A Couple's Intensive–Part 1 Preparation
The days before the intensive
In preparing for our couple’s intensive with Sage and Anthony, Pat and I were asked to write up an autobiography of key aspects related to intimate relationships in our lives, beginning with relationships and experiences in our family of origin and working up through each of our intimate relationships until the present.
For me this revealed an unbalanced and embarrassingly naive sense of relationship with girls and later with women. I noticed my early fascination with the physical dimensions but had little sense of the dimensions of intellectual, emotional, or spiritual intimacy. Then in my current relationship with Pat I noticed my unsteady Eros. I had made this waxing and waning of Eros a problem, associating it with my age, my CML, or my extreme diet early in the year. But perhaps this sense of fluctuating Eros has had much to do with my too-narrow understanding of Eros.
Driving up to Toronto for the intensive we read two pieces that struck home with me. The first was a writing of Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen on the relationship between the nature of one’s experience of one’s sexuality and one’s level of consciousness. From this I inferred that while my Eros was seeming to fluctuate on one level of consciousness that perhaps it was also in the process of dying on a lower level of consciousness and then would reemerge on a higher level of consciousness – the transcend and re-include process that Wilber promotes. I copied an excerpt from this article for my website (click to open).
I also saw similar patterns in my relationship with food. After our diet the first three months of this year and my dropping 30 or so pounds, I now seem to have, at least for now, a different relationship with food. Using the terms that Wilber and Cohen used in their article, I seem not as attached to food – no longer identified with food, either obsessing in having to have it, always looking forward to food as a primary source of pleasure in my life on the one hand, or on the other hand obsessing over rigid withholding. No. Rather I now can enjoy food when I have it, but do not define my joy in life around it. This seems to be a significant change in me.
The other piece we began reading driving up to Toronto was Pathwork Lecture 207 The Spiritual Symbolism and Significance of Sexuality. It was powerful, deeper and more profound than the Wilber/Cohen piece for me. We agreed that to work with Sage and Anthony who are steeped in Pathwork was a true blessing for us.
Thus, after months of conscious and unconscious preparation (the latter being our Spirit and the spirit world working behind the scenes), we finally enter our intensive with Sage and Anthony. This will consist of five 2-3 hours sessions of just the four of us. These sessions will happen in the course of Thursday evening, July 5, and then Friday and Saturday. We shall leave their kiva on Sunday morning, July 8.