After The Honeymoon News

We are pending for CEU certification for MFTs and LCSWs. We are hoping to be able to provide CEUs for participants in the upcoming retreats and workshops.

We continue to receive great evaluations for the way that we are bringing lessons of conscious communication to participants in our workshops. Years of practicing differentiation (that is, separate individuals playing passionately in connected interdependence) is paying off personally and professionally for us as a couple. We are continuing to use our workshops as a place to practice collaboration.

The Advanced Committed Partnership Group has decided to meet four times a year on the "cross quarters" to explore erotic partnership within a more committed framework. We are honored to be the facilitators for such a beautiful group of loving souls.

It seems that people are concerned about the costs of the longer retreats. This coming year we will offer some shorter weekends, which offer an opportunity for deep intimacy in a less expensive format.

Motivation

"Where are you coming from?" "What do you mean by that?" While these questions can be defensive, they also point to important information regarding motivation. In fact, a key to erotic partnership (friendly partnership with juicy sex) is managing where you come from in regard to desire?

Let me begin with a personal story.

When I was 16, after an early life with no spiritual guidance, I decided to join the local First Southern Baptist church. I jumped in with both feet — attendance several times a week, baptism, and camps. Overall, my involvement with the church was quite positive, but at a certain point I was pained by a question that I couldn't understand. So, I went to minister of the church and I asked him: Why is it that a person can work his entire life trying to do good, but be denied admittance to Heaven because he never asked God into his heart, while another person can live a degenerate life and at that last moment invite God into his heart and be saved?

I don't remember what the minister said to me (something about faith), but it wasn't adequate to help me deepen my understanding. However, the question of why hard work is not the most important spiritual practice has stayed with me. Over the decades, this question has become a cornerstone of how I approach the world.

Until we examine where we are coming from, we are acting unconsciously. Until we can see the drives and feelings underlying our intentions and actions, we cannot understand the role we play creating our own lives. But here is the more important part.

We must be conscious of where we are coming from in each moment. It is not enough to understand where we came from. We must understand where we are coming from now, in each moment, in each action. So, while the exploration of our childhood sets the stage for understanding our dynamics and patterns, we must not stop there. We must come into ongoing relationship with our deeper drives and feelings.

Sounds like it isn't too hard, right? Well, it depends on how identified we are with our drives and feelings. To the degree that I am identified with these deep motivations, it is painful to be conscious of them because, really being conscious of them requires disidentifying with them. That hurts.

Let's cut to the chase, this sounds esoteric when what I mean is completely practical.

To have erotic partnership we must be filled with desire for our partner. This in itself is no easy task because, if we have been in relationship with a partner for any length of time, we know that we will not always have our desire fulfilled. And that hurts.

But, we must not only be filled with desire, we must be conscious of that desire. We must have enough distance so that when we don't get what we want, we can feel the disappointment without blaming the other. We must be unattached from our desire enough so that even when we do get what we want, we can accept the pain of knowing we won't always get it.

We must fully engage with the beauty of the animal drives, mammalian affects and human values as they play through our being, bringing conscious awareness all the while.

We come to stand back from our drives and feelings, fully experiencing their compelling power, allowing ourselves to be filled with the life force that is our human destiny, while not having to act in any particular way.

In brief, we must fully own our desire without expectation. This is "where we come from" in embodying erotic partnership.

CEU reminder: If you are an MFT or an LCSW you can now get CEU's for your attendance at all After The Honeymoon retreats and workshops.