Conscious Relationship
Stephen and Ondrea Levine, from Embracing the Beloved : Relationship as a Path of Awakening
This book is not meant to be read in only a linear manner. It often offers an experiential process. It is as much poetry as prose. Absorbed phrase by phrase, image by image, it allows healing to enter the heart, the mind, the body.
We share the process from which we are learning daily for the benefit of all who wish to use relationship as a path of self-discovery. This work is not to be taken lightly. This is a book about co-commitment, not co-dependency. These techniques are not applicable to anything that resembles the old-style dominant/submissive relationships which have for so long perpetuated our all-too-human suffering.
When true hearts truly join there is a mystical union. An inter-connecting of whole human beings which, is the foundation for great insight and growth. It is a collaboration in healing.
Although we often speak in terms of merging, or becoming one, or dissolving into oneness—-this is not a giving up of one person to another. It is not - as the great German poet Rilke fears of such commitments, “a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both of their fullest freedom and development..”
Indeed, if two people attempt only to become one, they certainly may get lost. But if the oneness just beyond such concepts is their ultimate concern–if each heart is committed to the universal heart, our birthright, our original nature–neither stops. And the ongoing aerial act is spectacular.
Indeed, when Rilke says that the most that can be expected is that “two solitudes protect and border and greet each other,” he is speaking of the best of the ordinary way. They do not burn for the Beloved. They do not love the truth even more than each other. They refuse to give it all away. To be blessed surveying new frontiers.
The distance from your pain, your grief, your unattended wounds, is the distance from your partner. And the distance from your partner is your distance from the living truth, your own great nature. Whatever maintains that distance, that, separation from ourselves and our beloveds, must be investigated with mercy and awareness. This distance is not overcome by one “giving up their space” to another, but by both partners entering together the unknown between them. The mind creates the abyss but the heart crosses it.
A conscious relationship teaches us to treat ourselves and others as our only child. And to do it mindfully. It does not break the heart. A conscious relationship is as healing and life-affirming as an unconscious, old-style relationship is at times harmful and life-denying. The harmful effect of an unconscious relationship is that it keeps us so small, dependent on external circumstances for our happiness. More needs than gifts are brought to such an entanglement. But a conscious relationship, offers the possibility of relating across the gulf of I and other all the way into the heart of our beloved. A conscious relationship shows us to remain conscious while in relationship. It’s a whole new ball game.
A few years ago Ondrea and I were scheduled to give a talk about healing on what turned out to be Valentine’s Day. Coming from the stillness of our mountain retreat to the commotion of the “big city,” we were deeply touched by the care and kindness exhibited as the meeting hall filled. So many couples aiding each other. Those alone helped to their seats by the loved ones of the recently departed. The weary, nearly translucent faces of patients, friends and colleagues. So many others drawn with illness or gray with grief. So many returned for healing with their families. Their lovers. Men and women of every description—teen-agers and octogenarians, janitors and physicians, car salesmen and poets: black, brown, yellow, and white; gay and straight; sick and well–the loved, the loving, committed to a mutual process. So much buzz and affection. Five hundred gathered for an evening in this beautiful old stone church in an investigation of healing.
These open faces, and the exceptional, nearly initiatory, day we had just had, overwhelmed us with waves of loving kindness.
And we thought what a perfect day to speak about human kindness and maybe even share that term we love so in private but rarely used in groups: the Beloved. A word that incorporates the heart of the sacred into a profound appreciation of our deepest nature. A word that is a “bonding responder” for the way our relationship has become our spiritual practice. And how our practice, our work on ourselves, has become the central core in our connectedness.
And we asked ourselves whether we needed to talk about healing or could just effuse about the Beloved a few times before we realized there was no question. There was no difference. As healing progresses deeper, a more tangible sense of being ensues. From that sense of being there constellates the quality of “being present.” Being present we come into “the presence”: the space in which the process floats: the Moved.
We find the term “the Beloved” quite functional for many reasons including the obvious parallel between the hearts affinity for such an idea and the draw of the personal toward the universal. And, of course, because it is our practice to meet our beloved as the Beloved.
It is a term used in many spiritual traditions and is particularly well served in the Sufi tradition, whose mystical, devotional aspect seeks the “hidden mysteries,” yearning for the direct experience of the one they call “the Beloved.” In perhaps the greatest of all devotional poetry, in the spectacular longings of Rumi, Kabir, Miribai, and Rabia, the Beloved is all that is sought. The Beloved is the context into which the wounded and dismayed may enter, as the ever-injured and uninjurable vastness embraces. their pain and transmutes it to mercy. But to all who seek their own true self, whether Sufi or Buddhist, Christian or Jew, Jain, Native American, or agnostic, the Beloved is the ever-experienceable vastness of our true heart, our original nature. And for all, it is the possibility of freedom, the divine capacity to transform our pool of tears into the Ocean of Compassion.
The Beloved is neither a person nor a place. It is an experience of deeper and deeper levels of being, and eventually of beingness itself–the boundarylessness of your own great nature expressed in its rapture and absolute vastness by the word “love.” It is not for the concept, but for the experience, that we use the term “the Beloved.” The experience of this enormity we falteringly label “divine” is unconditioned love. Absolute openness, unbounded mercy and com-passion. We use this concept, not to name the unnameable vastness of being–our greatest joy–but to acknowledge and claim as our birthright the wonders and healings within.
As we began to speak on that Valentine’s evening, the words “the Beloved” exited our lips with a sigh–a gentle bow to those gathered in the room and to that within each of us, which is only love and boundless being.