Partnering
Chapter I

Relationship As a Joint Venture

Each of us has our own special basket that contains the magic of who we are and what we hold most precious in life. When we first meet and fall in love we get a glimpse into, and a feeling for, the interior world of our partner. We inhale the fragrance and magic of the other’s essential being. Then come the problems of life and one day, sometimes sooner and sometimes later, the magic is gone.

We would like to begin this book by telling you the story of “The Star Maiden.” We read this wonderful Bushman tale in Sir Laurens van der Post’s book The Heart of the Hunter and it is one of our favorite stories. We feel that it provides a beautifully haunting introduction to this book and to our picture of partnering as a “joint venture” relationship.

Once upon a time there was a Bushman farmer who had a farm in the Kalahari Desert. He had crops and raised cows and, though he was relatively content, he did wish that he would one day have a wife to share his life. One morning when he went out to milk his cows, he saw that they had already been milked. He couldn’t imagine who had done this. The next morning when he came out he found again that the cows had already been milked.

The next night he resolved to hide in a shed near the cows and discover exactly what it was that had been happening. As midnight came he saw a remarkable sight. Climbing down from heaven on a ladder that extended between the stars and the earth was a multitude of Star Maidens. They each carried a bucket and as they touched down onto his land, they began to milk the cows. This went on all night long and as the dawn approached they began their trip back to the stars, ascending the ladder one by one. Just as the last Star Maiden approached the ladder, the farmer ran out from his hiding place and grabbed her and told her that she would become his wife. Strangely enough the Star Maiden was very open to the idea of marrying the farmer. When they returned to the farmhouse, she told him the following: “I shall be very happy to marry you and I promise you that your farm will prosper. I have only one condition that I must set. I have here a basket. You must promise me never to open this basket. If you do open it, then I promise you that I will leave.” The farmer promised that he would do as she wished. The Star Maiden put her basket down in a corner of the room and so their life together began.

As his new wife promised, the farmer’s farm and crops prospered and he became one of the most successful farmers in the whole area. His wife went out into the fields to work every day and everything that she touched seemed blessed by the gods. He was a very happy man and, as the years passed, he became happier yet with his good fortune for he loved and appreciated the Star Maiden.

One afternoon when his wife was out in the fields and he was at home looking for something, he found the basket she had put away many years before. Though he remembered the injunction of his wife, he didn’t take it seriously any longer so he picked up the basket, put it on the table, and opened it up. To his surprise he found it empty. He found this very amusing and had a good laugh over the fact that it was empty. He remembered well the seriousness with which she had warned him about not opening her treasure.

A short time later the Star Maiden returned from the field. As she entered the room she knew immediately what had happened. She spoke to her husband with the following words: “A long time ago I warned you never to open up this basket because it was very special to me. I told you also that I would have to leave if you did open it. Well, you violated your oath and this evening I am going to be leaving you. I want you to understand the reason for this. I am not leaving you because you opened up this basket without my permission. That would have been all right after all these years. I am leaving you because when you opened the basket you found nothing in it. That is why I can no longer be with you.”

And so it was that as night came the Star Maiden, with great sadness, climbed the ladder back to her home in the sky, not because he had broken his vow, but because he had looked into her most precious possession and could see nothing there.

Isn’t this really how it is so often in relationship? Each of us has our own special basket that contains the magic of who we are and what we hold most precious in life. When we first meet and fall in love we get a glimpse into, and a feeling for, the interior world of our partner and we inhale the fragrance and magic of the other’s essential being. Then come the problems of life. We feel pressured to succeed, to make more money, to push harder. We have children who begin to carry the magic and we have less and less of it with one another. One day, sometimes sooner and sometimes later, the magic is gone. When we look into the basket, it is empty and we feel hurt, disappointed, and bewildered. The relationship is over even though we may live with one another for the remainder of our lives.

Despite many claims to the contrary, this magic does not have to disappear. Keeping the magic requires some effort, however. We must be willing to learn the lessons that relationship has to teach us. We must also be willing to take time to nourish the connection that exists between our partners and ourselves. All this is possible. This book is about keeping the magic — and the excitement — alive in your relationship.

Love and the Mutual Exploration of Consciousness

As you can tell from the story of “The Star Maiden,” we are a pair of incurable romantics. But we have discovered that romance is not enough. So, we use the term joint venture to describe a new kind of relationship in which two people come together for not only love, romance, and sexual chemistry, but also partnership, personal growth, and spiritual evolution. Love alone cannot make a relationship work because the forces that can destroy love are too powerful and, for most of us, too unconscious. Mutual exploration, learning, and personal growth without love cannot do the job either, because love is the oil, the elixir, that smoothes everything and makes it all worthwhile.

So, what does this mean? It means that, according to the first principle of partnership, you must have both love and a commitment to the mutual exploration of consciousness in order to convert your relationship to a partnering model. We cannot tell you how many times in our earlier years together that we reached a point where we both feared our love was dead. We felt utterly defeated and saddened and frustrated that the end had come. Then we did some work with each other. Hal may have shared negative reactions he had been harboring toward Sidra that he hadn’t been aware of. Sidra may have realized that they both were overworked or that she was giving too much energy to her family. Or a dream may have come that clarified what had been going on unconsciously. Suddenly the love returned, in full force and even more powerful than before, because we had mastered a new experience. After we saw this happen hundreds of times in our clients and ourselves, we realized the power of this combination of love and mutual exploration. This is why we scoff at people who insist that love must die with marriage and children. Love dies because people don’t have any kind of systematic way to deal with the host of things that impact marriage in a negative way. That is why the exploration of consciousness is a process that must go on forever.

We are not suggesting that all partners will be together forever. It often happens that the process of relationship can lead people to separate. What we can say is that the vast majority of relationships end because people don’t know how to handle the negativity and the sense of being overwhelmed that so easily invades primary relationships.

The second basic principle of partnering is that there is a fundamental equality between the partners. This kind of partnering is nonhierarchical. Each partner may have strengths and weaknesses in relationship to the other (for instance, one may be good with the big picture and the other may be good with the details) but these differences are seen as a way to augment and help support each other. Achieving this fundamental equality is more easily said than done because such a shift requires us to examine our basic power motives in our dealings with people. As each of us came to our relationship from a background of power and authority, we can assure you that the ability to come to this equality with each other was not easy, but the rewards have been well worth the effort.

Partnering versus Hierarchical Relationship

Most relationships, both primary and secondary, exist in a hierarchical form. What this means is that people either adopt a role of wielding power over someone weaker or of being submissive to someone who is more powerful. This classical hierarchical relationship is what creates the “bonding patterns” that have contributed so much to our understanding of relationships. In its simplest form, bonding patterns is a term that describes the parent-child interactions we learned as children that automatically govern our relationships until we become aware of them. These bonding patterns can be positive or negative. (For more discussion of bonding patterns, see chapter 3.)

Hierarchical relationships are often related to family and cultural training that establishes rules about how we should behave in relationship. (For more discussion of hierarchical relationships, see Sidra’s book, The Shadow King: The Invisible Force That Holds Women Back.) For more and more couples, however, this traditional hierarchical structure no longer works.

Most of us yearn for a more equal partnership and a deeper and more fulfilling kind of relationship. To achieve this, however, we must address our traditional hierarchical training. Most of us need to spend a good deal of time learning to recognize how these ideas and behavior patterns live within us and color our system of relationships. When we recognize and understand these, we have the freedom to accept or reject them as we see fit.

Once we have tasted partnering, particularly in primary relationship, we simply cannot have any other kind of connection. Partnering moves us into a relationship that is truly a joint venture; a venture that takes us into spiritual realms even as it helps us to deal with the myriad practical details of everyday living. A joint venture relationship can exist whether the partners are of the same sex or opposite sexes. Partnering is partnering and the same psychic laws apply to all of us.

In the business world, if two very different people start a business as a joint venture, they are equal partners. The success or failure of the business will depend to a great extent on their ability to function as equal partners. The same thing is true in partnering relationships of all kinds. Although many of us would prefer this joint venture kind of connection in our business and personal relationships, life has a way of messing things up and what begins as a very positive system of interactions between equals can easily turn into murkiness and negativity or outright war.

It is one thing to want a true partnering in our relationships. It is another thing to know how to get it and keep it. This takes work and learning and an attitude toward relationship that is radically different from anything that has been available in the past.

Principles of Successful Partnering

The skills we must learn for successful partnering require us to explore areas of knowledge and experience that may be completely new to us. Some of this knowledge is based on what our minds can handle. Some learning has to do with the development of a knowing heart. Other insights are based on — what to our minds are nonexistent — matters of the spirit. Still other knowledge comes from our physical bodies. Once we enter into the adventure of real partnering, we begin to explore all of these areas because each has its own secrets and these secrets impact our interactions with other people. Let’s look at some of the learning that a joint venture relationship requires of us.

Discovering the Reality of the Many Selves and How They Interact

You can learn about relationship from many wonderful teachers, writers, and therapists. When it comes to learning about the psychology of selves and their interaction in relationship, however, our work is the primary source.

From our perspective there is nothing that is more important, more vital, more helpful, or more essential than the realization that we have within us a group of selves that regulates our lives and directs our actions, even though we think that our choices come from free will.

Put another way: Without the knowledge of one’s inner selves there is little possibility for truly rewarding and successful relationships. Why is this so? It is so because a relationship is not something that exists between two people. Any relationship involves a multitude of selves in each person that interact with similar or opposite selves in the other. We have to learn who in us is interacting with our partner at any particular time.

As a man, I (Hal) discovered that I had been leading a life that was dominated by a particular self that had to do with being responsible. This often forced me to do things that I really did not want to do. When we are identified with a particular self we have no choice about our behavior. It is automatic. We can change this, however. In order to do so, we must learn to recognize the selves that run our lives and separate from them. Then we can choose to use their expertise in a conscious way. For instance, when my responsible father happily and automatically wants to give up an enjoyable afternoon at the gym in order to help Sidra around the house, I take some time to see what the more self-nurturing parts of me would have to say about this. Then, instead of automatically staying home — and later resenting this decision — I am able to consider the alternative of not helping her. I have a real choice; my responsible father self does not.

Balancing the Process of Primary Relationship with Individual Choice and Freedom

To surrender in partnering does not mean surrendering to your partner or to another person. It means to surrender to the process of relationship that develops when two people commit to one another. This process of relationship becomes the third party. Incidentally, this surrender is not necessarily a commitment to either monogamy or nonmonogamy. Neither is it a guarantee that the relationship will remain forever intact. It is simply the recognition that the process of the relationship is a third and separate entity that has a life of its own.

If you surrender to the process of primary relationship then you must learn to listen to your partner. This does not mean that you must obey or agree with your partner, just that you must truly listen and feel your partner’s reality. If you cannot listen or you do not hear what your partner is trying to say, then you must find out why this is so. Why can’t you hear what your partner is trying to tell you? What stops this from happening? You must continually give energy to the process of relationship and do whatever is necessary to move through the roadblocks that inevitably develop between partners.

It is not easy to find a balance between this surrender to the process of relationship and your need to feel and behave like an independent human being. If you do something that goes contrary to the requirements of your partner, you must learn to understand the viewpoint and feel the pain of your partner. You must carry both of your realities, yours and your partner’s. You cannot just fly off into rebellion or power to prove that you are tough and strong and independent as you go off to “do your thing.”

The key here is that each of us must learn to feel our own vulnerability so that we can feel the vulnerability of our partners. This deepens connections. Embracing our vulnerability is a very threatening thing to do in relationship because it means meeting the other person without defenses. To learn to live with our vulnerability in an emotionally healthy way is to learn to live in relationship in an undefended way. This does not mean that we give up our power and become victims, it just means that we must feel our vulnerability.

Relationship As a Business Venture

We find ourselves in awe of the complexity of life these days. We do not know what it was like in earlier times, but this complexity seems to have risen exponentially since the industrial revolution. When we combine two lives, add in children and family and friends and the technological revolution we are in, it can feel as though each of us is running a giant business corporation.

It is important to recognize that life is very complex and the details of relationship are also complex. Most people, however, do not notice this. It also helps to recognize, as early as possible, that a primary relationship is not just a personal adventure but also a major business venture that involves an enormous number of details. If you do not understand this and take the business side seriously, these details begin to erode the intimacy of the personal connection and the magic disappears.

There is an excellent analogy to computers that can help you to see this point. Computers have a number of default settings that simplify their use. For example, the type of print and the type size are set up so that whenever you start to work this default position automatically opens. You can change it if you want, but it is quite automatic and saves you a good deal of time. Otherwise, there are a multitude of settings to see to every time you begin to work.

In a similar fashion, if partners do not consciously decide who is going to handle what in the multitude of tasks that face them, then a default position goes into operation and the partners do things not out of conscious choice but rather out of old habit patterns. So, if a woman has been a very responsible person from her earliest years, she will, by default, take on more and more responsibility for more and more things until she is eaten up by details. The woman that she was in the beginning of the partnership easily dies in this way as she drowns in obligations and requirements that, at a deeper level, she resents. Imagine that her partner is used to his mother taking care of all of his needs. His default position is to view a wife as someone who is there to take care of his needs much as his mother did. The partners end up with a connection in which they alternate being mother and son and father and daughter to each other. This causes no end of trouble because the early family patterns are transferred onto the new relationship and this ultimately creates serous problems.

One of the wonderful things about relationship is that partners have different strengths and weaknesses. Each person brings into relationship a unique set of values, sensibilities, experience, and knowledge and many of these are complementary. So it is that one person’s strength can be another person’s weakness. If used properly, this is one of the great gifts of partnering. Partners can “rest into” each other and allow the partner with a specific strength to handle the main responsibility for that particular area of life. The idea of “resting into” means using these differences in a conscious way and not allowing the default position to determine what each partner does. Consciously resting into someone is very different from unconsciously allowing that person to take over a particular area of expertise.

For example, in our relationship Sidra has historically had the primary responsibility for keeping our finances in order. On a regular basis, however, we talk over the finances so Hal knows what is happening. If we do not do this, then when things go wrong Hal can easily become irritable and angry (we would say that a self that is irritable and angry takes over) because he has abdicated financial responsibility to Sidra.

On the other side, Hal has had the primary responsibility for setting up the teaching and travel schedule. Sidra is apprised of these activities and no final decision is ever made without her participation. So, she rests into Hal in this area without abdicating responsibility just as Hal rests into her expertise on the finances without abdicating responsibility.

To deal with the myriad of issues that partners must handle, it is necessary to honor the business side of life and relationship and make clear choices in partnership about what belongs to each person at any given time. This may change by the week, month, or year but it must be attended to.

Understanding the Role of Judgment and Self-Criticism in Relationships

For most people it is relatively easy to fall in love. Sadly enough, it is even easier for this love to be destroyed. To create a successful relationship, you must understand the issues that destroy love and develop the ability to partner with another person so that together you can combat the destructive forces and overcome them.

Certainly understanding judgment is a major key to success in partnering. There are two kinds of judgments. One is the kind of judgment we make toward someone else. The other is the judgment we make toward ourselves. This last is commonly known as self-criticism and is based on what we call the inner critic, a self that lives inside of us and just loves to say nasty things about us. Both of these have a devastating effect on partnering. (For more on the inner critic, see our book Embracing Your Inner Critic.)

A judgment toward another person can be silent or spoken. If you do not like something your partner does or says and you say nothing, this unspoken reaction becomes a judgment inside of you and distances you from your partner. After this happens ten times or a hundred times, you relate to your partner in a totally different way. You lose yourself and your love dissipates as a more judgmental self in you takes over. When this happens, you find yourself looking at your partner critically and judging him or her either silently or out loud. Soon your partner begins to feel that you are acting like a judgmental parent. Actually, to our way of thinking, you are.

What generally happens in partnering is that one person carries the judgments and the other person becomes the receiver of, even the victim of, these judgments. The victims in partnering are usually self-critical. They can find nothing right about themselves and they usually come from family backgrounds where the family system was very harsh toward them. Connecting to someone who is very judgmental is a natural, and painful, outgrowth of such an early development.

Strong self-criticism is devastating to partnership as well because the other partner is forced into a role. As the other partner, you either have to keep building up your partner, which gets very dull after awhile, or you begin to get angry. When this happens it is easy to become judgmental and, before you know it, you are drawn into a role that you never really wanted to be in. You are your partner’s judge.

Please note that when we speak of judgments in relationship, we are speaking about ordinary judgments, not abuse. There are relationships that are abusive. We are not suggesting that you remain in an abusive relationship so that you can learn the lessons that your partner’s judgments might teach you. If you are in an abusive relationship, please seek therapy with an appropriate professional.

Learning about Vulnerability: The Agony and the Ecstasy

The other side of judgment is our vulnerability. This is probably the most lesson learning that there is in all partnering work. Learning to live with vulnerability is the agony. Enjoying the depth of relationship that it brings is the ecstasy. Why is vulnerability so important? Why do we say it is so much the crux of successful partnering?

We are born into the world as very vulnerable children. Our whole personality essentially consists of ideas and behavior patterns that are trying to take care of our vulnerability and make us safe in the world. If we are powerful, we feel less vulnerable. If we become very responsible we feel less vulnerable. If we are nice to people and we please them, we feel less vulnerable. If we rebel against authority that we feel is unfair to us, we feel less vulnerable. Judgment itself becomes an effective way of avoiding our vulnerability. Underlying every judgment is some fundamental issue of vulnerability, some basic feeling of pain, helplessness, shyness, or insecurity. No matter how much we know about these feelings, it is always difficult to express them in relationship.

There are two steps to take in coming to grips with vulnerability. The first is to learn to feel it and to know that you have it. If you are 100 percent identified with power, how can you feel your vulnerability? Well, you can’t. That is why one of the first steps in partnering work is to recognize the selves that are running your life and to learn how to separate from them. Only when you begin to separate from the power systems that sit on top of your vulnerability can you begin to feel your vulnerability and reconnect to the magic of your relationship.

Once you learn to hear the music of vulnerability and to feel its feelings, the next step is to learn how to communicate these feelings to your partner. We are not talking here about identifying with vulnerability and becoming a victim. We are not talking about becoming a weakling. What we are talking about is learning how to communicate your vulnerability in relationship while at the same time you are in touch with the parts of you that carry your authority in the world. This is one of the greatest — and most rewarding — challenges for each and every one of us.

Learning Healthy Ways to Communicate and How to be Heard

The basic principle of communication is a very simple one. It goes something like this: “It’s not what you say to your partner that is of central importance, but rather who in you is saying it!”

People spend a great deal of time learning how to talk to one another and there is always a place for this kind of work, particularly for people who have had little or no training in any kind of communication skills. They need to learn what to say and what not to say. They also need to learn what words to use; that is, how to say it.

What is generally overlooked is the fact that the ultimate success of your communication process depends upon which selves in you are actually talking. For this reason, we do very little teaching about what people should say to one another. Instead, we focus on helping people become sensitized to the quality of communication, the energy behind it. Because of this, we pay a great deal of attention to how your communications are received by your partner.

Learning the Importance of Sharing in Decision Making

Effective decision making depends on our understanding of the different selves that live in us. For example, if one partner is a power person and the other is very vulnerable, decision making is difficult even though, on the surface, it looks quite simple. The power person tends to hog the show and make all the decisions while the vulnerable partner feels overlooked and often becomes resentful or withdrawn. It is really difficult for love to last in a relationship like this.

There are other selves that pair up to make decision making really difficult. If one person is a power person who likes immediate action and the partner is a process person who loves to talk things over in detail, there may well be trouble. If one person is very parental and the other is fighting this authority by acting like a rebellious teenager, you can forget decision making because it isn’t going to happen. Learning to recognize these different selves in our partners and ourselves and learning to appreciate that neither is right or wrong, just different, is the beginning of a very new and very different kind of communication.

Mastering the Energetic Connections in Relationship

In addition to the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual connections of relationship, there is also an energetic connection, the basic premise of which is very simple: There is an energetic reality that exists and operates between yourself and others.

This area of energetic reality is one of our most exciting, juicy, and valuable discoveries since our original work with the psychology of selves. For us, this work with energetics has led to a redefining of intimacy that has had a great impact on the way that we “do” relationship and what we aspire to in relationship. The older idea of intimacy has to do with two people who are trying to come together and to blend their energies totally. This can lead to a kind of fusion and a loss of individuality. The new intimacy has to do with each of us having choice as to how we use our energetic connections with our partner. Instead of striving to always be close and blended with one another, this new goal is to have choice about how much to blend and how much we need to separate at any particular moment in time. The name that we give to this process of being together energetically is energetic linkage. The consequences of this mastery over the connections we make in our relationships are staggering. For more discussion of energetic connections, see chapter 5.)

Embracing Sensuality and Sexuality

Many couples first become aware that their relationship is in trouble when they experience a sexual problem. As we have seen over and over again, when sexuality goes wrong, the relationship has also gone wrong in some way. Our experience has been that when fundamental relationship issues are cleared away, the sexual difficulties usually clear up of their own accord. If we cannot establish emotional intimacy in our relationships, then the sexuality usually suffers. This is why the discovery of which selves are running our personality has such a powerful effect on our ability to relate effectively to other people and why so many sexual areas get cleared up when we do our psychological homework.

In communication, the issue is not so much what we say to each other but rather who says it. In sexuality, the issue is not so much what partners are doing with each other as much as it is the question of who is it that is making the sexual connection. Learning about this helps us to get the right person (or self) out to do the job! (For more discussion of sensuality and sexuality, see chapter 6.)

It is important to establish a clear delineation between sensuality and sexuality. Sensual energy is what we often refer to as “Aphrodite energy.” This kind of energy exists in both men and women, though in our experience women have a more natural connection to it. It is a very important kind of energy because it is empowering, it creates an intense experience of being alive, and it can provide a strong kind of connecting energy between two partners. It is quite surprising to learn how easy it is to be sexual and lack sensuality. When this sensuality is missing in relationship, you can have an active sexual connection and still feel sensually starved.

Sexuality has to do with the direct expression of our sexual impulses. It is focused upon genital sensation and direction. It can exist by itself without sensuality, or it can accompany sensuality.

Including Children in Our Lives without Giving Up Our Primary Relationship

Many times have we asked partners when they felt their marriage had begun to unravel. And many times we have heard the same answer: “Our marriage ended, or began to deteriorate, when our first child was born.”

Is primary relationship forever to be destroyed by the presence of children? The answer is — very frequently — yes, if partners don’t do their homework. We have to discover the changes that occur with the birth of a child, how the whole network of energetic reality and linkage is changed. The good news is that marriages can remain alive and vital if the work of relationship continues and if the children do not begin to occupy so much space that there is no longer any room for a truly alive, romantic partnering. The energetic linkage in the partnership must be given priority even when children are involved or else a deterioration process will occur in the partnership and the primary linkage will go to the children, where it does not belong.

Meeting the Outside Challenges to Your Relationship

We have fantasies about writing a book on “How to Destroy Relationship” because showing what not to do can really get your attention. Until we write that book, however, we have taken the ten top challenges to relationships and gathered them together for you to see in chapter 9.

Your computer is one good example of the kind of challenge we’re talking about. It is one thing to own and use a computer with some choice. It is another thing to be married to it so that it becomes the primary love object and you can no longer say no to it. The availability of the Internet and the possibility of immediate communication around the world can be very seductive.

Because of the many goodies that have been made available to us in the technological revolution, “things” can help to erode our connection to our partners. The fascination with cars, electronic devices, and so many other gadgets is always there to hook us, like a giant fishing line with delicious bait that is just waiting for us to bite into it. Going along with this is the stock market and the fascination with online investing and making more and more money. All of this can bring much pleasure to our lives and can even serve to enhance our relationships so long as we don’t get hooked. The trick is to eat the bait and run!

Your Dream Life as a Mirror to Your Relationship

Dreams are very special to us and we want to give you some ideas about how to use them to enhance your relationship. They give us a picture of how the intelligence of the unconscious is responding to us individually and to our relationship collectively. Not everyone remembers dreams and we don’t want you to think of this as an insurmountable problem because there are many ways to explore personal growth work. If, however, you do remember your dreams, they can provide amazing opportunities for supporting the process of partnering.

Sometimes a dream is very objective and straightforward. A woman dreams three nights in a row that her husband is having an affair. She finally tells him the dream and asks for the truth and he finally discloses the affair to her. It is really quite remarkable how much direct information dreams can give us.

Another woman who has been working on her relationship with her partner dreams that she is looking into the bathroom mirror and she realizes that she is wearing a “smiling mask.” She begins to remove it and it comes off her face like putty as her real face begins to emerge. She was starting to become aware of how much she lived her life pleasing her husband and children and everyone else around her and how much resentment she felt underneath this behavior. The dream showed her the mask she had been wearing, a behavior that was not her but rather a self in her that had taken over when she was very young. Only after becoming aware of the mask does her real face begin to appear.

Chapter 10 will help you understand the language the language of dreams, give you a sense of the simplicity of many of your dreams, and help you understand certain basic principles of dream work. It is a world of magic unto itself.

Including Spirit in Your Partnering

In every partnering relationship there is a third entity, which is beautifully described in a recent book by Jack Zimmerman, Ph.D., and Jacquelyn McCandless, M.D., entitled Flesh and Spirit. The idea of “the third” is simply an acknowledgment of divinity, of the reality of spirit. It is often most clearly seen in the dream process where the intelligence of the unconscious expresses itself quite regularly. Spirit may be experienced in meditation, in extended physical activity, in sexuality, in loving someone or something, or in the use of the mind under certain circumstances. Surrendering to the process of relationship also involves surrendering to the reality of spirit and a willingness to be open to its guidance.

Along with the surrender to this spiritual dimension, there is also the development of individual rituals in partnering that allow us to create ways of honoring the reality of spirit. The development of such rituals has been a very significant part of our lives and we are pleased to share some of this with you.

These are some of the basic considerations that we feel are essential to a partnering relationship. No matter where you are in the relationship process we feel that if you can begin to integrate and implement these principles of partnering, then the quality of all of your relationships will dramatically change. The process of relationship in general and partnering in particular is always a “work in progress.” When relationship works, life feels wonderful. When relationship doesn’t work, life can feel quite miserable. Is there anything more important in our world today than working on ourselves and our relationships so that we can bring the gifts of partnering to a new generation of children and bring to our own lives a sense of richness and joy that comes with conscious relationship?

In the next chapter we begin our relational journey by entering into the world of the selves and learning the ways in which these selves determine how we function in relationship.