10,000 Hours of Love
A practical article connected into the broader SelfGrowth topic graph.
Primary topic: Life Transitions
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Browse published articles attributed to Sheryl Paul, with full-archive search.
A practical article connected into the broader SelfGrowth topic graph.
Western culture places a premium on feelings in the form of moods. While we diminish the importance of experiencing difficult emotions like sadness, disappointment, frustration, fear and jealousy, we worship at the altar of moment-by-moment impulses. This sounds like: I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like exercising. I don’t feel like working. I don’t feel like jou aling. I don’t feel like cleaning. I don’t feel like organizing. I don’t feel like studying. I don’t feel like cooking. I don’t feel like being loving with my partner.
Our culture worships the gods of youth and ete al happiness. If we could bottle and merchandize the elixir of youth, most people in the Western world would purchase it no matter the price. We extol the blemish-and-wrinkle-free face and lay ourselves prostrate at the feet of the toned body. A full head of luxurious hair is enough to sell cars.
In every session with clients, I drop down into the core of myself, breathing and opening into the vessel of being so that I can listen with the ears we do not see, the ones that hear unde eath the top layers stories into the invisible layers where the gem that needs to be revealed rises gently to the surface, glimmering with joy at being found.
A theme has been constellating lately in my professional and personal worlds, and when I see a theme I’m compelled to write about it here as it’s my indicator that we’re tapping down into the realm of the collective unconscious: the invisible realm where we’re all connected, all struggling with different variations of the same hooks, all holding hands beneath the surface as we glide along our stories aboard spaceship Earth.
To be human is to know that we are imperfect and whole: we will hurt and be hurt; we will feel disappointed and will disappoint; we will stumble and fall and get back up again. To be human is to remember that this being human is an experiment without a goal or destination but with a plan that includes learning about love at its center.
Whenever a theme arises in my weekly work with clients I know it’s important to write about it here. Last week the theme was: “I married the wrong person” or “It would have been easier with someone else.”
There’s a common concept in our culture – one that I’ve adopted myself at times – that fear is our enemy. When we’re caught in fear’s offspring of anxiety and panic, it certainly feels like we’re been taken into enemy territory and are being held hostage. It feels like someone wraps a gloved hand around our throat and is sitting on our chest with a fifty pound bag of bricks. Anxiety in any form around any storyline – relationships, health, impending loss/death – is an unmanageable state that feels like torture.
In 2008, shortly after we moved from Los Angeles to Denver with our two-year old son, I adopted a weekly ritual in honor of the Jewish sabbath: to shut down my computer for twenty-four hours. This was before the era of smartphones and before I was pouring my energy into my online business daily, but even back then it was a weekly challenge to rip myself from the seductive distraction of the computer and literally shut it down.
“Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to ‘take in’ the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.” – May Sarton, journal of a Solitude
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor E. Frankl
One of the most common questions I’m asked during a coaching session is, “What are red flags? You say that if I’m suffering from relationship anxiety and I’m in a healthy and secure relationship without red flags then the anxiety is a manifestation of pain that needs attention as opposed to intuition that I’m in the wrong relationship. But what exactly are these red flags?”
Shame is often a placeholder for powerlessness and a protector against grief. Instead of feeling the rawness of grief, the mind latches onto a shame story that says, “I’m broken.” Instead of surrendering to the powerlessness of painful situations that had nothing to do with you, like your parents’ divorce or any other trauma, the shame story says, “It was all my fault.” Instead of leaping off the cliff of thoughts and diving into the sea of vulnerability that defines being human, the shame story says, “I don’t deserve love.”
Once again, I turn to the poet and mystic Mark Nepo and The Book of Awakening for gems of wisdom about the stones that block our hearts from fully loving: “It seems this is the never-ending work of relationship, each of us in our own time and way moving the stones between us, repositioning the heavy things that get in the way, so the life of feeling can continue.”
While flipping through one of my favorite bedside stand-bys, Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, I came across the following passage and chuckled out loud: “My experience is that I can feel that I’m in the Grail Castle when I’m living with people I love, doing what I love. I get that sense of being fulfilled. But, by god, it doesn’t take much to make me feel I’ve lost the Castle, it’s gone. One way to lose the Grail is to go a cocktail party. That’s my idea of not being there at all.” p. 76
A coaching client recently wrote to me to share the following (shared with permission): Each time of the three times I spoke to you, you told me something that has been a huge lifeline for me: “If two people are willing to make it work, they can make it work.” You mentioned this to me three times and it’s been my mantra when I’m in the thick of things. That topic I know could help so many people, including myself. If you ever feel like you can share that beautiful wisdom in a blog post, that would be wonderful.
I recently came across the following in a book called “The Middle Passage” by James Hollis:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about. Rumir
In last week’s post, I wrote about the essential task of attending to our four realms of Self in order to find wellness and equanimity, and that in order to do this we need to have a loving, competent and clear inner parent at the helm of psyche. Just as kids feel safe when there’s an attuned parent sitting at the head of the metaphoric dinner table, so our inner characters – our Anxiety, Judgement, Fear, Jealousy, Critic, Taskmaster, Good Girl/Boy – feel safe when there’s a loving, clear, attuned parent at the head of the table of psyche.
Transitions, as breaking and renewal points, offer choice-points that determine how we unfold into the next stage of our lives. Many people find me during their wedding transition when when they’re broken open not only by relationship anxiety but also by the earthquake of feelings that erupt because of the transition itself. The same is true for the transition into parenthood, career changes, moves, and deaths.
One of the blessings of having a second child is that we, as parents, gain some skills by walking with the first one through predictable stages of growth, maturity, illness, and emotional challenges. When our firstbo had a high fever, we panicked. When the younger one has a fever, it’s old hat. When our firstbo struggled with separation anxiety we thought he would never leave our side. With our second born, we trust that he will find his way with time (and some help, if he needs it).
When my boys were learning how to write, they would freeze in their tracks for fear of making a spelling mistake. Their perfectionist tendencies were not a surprise to my husband and I – after all, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – and it was both fascinating and painful to see how powerfully the perfectionist halted their creative and free expression. I would say to them over and over again, “Make mistakes! It’s how you learn. I don’t care about spelling mistakes.
When I was in graduate school twenty-five years ago, we learned many essential principles and tools for becoming a skilled healer in the counseling arts. We thoroughly covered various modalities, including the depth psychological perspective that informs all of my work, and spent countless hours practicing the sacred art of listening, tending, and receiving. But there is one element that was left out – or at least it wasn’t explicitly discussed as an essential ingredient for healing – and it took me years before I understood why. It’s the element of love.
“Probably the next important evolution of Western humankind is to find a proper container for religious life so that we do not unrealistically expect another mortal human being to carry this high value. In short: don’t ask a human to be God for you.” * Robert Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth “Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy.” * Robert Johnson, We: The Psychology for Romantic Love
For those of you who are struggling with relationship anxiety, you probably saw the title of this post and wondered if I was going to talk about when to leave a relationship, and perhaps felt nervous that it was going to spike you.
The first part of this post appeared on Instagram this week. I’m expounding upon it here. Real love is available love. It’s not the chase. It’s not drama. It’s not longing. It’s not the kiss at the end of the movie or finally snagging the one who got away. Real love is here-and-now, human, messy love. It’s two imperfectly whole people committing to sharing and creating a life together – a life that will include as much heartache as joy. It’s the commitment that matters. The commitment to wrestling with the fear when it shows up, as it will.
These are words I find myself saying multiple times a day: to my clients, to my sons, to myself. Breathe it in. We see a prairie dog hit by a car lying on the side of the road. I turn to look at my son’s face to see if he sees it. As we live in a rural area, he’s learned over the years of seeing too many dead animals to look at the fields and mountains instead of at the side of the road while we’re driving, but sometimes his eyes veer to the telltale lump of fur. “A prairie dog, Mommy.” “I know, love. Breathe it in.”
Like all forms of anxiety, health anxiety is on the rise. With information about our health more available than ever, the anxious mind that seeks control at all costs can easily latch onto health as a hotbed theme that invites this mind to shift into overdrive. You mea I can prevent catastrophic events from happening if I only take these actions? Nothing could make the ego happier than jumping onto a train with control as the conductor. But there is no true happiness that arises when ego becomes perseverated on a theme. In fact, it’s nothing short of hell.
One of the biggest obstacles to finding more wellness and equanimity is the belief that we shouldn’t be feeling what we’re feeling; that if we were more evolved or healed or with a different partner we wouldn’t feel so ________ (anxious, depressed, lonely, confused, empty, bored). Because we live in a culture that disseminates the message that everyone else is living a happy life, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that there’s a manual that you didn’t receive that outlines the steps for happiness.
It was one of those moments that I could have easily pushed aside and continued on through my evening wrapped in the spiderweb of distraction. It was a moment so small that I almost missed the worlds of beauty and pain that lived within it, like a monarch butterfly floating past and I, caught in the clouds in my head, fail to recognize the utter miracle of this creature’s existence.
We long for rapture. We long to be transported to an otherworldly place where the problems that weigh heavily into our souls and the pain that pierces our hearts lift away, if only for a moment. We long to feel profoundly alive and deeply fulfilled. We long for ecstasy.
It took me many years to learn how to love my husband well, and, of course, I’m still learning. Like many people, I didn’t grow up witnessing a healthy model of true partnership. My parents, like all parents, did the best they could and they gave me many gifts, but I’m sure even they would agree that role-modeling a healthy and loving marriage wasn’t one of them. Coupled with growing up in a culture that transmits abysmally dysfunctional messages about what real love and real attraction are and aren’t, I reached adulthood quite clueless about how to love well.
There’s nothing like the first. The first family. The first friend. The first kiss. The first job. The first baby. The first heartbreak.
One of the blessings of having a second child is that we, as parents, gain some skills by walking with the first one through predictable stages of growth, maturity, illness, and emotional challenges. When our firstbo had a high fever, we panicked. When the younger one has a fever, it’s old hat. When our firstbo struggled with separation anxiety we thought he would never leave our side. With our second born, we trust that he will find his way with time (and some help, if he needs it).
There is often a predictable arc to relationship anxiety that includes three stages.* The first stage is characterized by typical symptoms of anxiety and panic: Can’t sleepr Can’t eatr Tearful Depressedr Bolting awake in the middle of the nightr Difficulty functioning at workr Fluttering stomachr Racing heartr
Let’s blow the cover off of another taboo topic in our culture, one that causes my clients to barely be able to whisper their experience loud enough to share it with me: “falling in love” with people other than your partner, including bosses, celebrities, religious figures, and even your therapist.
In response to one of the assignments in my Sacred Sexuality course to watch the film “Enchanted April”, a member of the forum shared the following. I was so moved by her response that I asked permission to share it here. She wrote: This film touched something deep inside me. After I watched it, I wrote the following in response to Lottie’s comment that “it is a wonderful thing to get on with one’s loving.”
The following is from course member findingpeace28, who shared this on the e-course forum two weeks after her wedding. As soon as I read it, I knew had to share it with those of you struggling with relationship anxiety and, in particular, the connection spike, to offer you a lifeline of hope and a rope of inspiration. As she wrote to me when I asked for her permission to share her words her, “I honestly feel like if I could get through, anyone can. I hope to provide encouragement to those who need it, because I’ve sooo been there.” ***
There have been countless times over the many years of my marriage when my husband will say something that makes me feel loved or do something that gets us back on track when we’ve been in a negative feedback loop and I’ll think, “Oh, so that’s how you love!” It could be something as small as walking me to the door to say goodbye instead of being satisfied with a kitchen goodbye or apologizing with a hug and an “I’m sorry” instead of just the words, and I’ll look at him with a certain amount of awe because he seems to know innately these simple ways of loving and repairing that I’ve had to lea