ABSTRACT: The author’s main point is that one’s
relationship with one’s beloved is part of a spiritual process that brings
us ever closer to the Great Mystery and keeps us crisply alive and real.
Mainstream psychology and science, even primal psychology, can take us
only so far -- due to their intrinsically anthropocentric viewpoint.
So a larger vision is called for, one in which we see ourselves as a part
of, related to, and interconnected with the Earth, and indeed the entire
Cosmos.
The author narrates his own long process of discovering the Nature
within him, through his contact 
with
the larger Nature without . . . and how that led him to offering such an
opportunity to others. Once an individual has reconnected with the
planet and the Cosmos and thereby regained a vital spiritual practice,
he or she can then adopt a spiritual perspective toward relationship.
Thus, the timing of relationship is important.
Relationship brings up our primal pain; yet it is through confronting
Pain within ourselves that we can come to love more truly -- to love our
beloveds as they are. Love is acceptance, learning reality-based
trust, and letting go of the fear that if we do not control the loved one
she or he will hurt us. While not an easy task, this truly loving
perspective helps define ourselves in a relationship as two souls intertwining
and coming to know the Cosmos through the quirky dance of our union --
such as this is what the author terms cosmological relationship.
The old shaman tells us how we are all fragments of the Great
One and that when we love, we connect with another fragment of the Universe
in such a way that for a time our illusion of separateness is dissolved
and we experience the bliss of Oneness (imagine how we will feel when we
are all reconnected). But do not cling to either Oneness (for that
in itself is boring) or Separateness (for that in itself is painful); instead
learn to dance, as the Great One does, back and forth between Oneness and
Separateness. For we are all One anyway, and this Separateness is
but a Game for us to enjoy.
From this shamanic perspective nothing is accident, everything
happens for a purpose. So also falling in love is no accident, rather
it is an opportunity to see the Great One in him or her; it is a spiritual
adventure, despite the Pain that it involves. For dealing with Pain
is the same as burning one’s karma. Primal process in relationship
is a spiritual path -- not easy, but rich -- and it will grow your soul.
For God is All -- both lightning and lightning bug, grief as well as bliss.
And "One does not become enlightened by imaging figures of light but by
making the darkness conscious" (Carl Jung). As we go through this
process, we will, over and again, experience ourselves as part of a Larger
Perspective . . . walking this path you find your heart continually opening
to your soul.
A Larger Vision
Scientists have examined relationships heretofore mostly within the
rather narrow paradigms of psychology and mechanical systems, drawing upon,
it is true, creative expressions from Sophocles to cybernetics to stimulate
their work. Recently, Thomas Moore (1994) has attempted with his
lovely book, Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship,
to shift the ground somewhat toward soul. Hillman, I learn from Moore
(1994), points out that "soul" moves down toward the ground while "spirit"
ascends toward the sky. While I value this distinction, I will be
using those two words interchangeably in this article, if only to indicate
that, ultimately, whether we move down or up from an Earthly perspective,
from the Universal perspective such distinctions are ludicrous. For
there is no absolute referent from which to measure direction; this is
a perspective I shall be endeavoring to demonstrate as we continue.
While there is much that we can learn from the field of psychology
about ourselves and about relating to others, ultimately our souls and
the soul of a relationship are sacred mysteries. As such, they elude
the measurements of the scientific method or any clear demarcation.
Primal and other psychologies can provide us tools and perspectives that
are helpful in relationships, but let me caution against employing them
without also activating the larger vision, which I hope will be readily
transparent to you as you read on. Moore (1994) points out, "It is
always a mistake to talk authoritatively about mysteries," and I agree.
I do not talk authoritatively about that which is mysterious to me.
I do, however, speak authoritatively about what I know to be true.
I dare to do so because I believe that I have had access to some more efficient
tools than Moore: Not many therapists know how effective primal therapy,
done properly, can be. In Moore’s (1994) work I sense the underlying
sadness of a therapist stuck within a less-than-effective therapeutic system.
On the other hand, I want to honor Moore’s (1994) main point: That
we must free ourselves from our rigid views of love, marriage, and relationship
in order to open ourselves to the sacred mysteries they contain.
In so doing, we can move from the narcissism of "I have trouble with relationships"
to the humbler understanding that "Relationships have trouble with me."
Once we accept this paradigm shift, we move from blaming ourselves for
the difficulties of relating to others, toward accepting those difficulties
as predictable challenges in which we might gain understanding of the mystery
of soul.
No matter how much we know, ultimately love and relationship elude
our microscopes and telescopes. Those who pretend to have "the" answer
to relating are deluded. I hope that I do not give the impression
that I have such omniscience. Love and relationship are much bigger
and more mysterious than any of us dreams. So I want to acknowledge
that when we enter loving relationships, as when we enter life, we set
sail upon a sea of deep mystery.
Things that are useless on this voyage: anchor, oars, sail, life
jackets, compass, a known destination.
What you might like to have on board: trust, maps from previous explorers,
fresh water, a knowledge of history, the ability to untie wet knots in
gale force winds.
Some Limitations of Psychology
Beginning with Freud, modern psychology focused upon the intrapsychic
-- what goes on within a person -- and made such important discoveries
as the unconscious and the significance of childhood trauma. With
Harry Stack Sullivan, psychology broadened to include how the larger social
context -- in terms of "significant others," beginning with our
primary one, our mothers -- spins webs of interpersonal influences
which profoundly affect us.
Psychology is still mostly limited to studying what goes on
within or between human beings (or rats).
Of course, there are notable exceptions, beginning with Carl Jung.
What I am referring to is the main thrust of psychology; practicing psychologists
defining themselves as "transpersonal" or "humanistic" account for less
than ten percent of the field. As important as mainstream studies
are, their anthropocentric viewpoint1
ignores the obvious fact that we are intimately wedded to a planet spinning
within a much larger Universe. It is as if humankind were the mythical
ostrich with its head buried in the sand, clucking, "All that is,
is tiny grains of sand!" . . . and never looking up at grass, trees, mountains,
sky, sun, moon, and stars. Plato told us so in the "Allegory of the
Cave."2
William Blake believed that we can see a world in a grain of sand
. . . and that "a fool who persists in his folly will become wise."3
So perhaps the behaviorists who run rats through mazes will lead us to
the Light.
However, until they, or someone else, does -- and don’t hold
your breath waiting -- I would suggest that we lift our heads up
out of the sand and look about us.
As a psychotherapist who works with relationships every day, I knew
that something was lacking in our approaches. When I asked myself
what that was, I came up with two answers:
1. Psychology ignores the person/planet/Universe interconnections.
2. Psychology -- semantically the study of psyche
or soul -- assiduously avoids discussing the spiritual in
its attempt to emulate the "hard" sciences. Those few of us who do
explore the tenuous interface between hard research and soul are usually
perceived as being (sometimes correctly) fuzzy-minded.
Don’t get me wrong; I support learning what we can about human beings
through the scientific method, which is one valuable means of perceiving
reality. However, there are other ways of seeing. And it seems
to me that largely ignoring the larger context within which we human beings
live and love simply because it is ineffable is hardly scientific.
Would a good scientist study the wolf in the zoo? The shark out of
the sea?
Once when I was teaching a night class and we were spiritedly debating
the nature of reality, some students were pointing out that what was "real"
was the blackboard, the chairs, and the four walls of the room. After
willingly granting that these substantial objects have reality (not wanting
to play Bishop Berkeley to their Dr. Johnson), I invited my class
outside.
It was a beautiful night. The Milky Way cut a white swath through
the darkness. Orion was showing his sword. And you could almost
feel the Big Dipper wheeling overhead like the hand of a giant’s clock.
I invited my students to look up, to contemplate the astral distances
that are beyond most people’s imaginings, and to wonder how the Universe
is shaped, how long it has existed and will exist . . . and to ask themselves
what in the heck we’re doing here. This, I pointed out, is also real,
a Larger Reality about which we know little yet within which we swim like
fish in water. How, I wondered, can we speak of Reality when we lop
from the equation this larger context? Isn’t that like fish refusing
to acknowledge they live in water? Yet that truncation we perform
every day, comforting ourselves with the illusion that blackboards and
income taxes constitute reality, while we go into denial about the Big
Picture.
We must break this denial. I urge psychology to address these
larger, spiritual perspectives of our relation to the Earth and the Cosmos.
Both the personal and the interpersonal occur not in a vacuum but in the
context of what I call the circapersonal -- i.e., that which surrounds,
flows through, and embraces us. We are children of a vast universe;
until we moor ourselves in the larger reality of that universe, we are
adrift upon a sea of night. Nor are we separate from this Earth:
We are part of her. We are not on the Earth but of
the Earth; we do not spin in the Universe but as an integral part
of it.
I came to this perspective not so much through thought as through
intuition -- an intuition that therapy or any relationship constrained
by four walls or an urban consciousness lacks reality. I think this
perspective is an important one for loving relationships and will share
it with you, first describing my own journey thither.
One Person’s Connection to a Larger Vision
The three weeks of solitude during the Intensive portion of my primal
therapy were so significant for me that I pledged myself a renewing week
of solitude each year. When it came time to take that week the following
year, any idea of returning to the kind of four-walled cubicle wherein
I had imprisoned myself for my Intensive was repugnant. As I considered
where to place myself for that week alone, the answer leapt out at me:
The High Sierra. Having backpacked there before, I had come to love
the glacier-worn granite, alpine lakes, and delicate wildflowers of the
high country. The idea of encountering the wilderness alone caused
only a slight concern until first nightfall at nine-thousand feet.
As darkness came down around me, I got scared. Although not
customarily afraid of the dark, I felt like a child without a protecting
parent. I built up a big fire and sat facing it with my back to a
friendly pine.
I slept fitfully that night and arose with the sun, glad to be moving
again. The temptation to abandon solitude was great, especially when
I fell in with a lovely, solitary woman who was similarly frightened.
I realized I would have to leave the woman and the trail if I were going
to maintain my intention.
Though it was difficult to say farewell to her, I let go of what
looked like a promising friendship and left the trail. Striking off
alone cross country increased my fears considerably. What if I got
lost or broke an ankle? But I knew intuitively that my soul needed
solitude in Nature. Although I had probably read of how Native
Americans did their vision quests, I was not consciously making a formal
quest: I was simply following my inner guide.
Navigating by map and compass now, I entered true untrammeled wilderness.
Though some of it was pretty rough, I finally found the secluded lake that
had looked so alluring on my map. As evening fell, I asked for and
received two trout from the lake on two casts of my Roostertail and was
frying them when I thought -- or felt -- "Bear!" the second
before I saw him. Ten yards away, all black, with his beady eyes
and twitching nose coveting my dinner.
Without fanfare, he charged.
Although I’d seen black bears before, I’d never been charged by one.
In fact, they’re not supposed to charge but to be timid. Having
a quarter ton of frothing fury hurtling at me definitely stopped my inner
chatter. In that moment I lost all civilized thought process.
I became Neanderthal man.
Still holding the precious pan with the sizzling trout in my left
hand, I picked up in my right a stone so big that I doubt I could even
have budged it in a normal state of consciousness. The bear was coming
straight for me, five yards away now, and I bellowed what can only be called
a Primal Bellow. As I bellowed, the bear veered right and was passing
by when I -- or the Neanderthal in me -- threw the stone.
The civilized forebrain clicked back on about that time, shrieking hysterically,
"You idiot! He was leaving! Now you’re really going to piss
him off!"
The stone, hurled with a strength far beyond mine, caught the bear
-- two yards away -- right over the heart. I would not
have been surprised had he dropped dead . . . or turned to maul me.
I heard a deep "Thunk!" such as when you strike a hollow log with a sledge
hammer.
The bear didn’t even break stride. Running like a fullback,
he disappeared into the firs.
I fell apart, shaking with shock and fear. Gingerly, I set
the pan down lest I spill the priceless trout. I sobbed as the shadows
lengthened.
I didn’t sleep at all that night. I built a huge fire and tended
it like an ancient priest through the slow wheeling of the stars.
I sharpened a long pole and fire-hardened the point. I was sure the
bear would return in the night for his vengeance.
The bear did not come back that night; I had to acknowledge that
revenge was my own projection. When the rosy fingers of dawn touched
the East, I found myself dancing with joy. I understood, as I lifted
up my arms and shouted toward the gathering light, why Nature people have
worshipped Father Sun. My own worship was heartfelt.
I left that lake and climbed a rockface that I hoped no bear could
cross. Atop the ridge I could look back to where I had been the night
before and see the stand of firs around what I dubbed Hungry Bear Lake.
The sky was a light blue, with soft lacings of cloud. I was all alone,
deep in the wilderness, with no protection other than my wits and my Neanderthal
collective unconscious. And suddenly, I realized that was enough,
that I was enough. I realized that, barring a catastrophic accident,
I could survive alone in Nature.
It was as if a great weight fell from my soul, and I wept.
Wept for all the unnecessary fear I’d carried all my life. Wept at
how afraid I had been to trust my Mother’s bounty and goodness.
She was all around me now, gently cradling me. The granite
cliffs, her strong arms; the grass and trees, her hair; the lakes, the
milk of her breasts.
Below me lay the lovely oval of a sapphire lake bordered by soft
duff and wildflowers. As I looked down upon this new lake, a huge
bear, cinnamon-colored, emerged from the forest at its south end and slowly
ambled along its shore.
I felt no fear. Bears were no longer my foe but my special
relations. I knew they would not hurt me, if I respected the
rules of Nature. Nature was family to me.
Since that day, I have made a yearly pilgrimage to that visionary
lake -- which I call Sacred Lake -- to renew my sense of
oneness with Mother and her other children. Usually the bears, whom
I have come to know personally, try to steal my food. Usually I drive
them off before they do so. It’s a game we play, more exciting and
real than most. And when Bear graces me with such a visitation, to
play with me, the hair always stands up on the back of my neck and I experience
for a time the awe and sublimity that Humans have felt in untamed Nature
for millennia; and I know a deep aliveness.
Offering the Opportunity to Other People
Soon after my personal vision, it came to me that I should share this
opportunity with certain other people. I now knew that there were
available in Mother Nature kinds of experiences that people would not have
in my consulting room. It was possible to take a small number of
people out of the city into the wilderness, to open to them the opportunities
presented by a guided experience of solitude in Nature wherein they might
lose some of their fears and discover a nurturing mother who embraced them
lovingly. I called this experience Contacting Mother Earth.
I have been leading this wilderness experience for twenty years now.
Recently, I have been taking people into Sacred Lake and protecting the
food from my bear brothers while the questors scatter around the lake basin
for two days of solitude and fasting. We re-gather to break the fast
and share our personal experiences and visions.
During the trip we do various exercises designed to help break us
out of our ego-shells and open us, first to connection with the "tribe,"
then with the planet, and finally with the larger Cosmos. Being no
true believer, I have no dogma I want others to swallow. I have only
a perspective and a way of being to share. We use Nature, storytelling,
drumming, movement, poetry, dreamwork, group process, and whatever comes
up to help create a doorway. Whether anyone wishes to pass through
is up to him or her.
I lead this quest each year as an augmentation to my indoor work
as a psychotherapist, for I see magic happen when people open to their
natural and cosmological environment. What I believe is that we cannot
be fully human in four-walled rooms. We have artificially separated
ourselves, to our great loss, from the planet who bears us and the Cosmos
of which we are an integral part. Our concrete and streetlights and
TVs and houses cut us off from our Source. Self-exiled and imprisoned,
we lose intimate connection with what is Real.
People speak of the "real world" to mean the nonacademic world of
business, courtrooms, rape, and war. But that is not the "real world"
any more than academia is. Both are but human excrescences upon the
face of the Real, like metallic paint upon a rock.
The Real World is our planet and our Cosmos. My perspective
is that what is most "real" is what was here before we evolved and what
will remain long after we have gone the way of the dinosaur and the dodo.
We are but one of the many children Mother Nature has spawned in her long
life. We are troubled if clever children, emotionally disturbed and
given to wrangling and the wholesale destruction of our own species.
"The Earth is infected," said D. H. Lawrence, "with a
disease called Man." Of course Lawrence, being nonsexist, meant Humankind.
He was far too wise to believe, as some do today, that all our problems
can be traced to male testosterone.
What we can do, of course, is to heal ourselves emotionally and learn
to live in harmony with our Mother, but she will survive whether we are
naughty or nice. To ask what we can do about saving the Earth is
incredible arrogance. The actual question, as Ted Rozak (1992) points
out, is what She will do about us.
Perhaps our Mother will have us treat this cancer with the radical
radiation plan we have created in our nuclear weapons. Or perhaps
we will be erased by a new virus she creates within us. She is a
forgiving Mother, but she won’t let us kill her and all her other children.
Whether we heal ourselves is of larger consequence than our individual
"happiness." It is both a human-tribal and planetary concern.
Which brings us back to the importance of the healing power inherent in
relationships.
Relationship/Planet/Cosmos
Our relationships do not form in a vacuum, although we may have that
illusion ("We two against the world!") during the Romantic Stage.
Society impinges when a spouse is sent off to a war or when a child is
removed from the home by the legal system. Then there is economic
necessity; most of us feel the pressure of having to make enough money
to survive. Many writers have pointed out how the Industrial Revolution
has sped up and complicated the process, thus impacting relationships.
As we have seen, couples today are renegotiating roles: who works and how
much, how the children are cared for. All of these societal issues
affect our relationships profoundly.
Good therapists know these things and take them into consideration,
helping couples negotiate their way through this morass. Few therapists,
however, know how important it might be to any relationship to be reconnected
to Mother Earth and the larger Cosmos and then how to accomplish that reconnection.
That reconnection is the work of a spiritual practice.
A vital spiritual practice connects the individual with the planet
and the Cosmos. Once connected and spiritually nourished, the individual
can then adopt a spiritual perspective toward relationship.
The timing is important here, for we have learned that inordinate
love -- the substitution of a human beloved for a Higher Power
-- skews both reality and relationship. Here is the distinction:
I cannot effectively make my partner my spiritual core, but once I have
a spiritual core within myself I can have a spiritual relationship
with a similarly grounded partner. First a Self, then the possibility
of a relationship.
For instance, the almost unconscious fears that I had about being
alone in the wilderness -- which were mediated more by childhood
traumas and Hollywood images than any present reality -- led me
to be distrustful of Nature, to treat her as something to fear and to armor
myself against. I could not allow her in as a loving presence.
Similarly in relationship: So long as I carry fears based upon my Pain
and societal images, I will have difficulty trusting and I will protect
my vulnerabilities. When I can discover that, no matter what a relationship
kicks up for me, I can take care of myself, then I am liberated to trust
and commit.
That trust is, first of all, in my own ability to be in love and
to survive, to know that I can be hurt -- badly hurt -- and
survive. Only when I have that capacity am I able to fully open and
to expose my vulnerability to another. Yet only when I am fully open
and vulnerable can I truly love.
In this sense, "love is letting go of fear." What do I have
to fear, really, in the present? Abandonment, betrayal, ridicule,
powerlessness, abuse? If the one I love hurts me in some way, the
real question is, "Do I have the capacity to experience that hurt and to
survive?" Those who cannot answer with an unequivocal "Yes!" will
be fearful of loving or are in the wrong relationship.
An example might make this more lucid. What I fear most in
relationship is betrayal and abandonment. Why? Because I experienced
trauma as a child when my father, home from the war, replaced me in my
mother’s bed. My fear is actually an old one, rooted in a past
trauma. However, I can project that fear into the present and
distance myself from my beloved when I imagine that she might abandon me.
I am of course right to fear abandonment in the present, for it will
occur. My beloved will abandon me (as will yours). She
abandons me when I need her to help with the housework and she is unavailable.
She abandons me when she is late. She abandons me when I wish her
to soothe me and she is unavailable. She might abandon me by dying
first, or by having a terrible illness. In other words, there are
countless ways of being abandoned. Some are more painful than others.
For me, given my primal pain, what would be most Painful would be to be
replaced by another man.
And could I survive that? Having done my therapy and survived
the heights and depths of my own feelings, having lived through countless
small abandonments and a few big ones, I know that I could survive.
I know that most of my fear is not actually present but past, and I know
what that fear is and just how much it hurts. Knowing all this, through
my feeling experience, I can be present and open with love and my beloved
in much the same way that I can now be present and open in the wilderness.
The connection is, I think, that our fears of the wilderness and
our fears of the unconscious parallel our fears of relationship.
We project our fears of the unexperienced experiences frozen in our unconscious
onto both wilderness and relationship. The adventurous among us might
then seek them out, but as a challenge to be conquered rather than a beloved
to be trusted and cherished.
Rather than making love to our beloved and wilderness, we instead
control and rape them. The rape of the wilderness has been well-documented
and is obvious to all who have eyes to see. The rape of relationship
is occurring around us everyday. At root, it occurs every time I
am so fearful of accepting my beloved as she is -- with her
bears and thunderstorms as well as her green pastures and warm lakes
-- that I attempt to change her into a suburban mall or a ticky-tacky
housing development.
The irony is, of course, that if I succeed in changing her from the
wide muddy Mississippi into a toddler’s plastic wading pool I will no longer
feel the same love for her that I felt when she was a more organic, if
less familiar, part of the Cosmos.
A central theme is that love is letting someone else be, rather
than trying to change them. Learning to let go of our fears and our
frantic struggles to change exterior reality -- be it a person or
a hillside -- and to love them as they are, is a great spiritual
labor, perhaps the greatest. To do so, we must face our fears rather
than attempting to work them out through someone else. That is the
core work that precedes and then continually accompanies good relating.
Once I have done the bulk of that core work, the better half of my
journey is complete. But not all. For any relationship, with
Nature or with a beloved, will have thunderstorms as well as days clear
as mountain brooks. Not being a fool, I don’t usually run about naked
in a thunderstorm. Lightning can kill. Being unprepared for
a sudden snowfall is potentially lethal. Nor do I pick up rattlesnakes.
Similarly with my beloved. She is usually a warm summer’s day,
rich with wildflowers and birdsong. I love her sunrise and sunset,
the richness of her stars at night. These parts of her I am completely
open to. But the sudden lightning of her rage or the poison of her
tongue I take precautions around. Just as it is not trusting but
stupid to swim while lightning flashes, it is unwise for me to offer my
heart when my beloved is in a rage. In both cases, better to hunker
down and watch the storm from a safe place, accepting and even enjoying
it for what it is while not risking death.
On Trust
There’s a lot of confusion about trust. People seem to think it
means expecting the best in all situations. They are then outraged
when the best doesn’t happen.
We remember the Chinese parable of the man who found the frozen snake,
took it home, warmed it by the fire, gave it milk to drink. Once
warmed and fed, however, the snake bit him. As the deadly poison
coursed through his veins, the man cried out, "Snake! How could you
do this to me! I saved your life! I took you into my home!
I warmed you by my fire! I fed you! Look how you repay me!"
And the snake replied, "Don’t blame me, buster. You knew I was a
poisonous snake when you picked me up."
Expecting a poisonous snake not to bite is not trusting but stupid.
Biting is a part of its snaky nature. In fact, you can trust a snake
to bite, a wolf to howl, and a salmon to swim upstream. Being outraged
at them for doing what is natural to them is demented.
But we do this to the people we love all the time.
Yesterday, a man came into my office, distraught that his lover was
habitually late. "What can I do about this flaw in her character?"
he wondered.
I asked him how long he’d known her.
"Two years, and she’s been late at least once a day the whole time!"
I inquired what he knew about her past history of punctuality.
"She hasn’t been on time her whole life! She was even born
a week late!"
While knowing absolutely that being late was a part of who she was
and had always been, he was unaccepting about this part of her, wanted
to "should" on her and change her. I suggested that he trust her.
Trust her to be late, since that is clearly what she did, and organize
around that.
Similarly, I can trust a woman I know to dramatize her life in order
to get people to take care of her; I can trust Lucy to pull away the football
every time Charlie Brown tries to kick it; and I can trust politicians
to break campaign promises. Intelligent trust is based upon reality,
not upon the way we think things ought to be.
Exercise: Make a list of the "negative" traits
of a person you love. How many of these traits have you struggled
to change? How much luck have you had doing so? What do you
conclude?
Now, think about these traits of your loved one as simply parts of
them, like a snake’s fangs or a dog’s fleas. Can you trust your loved
one to have their traits?
Trusting them to be as they are, can you still love your loved
one? How will you organize around these time-proven and trusty traits?
Love is acceptance, learning reality-based trust, and letting go of
the fear that if we do not control the loved one they will hurt us.
Love is letting another person be and accepting them as they are.
Love does not attempt to de-fang the snake or make the lion lie down
with the lamb.
Cosmological Relationship
A relationship circumscribed by four walls, a concrete yard, and the
freeway is cut off from the Earth. Some people manage to keep a ficus
or a housecat "alive" for years in a city apartment, though I wonder about
the quality of that life. Similarly, a relationship that is cut off
from the larger Cosmos is like a redwood trying to grow within a hothouse.
I imagine that sometimes it’s done, but it ain’t easy.
When I can move from a stance of fearfulness that attempts to change
my beloved from her wild nature into what might be safer and more convenient
for me, I must then deal with her not as a sanitized, conventionalized
Barbie doll but as an organic part of the Earth and the Cosmos. When
I accept and love her as Wild Woman, as a flower produced by Mother Earth,
as a burning star of the Cosmos, then I open myself to a cosmological relationship.
The fearful perspective helps define us as two ant-beings whose existence
is focused upon the position of toilet seats, protectionism, and the accumulation
and dispersing of little green pieces of paper. The loving perspective
helps define ourselves as two souls intertwining through these lovely bodies
and interesting personalities as we come to know the Cosmos through the
quirky dance of our union.
One perspective is that we are two lumps of flesh who merge, perhaps
create other lumps, and disintegrate back into the soil, having paid our
requisite amount of income tax. The other perspective is that we
are two eternal parts of the Cosmos who have perhaps met in many forms.
When I have a choice between two options like this, I always take
the more dramatic one. It’s more fun.
Once I step inside the cosmological perspective, I am in a space
of wonder and excitement. Everything is imbued with significance.
Everything glows with soul. This perspective -- that everything
that is glows with soul, that everything is connected in an intricate
web of relationship -- is fundamental to the way a poet like William
Blake or a shaman sees the Cosmos.
The Old Shaman Sings
Imagine for a moment that you are sitting with me beside the fire at
Sacred Lake. Millions of stars cast an eerie light over the startling
face of the sheer granite wall that rises vertically behind the gently
lapping waters of the lake. Occasionally the fiery trail of a meteor
sears the nightsky, joining with the sparks of our fire that ascend toward
heaven.
Suddenly, as though he had appeared from out of the earth, we see,
sitting across the fire from us, a strange old man clad in the skins of
animals. His hair is long and white. He wears a necklace made
of the claws of bears and pumas. His eyes are closed, and he is humming
a melody in a minor key. One hand dips into the deerskin pouch at
his side and scatters sweet herbs onto the fire.
Do not run. I know this man from my dreams. He is a wise
man of great spiritual power.
The melody he hums grows louder now, and we begin to make out what
seem to be words in some outlandish language full of gutturals and glottal
stops. Yet as we listen more closely, gradually we can understand
them:
"In the beginning there was only the Great One, and She was bored
with being One and being Great, and so She conceived the Cosmic Game, which
was to fragment Herself into millions upon millions of parts, each of them
Her, and none of them knowing it was Her, or that half of the Divine Play
was for all the fragments to dance together in intricate steps and then
reconnect once more into the All.
"And so there was a blinding explosion of a magnitude unimaginable
as She split into millions upon millions of fragments, some huge, some
tiny, and these parts hurtled away from one another faster than the eagle
flies, and not one of these parts knew or remembered that it was a part
of the Great One.
"And so, my children, all that you see and taste and breathe on this
night -- this cool wind, this pennyroyal tea, you and I, this wall
of granite and the stars beyond -- all are but fragments of the
Great One. To us it seems that stars and moon, you and I, are separate,
and so we are at the level of our limited perception. And at the
same time we are all connected, all One, for we are all parts of the Great
One who lives in each of us.
"I know this, for I have seen it in my Vision.
"And now all these apparently separate fragments of the One are dancing
across the great breast of sky, as we have for millions upon millions of
years, linked by those mysterious powers of attraction that those with
clever minds even now puzzle over and attempt to link as One. However,
they are too much in their heads, not enough in their hearts, and they
overlook Love, which is the binding force of the Great One. Love
is one part of the Great One being drawn to another.
"When we love, we connect with another fragment of the Universe in
such a way that for a time our illusion of separateness is dissolved and
we experience the bliss of Oneness. If we feel that much bliss with
but one other fragment, imagine how we will feel when we all are reconnected.
"And when we experience such union, we are both blissful and frightened,
for we are confused about what is All and what is ‘I.’ Naturally, for that
confusion is primordial from that first Big Bang in which we fragmented.
It is difficult for us to grasp that we exist both as separate ‘I’
and unified Great One at the same moment. Naturally, for we have
both contrary impulses within us -- the desire to be separate that
the Great One manifested in the Big Bang and the desire to be One which
is the purpose of the Great Game.
"Do not fret yourselves, my children. There is no hurry.
Enjoy your separateness. Enjoy your eventual reunion. And afterwards,
there will be another Big Bang and the whole Game will begin again.
So has it happened countless times before and will happen countless times
to come, throughout all Eternity.
"Right now, you have the illusion of separateness. Enjoy that
part of the Game, for that illusion is very real at this moment.
See! I am here and you are there. It appears that we are separate
beings. You hear me speak words you have not heard before, in a strange
tongue, and this is part of the Game, which one part of you relishes.
Being separate, knowing what it is to be within the finite shell of a "human
being" or a "cliff" or a "star," that is something!
"However, there can also be great pain in such separateness, for
another part of us hungers for wholeness, to be One again. There
is great pain in believing that the Grand Illusion is the only Reality
when it is but one portion of reality. The actual Reality is that
we are all One, that we are in fact the Great One fragmented for a time.
"And so, my children, when you have an experience of Oneness, be
it with this place, or a dog, or a loving person, enter into it fully.
For in that Oneness you taste the actual Oneness of the Great One.
Love leads us to taste that Oneness and will bring us home, over and again,
through the eons, to our Oneness again.
"But do not cling! Do not cling to Oneness, for that in itself
is boring, or to Separateness, for that in itself is painful. The
art of life is learning to Dance, as the Great One does, back and forth
between Oneness and Separateness.
"Loving relationships give us the possibility of experiencing both
Oneness and Separateness. When we fall in love, we feel as One.
We make love and for a moment we are at One with the Cosmos. Then
our bodies disengage, and we think it would be nice to fall into separate
sleep, or to take a quiet walk alone. Later, we argue over who is
doing more of the work or who was supposed to hunt that day. We do
not see that these arguments are but devices to pull us from the Oneness
toward greater Separateness. Once we are Separate, then we can reunite
in great Oneness. And so it goes.
"Our problem is that we attempt to cling to one or the other, rather
than accepting both as our birthright.
"Our problem is that we forget that we are all One anyway and that
this Separateness is but a Game for us to enjoy.
"In relationships we can learn to Dance the Cosmic Dance. We
can take the long view, as does the Great One, and enjoy the Separateness
as much as the Oneness, and we can enjoy the Dance as we move from one
to the other.
"And so, my children, only listen inside, to the Great One which
is within you, for can you doubt that She is there? Listen to the
pull that wishes Union and the pull that wishes Separation, and follow
your inner guidance. Of course one of you will sometimes wish Union
when the other wishes Separateness, and that is only part of the Divine
Game! The art of relationship is learning how to Dance together,
from Union to Separation and back again. So dance, my children, dance!
Ho!"
We find ourselves starting up, as if waking from a dream, and looking
around ourselves. The old shaman has disappeared. The cliff
is still there, and the stars, and embers of the fire, but we see them
now in a new way, as if they were not quite so other, though we
are not quite certain why it seems so.
The Interface of Relationship and Soul
Although the Old Shaman sees the Cosmos in a different way than most
modern scientists, cutting-edge scientists are learning from him and discovering
that his beliefs are startlingly in alignment with modern quantum mechanics.
Shamanism is not just a "religion" for Native American tribes; it is the
oldest (at least forty-thousand years) and widest-spread (world-wide) belief
system human beings have ever known. Because shamanism is based not
upon a dogma or a priesthood but the individual’s direct experience
of soul, the later, dogmatic religions attempted to stamp it out .
. . for individualism is antithetical to a mass religion.
Even today, the Norwegian Lutherans forbid the Lapps the use of the drum.
What does shamanism have to do with relationships and the Pain that
cripples our relating? First of all, let us acknowledge that, although
there are also many sociological reasons for it, the divorce rate among
shamanic peoples is much lower than our own. Perhaps we have something
to learn from them.
From the shamanic perspective nothing is accident. Everything
that happens, happens for a purpose. When I am traveling with the
Old Shaman and my car breaks down, he is never irritated. Our original
destination is obviously no longer our destination. This hot roadside
is. He squats in the meager shade of a Joshua tree, awaiting visitations.
Whoever comes along is who the Great One wishes us to encounter.
It is all part of the Divine Dance. A flat tire in the desert with
the Old Shaman is not an irritant but a spiritual adventure.
Similarly, whom we fall in love with is no accident. The Great
One is at play when this part of Herself meets this other part. There
is some Divine Purpose that is unfolding. The Old Shaman encourages
us to look at our loved one with new eyes, to see the Great One in her
or him, and to discover the spiritual adventure that awaits us when we
fully engage this two-legged form of Divinity, with all his or her "faults"
-- which are, of course, simply devices for our spiritual opening.
If we think of what we might call (from a psychological perspective)
our "faults" or "emotional wounds" within a shamanic perspective, these
injured parts of ourselves are not random but precisely what we need to
explore in order to grow spiritually. The greater the wound, the
greater the possibility for spiritual healing and growth. Carl Jung,
who was a bit of a shaman himself, said the same thing. And so we
must confront our wounds, go directly into them, to learn what it is our
souls need to learn.
The Old Shaman believes our souls have been around forever.
They are part of the Great One. We have probably gone through many
transformations, having assumed the shapes of a drop of sea water, a lichen
on a rock, the rock itself, a dinosaur, a flower, a vulture, a bear, an
ant, a mosquito, a breath of fresh air, a cloud, a fire, summer rain.
Now we are two-leggeds, walking the face of the Mother and, if truth be
told, swaggering a bit with the arrogance that two-leggeds seem to have
as part of what they must overcome. As two-leggeds, we can do terrible
damage to the Mother and to our brother and sister creatures. Alternatively,
we can perceive the beauty of the Cosmic Dance and play and sing and love.
Whatever we do, in whichever form we manifest this time around, we will
contribute to either joining or separation. And what we do in one
life, many spiritual masters tell us, will follow us into the next, as
karma.
Burning Karma
The primal pain that we carry upon our backs and in our hearts is called
karma in the spiritual context. Whether we enter the world
with it, or gather it through experience once we are here, or both, is
moot -- a central topic in the "nature versus nurture" debate.
The important thing, it seems to me, is not so much how it might arise
but how to rid ourselves of the continued burden of it. In primal
psychology we have seen means of doing so from a psychological perspective.**
Placing it in a spiritual perspective as well might help you on the journey.
Burning Karma/ Releasing Pain
Is a Spiritual Practice
Karma is, of course, a Hindu rather than a shamanic word; but
the concept is the same: We each carry the consequences of our acts in
our manifested forms from one form to the next.
Perhaps an example will help. Last night you drank too much
champagne at the wedding. You slept without remembering your dreams.
And this morning you have a terrible hangover. Your head hurts, your
stomach is churning, and you’re irritable toward your partner.
Similarly, if in your last embodiment you were a drunk, in this embodiment
you carry the consequences of the previous one. Perhaps you are an
irritable person who has frequent headaches -- I don’t pretend to
know exactly how this works (and I’m suspicious of those who do pretend
to know).
When you decide to free yourself of the Pain that blocks your love,
you are embarking upon a spiritual quest. And while the language
is slightly different, depending upon which perspective you view the process
from, the journey is much the same. Relationship is a spiritual
quest, a part of our spiritual process.
This quest leads, therefore, not only to improving relationships
that are in recovery from Pain but also to a deepening and broadening of
the soul. The work we do in relationship is both primal process and
soul work.
I am far from the first to notice this obvious parallel. The
great Sufi poet Rumi spoke of it often back in the thirteenth century.
He says,
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.4
And that was the poem my wife and I, separately, all-unknowingly, handed
to each other the day of our first date.
I believe it is helpful to be aware of this parallel between the
processing of primal pain and the burning of karma. For one thing,
having both contexts available lends energy for the task: When I am exhausted
with "processing Pain," which sounds like a thankless drudgery, I can move
to "burning karma," which sounds much nobler. It also places me in
a tradition that is thousands of years old, in which I am supported by
many fellow-travelers who describe their journeys in great works of poetry,
philosophy, and spirit. Processing Pain is not a new task.
People have been doing it for millennia. They just spoke of it in
different terms and had less efficient means than primal therapy for doing
so. My hope in this article is to bring together the two traditions,
the old one of spiritual growth with the newer one of the couple’s journey
in moving through their Pain in relationship.
Modern-day pilgrims can become lonely and alienated on the path when
we think we are the only generation to have to confront the challenges
of relationships. Yet how cogent a treatise on love was "Tristan
and Iseult"!5 Also,
more than most of us know about love is clearly documented in Shakespeare’s
"Romeo and Juliet."
And for those hesitant to commit to relationship, I recommend Rumi.
When things seem particularly difficult, look into St. John
of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul.
We are not alone. What we are confronting here is a human problem,
half as old as Time. And while the outward face of the problem may
look different to each generation, the core issues remain the same.
So I say to you, Pilgrim, that your quest is not yours alone but
Humankind’s. When you undertake it you are not single but part of
a mighty river of great souls who have sought to burn off the dross and
come down to the gold.
Relationship is a spiritual path and process. As such, it is
not always easy. But it is rich. And it will grow your soul.
Exercise: Sitting comfortably, close your eyes,
and breathe deeply for five minutes or so . . . relaxing the tight places
in your body by tensing and then releasing them.
See your beloved in your mind’s eye as you saw him or her the day
you met. Remember, slowly and carefully, each detail of that meeting.
How did your beloved look to you? Talk to you? Laugh?
Say to yourself, "My relationship is sacred. Through my beloved
I come to know Love."
By conceiving of our relationship as a spiritual journey together, we
open ourselves to a larger perspective of Love. The purpose of the
couple’s journey is not primarily happiness (although we’ll take that,
too, when it comes) but spiritual growth.
Relationship as Spiritual Journey
A paradigm shift occurs when I move from seeing my relationship as something
from which to squeeze comfort and happiness to a journey and process that
will at times be challenging and hard. The most important shift,
I think, is from looking to the partner for what I want, to looking
to myself within the Larger Perspective. My partner is then
no longer the be-all and end-all but one means of journeying in the Big
Picture. As such, she will provide challenges for me to work with
for my spiritual growth. This paradigm shift helps me let go of the
expectations that I put upon my partner, to see her as part of the Great
Mystery, to take one-hundred percent responsibility for my own psychospiritual
growth while actively supporting hers, and to journey together with her
in the exploration of the Great Mystery -- knowing that ultimately
we make this quest as separate beings who have been in each other all along.
It also helps me to operate on two levels simultaneously: the level
of existential aloneness -- upon which I am a separate entity, different
from all other entities and making my single, solitary way in a vast universe;
and the level of spiritual union -- in which I am at one with the
Great Mystery and know that the existential level is but a vivid illusion.
In my loving relationships, I can experience the second level and,
for a brief time, step out of existential aloneness and into the ecstasy
of spiritual union. Love leads me there.
In our loving relationships we function on both levels. In
the Romantic Stage we can be catapulted out of separateness and for a time
experience ecstatic union. Oftentimes, craving that experience of
union, people will hop from one brief relationship to the next. Another
option is to stick with the relationship as it moves into the purifying
fire of the Differentiating Stage -- to realize anew our separateness
-- this time within a relationship. Once we have done
that, we will find new avenues to union untasted by those who shun the
fire. The paradoxes are that the greater the union, the potentially
greater is the sense of individuation; the greater the individuation, the
greater the sense of union.
When we cling to one side of the polarity, to either union or separation,
we are like a hand that is either always open or always closed into a fist.
Hold your hand rigidly in either position for more than five minutes and
you’ll begin to hurt. However, by allowing your hand to move fluidly
between openness and closedness, you experience no pain, only appropriateness.
What we resist learning is that, as human beings, we exist in both
the separate and the unified forms simultaneously but seem to be able to
be conscious of only one or the other. And so we must learn how to
shuttle back and forth.
Sex is a metaphor for this shuttling. Two vividly separate
beings are drawn to each other and join, physically. Their bodies
become one. After an intense union that can lead to a sense of cosmic
Oneness, they fall apart, once again separate. We cannot, even tantrically,
remain forever in cosmic Oneness, nor do most of us wish to be totally
separate hermits. Clinging to either pole cleaves our wholeness as
human beings.
Just so in our daily spiritual practice of relationship. This
morning my wife and I awoke from strange dreams, each preoccupied with
his and her own process. She is off at work, separate, and I am here
writing. Later, perhaps, we will come back together, reconnect, make
love. It is this pulsation of apart/together that is as fundamental
to relationship as exhalation and inhalation are to breathing. If
I hold onto either the in-breath or the out-breath, I perish; to hold onto
either separateness or union is to kill relationship.
It is by allowing our relationship to inhale and exhale that we keep
it alive and growing.
To do so, both partners must let go of control, must have faith that
the moving apart and moving together are part of a larger Dance --
the steps to which we will learn if we let go and let Love.
Growing Your Soul in the Crucible of Relationship
There’s an old Sufi proverb that says: "You can meditate for fifteen
years and get one inch closer to God; or you can be really angry and be
with Him instantly." I think we can substitute for "angry" in that
proverb any other deep feeling -- sad, joyous, terrified -- and
the same closeness to God will occur. In fact, feelings are the royal
road to soul, and soul is what connects us to the Mystery.
Relationship will give you ample opportunity to be with God instantly,
through the intense feelings that most of us experience therein.
There is little that I know that is more directly sacred than a wave of
pure feeling. It is easy to understand how joy can put us with God,
for many of us have experienced a sense of union with the All through loving
another person or having an intense sexual connection. It is a little
harder to understand that experiencing the so-called "negative emotions"
such as anger, fear, or sadness can likewise lead us to being with the
Great Mystery. Let me assure you that they can.
First off, let’s reexamine this thinking that divides us into "positive"
and "negative" or "higher" and "lower." As soon as I split myself
in that way, I create opposition. One part of me is then fighting
and judging another part. My "higher" self is tsk-tsking at how angry
or fearful my "lower" self is becoming. This seems to me a sure recipe
for neurosis, for it cleaves the Self and alienates a part of it.
The alienated part, we have discovered, goes down into the Shadow, where
it generates enormous power. Jung pointed out that whatever part
we attempt to disown becomes part of the Shadow, where it becomes more
and more savage.
Let’s think another way. God made us with adrenal glands atop
our kidneys. In certain situations we’ll have a lot of adrenaline
pumping through our blood stream, triggering anger or fear, fight or flight.
This is God’s way of telling us that there’s something around here we need
to pay attention to. Perhaps I need to stand up for myself with someone
who’s stepping on my toe. Perhaps I need to examine my archaic Pain.
Feelings are positive guides that give us valuable information,
once we learn how to pay attention to them rather than blindly acting them
out. We shun that deep body wisdom at our peril.
As we go through the Differentiating Stage of relating, we will
be angry, over and again. Thereby, we get numerous chances to (1)
flush out our archaic anger from being wounded as a child and (2) to learn
how to differ honestly, manage conflict cleanly, and achieve successful
resolution with our beloved. As we do so, we will experience God
in more vivid ways than I ever experienced God in church.
If God is All, and not some Nobodaddy6
with a benign white beard, then God is anger and grief and terror as well
as sexual ecstasy and quiet bliss. God is the lightning as well as
the lightning bug. The lion as well as the pussycat. And not
a tame lion. We can find God more expeditiously in our Shadows than
in our idealized visions of the way we, or the Universe, ought to be.
To repeat Jung’s wise dictum: "One does not become enlightened by
imaging figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. The
latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular."
As we go through the power struggles that trigger our archaic Pain, we
enter a different dimension of spirit -- we become worse than we
are. Who is this snippish, stubborn, petty, petulant fool?
We come face to face with our Shadows. If we don’t flee, physically
or into denial, we then have the opportunity to enter the purifying fire
and burn off the dross of archaic Pain we lug about with us, like Pilgrim
with his heavy sack in the classic Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.
As we do so we can begin to heal our wounded Inner Child and start the
journey toward spiritual wholeness.
In the Romantic Stage, in the mysterious, magical, and sometimes
miraculous power of attraction, when Cupid’s arrow struck and we were intimately
bound together with someone we might not have rationally chosen (Bottom
with an ass’s head, as in Shakespeare’s "A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream"),
we still find God directly. When overcome by this "divine madness"
we are temporarily lifted up to become better than we are, and we stretch
our spiritual limits. We taste nirvana and are given a preview of
coming attractions for what a relationship can be.
After we negotiate the tricky waters of the Differentiating Stage,
we will come back to a new romance, a new union, that is neither all heaven
nor all hell, but a modified and modulated version of both. To get
there, we will have burned off much archaic Pain and learned many valuable
lessons of soulfulness. Extending the couples’ journey together,
we will learn new and deeper lessons as we grow toward mutual interdependence.
As we go through this process, we will, over and again, experience
ourselves as part of Larger Perspectives: Of the history of great lovers
when we are full of love; of our original families when the Pain ascends;
of our generational family as we see how we repeat family patterns; of
the broader society as we deal with sociological issues such as men’s and
women’s changing roles; and of the soulful when we experience the heights
and depths of our feelings and learn how to ride these waves with grace.
For me, the important thing to remember on this journey is that my
beloved is my spiritual companion. From among all others, she is
the one I have selected in some mysterious way to be my partner in spiritual
growth. Sometimes we will hate each other. That is all right.
From our hatred we will learn and grow. Sometimes we will be in bliss.
That is all right. From our bliss we will learn and grow. Whatever
comes to us is grist for the spiritual mill. I do not need to fight
with my companion on this journey. I can fight, instead, with those
parts of me that are less than accepting¾of me, of her, of life.
For the real spiritual task in relationship is, I think, letting go of
what should be and gradually coming to accept what is, with a beginner’s
mind and spirit. Not less than what is. Not accommodating down
to a humdrum existence. But coming to see and to accept the All.
Learning that the All is not only the beam in my beloved’s eye but the
mote in my own and not only the fertilizer but the flowers as well.
There is no task I know more challenging or more satisfying.
I hope that this article will help you along the path. It is
a path with much heart. At times it is discouraging; at times, ecstatic.
What I can assure you is that as you walk this path, with loving awareness,
you will find your heart continually opening to your soul.
May the road rise up to meet you on your sacred journey, and may
you be blessed with a true companion to walk it with you, singing the song
of love such that your two voices blend as one.
Notes
1. The anthropocentric viewpoint is one
in which humans are seen as the be-all and end-all of existence, viz.,
that the Universe exists solely for our benefit and that there is an accuracy
in viewing our species as the "pinnacle of Creation." [return
to text]
2. For a good rendering of "The Allegory of
the Cave," see The Philosophy of Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett.
[return to text]
3. See Selected Poetry and Prose of William
Blake, edited by Northrop Frye. [return to text]
4. From "Quatrain 1246," Open Secret: Visions
of Rumi, translated by John Moyne. [return
to text]
5. I like the Belloc/Rosenfeld translation,
The Romance of Tristan as Retold by Joseph Bediu (New York, 1965).
[return to text]
6. Nobodaddy is Blake’s word for the
false, conventional God, who is a combination of nobody and Daddy.
[return to text]
References
Janov, Arthur. (1970). The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy: The Cure
for Neurosis. New York: Dell.
Frye, Northrop. (ed.) (1953). Selected Poetry and Prose of William
Blake. New York: Random House/ Modern Library.
Moore, Thomas. (1994). Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love
and Relationship. New York: HarperCollins.
Open Secret: Visions of Rumi. (1984). Trans. by John
Moyne and Coleman Barks. Putney, VT: Threshold Books.
The Philosophy of Plato. (1956). Trans. by Benjamin
Jowett. New York: Random House/ Modern Library.
Rozak, Theodore. (1992). The Voice of the Earth. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
St. John of the Cross. (1957). Dark Night of the Soul. Trans.
by Kurt F. Reinhardt. New York: Ungar Publishing Co.
Zukav, Gary. (1989). The Seat of the Soul. New York: Simon
& Schuster/ Fireside Books.
Copyright © 1995 by Belden Johnson
*
This article was originally published in Primal
Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn
1995, pp. 34-53. Reprinted with permission. [return
to text]
**
For examples, see especially the other articles in this issue of Primal
Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, Vol 1., No. 2.
[return to text]
Note: Shaman art, at top of page, by
Peter Radford. peteradford@yahoo.com
Biographical Note
BELDEN JOHNSON is a primal therapist and a poet. He has also taught
college students and preschoolers. Together with Stephen Khamsi,
he founded The Primal Center in Berkeley in 1979. His professional
interests include the religion/psychology interface and human relationship.
The preceding article is excerpted from his recently completed book, The
Lover’s Guidebook: Essential Tools for Building the Path of Relationship,
for which he is currently seeking a compatible publisher. He lives
in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains with his lovely wife, Yashi,
who is also a therapist, and his two sons, Nate and Tim -- who,
since they now tower over him, he is thankful to have raised lovingly after
doing his own therapy. Belden can be contacted at johnson@gv.net
Related Book: Go to Primal
Renaissance: The Emerging Millennial Return by Michael
D. Adzema.
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Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology
