Kinds of Relationships

With over 30 minutes not a clip any more, more like a whole talk by itself - but full of information.

Kind of Relationships (from ATP06: A Trackless Path (retreat) 00:30:20.00 - 01:01:08.00)

(download into iTunes)

Balance in a Relationship

Balance in a Relationship (from Relationships and Emotional Reactions (talk) 00:04:59.00 - 00:10:01.00)

(download into iTunes)

And I'm making a distinction between knowing and understanding. Knowing is a mystery. And if you think about it, we can take any object, a stone, a flower, anything. To know it is to experience it completely, whatever it is. And that's a mystery. We can go into that in infinite depth. And as soon as we say, "I understand this," it's like applying a label, and you may observe that as soon as you apply a label to something you actually stop knowing it. Now you just relate to the label.

So here you are in the relationship; know your experience completely. And when we know our experience completely, certain things happen. One is that we know it's an experience, that it just arises seemingly out of nothing. It's there. Secondly, we know that it's an experience, it's not what we actually are, it's just something that arises. So there's a certain "Oh this is like everything else," in a very simplistic way. And when you know it, you know everything about about in all its particulars, how it's different from everything else.

And when you know something completely you also know what to do. That's a knowing that arises not usually through a conceptual process, but it just arises. And all of you had this experience where you were struggling, "What do I do in this situation, what do I do, what do I do?" And you sort of let go and there it is. And in that letting go, you've actually joined with the problem so you've moved into a closer [unintelligible] and there it is.

So this is the essence. It's at the heart of your question, I believe. That by knowing your own experience, the experience which gives rise to that question: "How do I maintain boundaries?" It's pointing to an experience that you're having. And when you know that experience completely then you will know what to do. Because there isn't a rule here, say "This is how you maintain boundaries."

Every relationship--I don't have anything handy for this--but imagine there's a ruler balanced on my finger. Okay? Now does that ruler stay still? No, it's constantly moving up and down. That's a relationship and the relationship is never actually in balance. It's constantly moving. So you correct the imbalances in the relationship and then it moves a little bit the other way and so it moves back and forth. That's what makes it alive and dynamic. What happens is sometimes the ruler gets stuck like that--a seesaw. Now it is stagnant in an unbalanced way. And that's where disdain and resentment and all of these kinds of things come about.

So there isn't a rule about how to maintain boundaries in a relationship. When that question arises it points to an experience in you which is a manifestation of imbalance in the relationship. So by knowing that imbalance and by moving into the experience of that imbalance completely you know what needs to be done to balance it, and that's what you do. And then the next moment it's something else. Okay.

Heartbreak

Heartbreak (from WS05: Warrior's Solution (retreat) (revised) 00:18:36.00 - 00:26:19.00)

(download into iTunes)

For instance, when in a relationship you sense that things are out of balance, what do you experience right at that point? ... There's anger, confusion, fear, all of these arise. But underneath those what else is there? Pain. Perhaps despair, but there's pain. What's the pain? ... Another way of putting this is you experience a broken heart. Because at that point, the person isn't meeting your expectations. And so to relate to the person, to be in the relationship, is to accept that what you want isn't going to be met, who you want them to be isn't who they are. And you experience a broken heart. That is the result of sacrifice, the experience of a broken heart ... At the point of recognizing that the relationship is out of balance there is that "Oh." That's the broken heart right there. Because you sacrificed your expectations of what you wanted the relationship to be and how it's going to fit into your world and how they're going to be the perfect person in all those different ways. Doesn't that break your heart?...

Conflict

Conflict (from PAP10: Power and Presence (retreat) 00:06:47.00 - 00:12:00.00)

(download into iTunes)

Now - most people want to know something about power, because they don't know how to handle conflict.

So I want to talk a bit about conflict.

First bit: what is conflict.

Conflict is the experience of resistance to change when two or more worlds interact.

...

Conflict only arises in the context of relationship. If there is no relationship, there is no conflict.

...

So what conflict represents is a problem in a relationship.

And you never have any idea of how the conflict is going to evolve. You have a lot of experience, you can make some fairly good guesses, but you can never actually know. There are always too many factors in operation. Some of them can be just the operation of chance.

Which means that when you enter a conflict, you can not know the result.

I'll come back and say a bit more about that in a moment.