Relationship Savvy Dialogues

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.

Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: Empyrean, Hawaii, healing, Paul and Layne, Relationships, transformation

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.

Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: community, Empyrean, Intensive Personal Evolution Program, Pamela Ney-Noyes, Paul and Layne Cutright, teacher, wedding

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.

Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne

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.

Continue reading »

written by Paul Cutright \\ tags: healing, mentors, Paul Cutright, relationship pain, transformation

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.

Continue reading »

written by Layne Cutright \\ tags: digital story, Layne Cutright, Rebirthing, spiritual awakening

 

The First Photo Paul Ever Made of Me - 1977

I was 23 years old and for two weeks straight I had been putting myself to sleep trying to figure out a painless and tidy way to end my life.

I could no longer bear the anguish of a breaking heart. I had to find a way to escape this “aching forever alone place” I was trapped in.

I remembered a place in San Francisco my roommate had taken me to visit. There were counselors there – nice people. One day I lifted my head up from the pile of used Kleenexes that had soaked up my tears and despair and reached for the phone.

I dialed the number for Theta House.

“I’ve been thinking of ways to kill myself.”

A warm male voice answered, “How soon can you get here?”

I drove the thirty minutes into the city, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. That was a trip that changed the course of my life. Theta House was the colorful, Victorian home of Leonard Orr, the founder of the Rebirthing Movement. One of his apprentices opened the door for me and I crossed the threshold into a mélange of unparalleled spiritual ideas. Here was where I would begin to learn the secrets of love and power.

I learned that the hurt in my heart wasn’t caused by my bad boy lover. Gabriel was my first love. We met when I was 17 and we had broken up and gotten back together more times than I could count. It was an addictive, high drama relationship that was destroying me and I still couldn’t let it go. He was a self destructive loser and I was in love with his potential.

Continue reading »

written by Layne Cutright \\ tags: abandonment, breaking up, Layne Cutright, Paul Cutright, relationship, relationship help, relationship pain

 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.

Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: emotional healing, love, Loving Relationships Training, LRT, Marshall Summers, Paul and Layne, relationship healing, Relationships, seminar, Sondra Ray, transformation, workshop

Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: four stages of learning, Paul and Layne, Relationships

“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.

Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: coaching, conscious incompetence, growth, learning, Relationships, unconscious incompetence

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.

Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: conscious competence, conscious incompetence, learning, Relationships, stages of learning, unconscious competence, unconscious incompetence