Couples Harmony

Committed, caring relationship means learning who we really are so we can become a person we value. By nature’s design this learning requires us to meet new and often uncomfortable experience.

We encounter life through our perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and then our choices of what to do with these endlessly shifting experiences

Here’s an example of what I’m learning about caring for each other.

One of my earliest relationship memories is my older sister Susan teaching me the box-step. With our grade school graduation dance fast approaching I’d told her I was scared about dancing with a girl.

“Oh that’s easy, stand up” she said confidently. In a moment we were retracing an invisible square with our feet. Once I understood the pattern, I very quickly became uncomfortable, and struggled to return to my “safe” distance. Being so intimate felt somehow threatening. I pushed her away to escape the unfamiliar.

Fast forward sixty years. Thousands of memories have stored in the library I call my body. One emotional memory—that “strangeness” of dancing with my sister Susan at age twelve —-reappeared this morning. The feeling re-emerged in me when Clare, my beloved wife of forty years said “Would you please not leave your dish in the sink?”

Instantly I felt emotions of discomfort and struggle. Something seemed terribly wrong inside me. Pain and fear took over my body, gripping my chest and belly. I felt I had to flee or explode. Wait……..over a dish in the sink?

I’ve meditated sitting and walking enough that the habit has become part of my balance. This moment of emotional turmoil became immediately valuable. Here is a clue to where I am still struggling.

So I stopped, didn’t let anger burst out and push Clareaway. With resolve I accepted the emotions as a clue to healing.

Intentionally I watched my breath and the emotions as my primary focus. No words, no dish, no sink, no Clare to blame.

I watched the coming and going of this breathing that moves in and out of all mammals. I watched and felt the urge for angry attack which moves in and out of all mammals. And then, seemingly out of nowhere….. mysteriously….. pop! I was struggling to get away from my sister Susan’s threatening-though well-meaning grasp. I was fully re-living that memory, alive and real.

I trust the connection between then and now is clear for you. My fear and anger with Clare was a gift, life’s offering of itself, to return to the shape of accepting love.

True to their design, feelings remain as lessons for us. They return with a wisdom and timing that will get our attention with discomfort. For all of us discomfort is motivation to change by accepting that we are still love capable of becoming any form.

In locating an old discomfort I exercised the inherent powert of connection. I had chosen not to continue struggling with Susan in that moment. By accepting that moment as both powerful and acceptable, I chose to return to this moment, this feeling, pain, fear. Clare, the dish and the sink together are realizing interconnection and using it well.

I am still learning to dance.

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This post was previously published on THEFATHERCONNECTION.WORDPRESS.COM and is republished with permission.

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