Month: June 2021

What do I Want in a Partner?

Well…I like my partner to be tall, and have nice teeth, be well travelled….oh, and like dogs and brunch.

Partners are not chosen from catalogs or compared to lists, and if they are, they are being slotted in to your life. and/or fantasies. This means you have architected a whole fanciful existence of stuff for you, and you are trying to shoehorn some poor bugger in there. Odds of success are moderate, but the end result will be entirely dissatisfying because this is seeking a life addition and not a relationship.

Before I go on, I should mention that even more determinative than hopes and fantasies are pre-existing marriages. If someone is married when you meet them, you probably won’t hook up. However we overlook the other forms of ‘marriage’ that people have such as marriage to a city, their pet, religion, ego, neighbourhood, profession, people, self-identity, fears, etc., and are unwilling to be flexible about those things so they will certainly occupy some portion of any future relationship. If someone would not move cities when you must, or not spend a weekend in a way that doesn’t include their family, they are married and are looking for a threesome to join in that marriage.

The most important and determinative form of marriage is marriage to dysfunction. Dysfunction develops as an adaptation to circumstances. It attempts to improve a situation by building an understanding and controlling the self and environment to minimize pain and suffering. It is most often (mostly) wrong and causes far more issues outside that circumstance, but that’s another blog post. For now, know that marriage to dysfunction is like getting married in Vegas when you were blitzed. You don’t even know you are married. Well, most people in informal ‘marriages’ don’t know they are wed. But from the outset of a new relationship you negotiate in the presence of that dysfunction so it can form a polygamist trio. And often the poor sap on the other end doesn’t even know it’s happening, they just accept it as “who I am”, and fall back on blanket notions that acceptance equates to love. That isn’t true. Fighting against and divorcing dysfunction is the hallmark of a truly progressive and powerful dynamic. If your partner isn’t the person who helps you identify and extinct your adaptations, why are they called “partner”?

The most successful relationships are where two people show up exactly as who they are and act authentically to co-create a new beast called a relationship. Think 2 dots that are forming a line between them. If a line is already made and one dot is walking around wielding this big line, that poke ain’t gonna be pleasant. It’ll be more like beating that other dot with the stick until she/he relents and accepts what the relationship is without helping to shape it.

Show up as you. Be authentic and silence your ego. Give the other person space to express their free will without your demands or coercion. If you’ve shown up authentically and built something great, you have got yourself a high quality relationship whose probability of gratification is exceptional, because you both made it together as yourselves.

Relationships are most gratifying when they bring out the version of us that we enjoy most. This can only happen when both people are authentically present in the formation of the relationship, self representing, and able to be themselves without unhelpful lists and fantasies. So show up with your full life, but be open to any and all changes that feel right, including those that upend the marriages that only serve your fears and inertia.

Illuminating the Ego Shadow

Our ego is our best friend and constant companion, providing supportive and protective guidance at all times. The problem is, the ego is a life-limiting, bigoted bozo who wants to keep you from living life, being present, and fulfilling your life’s purpose.

When we start to awaken and become cognizant of the ego’s meddling, the ego becomes smarter and disguises itself in more insidious ways to ensure it wins your internal game of thrones. The following is a flowchart guide that tests whether a thought comes from the ego. Don’t let your ego do the test! If you find ego presence, kick that thought to the curb.

Emotional Regulation

When we allow our emotions to be in charge some pretty gnarly things can happen, especially if we’re prone to emotional dysregulation. Emotionality by itself is quite useful but ‘dirty feelings’ lead to ‘dirty thinking’ and subsequently faulty conclusions and harmful actions. The following is a flowchart to follow when you feel triggered or activated and don’t want to turn your life into a trainwreck.

Where is Reality?

Ummm, isn’t the question “what is reality”? No, not in this post. This post is a guide to seeing things as they are, because for some reason, reality tends to elude us when it hides in plain sight.

Things are defined by what they do and what they do not do.

Fire is hot (because it burns) and will not buy you groceries (because this is something it doesn’t d0). We comprehend this fairly easily because we haven’t attached to it any symbolism or context that would make us question these facts. However, this is not the case in human dynamics, where we pile on as much symbolism and proxies as we can.

Your boss loves you and tells you all the time how valuable you are (what they do). That makes you feel good, and motivates you to do more work after-hours and sacrifice your personal time. However, when it comes time to give bonuses and promotions, you get shafted. Your boss didn’t go to bat for you (what they didn’t do). So while your boss’ words attempt to shape your reality, reality can actually be found in the outcome of that annual review. The most likely reality is that you do great things for your boss but these things are not being recognized by the company as outstanding or to your credit. Hence reality is present, as it always is, and it’s incumbent on you to accept the one that reflects your outcomes rather than the one that stokes your ego or manipulates you into a false reality that you want to be true.

In a personal relationship, your partner loves garlic-flavoured coffee (feel free to substitute anything in here, like watching football, gambling, flirting with others) and their breath is nauseating. You have spoken and they’ve assured you that they would kick this habit because you’ve been so clear about how profoundly disturbing this is to you and your relationship. Yet they don’t (what they do). Maybe they cut back a bit, maybe they drink it more discreetly or try to brush their mouths a lot afterwards. But the outcome is still occurring and it’s repulsing you all the same (what they don’t do). So where is reality to be found? It is found in the fact that your partner knows they are repulsive to you in a fixable way and are choosing not to remedy that. Once again, reality is hidden in plain sight. You would probably rather not acknowledge that your partner is prioritizing this habit over you and your relationship, but this is reality irrespective of any half-assed attempts or words to the contrary, especially if you’ve given them time and warnings over a while.

The next question I often get it, “how to I face a reality that is painful?” The answer is ‘authentically and with all your sensibility’. Accept that person’s choice and react or respond as is appropriate given reality. If you’re playing second fiddle to a habit or indulgence, and your partner refuses to address it, accept it and do what makes most sense.

Representation in Relationships (again)

I previously wrote about the importance of self representation in relationships, but the messaging isn’t quite sticking. Here’s another example of how great intentions (that represent someone else) fail in relationships:

You know somebody is doing something important from 3-4PM this afternoon. What do you do? Most would say, “leave them alone, like don’t call or text”. Who are you representing when you do that?

The person doing the important thing will obviously shut off their ringer, so you can text and call all you want. And in fact you should. Why? Because when that important thing is done, they’ll want to see whatever was natural in their dynamics sitting there in their inbox.

Doing this honours the sender and the receiver, with each party representing themselves. And once again, the outcome is the optimal. So don’t represent other people!

The Virtue of Gratitude

We are told that gratitude is an important virtue for us to appreciate the things we receive and experience. I don’t think so. Let’s explore.

Gratitude is about being thankful. You are supposed to have gratitude for your blessings, like health and family. The Bible often speaks about gratitude and reverence to the things that made and govern you, like god and your parents. So why shouldn’t we be thankful for having these things? What kind of person would question gratitude? There are three reasons why gratitude is not a useful thing:

  1. Gratitude invents a thing or being to which you are grateful. Thankfulness is directed toward the thing that bestowed you with the blessing. Who exactly are you thanking for health? It also presumes that the giver of blessings exists, cares, and is listening.
  2. Gratitude is an excellent way to lose presence. If you are savouring a moment and for whatever reason decide it is so enjoyable that you must end your experience to be thankful for it, you have ceased being present and rather succumbed to the forces that try to stop you from being in your life.
  3. Gratitude misdirects responsibility. By being thankful to something else, you fail to acknowledge your role in your blessings. Your heart is still beating because you skipped some fried foods. Your world is beautiful because you didn’t pour acid in your garden, or better still, nurtured some pretty things. Celebrate your good decision making rather than misattribute your circumstances to something that ain’t listening

What do we do rather than give thanks? Enjoy it.

Finding Your Passion

There are a lot of articles and books out there that help you to locate your passion, or more wisely, to stop looking between couch cushions and start being aware of your existing passions.

Let’s start with the bad news: if something isn’t making you jump out of bed excited in the morning, there is no exercise or article that’ll change that. You have likely architected your life to be repetitive, safe, controlled, and unexposed to passionate living. Surprised? Shouldn’t be. We gravitate to circumstances that provide predictability, control, stability, and future benefit. So we actually architect a life that attempts to avoid those things that are risky, exciting, spontaneous, and soulful, and this is what passionate living is all about…but there’s more.

Let’s talk about passion:

  • Personally I don’t have a passion for knitting, but some people do, so we know that passions are individualized
  • Some people have a passion for fixing up old cars or gardening, so passion can be a process
  • Some passions are about completing stamp collections or ensuring thing from the past remain untouched in the present, so passions can be outcomes
  • Some passions are about a general practice, like art, and some passions are for very specific things like the medieval harpsichord, so passions can vary in scope
  • Passions are identified from exposure. Olympic athletes, dancers, actors, and medieval harpsichord players all discovered their passions when something inside of them resonated with something to which they were exposed. This point is key and worth repeating. Passions are identified when a person is exposed to something and their soul resonates with that process, thing, or outcome.
  • If you talk to many passionate people they’ll tell you that their passions were not identified instantaneously, the passion only arose when they discovered the characteristics of the practice at deeper levels of complexity. So passions can be ‘love at first sight’, or ‘grown over more exposure and/or practice’. This is another very important point:
    • Some passions are identified instantly (however these may be lust and happy hormones masking as passion, so be cautious)
    • Some passions become passions only by engaging our desire for complexity, challenge, excellence, mastery (for some people, they can adopt most any activity that offers challenge and complexity and be passionate about it, which is what Flow is all about).
  • Passions, IMHO, are things that make you bound out of bed in the morning and lose track of time at night when engaged in them. Many of us leap out of bed on a travel day, so we can be passionate about the unknown and possibility of adventure
  • Passions are not about being sanctimonious, attention seeking, personal gain, or anything else that fuels the ego or offers a sense of belonging by providing access to a community.

So to borrow a mathematical structure: passion = (x) new exposure + resonance

Passion is found by one or more exposures to something to which you have resonance. So, if your current life lacks passion, you will need to expose yourself to new things (no, I’m not advocating flashing), and in those exposures, do it enough so that it challenges you not from newbie frustration, but from needing to improve your skill along a spectrum of expertise. The wilder and more differentiated experiences, the better. How do you know you’re passionate about the plight of wildebeest in Botswana until you get your butt to Africa and really understand their circumstances? How do you know you’re passionate about harvesting olives in Italy unless you’re in Italian olive groves? And the best part of choosing such wild experiences is that you can find your passion in a zillion things in between, like travel, speaking Italian, growing vegetables, harvesting machinery, Italian cheese making, and every other thing to which you’d be exposed.

Not every passion identification mission needs travel; what it needs is to be very different from your patterns. The more difference, the higher your potential for resonance. And better still if you don’t ‘bring yourself’ on these experiences because you will want to seek comfort and familiarity and also find things that gel with your tenacious self identity rather than show up open and disarmed for anything that may tickle your soul. Go to a tractor pull. Attend a support group. Visit a part of town you’ve never been. Seriously. Choose things you would never in a million years choose to do. This is where your passions will be illuminated if you remember the math and don’t get discouraged when it isn’t love at first sight.