Partnering: A New Kind of Relationship

Chapter 10

Partners on the Path
Spirituality and Partnering

The surrender to the process of relationship is at the same time a surrender to spiritual reality. This sense of transcendent reality awakens us to the remarkable intelligence that governs the universe without and within. Once we are connected to this intelligence we discover a third partner in our relationship. The presence of "the third" brings us a deepening of process, an amazingly knowledgeable ally, and a profound sense of peace that comes with knowing that we do not need to do it all by ourselves.

When it comes to partnering, we are not alone. We have our interactions with each other in the partnering relationship and we have something else as well. We have our spiritual reality. As Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber said so beautifully: "There is a light over every person, and when two souls meet, their lights come together, and a single light emerges from them to feel the universal generation as a sea, and oneself as a wave in it."

There are many different ways to think about this. You can call it being connected to God, being connected to universal or transpersonal energies, or being connected to the intelligence of the universe that echoes within each of us. You can also think of it as the impulse in us that wishes to serve our fellow humans and to make the planet a better place. However you choose to frame the spiritual aspect of life, it is real, it is objective, and it is essential for our individual well-being, the well-being of our partnering relationship, and the well-being of the planet.

For us it is clear that there is in the universe, and within each of us, a deeper intelligence that can be ignited as we begin our journey of personal discovery. Once this intelligence is activated it has the possibility of becoming an always-available friend and teacher to us. And what a remarkable friend and teacher it can be! With its help, we begin to make sense out of things that were previously a mass of confusion. We experience meaning, purpose, and direction in our personal lives that simply were not there before. Our dreams begin to make sense to us and they become an important part of our lives. New thoughts, new ways of looking at things emerge.

As we plug into this newly developing intelligence, we begin to experience the meaning and purpose that lie behind it. It wants something from us. It drives us with inexorable power and certainty toward a deeper understanding of our relationships and ourselves. It replaces in importance many of the other concerns in our lives. Our belief systems and the rules we have lived by in the past are now open to examination and a deeper consideration. We feel the purposive nature of this intelligence, we know that it wants something from us, and that it is moving us in an entirely new direction.

Our personal view is that this intelligence wishes us to become all that we can be, to make use of everything that we brought with us into this world. It wants us to embrace all of our selves so that we can more fully enter into life and relationship and learn to balance the remarkable array of energies that are within us. It wants us to claim our full humanity.

It is a source of immense strength (and a relief, too, we might add) to experience divinity as an integral part of one’s partnering relationship. Life in general, and relationship in particular, can be pretty rough going at times. In their groundbreaking book, Flesh and Spirit, Jack Zimmerman, Ph.D., and Jacquelyn McCandless, M.D., write about "the third" in relationship. They point out the need to always call in "the third" so that divinity is present and available to us, not just for our individual lives but also for our relationships. This third is an important part of what makes relationship sacred.

What must we do to begin to connect to this divine intelligence? Sometimes we do not have to do anything. Just beginning the process of personal growth can activate this intelligence. Once it is activated, it is there for us. We just have to know where to look for it. Since there are specific ways in which this intelligence manifests, there are also particular things that we can do to support the connection to this divine intelligence and to enhance the spiritual basis of the partnering process. Let’s now look at some of the things that you can do to deepen your connection to yourself and to your partnering.




Dreams As a Window to Your Inner Selves and Spirituality

Perhaps the simplest, the most fascinating, and the most rewarding place to begin is with dreams. Our dreams give us the most direct experience of this deeper intelligence. They also bring us into connection with our own spiritual reality, a reality that, in our dreams, is untouched by the rules, feelings, and expectations of others.

Your dreams can help you understand the amazing family of selves that lives within you. Your dreams are remarkable friends; they give you an objective, or unbiased, picture of how your selves dance with each other and, we might add, dance with the selves of your partner. Let’s look at the dream process and see what it can teach you about these selves.

We know that there are many useful ways of looking at dreams. You may have studied dreams already and have your own interpretations. The following is our own particular approach to dream work, one that we have found extremely helpful over the years. As you read this, remember that each of us has our own dream vocabulary, so please be aware that yours may be a bit different from this in some places.

Common Themes in Dreams

There are some dream themes that are very common. We will begin by looking at these and showing you (1) how you might decode them and (2) how you can use the information that they are bringing you.

High Places

Dreaming of being in a high place takes many forms. Sometimes the dreamer is on top of a tall building or on a high mountaintop. There is often a danger of falling, or at least there is some sense that a person in this situation could fall. In some of these dreams, the dreamer is in fact falling from a high place.

When you are up high you are away from the earth. You might be too identified with your mind or with spirituality which indicates that either your rational mind or your spiritual self is likely functioning as your primary self. You are probably disconnected from earth and all that it represents. This would mean that you disown your body, your feelings, or your instinctual energies. Another way of looking at this kind of dream is that people who are special, and who disown the ordinary, are always high up. Their position is precarious because whenever they stop being special, they can fall down and they fear that when they fall down they will become nothing.

We keep falling in our dreams because we continue to remain too identified with our minds, our being special, or our spiritual nature. So the unconscious shows us falling from high places over and over again. It is basically showing us where we are (up) and what we are missing (down). It is as simple and clear as that. Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, called this the compensatory principle of the dream process because the dream is always balancing out whatever we are identified with or whatever we disown.

Fast Cars and Freeways

In these dreams we are driving too fast or our car is out of control. There is often an accident or a crash of some kind.

Driving too fast is the classic dream of a pusher primary self, one that is out of control. The crash stops us. For example, Sonny, a very successful financier, dreams repetitively for many years that he is driving on a freeway at high speeds and his car crashes. This is an accurate picture of the way he actually leads his life. He is always busy and never slows down. After a number of years Sonny has a heart attack. Pusher energy can be very dangerous and this amazing intelligence within was sending him repeated warnings of this danger. (His wife was also telling him he should slow down, but that is another story.) If he had listened to his dream, Sonny would have understood its warning and he would have had the opportunity to separate from his pusher self before he actually got sick.

The car image often gives us a general picture of how we move through the world. If in a dream you are driving the car you drove in college, then your general psychology now is like it was then. If you are in a car and your father is driving it, then your life is being run by your father (either your real father, or the primary self in you that resembles your father).

In these dreams, you are usually racing on a freeway. Again, this is a pusher motif. You might find that, as you pay attention to your dreams and you separate from your pusher, you are now driving down country roads, or you have pulled off the freeway to stop.

Quicksand or Sticky Asphalt

Dreaming that you are trying to walk but it feels like your feet are in quicksand or sticky asphalt is another kind of pusher dream. Here the dream is balancing, or compensating, your primary self, the self that tries to push so hard all the time. Dreams often try to balance our primary self in this way. Here you are trying to hurry and you cannot. Your feet are stuck. The harder you try to reach your destination, the worse things get. Your dream is intent on getting the message through to you. A variation of this dream is one in which you are trying to catch a train or bus or ship and, no matter how hard you try to make it on time, you are too late.

School or Military Service

Dreaming you are back in school or military service is a very common dream. Generally it describes the fact that we are living our life today the way we did when we were in school or in the army. In these settings our lives were not our own and we had to dance to a drumbeat that was not our own. In these settings we had to do what was assigned to us. It is very easy to fall into life patterns that are psychologically very much like being in school or in the army. This dream usually means that we are following a set of rules and requirements that deny us our freedom. We have no choice but are at the mercy of the rules that in this case are usually the rules of a particularly demanding set of primary selves.

A variation of this dream is being in prison or being locked up in a concentration camp. These dreams reflect a loss of personal freedom in our lives and often indicate a lack of connection to our feelings. They usually come when we are working too hard and life is becoming a prison.

Police Officers

The police represent control. Very often when the pusher energy is out of control in our lives, we have dreams of a police officer stopping us for a traffic violation. This dream is also a compensatory dream. There is something in your life that is out of control and your control side is trying to help you regain control and, most likely, trying to get you to slow down. These are warning dreams and you need to learn to listen to them.

Houses

There are very many variations on the house dream. The image of the home represents your personality and how it is operating in the world. The house gives you a picture of how you are living. Is there enough space? Is there enough light? Is it cold? Is it magical? Do you have your own special space? Dreaming of moving into a new home is connected to a major change in personality. Many times when people are bringing more choice into their lives, they dream of new and more spacious houses.

Sometimes people dream that they are going down into the basement where they feel fearful. In this case they are moving more deeply into the unconscious as they explore new aspects of themselves. Discovering new rooms or new treasures in a house is learning about new parts of yourself. Dreaming of living in a Victorian-type home might be related to having a set of primary selves that is based on Victorian values.

Dangerous People or Things

Being chased by dangerous people or things is one of the most common types of dreams. Whatever is chasing you in your dreams is essentially based on what you are disowning. Many people disown their instinctual energies. They are afraid of their anger, their sexuality, and their emotions. So in their dreams they are chased by wild animals or by dangerous men who want to kill them or have sexual relations with them. By examining what is after you in your dreams, you have immediate access to discovering your disowned selves!

Sometimes these disowned selves can represent parts of ourselves other than our instinctual energies. If you are a pusher type bent on success then you may find yourself afraid of people who are not busy, like unemployed street people, people in hammocks, or "ladies who lunch." We saw a woman once who dreamed a dragon was chasing her. She crossed a small body of water and there the dragon stopped and became a book. She was a woman who had disowned the serious use of her mind and that became the dragon that was after her. A few months after this dream she enrolled in school and ultimately pursued a professional career.

Birth and Death

The unconscious needs a way to describe change in our personality development. The image of people giving birth to babies is a wonderful way to describe the development of new ideas, new feelings, and new ways of being in the world.

Conversely, the image of someone dying is a way of describing the end of a certain cycle, the end of a certain way of thinking or feeling or being in the world. There is a Buddhist saying that life is a thousand births and a thousand deaths and when we look at the frequency of the birth and death motif in dreams, we can certainly see how this is true.

If you dream that you die it is generally a time of great change in your life. In these situations you are usually shifting away from your primary self system. It is like a death. The old you is dying and a new you will be born.

Cataclysms

There are a wide variety of cataclysmic dreams. These suggest that there is a big change coming. Here are some of them. There is a huge earthquake and you know that it is the end of the world. It is World War III and you know that the world is coming to an end. There is a gigantic tidal wave that is going to destroy everything.

In most of these dreams the dreamer is going to die. Keep in mind that the dreamer in the dream is generally one of your primary selves. Dreaming of a tidal wave may suggest that your disowned emotional selves are getting ready to overwhelm your rational, controlled primary self. An earthquake means that your primary self that had everything in order is about to be overturned.

Flying (Not in a Plane)

This is also a very common kind of dream. To make sense out of it we have to determine the primary self of the dreamer. If someone is a very concrete thinker and a practical person with a strong attention to detail, then the dream reflects a readiness to move into his or her intuition, into the world of the imagination, and, very possibly, into the spiritual sphere.

If, on the other hand, the dreamer is very much identified with intuition and spirituality, then the dream can reflect an overidentification with intuition and the spiritual world. It means that the dreamer is always up in the air and does not have his or her feet on the ground.

Sometimes you are being chased in a dream or a situation is extremely emotional and then you jump up and start to fly. This would be a reflection of escaping into fantasy to escape a situation that is too difficult to handle on a psychological level.

Dreams and Relationship

So far we have been discussing certain categories of dreams that give us pictures of ourselves and the way in which we are living our lives. You can see, as we study these dreams, that we have a friend inside of us, a kind of dream master. This dream master, who is really the intelligence of the unconscious manifesting itself in the dream process, is an amazing advisor. It brings us all kinds of information, ideas, insights, and new ways of looking at things. It seems to want us to look at and embrace more and more of what we are. Its insights about relationship are staggering.

The Psychological Divorce

Listen to the following dream of a woman who had come to one of our workshops with her husband. They had both begun to separate from rigidly controlling primary selves and were beginning to meet each other in an entirely new, far more flexible way. This was her dream the last night of the training:

People are waiting for me to come down to the wedding ceremony except that it was actually a divorce ceremony. I’m wearing the same dress as the wedding dress I wore to my actual wedding. The bodice of this dress is different however. It is beautiful with colored beads across it. Neither of us have the script quite ready and so we are not quite ready for the ceremony to begin.

This is a remarkable dream. What is this divorce ceremony the couple is about to go through? It is the divorce from their primary selves. We think of it as a psycho-spiritual divorce, something that every couple truly needs. It marks the end of the relationship between two primary selves and the beginning of a relationship between two complex, sentient, soulful partners.

Many years ago Hal dreamed that he was in a court of law standing before a judge. The judge asked him what he was there for and Hal told him that he wanted a divorce from his wife (Sidra). He then asked Hal why he wanted this divorce and Hal told him that he wanted it because he loved her so much!

At that particular time Hal was learning to separate from the good father and the responsible father, the primary selves that had been so dominant in his life. Both of these selves had bonded him to Sidra in a way that worked against a deepening of the relationship. So long as Hal was identified with his good father, he could not react properly to Sidra, nor could he establish appropriate boundaries for himself. With the divorce from his primary selves — and from the bonding patterns — he was released and the relationship could move to the next level. This psychological divorce is the divorce that all partners must ultimately get from each other. It is the one that really counts.

Bringing Vulnerability into the Relationship

Let’s look at another example of how the dream process can point the way in relationship. A physicist came to see us. He was married to an artist, his total opposite in every way. Try as they might, they could not get close to one another. He had no connection to his feelings and his vulnerability. Needless to say, these were her strong suit. During one of our workshops he had the following dream:

I’m walking down a road and I hear someone crying. I look to see where it is coming from. I walk to the side of the road and there I see a hand sticking up from the earth. I rush over and start to dig. When I finally dig deeply enough, I discover a very young child and I pull him out of the earth.

Who is this young child that he discovers, that he is ready to discover? It is himself as a four year old when he had to "bury" his vulnerability. The dream master is giving him a picture of his own feeling nature that was buried at that time because his family was too disturbed and he needed to protect himself. He developed a strong logical mind that figured things out. With this, he felt safe no matter how much emotional disturbance surrounded him.

No wonder the physicist and his wife had such difficulty relating. To live in relationship without vulnerability is to live in torment because there is no place to touch at that deeper level that can provide the real food for the soul.

The Dream Master’s Picture of the Relationship

Sometimes the dream master of the unconscious uses humor to describe what is happening in a relationship. Many years ago, we got into quite a negative place with each other. It was pretty grim. Hal went into negative father mode and began taking potshots at Sidra for much of the day and into the evening. These took the form of constant criticisms that she blithely sidestepped. That night Sidra had the following dream:

Hal is throwing lit matches at me. I keep dodging them so he cannot hit me. Finally Hal explodes and yells at me: "Stop jumping around so much. Stand still so that I can hit you."

When we woke up the next morning and Sidra shared her dream, we both started laughing. The unconscious had made its statement and it was very difficult for Hal to stay locked into the negative energy any longer. We cannot tell you how many times in our life together a dream, or a combination of our dreams, has broken a negative bonding pattern between us. What a gift!

Sometimes the directness of the unconscious is quite extreme when it wants us to get the picture of what is happening in the relationship. In one instance, a woman dreamed that her husband was having an affair with another woman. She felt it was a dream so she did not say anything and the next night she had the same dream. Then, amazingly enough, the dream repeated itself a third time.

On the morning after the third dream the woman asked her husband at breakfast if he was having an affair. Once he got over the shock, he admitted to her that such was the case and they began to deal with their relationship and its problems. Imagine the intelligence of the dream master who insisted, who demanded, that this woman become conscious of this affair so that she could meet the challenge and move on with her life and deepen her process. It is as though the dream master forces us to shed our skin over and over again so that change can occur. For anyone who works with dreams, the hand of God is patently obvious and truly inspiring.

Another woman was married to a man who saw himself as very spiritual. He meditated a good deal and often criticized his wife because she did not meditate or have a spiritual practice of any kind. You might say that he was spiritually arrogant. During the course of one of our trainings, the wife had the following dream:

I am standing in a line of people next to an altar. Each person has a gift to bring to God that they place on the altar one by one. Many of the gifts are beautifully wrapped. All I have is a pile of loose gunk in my hand. The gunk is all of the confusion and problems of my life. It is loose and I can hardly hold it in my hand. I feel so very ashamed that this is all I have. Finally it is my turn and I place the gunk on the altar where it quickly spreads all over. Then from above a large fist comes down into the middle of the gunk and suddenly the gunk begins to solidify and out of it emerges a large fish. It is given to me as a gift and I am meant to eat it.

What a remarkable gift the dream master brought to this woman. She never thought of herself as being spiritual. It was her husband who knew how to do that. Suddenly everything was framed in a different way. There was a meaning in her life. Her problems were not just problems. They were the substance of her own transformation. Her dream was a dream for all of us. It showed her that God lives here, now, with all of our problems and all of our imperfections. All we need to do is to step to the altar and give to divinity our greatest gift — ourselves with all of our imperfections. You may be sure that a decisive shift occurred in their relationship as a result of this dream and its message.

With another couple the dream master provided another picture. The husband was always complaining about the fact that he felt his wife was overly protected. He wanted to reach her but never could. During one of our trainings she had the following dream:

I dreamed that I was in a large fortress made of concrete. It had thick walls and great battlements. I was snuggled down safe inside of the fortress feeling comfortable and glad that I had its protection all around me. I felt safe and well taken care of. Then I could see outside of my fortress and I saw what it was protecting me from. I saw that it was protecting me from a very soft gentle rain that was falling all around, a rain that would have felt good and would have nurtured me and helped me to grow. I was still glad that I was in my fortress, however.

What a remarkable picture of herself the dream master brings to her. Here she is, encased in her fortress. What is outside? A beautiful soft gentle rain that can nourish her if only she would allow it. Eventually she will leave her fortress but for now she needs this protection. What is the fortress? It is her primary self system. It is her mind, her control, her iron discipline, and her absolute requirement that she show no vulnerability.

So we see how dreams so beautifully reflect the dance of the selves as they operate within us and in our relationships. The dream world is like the handwriting of God. What a creative collaboration it is when partners learn how to decipher this writing with each other. Just telling your dreams to one another is a great way to start. There are many different ways to look at and work with dreams. It does not matter where you begin. Just know that the dream master and the unconscious love attention and they both flower when you spend time with them.

Pushers, Freeways, and the Soul

In order to feel our spiritual natures, we need to slow our lives down so we can see and feel and smell and taste what is around us. We often use the image of driving on the freeway to describe the speed and the power of the inner pusher. The pusher is driven by a deep anxiety about life and tries to cope with this anxiety by making us successful and helping us to earn a living. But whatever its motivation, the pusher is merciless in its demands on us and it keeps us moving at extremely high speeds. So one of the things we must learn is how to get off the freeway and begin to drive the country roads of our psyches.

With some couples, both people are so busy that they do not even know that they are no longer making contact with each other. Many years ago Hal saw a child in therapy who drew a picture of his family home. In the picture some people were racing up and down stairs while others were moving sideways, as though they were on wheels. Everyone was going so fast that no one was making contact with anyone else. That is how the pusher operates. You may get a good deal of work done and you may set new speed records, but you can forget intimacy and linkage and you most assuredly can forget about matters of the spirit.

Spiritual teachers will frequently recommend meditation as a way of slowing down and accessing spirit. We have no objection to meditation used for this purpose and it often works. The difficulty is that this does not solve the fundamental problem of a hyperactive pusher. It merely gives the meditator a break.

Imagine for a moment that you are driving on the autobahn at 120 miles per hour. It is now meditation time. You slam on the brakes and pull over and meditate for a half hour. Well that is certainly better than not meditating at all, but what happens when the meditation is over? You are back on the autobahn traveling 120 miles per hour, or maybe 130 miles per hour since you may feel you have to make up the time you lost while you were stopped.
The challenge to individuals and the challenge to partners is to meet this pusher energy together and find a way to slow down the car. We need to learn to build into our life times to be still or to move slowly and ways of being still or of moving with stillness. It is when we are still that we make our deeper and more intimate connections to each other and to the world of the spirit.

If we cannot learn how to do this on a psychological level, then drugs and alcohol become the method of choice for many of us. They do slow us down temporarily. They also shut down the cacophony of voices in our heads, especially the self-critical one who, together with the pusher, does so much to exhaust us and distress us and to maintain the success of the psychotherapy and medical professions.

Getting Off the Freeway: Linkage and the Experience of Spirit

When you learn to quiet down and be with each other, a very remarkable thing can happen. We are not talking now about watching TV together or reading together. Those are parallel activities in which both partners are still doing something. We are talking now about sitting opposite each other all alone with no one else around and simply exchanging energy.

We usually prefer no talking for five or ten minutes and minimal talking during the remainder of these times together. Just be together with no agenda and no expectations. You might want to play quiet music, but it should not be music that enlivens and distracts, it should be music that quiets and deepens. So far as we are concerned, this is sacred time and it is a time when spirit can enter and soul reality can make its essential meaning known.
This is also not a time for sexuality. That does something else for intimacy between partners. Some people use sexual practices such those described in the Tantric scriptures, to bring the experience of soul into their relationships. However, we have found that the deep intimacy reached during sex does not necessarily carry over to every day life and partners who achieve intimacy in this way can be as cut off from one another as any other couple once the intimate sexual experience is finished. Physical intimacy does not in any way ensure a real intimacy and linkage. But it certainly can contribute!

We can only ask you to spend some time just quietly being together and see what happens. You can develop your own way of doing this. Just keep it simple since this is a time for being and not for doing. The gift of linkage and the gift of spirit in relationship are priceless and well worth the effort.

Group Activities That Support Spiritual Contact

There are many kinds of group activities that support the experience of spiritual energies. A group of people who focus on bringing in spiritual energies can command a great deal of authority and catch the attention of the higher order energies. You may wish to join a traditional church or synagogue if this works for you. It may be a workshop or class where spirituality is taught and inducted. It may be just a group of people that gather to meet, travel, meditate, or pray.

In the wonderful Kevin Costner film, Field of Dreams, he is told by the voice in the field: "If you build it, they will come!" In the film this voice turns out to be that of his departed father. We say to you the same thing. If you make the time and space for them and call them (or him or her or it), they will come. We are talking about the presence of divine energy. If more than one person, if a group, calls the energies that come in are even more immediate and more powerful. [Shakti notes that this paragraph might be confusing to some people, as if you are calling in spirits.] Omit this paragraph, since we are talking about calling in the energies or spirits-- it sounds as though it could be upsetting to some people.

In the fall of 1998, we traveled to Bhutan with some good friends. It was a magical, spirit-infused time. There were six of us altogether: Joseph Heller, Kathleen Downes, Lynnaea Lumbard, Rick Paine, and ourselves. We meditated and prayed together in many of the Buddhist temples and the ancient shrines in Bhutan. The experience was a remarkable one for all of us. The two of us alone would have had a good time but we could not have begun to approach the level of intensity that occurred over and over again during these group meditations.

Ritual Activity and Sacred Space

One of the very lovely things that we have done is to create rituals in our life together aimed at being related to the world of spirit or asking it for help in some way. For example, each morning Sidra lights an oil lamp and incense in front of the Thai spirit house in our kitchen and when we leave on a long trip Hal lights incense in the front and rear gardens while Sidra lights the incense and oil lamp inside. [Note that I moved this sentence up into this paragraph. Ok?}How about here?? I'm also OK with it at the end of the next paragraph where you had it. It just seemed more at home to me here.

We have arranged sacred spaces in our home and in the garden. These are like small temple areas or altars. You can do whatever you like to create your own. Many people have a sacred space for their meditation practice. Outdoor spaces may involve arrangements of statues, stones, wood, and plants. Inside they can be sacred spaces — or alters — where you keep all sorts of special objects or photos in an attractive arrangement. You can use these sacred spaces for lighting candles or burning incense.

On a few occasions we have taken off our wedding bands and buried them in the earth for a period of time and then put them back on, each placing the ring on the other’s finger as we did during our original wedding ceremony. We have spoken new vows to each other on a number of occasions as a renewal of our connection. We often pray together, more as a ritual than as a regular ongoing activity.

Most people are bashful about their feelings toward God. So we say to you that if you are bashful, be bashful. Just do not let it stop you from doing what you need to do or say to feel connected to the world of spirit. Do not get cerebral and worry so much about details, like whether God is male or female, that you stop your own prayer and ritual. There is nothing wrong with religious speculation and thought so long as it does not take the juice out of your own brand of practice and ritual. Do whatever feels right to you. This is primarily a matter of heart and soul.

The Hand of God in Relationship

It is in our study of relationship that we have been the most moved, the most touched by what we see as the hand of divinity. The intelligence of the universe has created such an amazing system for becoming conscious that we stand in awe, over and over again, as we observe couples learning to become partners and claiming what they need to claim. The deep joys of these relationships and the rewards of this partnering are so marvelous that they feel like gifts from God.

We have learned that there are two basic laws of relationship. The first is the law of the disowned selves. Whatever it is that you hate or judge or cannot stand in the world is your disowned self. If you hate your partner’s neatness and you constantly feel judgment, then neatness is a disowned self. If your partner cannot bear it when you flirt at a party, then flirting is your partner’s disowned self.

We can even take this a step farther. It is not just what you judge that is a disowned self, it is whatever destabilizes you. If you are excessively jealous of your sister because she is so sexy, then sexiness is a disowned self. If you are powerfully attracted to a teacher that you met, then your disowned self will be your own inner teacher or your own spiritual nature or whatever it is that he or she teaches.

It is not just the law itself that is so profound for us, it is the fact that it behaves with such mathematical precision. As we watch disowned selves at work in the world, as we watch the way the universe sends them back to us like heat seeking missiles (which is what they become when they are disowned), there is no question in our minds any longer that God is truly a mathematician.

The second law, which shows this divine mathematics so beautifully, is as follows: Whatever you disown in your life, whatever self or energy you have repressed, that same self will find you. You will marry that self or your first or second child will embody that self. Your coworker, mother-in-law, dog, cat, ex-spouse, or stepchildren will embody that self. Whenever you are at war with anyone in your life where judgment and negativity are involved, you are dealing with a disowned self.

If you have disowned your vulnerability then one of your children will become ultimately vulnerable. You will either be totally upset with that child or irrevocably bonded to him or her. This will go on all your life together until you recognize that this child is your teacher and you must take back what is yours. In this case it would be your vulnerability. The wicked stepmother that you hate is your deepest teacher. She carries your ability to be unaffected by the needs of others, your impersonality, your ability to use power, and your strategic thinker. So long as you remain angry with her, you keep yourself unconscious and so stop yourself from embracing the missing selves that she carries.

[Shakti notes that these qualities sound so negative that the reader might wonder why he or she would want to embrace them. Do you have a simple way of remedying this, or do you want to just leave it along?]

What a remarkable thing the intelligence of the universe has done! What a method it has developed to force us to become more conscious human beings. Is it any wonder that we are filled with awe as we see these immutable laws of the universe applied to relationship?

When looked at in this way, spiritual reality lives in your every moment with people. Your deepest hatred can change suddenly into the most profound experience of divinity and with that experience of divinity comes an effortless compassion and a feeling of deep peace. All that you need do is recognize that your partner is your teacher and commit yourself to doing the work that has to be done. In partnering we make this commitment. Ultimately we will all be moving in this direction. There is nowhere else to go!