John Welwood - Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart

Drawing equally from spiritual and psychological traditions, Perfect Love reads like a book of philosophy: the ideas seem sound enough, though theres no way to prove them. Welwood is most compelling when he gets practical.... His approach is also noteworthy for its emphasis on learning how to receive love as well as give it.... Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships offers both grand theories and useful practices for incorporating these lessons into your life.

Body & Soul

Welwood skillfully identifies the fundamental obstacle in relationships and offers a clear, attainable, and transformative solution. Everyone should read this wonderful book.

Harville Hendrix

This book skillfully and eloquently describes how our deepest longing for love is in fact the key to healing our personal wounds and the woundedness of the world at large. John Welwoods message echoes the Buddhas, showing us how we have direct access to the love and happiness we most long for, as our very essence.

Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

Full of practical wisdom and divinely inspired insight. A marvelous guide for any seeker choosing to walk on loves path.

bell hooks, author of All About Love: New Visions

A profound guide to healing our hearts and our world. No larger social transformation is possible unless it is simultaneously accompanied by this kind of personal healing, one individual at a time. Every social change movement should encourage its participants to take time to follow the steps outlined in this extremely valuable and important guide to psychic health.

Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun and author of The Left Hand of God

ABOUT THE BOOK

While most of us have moments of loving freely and openly, it is often hard to sustain this where it matters mostin our intimate relationships. Why if love is so great and powerful are human relationships so challenging and difficult? If love is the source of happiness and joy, why is it so hard to open to it fully and let it govern our lives? In this book, John Welwood addresses these questions and shows us how to overcome the most fundamental obstacle that keeps us from experiencing loves full flowering in our lives.

Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships begins by showing how all our relational problems arise out of a universal, core wounding around love that affects not only our personal relationships but the quality of life in our world as a whole. This wounding shows up as a pervasive mood of unlove a deep sense that we are not intrinsically lovable just as we are. And this shuts down our capacity to trust, so that even though we may hunger for love, we have difficulty opening to it and letting it circulate freely through us.

This book takes the reader on a powerful journey of healing and transformation that involves learning to embrace our humanness and appreciate the imperfections of our relationships as trail-markers along the path to great love. It sets forth a process for releasing deep-seated grievances we hold against others for not loving us better and against ourselves for not being better loved. And it shows how our longing to be loved can magnetize the great love that will free us from looking to others to find ourselves.

Written with penetrating realism and a fresh, lyrical style that honors the subtlety and richness of our relationship to love itself, this revolutionary book offers profound and practical guidance for healing our lives as well as our embattled world.

As a psychotherapist, teacher, and author, JOHN WELWOOD has been a pioneer in integrating psychological and spiritual work. Welwood has published six books, including the best-selling Journey of the Heart (HarperCollins, 1990), as well as Challenge of the Heart (Shambhala, 1985), and Love and Awakening (HarperCollins, 1996). He is an associate editor of the Journal for Transpersonal Psychology. He leads workshops and trainings in psychospiritual work and conscious relationship throughout the world.

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Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships

HEALING THE WOUND OF THE HEART

J OHN W ELWOOD

TRUMPETER

Boston & London

2011

Trumpeter Books

an imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

trumpeterbooks.com

2006 by John Welwood

Cover photography by Gary Bartolini/Getty Images

Case studies drawn from the authors private practice have been significantly altered in order to protect privacy.

Excerpt from I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz (Sufism Reoriented, 1996), copyright 1996 by Daniel Ladinsky. Used by permission of Daniel Ladinsky. Excerpt from The Essential Rumi (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1995) reprinted by permission of Coleman Barks. Excerpt from Heartbeat on the CD Songs for the Inner Lover (White Swan Records) reprinted by permission of Miten. Diligent efforts were made in every case to obtain rights from copyright holders. In a few instances, the efforts were unsuccessful. The author and publisher are grateful for the use of this excerpted material.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced 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.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Welwood, John, 1943

Perfect love, imperfect relationships: healing the wound of the heart / John Welwood.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2275-7

ISBN 1-59030-262-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)

1. Love. 2. Interpersonal relations. I. Title.

BF575.L8W45 2005 158.2dc22

2005009288

This book is dedicated to peace in the world.

May all beings know that they are loved

so they may live at peace with themselves and all others.

Jump to your feet, wave your fists,

Threaten and warn the whole universe

That your heart can no longer live

Without real love!

H AFIZ

Contents

A night full of talking that hurts,

My worst held-back secrets:

Everything has to do with loving and not loving.

R UMI

T HE WORDS I LOVE YOU , spoken in moments of genuine appreciation, wonder, or caring, arise from something perfectly pure within usthe capacity to open ourselves and say yes without reserve. Such moments of pure openheartedness bring us as close to natural perfection as we can come in this life. The warm and radiant yes of the heart is perfect, like the sun, in bringing all things to life and nourishing all that is truly human.

Yet oddly enough, even though we may have glimpses of a pure, bright love dwelling within the human heart, its hard to find it fully embodied in the world around us, especially where it matters mostin our relationships with other people. Indeed, for many people today, risking themselves in a love relationship has become a frightening proposition, a near-certain prescription for overwhelming pain or emotional devastation. Scratch the surface of our sex-and-romance-crazed culture and you find a sense of disillusionment in many people where they feel, as one pop song puts it, that love stinks. Or, as a young woman in one of my workshops expressed it: If love is so great, why are relationships so impossible? Dont tell me I need to open my heart any more. My heart is already too open, and I dont want to keep getting hurt.