Relationship Savvy Dialogues

 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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Continue reading »

written by Paul Cutright \\ tags: Egypt, Great Pyramid, Greece, Israel, Nile, Paul and Layne, spiritual pilgrimage

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.

Continue reading »

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

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.

Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: extraordinary relationships, lessons learned, Paul and Layne, teachers