Dropping the Struggle in Love
An Excerpt from Dropping the Struggle by Roger Housden
Love between two people is a great work, and that work is often not easy. It is not easy under any circumstance to stay awake to our self-deceptions and unconscious expectations, even less so when it involves someone else who is bound to have misperceptions of his or her own.
So inevitably struggle happens, both inside us and between us. We struggle to find the “right” person, or we launch a campaign, covert or otherwise, to change the person we are with. Yet struggle is not the same as work. Struggle needs us to hold to a position. It needs us to be right and the other to be wrong. Relationship work, on the other hand, needs us to engage in an honest and humble exploration of our vulnerabilities and those of our partner. Struggle tightens our defenses; work can loosen them.
We struggle internally, too — with our beliefs and positions and fears. Why am I not in a relationship? What can I do to call in the One? In the words of the Clash song, “Should I stay or should I go?” Do I want to take on the challenges of being alone or those of engaging in an intimate relationship? How can I honor my needs both for independence and for intimacy?
I am as much a fool in love as anyone, but I have learned that as soon as we stop looking for answers in the self-talk in our head, as soon as we rest back from any position at all, we soften. Then we have enough presence of mind to bring our attention away from the debate and down into our heart, down into our physical presence. Then our body can speak to us. The more we place our attention there, the more a spacious silence can rise in our heart, and miracle of miracles, we may begin to feel the love that is always present, the love that we did not make or decide on, the love that both includes and transcends ourselves and our partner. In that moment, we no longer need to look for love outside, from another person or people; we ourselves are that love.
Stillness, equanimity, love — it seems paradoxical that we can experience these qualities when we step back, disengage, and detach from our thoughts and feelings. But this form of detachment is not a closing off or a disassociation from our experience. It is a deepening of it. The poet Czesław Miłosz, in his poem “Love,” says:
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart...
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Perspective, or detachment, heals the heart because it frees us from the illness of self-absorption. It’s no longer all about us. It allows us to see that the other has needs, too; that his point of view is as valid to him as ours is to us. We see things in context, as part of a larger picture. If we can look at ourselves this way, we may see that we are “only one thing among many.”
When my only son was a child, I was strongly attached to not being woken early, which is still the case. I was also very attached to my morning meditation practice. So when my son would wake up I made it clear that he needed to slip into the family room and stay there, playing on his own until after I had finished my meditation. The obvious — that he was alone and probably lonely — seemed to pass me right by. My habits were more important to me than my son feeling loved. Occasionally I would leap up out of meditation and call to him to be quiet, the irony almost completely lost on me. That was self-absorption, and it wasn’t pretty.
Now, decades later, I soften more around the edges of a reaction and stay present, in the stillness that is always the background, to whatever emerges. Another name for that stillness is love. Being willing to let go of the thoughts and feelings that prevent me from living fully into the moment is a humbling process, a lifetime’s work that has no arrival point. But my world feels a little more loving as a result; I am more generous both to myself and to others.
Roger Housden is the author of Dropping the Struggle and numerous other books, including the best-selling Ten Poems series, which began in 2001 with Ten Poems to Change Your Life and ended with Ten Poems to Say Goodbye in 2012. He offers writing workshops, both in person and online, with an emphasis on self-discovery and exploration. Visit him online at http://www.rogerhousden.com/.
Excerpted from Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have. Copyright © 2016 by Roger Housden. Printed with permission from New World Library.
Link to Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have
So inevitably struggle happens, both inside us and between us. We struggle to find the “right” person, or we launch a campaign, covert or otherwise, to change the person we are with. Yet struggle is not the same as work. Struggle needs us to hold to a position. It needs us to be right and the other to be wrong. Relationship work, on the other hand, needs us to engage in an honest and humble exploration of our vulnerabilities and those of our partner. Struggle tightens our defenses; work can loosen them.
We struggle internally, too — with our beliefs and positions and fears. Why am I not in a relationship? What can I do to call in the One? In the words of the Clash song, “Should I stay or should I go?” Do I want to take on the challenges of being alone or those of engaging in an intimate relationship? How can I honor my needs both for independence and for intimacy?
I am as much a fool in love as anyone, but I have learned that as soon as we stop looking for answers in the self-talk in our head, as soon as we rest back from any position at all, we soften. Then we have enough presence of mind to bring our attention away from the debate and down into our heart, down into our physical presence. Then our body can speak to us. The more we place our attention there, the more a spacious silence can rise in our heart, and miracle of miracles, we may begin to feel the love that is always present, the love that we did not make or decide on, the love that both includes and transcends ourselves and our partner. In that moment, we no longer need to look for love outside, from another person or people; we ourselves are that love.
Stillness, equanimity, love — it seems paradoxical that we can experience these qualities when we step back, disengage, and detach from our thoughts and feelings. But this form of detachment is not a closing off or a disassociation from our experience. It is a deepening of it. The poet Czesław Miłosz, in his poem “Love,” says:
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart...
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Perspective, or detachment, heals the heart because it frees us from the illness of self-absorption. It’s no longer all about us. It allows us to see that the other has needs, too; that his point of view is as valid to him as ours is to us. We see things in context, as part of a larger picture. If we can look at ourselves this way, we may see that we are “only one thing among many.”
When my only son was a child, I was strongly attached to not being woken early, which is still the case. I was also very attached to my morning meditation practice. So when my son would wake up I made it clear that he needed to slip into the family room and stay there, playing on his own until after I had finished my meditation. The obvious — that he was alone and probably lonely — seemed to pass me right by. My habits were more important to me than my son feeling loved. Occasionally I would leap up out of meditation and call to him to be quiet, the irony almost completely lost on me. That was self-absorption, and it wasn’t pretty.
Now, decades later, I soften more around the edges of a reaction and stay present, in the stillness that is always the background, to whatever emerges. Another name for that stillness is love. Being willing to let go of the thoughts and feelings that prevent me from living fully into the moment is a humbling process, a lifetime’s work that has no arrival point. But my world feels a little more loving as a result; I am more generous both to myself and to others.
Roger Housden is the author of Dropping the Struggle and numerous other books, including the best-selling Ten Poems series, which began in 2001 with Ten Poems to Change Your Life and ended with Ten Poems to Say Goodbye in 2012. He offers writing workshops, both in person and online, with an emphasis on self-discovery and exploration. Visit him online at http://www.rogerhousden.com/.
Excerpted from Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have. Copyright © 2016 by Roger Housden. Printed with permission from New World Library.
Link to Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have