Relationship Savvy Dialogues

How Do We Reach Intimacy?

Each person seems to understand the intimate experience in his or her own way. In a sense it takes a journey of personal discovery to learn how to share intimacy with another person. Here are some guidelines that may help to define that journey –

Know Your Self: Get in touch with your own private experiences. In our stressed-out world this is often hard to do because our attention is directed outward much of the time. It helps to sit – doing nothing and being distracted by nothing – and spend time in reflection and introspection. Observe your thoughts and feelings. The brain has pleasure centers – close your eyes and imagine yourself experiencing pleasure. Become familiar with those parts of yourself that are strong and that feel whole and integrated. Learn to feel comfortable with the part of yourself that senses calmness, confidence and peace. (Some people like to spend a few minutes every night before bed, perhaps with just a candle burning, reflecting on the events of the day. Others prefer to keep a daily journal of their private thoughts and feelings.) Until you know your own private feelings, it is difficult to share them with someone else.

We cannot expect to be intimate with another when we are out of touch with our own internal experiences. Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: communication, health, Relationships, trust

Intimacy in Relationships is One Key to Emotional Health

Some of us search our entire lives for a feeling of oneness with another person. It’s hard to describe, really, what we search for, but we know it when we finally achieve it. Maybe we tire of that dark feeling of being ultimately alone as we struggle through life. If only there were someone else here, we say to ourselves, who could understand and share these burdens. Then it wouldn’t be so lonely. It wouldn’t be so hard.

Or perhaps, in our more positive moments, we want to share not just the burdens but our pleasures too, our strength and beauty. We want the powerful impact of our internal experience to have an impression on someone else, as if to say that we count, we are whole, and we want to impart this feeling to another person. Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: intimacy, intimate experiences, Relationships

We call it selfing, neither selfish nor selfless, but the perfect balance between the two. Selfing is the skill of being true to yourself and being in balance with your commitments to others. It can be a special challenge if your world is filled with many wonderful opportunities to say “yes” to and it feels difficult to choose between them. Or, it can be difficult if you have a hard time saying “no” to people. It can be helpful to remember that every time you say “yes” to something, you are also saying “no” to something or someone else, maybe without being aware of it. Many people are over-committed and they haven’t recognized it yet. They are simply feeling the symptoms. The symptoms are recurrently feeling conflicted in what you “should” do as compared to what you “want” to do. Feeling exhausted. Feeling guilty because you are afraid you are letting others down. Not having enough time. Feeling resentful. Feeling like the weight of the world is resting on your shoulders. Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: happiness, priorities, Relationships, selfing

What does Conscious Evolution mean? In part, it means that you are evolving. Your experience of yourself is evolving. Who you are now is in the process of becoming something even greater than who you are in this present moment and you can participate knowingly in this process.

There is greatness in you being called forth. Your partnerships are the womb of this greatness. You are like the caterpillar that goes into a chrysalis to become the butterfly. Your partnerships are the place where you evolve into the best you that you can be.

Recognizing that your partnerships provide you with a powerful opportunity for your personal and spiritual growth, you can truly take advantage of the opportunities present in your partnerships if you share a commitment to use your relationship with each other for your mutual growth and evolution. Continue reading »

written by Paul and Layne \\ tags: communication, partnerships, Relationships, spiritual growth

As you may have read in the previous six posts in this series  we met and fell in love in San Francisco in 1976. Within one year we were travelling the USA leading weekend relationship trainings.

Paul & Layne - Hawaii 1980

We then settled in Hawaii for a seven year experiment in dramatic personal transformation with a group of kindred spirits.

We were the leaders of the Empyrean Community where everyone was consciously using their relationships as a path of personal evolution and spiritual awakening.

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

 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.

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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

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

Layne - My Beloved Angel Who Watches Over Me

This is one of my favorite pictures of Layne. I made this image of her during our first year together when we were in New York City to lead The Loving Relationships Training in 1977.

We were starting a grand adventure full of hope and promise. Who could have known how it would all unfold, even as it is still unfolding?

written by Paul Cutright \\ tags: Layne Cutright, love, 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.

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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