angle.

We had the unusual opportunity to connect the dots from a myriad of seemingly unconnected events, from dozens and dozens of people’s lives, across generations. These observations explained in profound ways how our relationships are not coincidental or accidental.

There is something so intelligent, so loving and so miraculous using our relationships like a classroom – a classroom in which we can all learn to bring forth the highest and best in ourselves and each other.

We were completely absorbed and enthralled watching these complex webs of relationship being woven and taking form before our eyes.

In our early days together we had seen how unresolved issues from the past were being acted out in our relationship with one another. But, to see a whole community doing the exact same dance was a revelation and a glorious spectacle.

In hindsight we can see that we were truly blessed to be living in this rarified sphere of human relating.

We were in love with one another, in love with life and in love with the wisdom we were receiving.

Most love affairs have their ups and downs.

Our most powerful feelings arise in our relationships . . .

Who doesn’t know the confusion of misunderstandings and the pain when another has unexpectedly failed you?

Or the relief and excitement when you make up and things start turning out again.

And the torture of feeling unexpectedly betrayed by the most important person in your life and you can’t figure out how to make things right.

Then there are all the feelings that can go with recovering from a breakup, divorce or the death of a loved one.

Diving deep and figuring out the agony and the ecstasy of relationships had become our full time job. And we had imagined that a soulful wisdom was the answer to all of these relationships dilemmas.

How could we possibly have known that our love affair with wisdom was vulnerable to all the same feelings of a human love affair?

We sincerely hope you are enjoying this stroll with us down memory lane. To be honest, this is the first time we have written about any of this and we are surprised at some of the feelings arising as we share this with you!

There is much more to come and we hope you will stay with us. There is purposeful good to this story that may have profound implications for you! Stay tuned for details of a big announcement coming soon.

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 any of these posts to participate. We are especially happy that members of the Hawaii Empyrean Community have found their way here and have added their voices to this conversation.

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.

Pamela Ney - 1979

With IPEP III, we added a Teachers Training to run along side it. Pamela Noyes was the instructor for the Teachers Training.

When we first started coming to Hawaii she had been the production manager for the Hawaii LRTs. Our friendship with her felt like it began lifetimes ago and in this lifetime it just picked up where it had left off before.

She has been our greatest support over the last 30 years. She was the one who would hold us when we wept from the fatigue of living at the edge of our capacities. She would shine the light when we felt we had lost our way. She was a soul partner in our Empyrean vision and her strength, commitment, heart and creativity were one of the strongest factors in the success of the Empyrean community.

There was an unexpected side effect from our little consciousness experiment on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. People met in our living room, fell in love, caught the Empyrean Vision and took our teachings out into the world. They went out two by two to the mainland and they taught six month programs and trained teachers, who then went out and started other programs and taught other teachers.

We have started thinking of it like generations in a family tree. Every once in a while we will get an e-mail from one of our “great, great, great grand children who are teaching programs patterned after ours. At last count, and that was ten years ago, there were programs in 13 cities around the world from Canada to England to Australia.

We have lost track of it all now. Though it would be nice to see a map of the Empyrean Family Tree, just to see how big it did grow. If you are a descendent from the Hawaiian Empyrean family we would love to hear from you.

Even though we were quite intentional in creating Empyrean and we certainly seemed to have had a vote in how it all turned out, mostly it felt like we were along for the ride, while a celestial hand rested on the tiller.

As our commitment to the Empyrean experiment and vision grew, we deepened the commitment in our own relationship by getting married. After four years of being together in a romantic and creative partnership we could hardly have imagined, we were married April 20, 1980, surrounded by family and our loving community. (You can see a few pictures of our wedding below.)

Yes, we are still married and the vision of a new humanity in communion with their own souls and joined on a common path of wisdom and heart still blazes in the core of our being. Naturally, we are still learning and growing ourselves. And what we taught then has been refined, codified and in some places outgrown.

Change is the nature of things. After Empyrean in Hawaii there were three more eras in our development as teachers.

We are now poised for the sixth era. We are excited and our commitment is being re-energized as we get ready for what feels like the biggest and most ambitious effort of our life.

Stay tuned for more . . .

We are very interested in your thoughts and feelings about this story. What does it bring up for you to read about this kind of experience?

If you happen to be reading this and you were a part of the Empyrean Community in Hawaii during this time, we hope you have enjoyed our stroll down memory lane! We would love to read your comments.

To leave a comment click on the Add Comment link at the upper right of this post. If others have already left comments, the link will simply say, Comments.

A sense of new beginnings was ruffling through our psyches. We loved teaching The Loving Relationships Training, but we were unexpectedly swept into the next stage of our development as teachers.

As weekend seminar leaders we travelled all over the US, with new students at every event. Most of them we would never see again. We began to wonder what could happen if we worked deeper with the same people over an extended period of time.

A group of students who share our values of spiritual love, emotional honesty and direct contact with the divine within, started to gather around us. We developed our own educational company called Empyrean Enterprises, Inc.

Paul & Layne Aglow with Love

We yearned to explore the outer reaches of personal and spiritual evolution with a bonded group who were committed not only to their personal process, but also dedicated to bringing out the best and highest for every one of their fellow travelers.

Empyrean is a word that comes from the Greek meaning the highest heaven, the celestial vault, the sphere of pure light, the abode of the gods. Enterprise means a bold undertaking. Thus, Empyrean Enterprises was a bold undertaking to that place in consciousness where the Divine lives in all of us.

Heaven, we learned from our studies of Catherine Ponder’s work, means expansion. Heaven is a state of expanded consciousness. We were definitely intent on the fast track to expanding our consciousness and sometimes it felt like we were holding on for dear life!

In 1978 our Empyrean Experiment launched with a group of eight students enrolled in a six month program that met 18 hours every week! It was called the Intensive Personal Evolution Program or IPEP for short.

Intense is the perfect word for it. As teachers and entrepreneurs we  were playing full out, stretching our capacities intellectually, emotionally and psychically like we never had before. It was challenging and demanding, but the results for the students were astonishing. So we did another one.

IPEP II had 14 students and we had to move to larger quarters. We rented a house at the back of a lush tropical valley bounded by steep mountains. During that program we created a weekend workshop called Celebration! It was a theatrical, transformational, spiritual extravaganza!

We had dramatic mood lighting, fog machines, chorus lines with high kicks, prayer dancing and a curriculum that stretched each student into new depths of emotional honesty and freedom.

Layne sang several times, a torch singer, pouring her soul into spiritual love songs, in a solo spotlight. She revealed a previously hidden talent that brought the room to tears and to their feet in applause.

The IPEP students served as the production team for Celebration! They joined us, their teachers, in co-creating a sacred space for dramatic personal transformation. It was quite simply, SPECTACULAR! SPECTACULAR!

Trying to find the words to capture the magic of it all seems impossible. Frequently through out the weekend of Celebration! a spiritual energy of such exquisite power and refinement literally filled the room with sparkling particles of pink light that people would actually see and feel. Whoa, those were some, over the top, celestial, special effects!

Our Celebration Team put their whole heart and soul into every task required of them. We were constantly amazed at how each of them imbued the simplest of tasks with loving care.

Being greeted and escorted to your seat by our six foot four, movie star handome airline captain whose heart is as big as the all outdoors, was the most majestic, welcoming experience you could possibly imagine.

For introductions at the beginning of Celebration! each student was given a single rosebud to add to the growing bouquet in a silver champagne bucket, placed center stage. The assistant who placed the flower in each participant’s hand could easily have been mistaken for an angel on holiday, radiating compassion and care with every look.

The whole team was joined by a common vision to lift everyone in the room, students and teachers alike, to an experience of profound love, an uncommon love that transforms problems into spring boards for conscious evolution and inspires and energizes a sustained commitment to personal healing.

The photos below are from several Celebration! experiences from 1978 through 1983. If you click on a photo it will open in a larger window.

(All photos are (c) Tom Gillen)

The love we had come to know in our personal relationship with one another had extended itself into a community of kindred spirits. We were participants in and witnesses to the miracle power of love. We had the direct experience that when love is shared it multiplies exponentially.

You may wonder, as we did, the implications for the world at large if it just kept expanding. It’s a big IF, but our experiment, both in our personal relationship and in our new, growing community was (and still is) all about playing with big IF’s!

We are very interested in your thoughts and feelings about this story and the photos from Celebration! What does it bring up for you to read about this kind of experience?

If you happen to be reading this and you were a part of the Empyrean Community in Hawaii during this time, we hope you have enjoyed our stroll down memory lane! We would love to read your comments.

To leave a comment click on the Add Comment link at the upper right of this post. If others have already left comments, the link will simply say, Comments.

When Layne told me she was breaking up with me, I could hardly believe it. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, though. I had already been divorced twice and I was only 29, so I was used to my relationships with women not working out. I just had thought my relationship with Layne was going to be different.

What really surprised me was my response. I actually felt calm inside when she said she didn’t want to see me any more because she was committing to Gabriel. It felt strange to feel so deeply connected to her yet unattached and like I really could release her and let her go at the same time.

It was clear to me by the way I was feeling and responding to Layne’s announcement that the work I had been doing on myself the past year was truly healing my deepest fears. I reflected on how far I had come in such a short time.

Paul in 1974 Before Emotional Healing Work

I recalled my life before I came to Theta House where I met Layne.

I got married while I was still in art school. After graduation I drove a cab and built a photography studio with some buddies from school and worked for a prominent wedding photographer.

When my wife got pregnant our relationship began to deteriorate. We went into therapy that didn’t seem to do much but make me feel even more guilty and terrified than I already felt. It got so bad that we ended up on welfare and Food Stamps with a new born son. It seemed like my wife and I were fighting constantly. My self esteem and self confidence were subterranean.

I thought of myself as a spiritual person. I spent hours in metaphysical bookstores reading books on spirituality. I went to the San Francisco Zen Center to meditate. I also believed my spirituality would eventually help me resolve the pain and fear I was in, but now I was having my doubts as things went from bad to worse.

It was about this time that I learned about a personal growth center called Theta House which came highly recommended by a trusted friend. When I visited the place I liked what I saw and the people I met there. Maybe I could put aside my fear and distrust long enough to find out if they could help us.

I was intrigued by the healing and transformational processes they used there. I thought maybe they could help us since the therapy didn’t seem to be doing much good. I was looking for anything that could free us from the emotional pain and dysfunctional patterns that had us in a death grip.

Even though I was highly suspicious and distrustful, I decided to trust these people who seemed kind and loving and spoke with such confidence about their ability to help us. The only hitch was that my wife was not the least bit interested. In spite of my fear and distrust I felt called to explore this path and I traveled it without her.

I was guided through a series of profound emotional healing and consciousness expanding experiences that shifted my sense of who I was. All of a sudden a veil was lifted and the invisible was made visible to me.

 With the revelation came a passionate, all consuming determination to realize the potential for being someone who could create a meaningful life of happiness and contribution.

Paul in 1978 After Emotional Healing Work

I saw the hidden architecture of my life and why I had been suffering for so long.

I also saw how to change all of it. It was a revelation and I was elated that I had found this place and these people.

Looking back, there were two important factors that were critical to the success of my journey: having the right mentors and my ability to trust them and let them help me.

I had two mentors who guided me in very different ways. The first was Marshall and the second was Kyle. Marshall primarily facilitated my emotional healing. He cleared the way for all my spiritual ideas to take seat in my heart.

The fabric of my everyday life began to take on a new and welcome sense of calm and optimism about my future. Marshall helped me see myself and others more deeply and I began to “read” the hidden consciousness patterns that create a persons’ life and relationships.

Kyle taught me to work with groups. I learned how to focus and channel a healing energy into a room without falling over myself. It was like learning to surf on huge rolling waves of energy and consciousness. Kyle made it look easy, but keeping my balance atop that powerful force was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Kyle was brilliant and helped me grow beyond my father’s mind of poverty and failure to create more prosperity and success than I had ever imagined.

Later, when Sondra needed new trainers for The Loving Relationships Training, I was ready!

It’s only in hindsight that I can see the synchronistic convergence of mine and Layne’s separate paths. At about the same time, but before we met, we had each stepped into a world of deep emotional healing and expanding consciousness to have successful relationships.

Then we met, shared an unexpected mystical moment and fell deeply in love.

Oh yeah, back to the breaking up incident when Layne decided to stay with Gabriel . . . That lasted about two weeks. She told me it was the most miserable, unhappy two weeks of her life and she knew she had made a mistake! (Happy Dance!) She wanted to know if I could I find a way to take her back. The way she put it was she saw that Gabriel represented her past and I represented her future.

We decided to use our relationship as a proving ground for what we wanted passionately to believe was possible, but we had no way of really knowing if it was or not. We had to find out for ourselves.

We were experimental, creative and unstoppable in our commitment to realize the full potential of our love for one another. We were on a spiritual adventure together, filled with countless surprises and rich in drama.

All the seeds of hope and love and trust were bearing fruit in our life together as we sought to bring out the best in each other and to help others along the way. With our commitment to the LRT we imagined ourselves teaching it forever. We were completely unprepared for the sudden and unexpected change ahead.

What does this story bring up for you, if anything? Is there some part of your own life experience that resonates with what I share here? I appreciate any comments or questions you care to share.

You can click the Comments link to the right at the top of this post. Also, please feel to share this by retweeting it or using one of the links below.

The movie below was created as an assignment for a digital storytelling program in which participants were to create a short movie about a personal spiritual experience. In fact, it is about an experience I had following one of my early Rebirthing experiences in a hot tub at Theta House.

I had to write the script, select the images and music and record the voice over. It was curiously easy and all consuming for me. You could know me for 50 years and never hear me tell this story. It is so deeply personal, repeating it over and over again would have ruined it for me.

I’m glad I found an artistic way of sharing it that brought new life to the memory of the first time I heard my Soul speak to me. I hope you enjoy it.

Who I Am Becoming

by Layne Cutright
(c) 2003 All Rights Reserved

I would love to know how watching this makes you feel. What kind of thoughts does it bring up for you? Please feel free to share your comments by clicking on the Add Comments link at the top right of this post.

Down below to the right there is a link to “retweet” this post if you have a Twitter account. If you like this (or any previous posts), please consider sharing it by retweeting it. The share button will open a table of lots of other ways to share this, like Facebook and many others.

 If you’ve read “our story” on our website you know just a little bit about a pivotal event in our lives. We revealed a little about a ‘mystical moment’ we shared in 1976 that sparked a romance, a vision and a ‘relationship experiment’ that is still going on today, 33 years later.

But, as you might guess, that’s not the whole story.

Now, we feel compelled to share with you experiences and events that only those closest to us have known anything about.

You see, there have been five distinct passages in our life together and we are now on the threshold of our sixth passage. But, for this imminent passage to make any sense it needs to be threaded to the prior five.

Even though we were both relatively young when we met (Paul 29 & Layne 24), we were already pretty well bruised, battered and discouraged from our separate experiences of hopeful relationships gone bad. We had both experienced the pain of loss and disappointment over and over and over, again.

Was it chance or serendipity or fate or a soul agreement that brought us together in such a dramatic fashion? Who knows? What we do know is that we were blessed to have come into contact with some extraordinary people, a loving and supportive community and some amazing opportunities – and we took good advantage of them!

One of those opportunities was a program called The Loving Relationships Training created by Sondra Ray and Marshall Summers. At the time it was the only weekend workshop in the Bay Area, maybe even the whole country, solely about relationships.

We each attended the training as participants separately before we met. Then, after we knew each other we helped produce the training by being on the logistics and production team. With the popularity of Sondra’s new book, Loving Relationships, there was suddenly a demand for her training all around the country.

Paul and Layne Teaching Their First Seminar Together in 1977

By this time, we each had spent more time in The Loving Relationships Training (LRT) than anyone else, along with our friend, Michael.

Sondra and Marshall had broken up and gone their separate ways and Sondra needed people to lead the training to meet the growing demand nationwide. That was a huge opportunity for the two of us and Michael.

Less than a year after meeting and ‘falling in love’ we were teaching about relationships in front of seminar rooms of up to 100+ participants all over the US.

One of the great things about the LRT was that it was always taught in tandem by two people in front of the room. As trainers, we were supposed to be modeling and demonstrating the teachings in our own relationships with one another.

The three of us would teach together in different combinations – Paul and Layne, Layne and Michael, Michael and Paul. It was an emotionally and psychologically rigorous training for us leading that workshop because it demanded openness, authenticity and congruence simply by virtue of the material.

The participants would see through any kind of act or falsehood. This wasn’t something that could be faked and it definitely wasn’t about ‘looking good’.

If any of us got ‘plugged in’, that is, if any unresolved, historical emotional pain got triggered, there was no hiding it! The space was such that we had to reveal what was happening with us. We had to be real and deal with whatever came up, right there in the training, in front of the entire room full of participants and assistants.

That was a very big part of what created the emotional and psychic safety for the participants to heal and grow in the workshop. Sometimes the atmosphere would become so charged with emotional healing energy that practically everyone in the training would literally fall out of their chairs onto the floor in wailing paroxysms of emotional and relational healing.

This is not an exaggeration or hyperbole. Imagine a room full of 50 to 75 or so composed adults sitting in their chairs in rows facing the front of the room where two trainers are sitting in directors chairs, their training manuals secure on music stands in front of them with a vase of flowers on a round table behind them, simply talking about content so psychically and emotionally potent, that those adults begin to tremble and cry and  and wail. And, yes, fall out of their chairs onto the floor, literally, helpless to do anything but surrender and go through the experience – a life changing transformational experience.

We did not hypnotize them or put them into any kind of trance with some secret voodoo. It was, in fact, a dramatic example of people COMING OUT of a lifelong trance that had held them in its grip.

But, after a couple of years of experiencing this over and over again, weekend after weekend, with different groups of people, this level of cathartic healing and personal transformation was becoming common place.

Most of those people we never saw again after the weekend. We wondered what happened to them and their relationships. We wondered if such dramatic change lasted for them.

We felt incredibly fortunate to have been given this profound experience and opportunity to facilitate such healing for others so early in our own transformational process. We had definitely grabbed hold of a bullet train and we weren’t letting go!

Yet, we found ourselves yearning for something more . . .

Whether this blog post is your first time hearing of us or if you have been following us for awhile, perhaps your being here right now reading this is no accident. Regardless, you may want to stay tuned for the rest of the story – there is much more to come!

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.

Click Here to download PDF of illustration

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Daniel J. Boorstin, PhD – Author, Historian, Attorney

Unlike learning to drive a car, which you were not born knowing how to do, relationship success seems like it should just come naturally. After all, you were born into relationship and were raised in relationships. You’ve been in relationships of one kind or another your entire life. What could be more natural?

Unfortunately, what comes naturally to many people is not always the wisest choice. For most of us our relationships school was watching how the grownups did it. We modeled our parents for good or ill and our childhood modeling is a force to be reckoned with if we choose to learn to consciously create our own version of happily ever after.

Some of you may not know we still have a private practice. We’ve had a private practice for 30 years and it’s still one of the most satisfying parts of our professional life together. We work with young couples just starting out in life who want to learn what it takes to create a fulfilling relationship. And we work with couples in trouble who have tried everything, and yet the same old problems keep recycling themselves with slight variations.

John and Alice got married right out of college almost twenty years ago. When they came to us Alice was in her early forties and John a few years older. They had three children, two still at home and the oldest was leaving for college.

When they contacted us for help they complained that the romance and feeling connected had long since gone out of their marriage. They had been to a couple of therapists which hadn’t worked out as well as they had hoped. “All we did was keep talking about the same stuff over and over again. And it never really went anywhere.” They had gotten just enough insight to move from the “ignorance is bliss stage” to the “Yikes! I’m not very good at this stage.”

The four stages of learning apply to creating relationships, just as they do to learning to be consistently good at just about anything.

John and Alice were stuck between stages one and two, Unconscious Incompetence and Conscious Incompetence. They would get a burst of enthusiasm to “improve their relationship” and then after they started practicing some new things they would feel frustrated and lose interest, or so it seemed.

What was actually causing the frustration was an unacknowledged judgment that they “shouldn’t” have to be learning at all – they should already know how to do it “right.” They loved each other – why was there any problem?

It’s a mindset they had absorbed from their culture without noticing, and it was getting in the way of being deeply honest with themselves and declaring themselves “beginners” at relationships.

Once they moved beyond that prideful place and allowed themselves to become learners with a beginner’s mind, they felt freer to make mistakes in their practice and then learn from those mistakes. That’s what happens in stage two; you make mistakes because you are growing beyond your comfort zone. You are supposed to make mistakes in stage two. If you aren’t making mistakes you aren’t doing it right.

They developed a new patience with one another and stopped judging themselves for not being as far along as they thought they “should” be. It was a tender moment that day they stopped judging their relationship and decided to love it AND help one another learn.

They decided to make it an adventure rather then something to get through. They had a new determination to practice their new skills regularly and find some new ways of solving old problems.

Pretty soon after that, the silent resignation they had been living with disappeared and they were “lit up from the inside,” as they put it. Of course, it was deeply gratifying for us to watch them let their love for one another take them down a new path of invigorating discovery.

They were actually having a good time with it. Their sessions with us were filled with a new and refreshing good natured humor, the kind that comes from not taking things too seriously. We all laughed a lot and they grew to stage three – Conscious Competence.

The spark of romance was back. The energy of discovery and fun was doing its magic and a renewed vitality was becoming the norm.

And so, they all lived happily ever after, right? You bet, as a matter of fact! Even while the ink was still drying as they kept applying their new skills to rewriting the old script.

There aren’t enough stories of what happily ever after really looks like. We all grew up thinking our love was supposed to be enough. But truly great relationships in these busy and demanding times require extraordinary means.

Essentially, what we really helped John and Alice to do was to create a new future on a path different from the one they had been on their entire lives. They hadn’t known they could do that . . . and then they learned.

Questions to ponder for comment: 

1. What was new for you in this post?
2. What was validated for you in this post?
3. How can you use what you learned in this post?
4. Do you have any questions about this post?

Learning to Drive

 Do you remember when you first learned to drive? 

How you could hardly wait to get your driver’s license?  Before that, driving a car did not interest you at all.

Sure, you rode in the car with your father or mother driving, but that happened without you being concerned in any way with what was involved in the activity of driving. You just got in the car with them and ended up wherever they were going without any awareness at all of the process of driving the car to get there.

Until you wanted to learn, driving a car did not exist for you as a distinct activity. And then one day it did and from then on you could hardly wait to learn! And either you took drivers education in high school or you learned from a private driving school or your father or some other relative taught you. There was no question that you needed a teacher because you could not teach yourself!

Once you started to learn you realized all the things you had to be aware of and pay attention to, all at the same time. If you’re old enough to have learned on a manual transmission, you remember how overwhelming it felt to manage the clutch and the gas and shifting all at the same time. And, doing it in such a way that the car didn’t lurch and stall. Which it did many times, no doubt!

Eventually, you learned to coordinate letting out the clutch, stepping on the gas, looking in the rearview mirror, watching where you were going and applying the brake without putting everyone through the windshield all at the same time. And doing all of this without stalling the car or running into anything. You might have been nervous and sweaty, but you were beginning to drive!

When you finally got your driver’s license you could drive by yourself without any one teaching or coaching or correcting you. And today you can drive a car, carry on conversations with passengers and listen to music all without a second thought. You can drive for hours without having to pay any conscious attention to all the myriad things that were so overwhelming when you were learning. Now driving is totally automatic for you.

Your driver’s license qualifies you at a minimal level of competence to drive a car. Before you could get your driver’s license you had to pass a written test and a road test demonstrating your knowledge of the rules of the road and your skill at maneuvering your vehicle without causing any damage to life or property. Beyond that, how well you drive a car depends upon how good your teacher was and how good of a student you were.

What we have just described here represents the four stages of learning relative to driving a car. These four stages apply to learning just about anything.

The four stages of learning are:

1. Unconscious Incompetence – you are not aware of the existence or relevance of the skill – you don’t know what you don’t know

2. Conscious Incompetence – you become aware of the existence and relevance of the skill and you may choose to learn it – you know there is something you don’t know

3. Conscious Competence – you have learned and can perform the skill without assistance – you know what you know but you have no mastery

4. Unconscious Competence – you become so practiced at the skill that it enters the unconscious parts of the brain – it becomes ‘second nature’ – the beginning of mastery

There is actually a fifth stage which we will touch on briefly in part two of this post.

So, what does this have to do with relationships? A lot, actually, only with some complicating twists. We’ll talk about that in our next post, so stay tuned . . .

Questions to ponder for comment: