Investigating Your Way of Relating
For the past 17 years Ariel and Shya Kane have been together. For the past 13 of those years, they have been together – not working on their relationship. This may seem like a strange contradiction to what most of us believe is necessary to "make it work." The Kanes' philosophy is that you don't need to work on your relationship. Rather, if you just stay present, surrendering to each other and the moment, you will do what is appropriate and your relationship will flourish. At one of their workshops, excerpted here, they spoke with the participants about the challenges we all face when relating, due to our individual and societal programming and conditioning.
Shya: When I look around, I don't see many relationships that actually work for those involved in them. Our definition of a working relationship is one that produces satisfaction, nurturing, aliveness and the experience of being loved. I am talking about relationships between men and women, but it could be men and men or women and women, or your relationships to your boss or employees, but let's just go with the men and women first since, for the most part, that is who is here.
There is a primary cause of relationships not working: the war going on between the genders. This battle is mainly unspoken. It has been socially and culturally ingrained in the people of this society and so you have two strikes against you going into any relationship if you don't know that this war exists. Now, if you are aware of this dynamic, you will be able to see it in yourself before it destroys your relationships. If you don't know what's going on, the mechanics of our lives are such that our relationships become battlegrounds – either overtly or covertly. Sometimes people are at war and they do it inside their head so it appears as if they are doing great, but inside there is an ongoing complaint.
Ariel: Or they "bicker". Bickering is when you don't actually have out and out fights – you may have those also, we're not ruling that out – but bickering is when you pick at each other, or pick on each other. Tonight, let's see if you can become aware of the war that exists in you. This war can take place on the spoken level, or it can take place in complaints and arguments in your private internal conversation. It exists in the very way you hold your body or the way you resist being asked to do something or being told what to do.
Shya: I think it would be very useful for you to take a look at what brought you here...and we are not talking about the mode of conveyance, meaning bus or subway or car, but what drew you to this particular evening.
Ariel: What is it about your relationships and your ability to relate that you want to talk about, look at, or explore?
Woman: My name is Judith. Certain things, come to my mind when people say the word "relationship". When I think of relationship, I think of my not being in one, and that I should be in one. There are other ideas and thoughts that I have carried around with me through my life. So, I guess I really came this evening to explore my beliefs, or the places where I stop myself from being in relationship, and the judgments I have. For instance, I'll look at what my partner is doing that I think doesn't work in relationship, as opposed to looking at the things going on in me that don't work.
Shya: I want to ask you a couple of questions, because as you are talking, I'm seeing a line of women behind you – not in this room, but I'm seeing images – like, your mother – does she have sisters?
Judith: Lots.
Shya: How many?
Judith: She has five sisters, so there are six of them altogether.
Shya: O.K., so there are six women that you were brought up around, and would it be accurate to say that their relationships with men don't work?
Judith: Yes.
Shya: Right. So there was a lot of conversation in your family, as you were growing up, about "lousy" relationships.
Judith: Yes. There was, a lot.
Shya: So, this is what you have as your heritage. This is the handicap that you bring to relationship because what you have been trained in is how to destroy relationships, not how to have them work.
Ariel: When I look at you, what I see is your mother, whom I've met, and I see that you fall into the "I'm not going to be like that" category.
Judith: What do you mean?
Shya: You are trying to not be like your mother.
Ariel: It's almost as if you have said, "If my relationships are going to look like hers, I'm better off to not have one." So, if things start appearing to your child's mind, the mind that made the picture up of what a "bad" relationship looks like – if things start falling into that realm, then you will get rid of the relationship.
Judith: Yes, that's true. I definitely see that.
Shya: And then you come to relationships knowing it's not going to work.
Ariel: Because they never do.
Shya: So that's the conversation that runs in your head. "It will never work out."
Judith: Right. It's just a matter of how long before it falls apart.
Ariel: Now that we just talked about this information, don't do anything with it. Don't make any decisions about how to proceed in your life now.
Shya: Don't decide to produce anything to make your life "better". We have discovered that if you have an idea of what you need to produce, you will produce it, but the idea may be inaccurate. And most of our ideas about how to have great relationships are inaccurate. So, we manipulate the circumstances of our lives to produce what we think is going to produce happiness and satisfaction and it very rarely does because any idea you have is a mental construct that you have put together mostly as a child – and so even if you were to achieve it, it wouldn't be satisfying.
Ariel: For instance, Judith could say, "Right! Now I'm going to not worry about relationships ending when I go into them." It's a new decision in resistance to the old decision. The old decision didn't work, and the new one won't work either. If she just allows herself to see that this is a decision she made, and does nothing with it, it will disappear.
Shya: Since the essence of relationship as individuals requires your being in the moment, I want to suggest some things that will allow you to be here more fully. First, if you can be interested in what people are saying, rather than in the comments that run through your head about those people, it will support you in being here. Most of us have been trained to interpret what's being said. We have never been around people who are straight enough to say what's true without it needing to be interpreted and here, if you can just hear what's being said without interpreting it or comparing it to anything that you have heard before, your relationships could transform. See if you can operate as if you don't know, rather than as if you do, because it's the things that you know or think you know that have caused all the problems in your relationships.
Ariel: And judgments that you are listening to in your thoughts don't have to be negative. For instance, you could be thinking, "Wow! Judith is really a beautiful woman, I'd like to go out with her. Maybe she's available." That kind of mental commentary will take you out of the moment. See if you can keep bringing yourself back to the moment and back here. The more practiced you are at being present, the more appropriate you will be in relating to yourself as well as to others.
Woman: Hi, I'm Tara. A lot of my love relationships have ended because of things that I did and things that they did . . . how we were together. What I want is a greater understanding of who I'm being in relationship. I would like to be in a relationship that is committed, but then there are things that I do or behaviors that I have that don't allow the relationship to continue, or behaviors another person has that don't agree with me.
Shya: So, you put a pressure on yourself to have a "committed" relationship in the first place.
Tara: Yes, I have.
Shya: Right. So when you walk into a room, you don't just walk into a room. If it's a room full of eligible men, something happens in you. You start scanning to see if "the One" might be there. Up until relatively recently, anybody who was outside of marriage at age 25 or 30 was considered to be a spinster and that had some very strong negative connotations attached to it. Do you remember listening to conversations that your mother had with her friends?
Tara: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
Ariel: What was the essence of those conversations?
Tara: They were not pleasant. They used to talk about someone in our family who was unmarried and say that she was an "old maid" and I could tell that was not a good thing to be.
Shya: Right, and you also had the idea from a very early age that you were going to be a mommy some day.
Tara: Yes that is also absolutely true.
Ariel: The idea that you were going to be a mommy was programmed in a long time ago and is now an expectation even if that life choice is not currently an appropriate one. Given who you are and what your life is about, it may not be a very good idea to have a child but it was something that you told yourself you would do when you were a little girl while playing with your dolls. You knew that someday you would be a mommy and have babies.
Shya: Now, that early decision puts a tremendous pressure on you. You might have a very different point of view about life but you are blindly following the dictates of a much younger, less expansive version of yourself. Your haven't investigated how you feel right now. You need to bring some awareness to your basic ideas about who you are, what you are doing here, what your purpose in life is and what you want out of life. You need to start looking at these things from Tara at age
Tara: 39
Shya: 39, rather than Tara at age six or five or four – whenever it was that you formulated the way you are supposed to be. You have also been programmed that you need to have children to pass the line on. So you have been listening to those stories from your earliest childhood because you grew up among some very unaware people. Now, they weren't aware that they were unaware. They were just very unaware. They lived their lives mechanically and they were very survival–oriented. One of the strongest things in survival is to have children to take care of you in your old age. It may not be appropriate in these days because most children don't take care of their parents in their old age anyway. They send them off to a home somewhere to be taken care of. But that is the stuff that formulated your idea of who you should be, so now you beat on yourself because you are not married, with children. You think you should be by now.
Tara: I don't think I beat on myself as much these days, but I have done that for many, many years.
Shya: If you are unaware that you have strong prejudices towards being an "old maid" and towards yourself for not yet being a mommy, then when you relate to someone, it will be strained because you are not simply being with another, you will manipulate them and yourself to produce the child's idea of relationship and family.
Ariel: O.K., lets go back for a moment to your starting premise. You said you felt that you did things and your partner did things that ended the relationship and that is not necessarily true. It is possible that when you got together you had something to share, there was something ripe about the timing but then later, you outgrew each other. Your energies or lives moved in different directions. Have you heard the expression, "love is blind?" Well, love can be blind – you get a backlog of needing and wanting to be loved, wanting to be touched and held, wanting physical intimacy, you get together with a partner and you bleed off some of that backlog and then you are left with the reality of who you are with . . . and sometimes those relationships aren't appropriate over time.
Shya: Another possible aspect to investigate, is that normally the way most people's minds operate is to find faults. You don't think that things are perfect the way they are, you think that they are faulted or flawed – so therefore you are also flawed. You see things that you consider wrong with you and you see things that you consider wrong with other people and in your head, you have judgments. You don't necessarily say them, but you think them and then they start to have repercussions because people can read your thoughts. Now they may not read your thoughts directly as thoughts, but they can read your body posture, they can read the look in your eye, the way you hold yourself. They know that you are thinking negative thoughts about them. You said that relationships ended because of things you have done and things your partner has done. Everything in your relationship has to do with you. You can forget the partner because if you get rid of that one, you will get another partner. . .
Tara: and it'll be the same.
Shya: It has been hasn't it?
Tara: Absolutely. Different face . . . same scenario.
Shya: Different sized body, but basically the same type of person, so it's like karma, you know? If you are not willing to be with what's in your life, and in your relationship in this moment, it'll come around again.
Ariel: Some of you find it very challenging because once you are in a relationship, you start competing with your partner. This dynamic can be especially strong for women who compare themselves and their achievements and want to prove that you are equal to or as good as a man. It is also strong for men who have been programmed not to let "girls" get ahead of them. Most women whom I've met have not discovered that they can just be themselves and still include their femininity. They haven't seen that they don't have to be manly in a man's world, that they can be very potent and powerful as a human being, but without force, because force looks really bad on a woman. Of course, it doesn't work so well for men either. Here is what true independence looks like: The ability to surrender to another human being. If you don't have that ability to surrender to another human being, you are not independent, you are totally run by a mechanical way of being. If you have the choice, the ability, the willingness, then you are truly independent. It takes a very strong person to say "Yes . . . yes . . . okay, yes . . . yes . . . sure . . . all right . . . yes."
Shya: You have run your life for a long time being what you have thought of as "independent", Tara? Has it brought you happiness?
Tara: Yes, I have tried to be independent and no, it hasn't brought a lot of happiness, even though I thought it would.
Ariel:Today I spoke with a couple of friends of ours who've been married for six or seven years. Last weekend they had a breakthrough in their ability to be intimate. They were more in tune with each other than they ever had been before. There was a mutual "yesness" to one another. They broke down, they broke through, they melted through – however you want to phrase it – the natural barriers that they had learned, erected, absorbed throughout their lives. There was a quality of giving without holding anything back. Shya and I have been together for more than 15 years, and we find that the relationship keeps strengthening and deepening. We are expanding so there is always more to give, there is more available of us, less little corners or residual things that we hold back from each other.
Shya: Whether your relationship is new or well–seasoned, there is the
possibility to surrendering to your life and your partner and having your
relationships enter the realm of the miraculous.
Since 1987, internationally acclaimed authors, seminar leaders, and business consultants Ariel and Shya Kane have acted as guides, leading people through the swamp of the mind into the clarity and brilliance of the moment. To find out more about the Kanes and their Transformational Community or to sign up to join their email newsletter, The Excellence Club: Having It All, visit their website at: www.TransformationMadeEasy.com. Information about their three award-winning books – Working On Yourself Doesn't Work: The 3 Simple Ideas that will Instantaneously Transform Your Life, How to Create A Magical Relationship: The 3 Simple Ideas that will Instantaneously Transform Your Love Life and Being Here, Modern Day Tales of Enlightenment – is also available on their website.
