CENTERING AND THE ART OF INTIMACY BOOK AND HANDBOOK GAY HENDRICKS. PH.D. AND KATHLYN HENDRICKS. PH.D. 2 Gay Hendricks holds a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford University and is a professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. He gives workshops and lectures to thousands of educators and mental-health professionals annually, and he is the author of ten other centering books. These include The Family Centering Book, How to Love Every Minute of Your Life, and The Moving Center, the last written with Kathlyn T. Hendricks. Ph.D., California Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Kathlyn is a consultant in movement education, a teacher, and a psychotherapist whose special interest is the psychology of the body. 3 For my parents, Priscilla and Robert Swift. KATHLYN HENDRICKS For Katie GAY HENDRICKS 4 Contents Prologue / 5 one / The Secret, 7 two / How to Get Close, 14 three/ On Getting Separate, 22 four / The Differences Between a Relationship and an Entanglement, 26 five/ How to Create Enlightening Relationships, 33 six/ The Intentions and Agreements Essential to an Enlightening Relationship, 38 seven/ Look and Feel Like in the Body, 45 eight / Projection: A Major Barrier to Enlightening Relationships, 53 nine / Solving the Upper-Limits Problem: Learning to Handle More Positive Energy, 59 ten / Specific Problem-Solving Strategies, 72 eleven / Sex and Money in Enlightening Relationships, 80 twelve / Experiments in Enlightening Relationships, 87 Epilogue / 105 Centering and the Art of Intimacy Handbook , 107 Workbook: Your Manual for Transforming You Close Relationship, 156 5 Prologue Love is the best thing human beings do. Love is our glory, and it is also a power. Love is so powerful that even a little of it can heal and transform our lives permanently. We may go to the ends of the earth to find love or to escape it. What human beings most deeply want is a total, permanent experience of love. Beneath all the strivings for recognition, power, money, and things, what we really want is love. But what keeps us from feeling it? Why is it that what we most deeply want is also so hard to get and keep? The reason is this: The power of love clears out anything in its path, and we deal with what comes up either in a way that lets more love in or in a way that shuts it out. For example, a man has been rejected in a past relationship. Along comes a new love. Part of him rejoices (love is what he most deeply wants), and part of him fears (because love is associated in his mind and emotions with rejection). Because there is part of him that seeks permanent, total love, his old harbored feelings of hurt and rejection must be cleared up. The experience of being loved by the new woman will bring these feelings to the surface. But how will he deal with them? Will he project them onto the new woman, expecting her to reject him? Will he set it up so she actually does reject him? Or will he see his old feelings for what they are- a flurry of old pains that are being cleansed and released by the power of his new lover's positive energy? 6 Above all, will he handle the situation in ways that move him to a higher level of giving and receiving love, or will he perpetuate the old pattern? There are myriad ways of shutting out love. There are only a few secrets of letting more love in. However, these few secrets are so powerful that we really do not need more. All we need to do is learn what they are and how to use them properly. That is what this book is about. We have explored the problems in relationships in several ways. First, our own personal experiences in love and relationships have been the major proving grounds for the ideas and techniques in the book. We have come to a loving and creative relationship with each other through the ideas we discuss in the following chapters. In addition, we have a combined total of more than twenty- five years' experience in working with people in psychotherapy; our clients and workshop participants have been a broader proving ground on which to test and refine these techniques. Too, we are familiar with the research literature in both psychotherapy and relationship therapy because both of us have been working as teachers of therapists for the past decade. Our own relationship is the most important element of growth and learning in both our lives. Although we may refer to the research literature and to our clients' experiences from time to time, we can guarantee you that as a couple we have personally experienced and found successful all the ideas and techniques in the book. Our goal in the book is to study the process of developing and keeping a close relationship in highly personal detail. We want to listen to the heartbeat of intimacy, to explore what it actually feels like to overcome the barriers to having ecstatic, creative relationships with other people. We know it can be done, and we want to see more of it in the world. In our view, the opportunities in relationships for psychological and spiritual growth are infinite and the rewards boundless. What could be better than the clear experience of love and having persons with whom to celebrate it? Let us open the book of secrets together and discover the surprises that await us. 7 one The Secret We come into relationships with high hopes and a history. The history consists of personality problems stemming from past experiences. The love and positive energy that are generated between two people bring the problems up to the surface. Here are some examples of personality problems: • I feel unlovable deep inside. • I can't stand being criticized. • I get moody and depressed for unexplainable reasons. • I feel explosive rage. • I want people to take care of me. An odd paradox emerges. Problems like these are often thought to occur because of a lack of love. Perhaps this is true back in childhood when the problems are first set in place. But in our present lives it is the experience of being loved that brings the problems to the surface. Love heals, and the healing process first has to bring the problems up into the light. When problems emerge, we often do not know how to deal with them, so we retreat from the other person and blame the problems on a lack of love in the relationship. If you do not think you are worthy of positive attention and love, you will likely feel uncomfortable when you get some. Try an experiment some time that we have done with hundreds of people in our relationship workshops. It is designed to help you explore any barriers you have to receiving positive energy fully. 8 Get a friend or mate to stand facing you. Have that person look you squarely in the eye and say sincerely to you every ten seconds or so, "You are magnificent" We are all magnificent, though we might not believe it, so the statement is strictly true. Have the person continue doing this for two or three minutes. During each pause, notice what happens in your mind and body. Some typical mind responses are: • The thought "No, I'm not" • The mind wanders. • Racing thoughts. • Blanking out Some typical body responses are: • Losing eye contact. • Feeling tension in the body. • Feeling the urge to turn away. • Emotions welling up, such as fear and sadness. The point of this experiment is that nearly all of us have resistance to receiving positive energy. Every one of us can benefit from learning the ways we block it. If you find, for example, that you deflect positive energy by changing the subject or making a joke, you can keep an eye on this pattern in future situations. We will have more to say about this subject in a future chapter devoted to the various ways humans deflect positive energy. A close relationship is like a cosmic searchlight that seeks out the absolute best and the absolute worst in us. When one person connects closely with another, the energies of the two people are combined and enhanced, creating the potential for the relationship to climb to new heights or to fly apart. The reason for this paradox is that a close relationship challenges two major fears 9 that human beings carry with them: the fear of getting close and the fear of being alone. Ideally, we would have the capacity for comfortably being very close to other people and comfortably being independent. In fact, few of us are completely at home with ourselves and others without some significant work on ourselves. The problem in getting close is that in the past we have experienced shocks, hurts, and irritations in close relationships. These problems often go back to childhood. Take, for example, the situation of a young girl who likes to hug and be close to her father, who happens to smoke cigars that irritate her sensitive breathing apparatus. She reacts by sneezing, a perfectly normal response. Her mind gets three things tied together: closeness, cigar smoke, sneezing. Later In life she snuggles up to her husband, who doesn't even smoke, and she sneezes. The mind works this way for good reason. It has to take snapshots of things that hurt you. You put your hand on a stove and get a bum. The mind has to come up with a way of keeping that event from happening again. So it shoots a picture of the whole scene. If at the time you burned your hand you also happened to be chewing your first mouthful of licorice, you might find that later in life you don't care much for licorice. Unfortunately for us, the mind often over generalizes. Ideally, if we get close to Dad and he sexually molests us, we will simply stop getting close to Dad. But the young and impressionable mind goes one or two steps further and thinks: • "Don't get close to men." • "Beware of sexual feelings." • "Tense up around men-you're likely to be violated." So, we have the following problem to contend with: We have gotten close, we have had an unpleasant experience of some sort, and the mind has taken a snapshot of the general situation. What happens next is truly extraordinary.