Gay Hendricks - Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment

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C ONCLUSION

Conscious Loving is a marvelous addition to the nourishing practical wisdom Gay Hendricks has been offering for a long time. I have learned much about self-love and human emotions from Gay. I have learned about intimacy from Kathlyn and Gay. This book is a product of their co-commitment to all of us.

I cant think of anything more important than conscious loving. Our cultures severe family problems and massive addictions attest to the unconscious contaminations resulting from our dysfunctional source relationships.

Our models of intimacy are patently out of date. They come from a social era that was survivalistic. When survival is at stake, it is good to have one person in charge. It is also good to be co-dependent and non-feeling.

Our culture is leisure oriented. The old model is totally inadequate for dealing with the new possibilities for love and emotional intimacy which result from the new leisure.

Kathlyn and Gay are offering us a new model. We need it badly. We must help our ailing non-intimate marriages. The marital relationship determines the health of the family to a large degree. In spite of a couples best intentions, if they use the old model, their relationship is probably going to fail because the old model is based on an imbalance of power. In this book, the Hendricks teach us that intimacy is only possible when there is a balance of power.

Most importantly, they offer us exercises which will help us to achieve this balance of power in our relationships. In fact, the practicality of this book is its greatest asset. The Hendricks offer us a rich array of experiential exercises which can teach us how to love intimately.

I consider Gay and Kathlyn to be my teachers. I encourage you to buy this book and use it to the hilt.

J OHN BRADSHAW

P ROLOGUE

At our wedding many years ago we were blessed to be married by a couple, Mary and Ed Graham, who represented (and still do) the heights of co-commitment to which we aspired. At the pinnacle of the ceremony, they read a poem they had chosen for us; the moment became for us the spiritual epiphany of our lives. It is written by the Jungian analyst, Sheila Moon, and we share it with you as prologue to the journey that we begin together.

LIFE DANCE

What follows, in such time as has not
come, yet waits for me to find it?
What dreams drift in mists
covering what unfamiliar peaks?
What unexpected mime is being readied
for me, and what part will I have?

In any case the tale will be
the Fools, with his naked joy, his Bride
dancing down the world of time,
somersaulting into wherever they arrive
awry, askew, rumpled, roses in their hair!
How unthinkable to go with them!
To open fingers, toes, eyes, arms,
for receiving their grace so graceless,
to see their faces clown-white, death
white, their gaze shining as moonrise!
How unthinkable! But heart
bends to them as toward flowers.
So bend. Perhapsbe mended.

Perhapswhy not?be thrown by
winds into their wild sweeps of sky
where up and down are words only,
where sea reaches and ragged spume
become living whether or not I
choose it so, where I am pitched
and tossed in a game whose stakes
are higher than I can encompass!

Shout! Rush into all storms
but with honest intent The Fool
and his Bride are truth,
honest and honestly moonstruck, and
they dance in hurricanes,
in the very eye itself. In peace.
So in some fashion they stand
beyond me in storm. Dancing. Calling.
Blurred and whirling in time
neither before nor after, I must
go, or fall away forever, forever.

Conscious Loving: The Journey in Brief

For most of us, relationships are a struggle. We each have a strong inner urge toward conscious loving: toward love relationships that are free of mistrust, disharmony, and unspoken words. We want our relationships to be springboards to higher consciousness and enhanced creative expression. Yet within us also lives an urge toward unconscious loving: we are encumbered by the burdens of our past programming. In this book we will present the results of our exploration of relationship issues over the past twenty years. From our work with over one thousand couples we have discovered the key flaws that produce distortion in relationships, and we have developed a precise, step-by-step program for turning your loving into conscious loving. We have also identified the crucial choice points in the evolution of a relationship that enhance or ruin the opportunities for intimacy.

Unconscious loving turns relationships into entanglements which bring out and actually require the destructive habits of each participant. Unconscious loving saps energy and creativity. By knowing the crucial choice points and practicing the skills of conscious loving we describe, a state emerges that we call Co-Commitment. It is a state of well-being which enhances the energy and creativity of each person. In our journey together through this book you will learn the intentions that allow co-commitment to unfold, how to spot and overcome the unconscious patterns that emerge in any close relationship, how to identify feelings and key body sensations, how to tell the microscopic truth, and how to make and keep commitments.