Maude Mayes's Blog: Secrets of a Successful Relationship Revealed, page 79

What Active Listening Can Do For Your Relationship

Maude: We recently participated in a course for couples at our local Adult Education center. It’s fun to interact with a group of couples discussing and sharing their direct experience. One of the techniques for listening that the instructor had the participants try was what is called “mirroring”. This is where you listen attentively to what is being said to you and then repeat back to the person what you have heard before commenting. This is a great technique for learning to pay attention to the person speaking. It helps you to be quiet and hear what is being said, as well as preventing you from being in your head preparing what your response is going to be.

This technique is a great step towards real active listening, but it is just a station along the way. When you are really listening, you are paying attention to the whole person. You are hearing the language of their body, their expressions, and their heart speaking to you. Even with mirroring, although you are hearing what the person is saying to you, you are also busy in your mind remembering what they said so you can repeat it back. You are to a certain extent busy with the future rather than the present.

The type of active listening that we find critical to peaceful relating creates an experience of union between those participating. For this deeper connection to occur, it is necessary to approach your partner with “empty mind”. You must come to the exchange with total presence, offering yourself in both parts of the exchange – listening and communicating. When you are truly present you can hear and absorb all that the other offers. It is through this kind of exchange that you will be able to find mutual solutions.

When both people are fully present an almost magical exchange takes place, and out of the ideas and longings of each of the parties a new idea or solution presents itself. This product of your co-creativity is not the thought or desire of either party; it is a merging that presents something neither of you could have come up with alone. This mutuality is created in the union of give and take that occurs when both are fully present with each other.

It is there that peace is born.

In active listening, approach your partner with “empty mind” & total presence #quote #relationships
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Phil: We write our books and blogs based on the direct experiences of our relationship, and when we were exploring how we resolved differences without arguing, we saw that one part was listening to the other person and trying to hear what they had to say, rather than preparing a response. We called this “active listening,” and only later discovered that the term was in common use, but included an extra aspect called “mirroring” where the listener repeats back what (s)he heard to ensure an accurate understanding.

Fine, we thought. This is just what we do, with some feedback glued on. It sounds like a great technique for ensuring concordance.

But it’s not. Far more is being communicated than just the words.

Eye contact, head movements, gestures with the arms and hands, posture, facial expression, distance from another speaker, noises such as clearing the throat, loudness and softness, high pitch and low pitch, the real or pretended quaver that accompanies emotion – all communicate singly, together and in concert with language. The live voice, insists the Hungarian linguist Ivan Fónagy, is a world apart from the printed page. Every spoken word or phrase conveys meanings that are not present in the words: anger, affection, inquiry, displeasure, reassurance, uncertainty, restraint, haughtiness, submission, authority – ‘moods’ and ’emotions’ which have to be signaled and detected if people are to know how to deal with one another. “Language – The Loaded Weapon” Dwight Bolinger

The problem with mirroring is that it encourages attention on the words and requires mental effort to remember or summarize them in preparation for repeating them back. It takes you out of the present because you are preparing for the future.

Instead, active listening is about opening yourself up to the full bandwidth of the message. Just as the speaker may not be fully conscious of all the nuances that Bolinger describes, so may the listener not be fully able to articulate them, but they can be received and understood all the same. This is empathy in action. It consists of being present and being open – what the Buddhists call “empty mind.” When practiced fully by both people, it can, on occasion, lead to a shared consciousness – a mind meld, if you will.

Listening like this is not restricted to couples. Your family, your checkout clerk, your boss – they’re all broadcasting across the spectrum, and language is just one channel. To hear it all, you must put your ego aside and just be present.

Here’s another post that we’ve written about active listening.

Successful Relationships Reading Corner

In this week’s blog, we wrote on how to freshen up your relationship; here are some articles with various ideas about that.

Creative Things to Do in Your Relationship/Marriage to Keep It Interesting “I know firsthand from having been with my spouse in a relationship for nearly ten years (married nearly seven years) that you need to constantly find ways to keep your relationship strong and beating with enthusiasm. It’s easy to let it fall through the cracks when you have kids, a career and other obligations to tend to but that’s why making a point to work on it is vital to its survival.”

5 Tips for Healthy, Loving Relationships “Romantic relationships, in all of their complexity, are a fundamental component of our lives. And as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke mused, “There is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another.” What makes a good relationship? Holly Parker, a clinical psychologist and instructor of the course The Psychology of Close Relationships, offers her advice on how to have healthy and loving romantic relationships.”

21 real couples reveal how they keep the spark alive in their relationship “Anyone who’s in a relationship wants to know the secret recipe to making their love last. And while everyone’s relationship is different, there is something to be learned from those who have managed to keep the spark alive for years or even decades. INSIDER asked real people in real relationships what they do to keep their partnerships exciting and healthy. Their advice was heartwarming, informative, and, at times, surprising.”

How to Freshen Up Your Relationship

Recently, we needed some odds and ends for the household and went out to some garage sales to hunt for them. We hadn’t gone to any in a long time and we had so much fun together. We both felt really relaxed and just enjoyed the shining sun and the adventure of the hunt, while hanging out talking and sharing together.

What was so special about this foray? Changing up the pattern seemed an important part of it.

We have a great life and a great relationship. We are lucky (or perhaps smart enough to have arranged) to have a life with enough freedom to spend quality time with each other – we retire early each night to enjoy each other’s company, we go out to breakfast and work on the blog, we like going to afternoon matinées, we have a subscription to the local playhouse, etc. It’s a comfortable life and a comfortable pattern.

These times together create lasting memories: a play we saw, a meal out, a Netflix binge, but events that went beyond our usual routines also stand out: redwoods, a train trip, an Airbnb in Joshua Tree, and remind us of how much more is out there when we make the effort to reach out and grasp it.

Our situation has changed, as Maude has recently retired from her full time job and all kinds of things are now possible. The experience of these departures from our usual activities, and how good we both felt as a result, got us talking and thinking about how important change and new experiences are to us as individuals and in our relationship.

It is important in every relationship to find a balance between your comfort zone and actions that bring variety and novelty. As a species, we are a bit wary of the unknown and unwilling to venture out of our safe areas. It’s a basic survival mechanism, but when we do step out, it often adds to our shared experience and joy.

Even in the best of relationships, there is always the danger of taking for granted the things that are working well, and only attending to what is broken or needs special effort. It is very helpful to find ways to include new experiences between you and your partner.

We don’t want to present this as any kind of diminishment of the daily pleasures in the way that the consumer society whispers “Your old Multitron is soooo limited; think of the satisfaction a new Omnitron 2000 will bring you,” but as a way to open yourself up to the full possibilities of living. It’s not the scale of the event: it doesn’t have to be the Grand Tour or the extravagant party.

We have friends who have been together a long time and they made a point of taking a long weekend away every two to three months. After they retired, and as they are really into traveling, they changed that up and now take one big trip to another country or a place they have never been, usually for a month or so at a time. They prepare in advance, really get into making the travel arrangements and often get tapes from the library to learn the language of the place they will be going to (at least enough to ask for some of the basic things like a bathroom and to order and be polite.)

For us, going out in the community and hunting for treasure at the estate sales was a really simple but great adventure in just spending some time together without anything either one of us really had to accomplish.

In your relationship, changing up the pattern is important #relationships #marriage #quote
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Look at your mutual life and how it is organized. Even when it is great, it might be fun to see if there’s a way to add some newness in your shared experience! It may not even be an event with your partner – we wrote last week about the balance of time together and time apart. Perhaps it’s something that has been tucked away at the base of your mind like a retreat or a painting class or a fossil hunt. Go ahead. Stretch your self.

According to brain plasticity research it is really good for us to break patterns and do new things. It helps keep our brains active and perhaps even growing. We find it is good for partnerships as well. We would love to hear from you what you do to add some spice to your togetherness.

Successful Relationships Reading Corner

In this week’s blog, we wrote on how to be both together and separate in your relationship. Here are some articles to that topic.

Time Together vs. Time Apart: Which Is More Important? “How much time should a couple spend together? Apart? That’s the tug and pull of many couples. Too much time together could make one partner feel suffocated. Too much time apart could make one partner feel isolated.”

The 10 Secrets of Happy Couples “There is no substitute for shared quality time. When you make a point of being together, without kids, pets and other interruptions, you will form a bond that will get you through life’s rough spots. Time spent together should be doing a shared activity, not just watching television. Perhaps going against conventional wisdom, spending time apart is also an important component of a happy relationship. It is healthy to have some separate interests and activities and to come back to the relationship refreshed and ready to share your experiences. Missing your partner helps remind you how important he or she is to you.”

Why Every Couple Should Have Individual Alone Time “Being one half of that perfect couple… the couple still in the honeymoon period, years after that first passionate kiss. Having that long-lasting relationship, where you still lust after one another like lovesick teenagers. It’s what every man and woman dreams of… and I had it. The secret ingredient to being that constantly smitten couple was actually hidden in the time we spent apart. Here, I’ll explain exactly why that’s so important:”

How to Be Both Together and Separate in Your Relationship

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.

Here is an alternate translation of the above:

Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.  Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.

The very concept of being together and separate is a cornerstone of our relationship. We used a section of the Rilke quote above in our wedding vows. It has been clear to us from the start that we both wanted to share the greatest of intimacy and at the same time support each other in our lives as independent autonomous people.

As clear as this has always been, we have grown and developed a much deeper understanding of what is required to live a life where deep sharing and individual personal progress are both supported and joyfully celebrated.

The concept of being together and at the same time being separate is a cornerstone of relationships
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The key to this is the ABC of Acceptance, Balance and Communication.

Acceptance

For this sort of mutuality to exist there must be a kind of total acceptance, in which each partner rests secure in the other. When this acceptance is present you can rest in the knowledge that you will not be judged, attacked or manipulated. You know in fact that you will be celebrated and appreciated for who you are. This acceptance eliminates any fear of disapproval or any threat of withdrawal of affections. It offers support for your explorations of yourself and your path without any worries about agreement or explanations.

One of the things that we marvel at is that although we both pursue our individual lives and their separate expression, we never feel disconnected or estranged. We have forged such a deep bond through this experience of support and trust, that it goes with us everywhere, whether we are physically in the same place or not.

Balance

A critical part of achieving this type of loving flow between together and apart is to reach a balance of these states. Pay attention to the balance between your need to find your own destiny and the need for connection. This will be different for each partnership and will change over time as well. This is part of the grand adventure of living this type of love: keep redefining your time together, evaluate each of your needs in the present, and honor your bond with time and attention. Take time to be together no matter how busy you become in your private journey. Take time to be apart no matter how enticing that shared intimacy is.

Communication

The way to avoid getting lost in either part of this balance between self and union is to stay in the present together and communicate what is happening. Offer your partner both the freedom to fly and the security of connection. The simple act of talking with each other regularly will eliminate many an avoidable misunderstanding. Never take your partner for granted because things are so good between you that you instead put your mind to what isn’t working in your life. This is a mistake that we can all make too easily. Rejoice in your relationship and let it be your nourishment for all the mountains you need to climb in your personal work.

‘Me’, ‘you’ and ‘us’ are all parts of a successful relationship. Foster all the parts and the whole will be a bastion of renewal and life force.

Successful Relationships Reading Corner

In this week’s blog, we wrote about how sexuality can unify body, mind and spirit. Here are some articles commenting about different aspects of this topic.

5 Signs You’re In A Highly Sacred Relationship “On some level, every relationship is sacred as it holds opportunity for us to grow. However, there’s something distinct about the intimate relationship shared by lovers. Our partners are not defined by genetics or familial bonds. We’re not necessarily thrown into proximity by way of work or school environments. We choose willingly to enter into relationship with them. In addition, there’s the added component of physical intimacy. Here are five characteristics of healthy, sacred relationships:”

Spiritual Sex: Ecstatic Love Beyond The Physical “I’m not at all pessimistic about the possibilities of lasting sexual love, but I do believe we are looking in all the wrong places. We cannot mandate thrilling, connected sexual encounters and just because one is married and “should” be having lots of fulfilling sex, doesn’t make it so. The fact is we do not have any idea just how deep and all encompassing sex can be because we are stuck with a model of sex that I call, “The Performance Model: Sex equals intercourse”: the goal of sex is orgasm, and great sex is a virtuoso performance.”

Why Sex is Sacred? “Our language suggests that once upon a time, Western Civilization understood the sacred nature of sex. This wisdom was lost during the Inquisition, in fact, one might say that this was the purpose of the Inquisition: To create a cultural shift from sex as sacred to sex as sinful, as the movie, Dangerous Beauty, beautifully demonstrates. Now it is time to return to the ancient wisdom of worshipping life rather than death. Or as we said in the sixties, ‘Make love, not war.'”

How Sexuality Can Unify Body, Mind and Spirit

Phil: Sex is an important part of our relationship, but we haven’t written about it much, as it is both transcendent and elusive.

We see sexual encounters as lying on a spectrum from two people having separate sexual experiences together to a full union. The former is about self-pleasure, a form of masturbation where your partner is a sex aid. The latter enters the realm of the mystical, the spiritual.

To write about union, I need to first discuss the issue of identity. That’s usually thought of as the question of “Who am I?”, but the sibling question of “What am I?” is also relevant because it includes the answer “I am human.” (As an aside, I want to say that the answers to these questions are by their nature non-verbal, but let’s stick with words for now.)

So if I am human at the same time as I am my individual self, I can also be the union with Maude at the same time as being just Phil. And this is the heart of our sexual experience: merging as well as retaining our own identities. There are a number of things to say about this:

I am not talking about sexual ecstasy; that exists, too, but it is only the means; it is like a step-ladder that allows access to a higher place. Its role is as an instrument to its music.
This is indubitably a shared experience. Not only is this manifest at the time, but afterwards, when one of us attempts to describe it, the other will go “Uh huh, uh huh” in agreement. Every time. Without fail. We may not use the same words, but we are unmistakably speaking about the same thing.
For this to occur, there must be full openness, full acceptance. There can be no holding back, no distrust. This is so easy for us because we practice full acceptance in our relationship (and we’ve written extensively about this elsewhere.)
There is no special process to bring about this state of union; in fact, quite the opposite. Sexual arousal is a feedback loop: I am turned on by Maude’s arousal, and she is turned on by mine, and so it escalates. (It must be this way for all couples, else sex would only occur when both people happened to feel sexual at the same time. I also suspect that much sexual dysfunction occurs because this feedback loop does not take place.) It works best when I simply hang out and let this intensification happen, rather than bringing in ideas of what Maude or I would like.
This is not some qualitatively different state from the rest of our relationship; it varies only in its intensity. I think that for many couples, the transition from a disconnected daily life to a connection via sex is difficult to make, and constrains their sex life. We find that we can flow easily between the two.

So in conclusion, I would say drop expectations and be open to the transcendent gateway that is in all of us.

In sexual union you can experience both an intact individuality and a merged self #relationships
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And the two shall become one flesh. Mark 10:8

Maude: Our blogs are written from our experience and the desire to share the treasure of what a relationship can be like when it is founded in peace and mutuality. An important part of this is our shared sexuality, although we haven’t blogged much about it (we are working on a book from this perspective.)

There are few areas within our lives that can give us a perspective on the connection between the physical, mind and spirit aspects of ourselves more than sexuality.

In order to have an experience of true union through sexual intimacy, a number of elements must be in place. This can happen when:

Each partner has spent time getting to know themselves
Power is not an issue between the partners
There is no need to defend as there is total acceptance of each other
The desire for mutuality is paramount
Partners rest secure in the knowledge of being on the same side

The drive toward union is very strong and we all have a natural propensity to come together. This has developed beyond the instinct to procreate, as the mind has evolved beyond the survival level to an ability to connect with spirit.

Through the exercise of love we are able to combine our expanded nature and experience both an intact individuality and a merged self. When Phil and I come together in this union, it is both well known and totally surprising! It is transportive. I am both there as a separate person observing the experience, and completely immersed in the joining.

To reach this place of union where the two of us become one, it is necessary to move beyond my own pleasure, even the experience of pleasure giving, to the experience of Our Presence. One of the unique aspects of this Presence is that it exists on and requires the participation and integration of physical, mind and spirit. Once such a unified connection is established, it usually carries over into all aspects of partnership. We never feel separated from this union. It expresses itself in all the aspects of how we live together and how we are together.

This master pattern is critical to achieving true peace. We can move toward our relationship to the whole more easily when we understand that it does not take anything away from our individuality. What appears as a paradox is actually the answer. It is through this understanding that we can actively spread peace one relationship a time.

Successful Relationships Reading Corner

In this week’s blog, we wrote that knowing yourself is important for your relationship, and we’ve found some very good articles about this – so many that we picked four this week.

Know Yourself? 6 Specific Ways to Know Who You Are “This blog will reveal 6 elements of self-knowledge that can help you understand your own identity. As you live your daily life, you can look for clues to these important building blocks of Self. But first, why is it important to know yourself?”

Knowing Yourself: How to Improve Your Understanding of Others “Developing a better understanding of yourself may also improve your capacity to better understand the thoughts and feelings of other people, a new study from Germany suggests. Researchers found that adults who participated in a psychology-training program to enhance their “perspective-taking” … became better at understanding themselves as well as understanding others, according to the findings published…in the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement…. all things being equal, more people are undone by behavioral issues than by anything else.”

The Right Way to Get to Know Yourself “To put it rather indelicately, many self-help books attempt to provide remedies for scraping away the sticky build up from the business of everyday living in order to reach an Authentic Self. But I fear the quest for an Authentic Self is as likely to succeed as a quest to capture a unicorn.”

People Don’t Actually Know Themselves Very Well “the truth is that no one has perfect self-awareness—you probably believe more than a few things about yourself that are false. Sixteen rigorous studies of thousands of people at work have shown that people’s coworkers are better than they are at recognizing how their personality will affect their job performance.”

Knowing Yourself is Important For Your Relationship

Photo by Laurenz Kleinheider

We have been discussing how to keep love alive in your relationship, suggesting ways to share and interact with your partner that will infuse your relationship with passion and kindness.

For this to work, you have to like being with your partner, and you have to like being with yourself as well.

If you are having trouble feeling love and warmth toward your partner, remember what brought you together to begin with; look for those places of core value and attraction to personality that drew you into this relationship. What has changed?

Perhaps there are real rifts that need to be dealt with. However, all too often people have let life’s demands and challenges so absorb them that they have lost connection with their partner. In the last few weeks we have offered a number of ways to change this dynamic and suggested approaches to rekindling your romance.

The other half of this equation is to know and to like yourself. If you can find acceptance and appreciation for yourself, you will be able to do so much more naturally with others.

You have to be content with yourself before you can be in a contented relationship #relationships
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That means just being comfortable sitting with yourself and having trust that the universe will provide. Of course you will still have wants and needs, from thirst to thrills, but this is in contrast to having an inner core of dissatisfaction or pain or anger that can be temporarily obscured by the pleasures of life, but is always there, like a tinnitus of the soul, disturbing you in those quiet moments. If this is you, be brave: hunt it down, challenge it. You are not this beast. Meet it head on, and the truth shall set you free.

It’s not easy, and it’s never complete. It’s like weeding a garden: pluck out the weeds, haul them to the compost heap, and on return, the smaller weeds that you overlooked make the garden still look unkempt. Pluck those, and tiny shoots still defy perfection.

You have to be content with yourself before you can be in a contented relationship. That’s not to say you can’t be in a relationship at all, but if you feel dissatisfaction, pain or anger, accept that that is what you bring into it. When those emotions come from your partner, do not accept your role in their scene, their act, their drama. You do not have to respond to pain with guilt, to anger with fear or flight or struggle. To react in such a way is codependency. Instead, have empathy and compassion. This is your partner on the path to finding themselves.

To like yourself, you have to spend time really getting to know yourself. The more you accept who you are and appreciate who you are, the more you will be able to recognize your partner, and accept them for who they are.

Any time anger enters your heart, weed your garden.

Successful Relationships Reading Corner

In this week’s blog, we addressed how to keep love alive in your relationship; here are some articles that also offer suggestions.

How To Keep A Relationship Interesting “The good news? Even the happiest, most stable and loyal of relationships will ebb and flow. The tough pill to swallow? You’ll still need to roll your sleeves up, bite your ego and build your patience to maintain a love affair that can stand the test of the ages. Here, psychologists provide their best solutions for recharging your relationship with intrigue and enchantment:”

18 Ways to Keep Your Relationship Strong “It takes more than love for your relationship to work. Although love is the foundation of any happy romantic relationship, love is not enough. In order to have a healthy relationship, both parties have to be willing to work on it. Below you’ll find 18 ways to keep your relationship strong.”

The Science Of ‘Happily Ever After’: 3 Things That Keep Love Alive “As Daniel Jones, author of Love Illuminated, explains: we spend youth asking “How do I find love?” and midlife asking “How do I get it back?” Anyone in a relationship or who plans on being in one needs to know how to keep love alive over the long term. But how do you learn the secret to this? Everyone is happy to explain “how they met” but few give the details on “how they stayed together.””