There are many ways to share our love. At different times in our life, we may find that it is right for us to have different kinds of relationships and also multiple romantic partners. However, what interests us most in the Learning Love Workis what can happen when two people are in an exclusive and committed romantic relationship, a deep friendship, or a sustained relationship with a teacher, guru, or therapist. That is when, in our experience, the full power of love shows itself.
When someone becomes highly significant for us, in what in psychology is called “attachment,” it opens us to a profound emotional experience that can motivate deep growth and self-knowing.
At a certain point in our development, we may reach a point in which we would like to go deep with someone, either a lover, a friend or a teacher. It is not actually a mental choice but more of a natural movement in our growth. Something inside pulls us, opens our heart to a new dimension, which is beyond our mind and out of our control.
There are special and unique lessons to be learned when we choose to have this kind of committed and sustained experience. These lessons most likely will not be fully provoked until a relationship develops the kind of depth, significance, and safety that commitment provides.
Here are six powerful lessons that intimacy can teach us:
1. The love that grows as we continue to go deeper and develop greater trust and safety together allows us to connect in a sustained way with what we call, “the love current.” It is the experience of pure love.
2. By learning how to be consistently open and vulnerable, we can slowly overcome our mistrust of others and life and experience that it is far more nourishing to let someone close rather than remaining separate and isolated. We begin to develop trust in our capacity to be with life as it happens, even when it is painful.
3. In a sustained love relationship, the other person becomes our intimate mirror reflecting beautiful parts of ourselves that we have repressed as well as showing us our defenses and strategies and the negative impact they have on ourselves and the other person.
4. Sustained committed intimacy shows us how our childhood traumas affect our behavior, thinking, and feeling today, and allows us to break free of old patterns.
5. Deep intimacy also teaches us to accept the other person as he or she is even when they don’t fulfill our expectations. This helps us mature.
6. We can also learn to recover our boundaries by learning to feel and respect our bodies’ signals and standing up for ourselves when necessary.
Alice’s experience is a beautiful example of the power of love. She is a 35-year-old woman with a long history of troublesome relationships with men. She has always been attracted to men who are not really interested in a committed relationship. When she is with them, she quickly loses herself and becomes a beggar for love and attention, complaining that she is not getting the love and attention she would like. She also says that she is hopelessly jealous and gets depressed whenever the man she is dating even looks at another woman. This only drives the other person away and the man tells her she is too needy and too possessive. At the same time, whenever a man is interested in her, she ends up losing respect for him if he shows any weakness or dependency. When asked what it is for her to imagine to be alone without a man, she says that it is simply too painful. She comes to us wanting a solution to her problem and some advice about how to succeed in love.
As a child, her father was angry, frequently yelled in the house, and beat her often. Her mother was terrified of her husband and not only did she not protect her from her father’s rage but also often criticized and yelled at her. She still feels afraid of her father who continues to be a rageaholic and feels distant from her mother. She admits that she has deep shame and insecurities about herself, especially as a woman, and is full of fear. She now has internalized her parents judgments of her and continues to criticize herself for being too needy and too weak.
She is committed to working with us both individually and in seminars, and in the process, learned to understand how her childhood traumas from both parents caused her to profoundly distrust love, be afraid to be vulnerable, and be disdainful with men who showed any kind of “weakness.” She also began to develop much more love for herself both as a person and as a woman. In one of the seminars she did with us, she met Hans who was also involved in the Learning Love Work.
At this writing, they have been together for two years. Although they have had to overcome some challenges such as her difficulty accepting how much time he devotes to his work and his having trouble with her difficulty opening to him sexually. But they are working with each struggle as they arise, and she says to us that she has never felt so happy and in love.
Dominick is a 57-year-old wealthy businessman. Ostensibly, he comes to therapy because of continual conflicts with his girlfriend of three years and would like to find a way for them to be together more harmoniously. He complains that she pressures him for deeper commitment and she is often highly reactive and emotional – both of which make him angry and pull away. He is used to having his own way. He is not accustomed to trusting anyone and he uses his wealth and the considerable force of his personality to get people to do what he wants. He has had three significant relationships in the past including a marriage that produced three children all of whom are now adults and living on their own.
In his relationships with women as well as with his children, he admits he was never available because he was consumed with his work. Now, he regrets this, especially regarding his children and he feels that his current girlfriend is the first connection that really matters to him and would like to make it work. His greatest difficulty has been to tolerate his vulnerability and to expose it because it was never safe for him to be vulnerable as a child. He grew up with a raging, rigid, unaffectionate, and critical mother and a father who was loving but absent. Therefore, whenever he felt frightened, insecure, or out of control, he retreated into his own world.
However, Dominick was motivated to overcome his mistrust because he knew that without being able to have intimacy, his life was missing real meaning. It was challenging for him to begin to see that his blaming of his girlfriend and his work addiction was simply a way not to be vulnerable. As he increasingly took back his projections and excuses, his partner became less reactive and demanding. Slowly, they settled into a beautiful flow with each other and tasted the consistent love that they had been sabotaging with their defensive behaviors.
Our own love story can be another example of the power of love. Part of our passion to transmit this work is that we can confidently say that we are living it. We came together 25 years ago when we were both living in the Osho Commune in Pune. At that time, we already realized that we had essential criteria in common for intimacy to work. We had both been in former relationships and were no longer interested in multiple partners. We shared a love for the master and meditation, an understanding that intimacy takes work, and a desire to communicate intimately consistently and honestly.
As always happens in a deep relationship, our childhood experiences were a good opportunity for ways to potentially trigger each other. Amana’s father was a dysfunctional alcoholic and Krish’s tendency to be somewhat chaotic and forgetful at times, could remind her of her father. Fortunately, he is able to keep it together enough so that there is no chance for confusion. Krish’s mother was loving but also controlling and overbearing and Amana’s strength, precise ways, clarity, and confidence can occasionally invite what we call a “mother moment” for Krish. But when couples have awareness of their triggers as we do, they can each take responsibility for them, learn to refrain from reacting on each other, and explore the fears and insecurities underneath.
Furthermore, over the years, we have profoundly learned from each other. Krish has softened his male pushing and compulsively seeking ways, settled into enjoying life without constantly striving toward goals, and developed deeper sensitivity by feeling how Amana sees and lives life. Amana has adopted some of Krish’s intensity and go for it energy, accepted and truly learned to enjoy the challenges of long hikes and bike tours and learned to set limits and go with her own flow without being pushed or rushed.
In our work, we describe two basic life lessons that we can learn from intimate relating. These are the last two of the list of six we mentioned above. The first of these two we call, “the lesson of acceptance and containment.” The second we call, “the lesson of inner structure and integrity.” As we come closer to another person, it is natural and predictable that our expectations increase and with that, our disappointment and frustration when they are not met.
These moments invite us to learn to accept the other person as he or she is and to contain our pain when we are not getting what we want. At the same time, closeness also challenges us not to compromise our integrity to preserve harmony. As we grow, we recognize the price we pay for betraying ourselves. It motivates us to find the inner structure to learn to trust our body and our feelings, connecting with our own flow and love current inside, and to affirm what is true for us regardless of the consequences.
Sustained intimacy is not easy. To make it work, we will need to approach it as a spiritual and emotional journey that will trigger us to face many hurts, insecurities, fears, frustrations, and disappointments that have their roots in unmet needs from childhood. It is much easier to keep our love life superficial and avoid the profound lessons of committed intimacy. But the fact that it is challenging is precisely the source of its power.