The Conscious Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

put a few Nobel prizes in my pocket.”
    Kathlyn continues her journey: “That moment in the dining room when I was nine also opened my life work. I grew adept at observing body language to discover what was really going on underneath what people were saying. My closest friend and I played all sorts of mimicking and acting games. One of my favorite pastimes was guessing the feelings behind people’s gestures when I was walking or waiting for the bus. In my late teens I discovered that a profession called dance/movement therapy actually existed; it used nonverbal communication and movement to heal individuals and groups. The more I explored this medium, the more my conviction grew about the need to ground decisions in the body. When I was confused or troubled, I would move until clarity surfaced. And I added ‘energetic,’ ‘aware of his body,’ and ‘good dancer’ to my wish list for my ideal mate. I wanted someone who was as passionately absorbed by human behavior and potential as I was.
    “This choice, which I would now call the Short Path, required me to make decisions that superficially looked ruthless. My inner voice would demand that I leave a relationship—even if it seemed as if I were jumping off a cliff. Sometimes I wondered about my own judgment. I left my son’s father when Chris was a year old, even though my mother, and others, warned me, ‘You could do worse.’ But it had become clear that he wasn’t interested in the kind of evolving path we had originally talked about andunited from, so I decided it was better to be alone. I was twenty-one, still in college, and had about two hundred dollars a month to live on and an infant to raise. I knew I would rather navigate single parenting and juggle day care with school than continue to live in a dead end where the most that was demanded of me was to keep the refrigerator stocked with beer.
    “The moments when relationships end seem so much clearer in retrospect than they do at the time. The night before Chris was born, his father had been taken out drinking by his buddies for his twenty-first birthday. So when we got to the hospital in the early morning hours, he was tipsy, tired, and somewhat lacking in social proprieties, in my opinion. I had really followed the happily-ever-after script as best I could, complete with embroidered hand towels, coupon-cutting, and homemade German chocolate cake for the big birthday. I went to the hospital with my hair in curlers because labor was scheduled to be induced the next day and I wanted to look as pretty as possible. I was in strong labor, three and a half weeks overdue with what turned out to be a ten-and-a-half-pound baby, in an unfamiliar atmosphere—and my husband was either asleep or flirting with the nurses.
    “Today I can admit that when Chris was born—with forceps and considerable loss of blood—my first thought was ‘Oh, now I have two children to raise.’ I felt totally abandoned during the event where I most needed support. If I had known how angry I was, I might have been able to reach out and reconnect. But in that moment I had already left, although it took me another year to make the move. One afternoon I came home from college after picking up Chris from day care. I was very excited about a new book I was reading in my sociology class, and I had bubbled on about it for a couple of minutes, when Chris’s father said, ‘I’m not interested in reading, and I’m not interested in hearing about all these theories.’ That was it; my inner voice said, ‘Get out of here or die.’ I got out.
    “Chris journeyed with me through those early turbulent years of short-term relationships with a variety of men, many of whombailed out at the prospect of having a young child around full-time. I knew that if I wasn’t growing, I couldn’t give anything of value to Chris, and I wasn’t ready to give up before I’d even lived. The challenge of essentially raising both of us forged independence,