Gay Hendricks - The Conscious Heart: Seven Soul-Choices That Create Your Relationship Destiny

We have only one choice to make, now and always: to open ourselves to embrace truth and its constant companion, love; or to withdraw from truth and love, defining ourselves through contraction and resistance. This choice is placed before us relentlessly, with exquisite precision, in our close relationships.

There is no better place to practice all this than right where we are, every moment of every day: in a relationship with our own hearts and souls, and with the hearts and souls of people around us. This is why close relationship opens the conscious heart.

From the Introduction

Gay and Kathlyns most vulnerable and powerful book yet. If you want a real loving relationship, study this book. Its all here, and it works.
Kenny and Julia Loggins, co-authors of The Unimaginable Life

I consider Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks to be my teachers.
John Bradshaw

Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks are masters in the art of intimate relationships.
John Gray, author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

Other books by the authors

CONSCIOUS LOVING
By Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., and Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D.

AT THE SPEED OF LIFE
By Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., and Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D.

CONSCIOUS BREATHING
By Gay Hendricks, Ph.D.

THE CORPORATE MYSTIC
By Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., and Kate Ludeman, Ph.D.

THE CONSCIOUS HEART

A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bantam hardcover edition / September 1997
Bantam trade paperback edition / February 1999

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:
Excerpt from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. Translation copyright 1990 by Victor H. Mair.
Reprinted by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1997 by Kathlyn Hendricks and Gay Hendricks.

Author photo by Clint Weisman.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-52282
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

eISBN: 978-0-307-57308-7

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

v3.1

Love says
lets get down
in the pit of your fears
and wrestle
hip to hip.
Lets swing
the maypole of lust
through your butterflies and
free their belly dust.

Love says
lets pry
your dirty fingernails
from the antic box
where howls and yelps
flutter and scratch.
Lets pull the thread
that unravels
your naked source.

Love says
lets slide
through the rollercoaster
of your heart
upsidedown
and run our toes
through the muck.
Lets bowl
in your mind
and scatter the knobby pins
of your fort.

Love says
lets do the tablecloth trick.
Lets pull
out the smooth assumptions
you squat over and see whats left.

Love says
lets tickle,
lets scuffle,
lets go eyelash to eyelash
and see who blinks first.

Love says
I want
everything.
Ill devour you to
the last earlobe.
Then,
well play.

KATHLYN HENDRICKS

W e are grateful to the couples and individuals who have worked with us in therapy and workshops over the past twenty years. They are the laboratory of the human heart out of which our work has developed. Their contribution to the work is immense: Through them we have discovered what is most essential in relationships and in human transformation. We are also grateful to the several hundred graduates of our professional training programs for helping us refine the practical application of our work.

We feel deep gratitude to friends and family who have been with us on our incredible journey: Alex Merrin, Mary Manin Morrissey, Amanda Hendricks, Chris and Helen Hendricks, Mike and Lou Hendricks, Bonnie Raitt, Pamela Polland and Bill Ernst, Julia and Kenny Loggins, Polly and Bob Swift, Rod and Sandy Wells, Steve Sisgold, David Hubbard, Gary Zukav and Linda Francis. There are many others, too numerous to name, but you know who you are, and we thank you in our hearts.

After our children left for college in the mid-eighties, we decided to use our newfound freedom to take our work more into the public forum. Thanks to the many people who were there with helping hands:

Oprah Winfrey, a great spirit, who first gave us a large national audience

Bob Berkowitz

Sally Jessy Raphael

John Bradshaw

Deepak Chopra

We are blessed with the finest literary agent in the land, Sandy Dijkstra, and an editor, Toni Burbank, who is not only masterful in her work but also an extraordinary human being. To both of them our gratitude is absolute.

W elcome to the path of the conscious heart. This path invites you to create your relationships by design instead of by default. It shows you a set of stepping-stones that will carry you to the rich and magnificent feeling we call essence. Essence is your deeply felt sense of who you truly are, accompanied by a feeling of unity, clarity, and love. Essence is known in your mind and experienced in your body. It is always just a breath away and can be yours in every moment. Once you have embraced essence in yourselfthrough the practices we call the path of the conscious heartyou have a place to come home to in yourself. Then you can invite another person into your home, if you desire loving partnership.

Nothing can reveal essence like a close relationship, and nothing can obscure it more thoroughly. The unconscious heart would have us reject essence and cling to our old wounds and defenses. To open the conscious heart and embrace this essence-feeling, you have to master a handful of skills and attitudes that are wonderfully simple yet that require benign vigilance of the highest order. Life gives you repeated opportunities to make choices that lead you closer to or farther away from your essence. In every moment you are choosing either to embrace essence or to shun it. In our own relationship we came to recognize the choices that took us toward essence, such as appreciating each other or genuinely wondering. Other choices, such as insisting on being right, buried essence in the unconscious heart. We then had to patiently work to reopen the conscious heart for minutes, hours, and sometimes days.