Book Excerpts
Introduction
The Fertile Darkness
The Naked Heart
First Impressions
Faces in the Mirror
Dismantling Negative Patterns
Shakti
Union
Sexual Communion
The Essence

Articles
- The Secret of the Sexual Dance

Chapter 5

  Dismantling Negative Patterns

If you don’t subject wheat to the grinding millstone
how will bread ever come to decorate your table?
-Rumi

As a red-haired, spunky, young girl, Martha received disciplinary spankings from her father periodically throughout her childhood.  As an adult, Martha found herself caught in a destructive pattern of being attracted to and having relationships with physically abusive males.  As Martha reflects on the situation today, she becomes aware of a thought pattern she carries within herself:  It hurts to love a man.  Her ingrained belief cuts to the heart of the matter, but it wasn’t until she was able to investigate her past and carefully examine her inner dialogue that she began to associate her attraction to violent men with her experiences of being physically assaulted by her father.

As a sensitive ten-year-old boy, Todd was emotionally overwhelmed by his parents’ divorce.  As an adult he has great difficulty committing to a long-term relationship; he becomes anxious and confused when approaching the point of real emotional intimacy with a partner.  After bringing his focused attention to the thought patterns he’s been living with for years, Todd now hears clearly the inner message he’s been communicating to himself:  Love means loss.  It’s a simple core belief but one that is loaded with emotional content.  Todd’s avoidance of committed relationships is an unconscious attempt to avoid reviving the pain associated with his parents’ divorce.

Core beliefs, based on potent past experiences, become the unconscious window frames through which we attempt to interpret and organize the various events in our life.  These beliefs define the individual ego, with its set patterns of thought and emotional reactivity.  Left unchallenged, core beliefs can confine us and our relationships to limited, unwholesome, habituated modes of thought, feeling, and behavior.  

Emotional defenses like denial, avoidance, and displaced anger crystallize around our core beliefs. They serve as protective shields against the pain associated with early childhood experiences.  Each time a life event resonates sufficiently with the earlier seed impression, our emotional defenses mechanically kick into action, along with the corresponding core belief, forming an unconscious reactive pattern that attempts to distance us from both the present perceived threat and the primary negative experience. The deeper the wound, the more intense the defensive reaction.  When some seemingly random event in our relationship triggers a faint memory of the earlier experience, we can suddenly find ourselves in a habituated pattern of blame and denial that prevents us from acknowledging and feeling the original pain.  Often this involves distancing ourselves from our partner.  But the root of the problem does not reside in our partner.  It is in the internal unresolved pain of our past. 

The Four Stages of Healing Relationship Conflict 
So how do we dismantle the negative (reactive) patterns that prevent us from enjoying a spiritual relationship with our partner, ourselves and the Beloved? In the first example above, Martha needs to reflect on her own core beliefs and feelings, the ones that support a pattern of abusive relationships, rather than blame her male partners. She has to turn within as a first step toward cultivating a stable, nurturing relationship.  In the second example, for Todd to cultivate a committed relationship he also has to listen to the underlying thought patterns (core beliefs) and feelings of fear that cause him to avoid intimacy with loved ones.  He too must turn within for the answer.

But turning within is just the first step in dismantling negative patterns and resolving conflicts in our relationships. There are essentially four stages to healing conflict in a relationship. 1. Turning within, which involves owning our projections of anger, fear, and other emotional responses, and reflecting on underlying thought patterns. 2. Becoming receptive , which means opening to the full experience, including our partner’s pain and point of view. 3. Recognizing our interdependence , which entails opening ourselves to the essential truth that we are not separate at the level of the heart. 4. Resting in the heart , which refers to transcending the mind (our conditioning) so that we are no longer identified with our stories but are at peace both internally and with our partner.

Let’s explore each of these healing stages and discover how they can help us to achieve greater peace with our partners and a deeper union with the Beloved.