The Conscious Heart Read Online Free PDF

resilience, and innovation out of unformed potential. It was with Chris that I first practiced the relationship skills that have evolved into The Conscious Heart . Many times I had conversations with him about what I was feeling and asked him what he was feeling. He helped me stop smoking when he was five. By the time he entered school, he could easily ask, ‘Mommy, are you sad today?’ or talk about how his friends sounded when they were hiding something or needing a hug.
    “What saved us in many frustrating situations was sharing what was true for each of us. Chris could call my bluff and demand to be heard with great courage and vulnerability. He became interested in body language and the nuances of behavior, parallel with Dungeons and Dragons and martial arts. Until I met Gay, Chris was my primary relationship, the one I protected and nurtured with every faculty I possessed. I had adult partners, but until I found my essence-partner, I hadn’t committed to a primary relationship where Chris could revolve as a constellation. Until Gay, there had been no choice; Chris was the hub.
    “My relationship mythology didn’t fall away quickly. I had learned, as many women do, to look for others’ approval to validate my worth. I had consolidated my early reading, experiences, and observations into a personal comic-book version of Super-woman: the heroine who can do everything and still be feminine and totally responsive to her mate’s every need. My fierce independence contained a trap, though. I was raising Chris, maintaining a private practice in movement therapy, going to graduate school, cleaning the house, making gourmet meals, and sewing original creations—all without looking too closely at what I really wanted. No wonder I sometimes got resentful, but I would turn my anger against myself for not living up to my personal myth.
    “Gradually I learned that I could want, that I could ask forwhat I wanted and could learn from that choice. I love to be stretched emotionally, cognitively, physically, all ways, and I turned toward lessons like a heliotrope. Each one of my relationship decisions, even the steps backward, led me closer to the moment in that graduate school class when Gay and I recognized each other and I came home.”
    Gay continues: “It was the truth-withholding pattern that finally brought my five-year relationship to a crisis point. Often my partner would not tell me the truth about some significant issue, then would start finding fault with me. I would get rattled, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, only to find out later that her hypercriticalness was coming from a withheld truth on her part. I realized that I had encountered this pattern before, in one of my first significant relationships, when I was in my early twenties. My partner had suddenly one day become suspicious—to the point of paranoia—that I was having an affair with another woman. This went on for the better part of a month, with many heated denials on my part. Later it turned out that she had indulged in a one-nighter while she was away at a conference and had not confessed this to me. The guilt had eaten away at her, inspiring her suspiciousness, until the truth came out.
    “Shortly before my moment of ‘waking up’ in 1979, my partner had become erratic and critical, which was puzzling to me because we had been getting along quite well. Then, by accident, I learned that she had started smoking again on the sly—an addiction that had previously caused many a rift between us. She had hidden it from me for several months. When the truth came out, I discovered that her smoking coincided with her erratic and critical behavior toward me. This was indeed a hot-button: My mother’s tobacco addiction had eventually killed her.
    “For my part, I had indulged in some sex play in my office with a graduate student late one night. Naturally, I had failed to mention this to my partner, justifying my withholding of the truth