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Spirituality
By Jim Nourse
The stage on which our most significant hopes, dreams, projects and conflicts play themselves out is the interpersonal relationship. This is true in whatever the relationship context -- employer/employee, friendship, business relationship or spouse. In no other situation does it become more apparent how readily we make our happiness dependent upon factors external to us, and therefore set ourselves up for suffering. Not to mention the suffering created for the other person, who finds that she has unwittingly been fit into our agenda as needing to follow a certain script in order to meet our requirements for happiness. And what exacting writers, producers and directors we are! Most if not all the time we are not even aware we are doing this with each other. Aware. There’s that concept again. Without awareness, we stumble through relationship on automatic pilot comprised of habit patterns learned from parents, relatives and other people who have themselves inherited many generations’ worth of conditioning.
There have been many books written about how to improve your relationships and I see no need to repeat the good work that’s already out there on active listening, I-messages, reflecting, conflict resolution, and so on. There are many volumes that describe how we project onto others the unfinished business left over from conflicts with parents and other authority figures. This book is about using what we are given in everyday life as an opportunity for awakening, and, in doing so, to enhance our experience of everyday life and lend it a sense of being sacred ground. Relationship is such a huge part of everyday life, there must be a huge capacity for awakening there!
When conflict arises in a relationship, there also arises a sense of urgency. When there is little or no awareness present, this urgency will cause a person to press forward with his case, in an attempt to make the other person see things his way. Of course, the other person is doing the same, so things can escalate pretty quickly. If an individual has few skills for dealing with conflict, the situation can even degenerate into physical violence, but just at the level of the spoken word, raised voices, sarcasm, threats of various sorts can all be hurtful and do great damage. The tragedy is that these instinctive and unskillful actions accomplish exactly the opposite of what we want, which is to be heard, understood, valued and to move forward together. In working with interpersonal conflict one of the first things I tell people is “almost always, you can buy yourself some time.” This urgency about getting the other person to come around is the great enemy of growth and harmony in relationship, not to mention how it quashes any opportunity for spiritual development. I want to talk about two factors in buying time that are of the utmost importance in the process of awakening in the midst of relationship.
The first factor is the cooldown effect, which has been known about forever and is the basis of the “bite your lip” and “count to ten” prescriptions of folk psychology. This is all about taking time to allow fear, hurt, anger and whatever other emotions may be fueling the sense of urgency a chance to subside. When the temperature indicator on the dashboard is in the red zone and jets of steam are escaping from under the hood, this is the time to pull onto the shoulder and for now just simply let the engine cool down. It is not the time to keep driving in hopes of completing whatever agenda seemed so important, and it isn’t time to unscrew the radiator cap.
There are some misconceptions going around about “getting it all out” and “blowing off steam” that need to be corrected. There are some psychological techniques that include the opportunity to engage in emotion-release, but it is important to understand that these techniques are carefully and caringly structured and employed in a safe and supportive setting, and utilized for purposes of healing traumas. Intense emotion release is not a prescription for daily living. I have worked with many people who have said to me “I thought you shrinks tell people to just get it all out”; or, “I’m just a very emotional person. I blurt it out and then I’m done with it. That’s just the way I deal with things and my husband should learn not to take it personally.” In the first instance, we shrinks don’t prescribe just getting it all out, if that means spewing out your rage on whomever happens to be unlucky enough to have crossed you or your path at the time. There is a major difference between telling someone how you feel and launching emotional missiles at them.
In the case of blurting it out and being done with it, at first glance this makes some sense. It’s well known that stuffed emotion leads to a host of problems, both mental and physical. But is it true that, when it comes to strong emotions, the only choices we have are to blurt them or to stuff them? I’ll return to this question in a minute.
How do we buy ourselves time? Pretty simple. Here are some key phrases that you can use or put into your own words:
• I’m starting to feel pretty upset now and I need to cool down before I talk about it.
• I’ve heard what you said and I need time to take it in and think about it.
• If I talk to you about this now, I’m afraid I’ll say something hurtful and I don’t want to do that, so I need to think about it and talk later when I’m calmer.
• I appreciate your telling me this, and I need some time to think about it before I tell you what I’m feeling because I want to be clear.
These examples buy you time so that when you do get back to the person (and it’s important that you do!), you’re responding rather than reacting. Anything you say will have a greater chance of being spoken effectively and be better received because you will be coming from a calm, rather than an agitated, mind frame. In addition, when you tell someone you’re going to think about it and get back to them, you’re telling them that you take them and what they have said seriously, i.e., that you value them and the relationship you have with them enough to reflect upon their concerns and respond to them in a respectful way. It’s hard for someone to stay agitated and angry if you’ve just given them this affirmation. If, however, they’re itching for a fight (“no, I want an answer NOW!!!”):
• If I talk now, this is going to become an argument. Do you really want that?
• Do you want to work this out, or do you want an argument? If you want to work this out, I need to take some time to settle down so I can hear what you’re saying more clearly.
What’s tough about this is that you probably feel completely justified in striking back. The other person is being ridiculous and stubborn, it’s not fair that they’re blurting out their feelings and I’m playing the pacifist, why do I have to be the one who does this the “right” way? The answer is that this is the umpteenth version of the same old argument and leads nowhere but to more pain, and someone has to start doing it differently or this will just be argument #156.
One of my clients realized that during his forty years of marriage he and his wife had the same six arguments over and over, and he had the idea of numbering each one. That way they could just scream at each other “NUMBER 4!!!!” and spare themselves the details. You can resist it or resent it, but the one who has the most awareness, who can see a different way, has to be the one who makes the first move. Gandhi’s dictum “Be the change you wish to see in the world” is exactly about this.
Having bought yourself some time, what do you do? The second factor in buying time could be called the mindfulness effect. This is using the conflicts in relationship in the same manner as those times when you are forced to stop and wait. To be mindful in the midst of a conflict, to gradually become mindful earlier in the conflict, to develop the capacity to be mindful at the earliest signals of conflict on the horizon, is to master a very important part of the art of living.
When we become aware that a relationship encounter is headed in a painful direction, we have already begun to practice mindfulness. If we can use this awareness as a signal to allow this awareness to begin to expand, we begin to occupy the seat of the Observer as I have already spoken of it, and as we come to rest increasingly in this position, we become less and less identified with the fight, with having to win it, with having to make the other person see it our way. At the same time, what started as an interpersonal conflict becomes an opportunity for touching and expanding that quality of Being that has such a peaceful yet enlivening influence in our lives.
You might begin by getting clear with yourself exactly how you know when there is a problem coming up between you and someone else. It’s always good to check in with your body and your breath. Almost always, when tension begins to come up between people, you can identify some change in sensation somewhere in the body, and you can notice that your breathing becomes limited. Body sensations often consist of a tightness in the neck or shoulders, or a feeling of vague pressure in the interior of the body, discomfort in the area of the stomach, increased heart rate, to name a few.
Breathing may become shallow, more rapid, or there may be a tendency to hold the breath. Get to know what your internal cues are that tell you you’re stepping into a conflict. And then allow your awareness of the moment you’re in to expand, to include emotions that are arising in you, and any stream of thought that may be moving through. One of the really interesting things to note is the inner thought commentary that is going on during a conflict. You may become aware that a whole set of interpretations of what the other person is saying is taking place, and a rehearsal of your comeback or counterattack. From the position of Observer, just allow yourself to breathe, to be aware, to sit with, and as much as possible not resist what is coming up.
Even if you resist, see if you can also become aware of resistance and what it feels like. Let yourself be aware of the other person and the physical setting the situation is taking place in. Be aware of the internal pressure you keep feeling to jump into the argument whole hog, and then breathe with it, stay with it. When you find yourself veering toward identifying with the angry feelings, the hurt feelings, the thought stream, or whatever is arising, gently bring yourself back to the Observer.
As you continue to work with yourself in this fashion, you will find that none of these inner phenomena stay the same. They all have a beginning, a middle, and an end, so to speak. I can sit with my anger, breathe with it, note where I feel it in my body, note that thoughts go along with it, and it will run its course for now and settle down. I have not suppressed it; neither have I acted it out. I have therefore not used it to do violence to the other person or to myself. Touching whatever arises inside with this observing awareness respects its place in the inner ecology of my experience.
What happens as I allow this mindful attention to expand is usually greater calm, centering and clarity, and the possibility that I might make use of the feelings and thoughts that have come up in a more skillful way. Anger is not destructive when I can use it as a signal that something is happening that feels unacceptable to me, rather than as a weapon to strike back. The short-term effect of viewing our relationships through the lens of mindfulness is that conflict can be reduced. Psychologist Robert Pennington of Resource International, Inc., has referred to this as “catching the snowflake before it becomes an avalanche.” Conflict in relationship is so much like this.
It begins with a thought or interpretation of what someone means when they say X. If I interpret X as meaning something negative, and believe unswervingly that this is NOT an interpretation but truth itself, then this interpretation will generate a negative emotion such as fear, shame, anger or rage (or all of the above), which will cascade into either retaliation or stuffing. In the case of retaliation, overt warfare will break out. In the case of stuffing, covert war is waged (the silent treatment, emotional withdrawal, psychosomatic illness). Mindfulness offers a third alternative which neither fights nor flees, neither attacks nor represses, but which treats both the inner and the outer dimensions of the situation with respect, literally allowing both people and the situation breathing room. Letting the snowflake be just the snowflake, or, if it has become a snowball, at least not throwing it. The unanticipated positive side effect is nothing less than having had one more dip into the state of Being and all the benefits it confers.
In buying time, and then in shifting perspective from attacker, counter-attacker or victim to that of Observer, we allow a latent potential for peace within us a chance to begin to surface. It’s not so much that we make peace as that we clear the way for peace. The work involved is refusing the commands of our impulses to press forward into action, no matter how justified it may feel. Each moment of conflict in a relationship presents a choice between being right and being true. In mindlessness I can become so lost in pressing my case that I fail to see or hear what impact I am having on you. I may “win” the argument, but I have just lost a piece of the relationship.
If this happens enough, there will be no relationship left. I will also have lost an opportunity to allow my own awareness to expand into a larger perception of reality, which includes not only the validity of my argument, but also the impact of my behavior on the other person, and of other possibilities that cannot be seen when I am trapped in the tunnel of my own insistent agenda. I know this is difficult. Conflict in relationships can trigger unresolved wounds and their resulting emotions from early childhood, and a marriage can then become the staging ground for righting an ancient wrong rather than solving a contemporary problem. The force of these unconscious dynamics is powerful, and may require psychotherapy to resolve. Whether this is the case or not, the choice to invoke mindfulness as conflict is building is a choice to shift from an insistence upon being right to being true – true to the value of the relationship that I have committed myself to, to the possibility that more is at stake than my own position, and to the potential for spiritual growth that comes when I am willing to sit with the tension and for now not know what to do with it.
Fidelity in our contemporary understanding of marriage has become reduced to a legalistic notion of sexual loyalty, but it is a good deal more than that. It is both a commitment and a devotion to a higher reality, an undefined and invisible reality that is greater than the two individual realities that comprise it. Understood in this way, fidelity is present when I can know and tell you what I feel without attacking you, know and tell you what I think without coercing you, disagree with you totally without behaving disrespectfully toward you, because, above all I value you, myself, and the relationship too highly to do otherwise. When I do otherwise, I am having an affair with one of my old lovers – fear, coercion, manipulation, rage, self-pity, self-righteousness.
I’m ducking out on the relationship and finding comfort in an old familiar one. To buy time, to become mindful, to be willing to not know for now, to breathe and sit with every thought and feeling that is arising without having to change or act on them in any way for now, is to give this larger reality of the relationship an opportunity to come into focus, just as the larger reality of Being is emerging within.
If “no time” is one of the arguments against adopting any intensive spiritual practice, how much time would you estimate you spend engaged in fighting with your significant other, always getting the same result? Here is an opportunity to shift from mindless, repetitive infidelity to a love that is true! Traditionally it has been held that celibate monasticism is the surest path to enlightenment, but it may be in our age that intimacy and its inevitable conflicts offer an untapped reservoir of spiritual possibility. To tap that reservoir we must, as in other contexts, use time already present but previously misused as a point of departure into new potentials.
Dr. Jim Nourse is a clinical psychologist and acupuncturist in practice over 30 years. He has a longstanding interest in the spiritual aspects of health and illness and has led seminars, workshops and trainings in stress management, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, and Holotropic Breathwork™. He is affiliated with the Center for Integrated Health and Healing in Brevard, North Carolina (www.cihh-brevard.com). He and his wife Judith, a practitioner of reflexology and Feng Shui, live in Hendersonville, North Carolina. This book may be purchased at Amazon.com
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