The Deeper Love

For the last 8 years Chameli and I have been practicing and teaching an approach to intimate relationship which we call the Deeper Love. It has arisen one hundred percent out of our own personal experience, and our longing to bridge a schism which can often be confusing and painful. We have taught this as a seminar both in the US and in Europe.

I started to guide people into awakening in 1991 at the invitation of my teacher H.W.L. Poonja.  He asked me to “share the secret with my friends.”  My wife at the time and I returned back to Seattle, where we had previously been living, and I started giving “Satsang.” People would come to our small apartment, just 8 or 10 at first, to find out what I had been up to in India.  It didn’t take long for that same realization of spaciousness to become infectious.  Soon the meetings grew from 10 to 30, then from 30 to one hundred.  It was during those first months that our first son, Abhi, was born.  A couple years later we had Shuba, our second child.

So there I was, after a few years, giving teachings to people all over the world that were profoundly impacting their lives and helping them experience the “Big Love,” — and I also had a personal life: I was married with children.  It was sometimes confusing and disorienting to discover that the “Big Love” we shared in Satsang and on retreats was not sustained at home.  I was still experiencing the same kinds of conflict, misunderstanding, and shutting down as I had known all my life, not only in my own relationships, but I had also seen in my family growing up.  Eventually that marriage fell apart amidst feelings of failure, deep disappointment, and some sense of hypocrisy that I had been unable to live, in my personal life,  what I had been  teaching on a bigger scale.

 

Relationship as a Practice

Here is a passage from my 2005 Bestseller, “The Translucent Revolution.”

As with every other area of our lives, there is a symbiotic relationship between the depth of our translucence and the way we view otherness. Translucence naturally shifts our habits of relating, without our doing anything about it. We have less to defend as we come to know ourselves as bigger than our own story, and our relating naturally becomes less strategic. As we see the other as myself, even if only in snapshots, we find that compassion occurs effortlessly. We develop more humor about the idiosyncrasies of our personality. We have less investment in laboriously working things out, and a greater willingness to breathe a sigh and return to innocence. The need to change others relaxes, since we are less tied to them as a source of our well-being. All these things can happen more or less spontaneously as by-products of waking up. At the same time, the attention we bring to our habits of relating can deepen and stabilize our expression of translucence. We can always bring more skillful means, more as an art form than as self-improvement, to our relating. We can become more aware of, and tell the truth about, the old habits that have created separation. These old habits run deep, and they will not necessarily die on their own. Our social environment reinforces them. When we are willing to put awakening into the fire of relationship, it will reveal all old habits and allow them to be released. Says Gay Hendricks:

“I think therein lies the difficulty, as well as the awesome beauty, of relationships. The universe is attempting to meet itself in play. When one person meets another, as that space links up with that space again, it pushes to the surface all the little places where we’ve withdrawn from space. Whether it’s being physically beaten, or starved to death, or criticized, or in beating others, those are the places where we’ve withdrawn and crystallized into mass, and then that has to come to the surface.”

 

Other Realization

Here is a passage from my 2005 Bestseller, “The Translucent Revolution.”

As a child, Michael Barnett went on vacation every year with his family to Broadstairs, on the southeast coast of England. On the beach, there was always a Punch and Judy show, a small tent with an opening like a stage at the top. A puppeteer would hide inside the tent and control his puppets: Punch and Judy, a husband and wife who were constantly fighting. One year, when Michael was about seven, he went to the beach with his brother, David, who was a few years older. The two boys got separated near the tent. Young Michael forgot about his brother as he wandered on his own, past all the other shows and entertainments. But eventually he returned to the Punch and Judy show, looking for David. This time he approached from the back.
“I saw a man kneeling in a box, his hands in the air. On one hand was Punch, and on the other was Judy. With my beloved Punch and Judy as gloves, he was creating the whole show, all by himself. I stopped, open-mouthed. I was absolutely shocked — it was like realizing that Santa Claus does not exist. I thought, ‘My God, it’s all a game! And what’s more, Punch and Judy are the same person! From the front, they are fighting each other. From the back, it is one man playing out a struggle, pretending a war between a man and a woman. What are they arguing about, why are they attacking each other? They are the same! Punch and Judy are the same person. This guy is both.’
“Of course I didn’t interpret it then as I do now. This is the truth I have discovered, that we are all Punches and Judys . . . husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters — we are all playing Punch and Judy, ultimately. But every Punch-and-Judy in the world is the same person. When you argue with your lovers and your friends, you are all the same person.”

 

Longing for Love

I’ve been traveling around the world most of my adult life conducting trainings and seminars.  During this time I probably got to hear every kind of story that a human being could tell:  people feel miserable, people think they are enlightened.  Someone is on a winning streak, someone is down on their luck.  One person is in perfect health, and another is at death’s door.

John Prine is one of my all time favorite singers, he summed it up beautifully like this:

That’s the way that the world goes ’round!
you’re up one day,
the next you’re down!
it’s half an inch of water
and you think you’re gonna drown
that’s the way that the world goes ’round!

So, I get to hear every kind of story.  What always touches me the most, what gets my heart every time, is when I meet someone who is single, and who sincerely and deeply has a longing for love.  It’s perhaps the most touching, innocent, raw, simple, and yet explosively potent state of human consciousness.  When we are busy seeking for enlightenment, or when we think we have found it, things easily get complicated.  We create all kinds of theories and concepts.  The same thing happens when we focus on health.  Next time you’ve got something wrong with your body, just ask around and you will find everyone has a theory on the universal panacaea.  But being single, and wanting to share your heart with another is such an innocent, beautiful place to be.

 

Intimacy has been my Guru

I’ve been greatly blessed in my life by being with with many great teachers.  I was close for many years to H.W.L. Poonja (people called him Papaji), and it was he who initially asked me to be a teacher of awakening.  I had some fantastic visits with Urgyen Tulku Rimpoche who was at that time the lineage holder for the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.  But my greatest teacher, my greatest guru by far, has been my marriage with my wife Chameli.  It has rooted out habit patterns which no other teacher has managed to do.  This marriage has been a portal to a depth of love and spaciousness that nothing else has come close to.

It has not always been this way.  After Poonja first asked me to teach I returned to the west and conducted “Satsang” for many years.  It’s easy in a context like that, when people gather together to meditate and to receive teaching, to experience a kind of “Big Love”, a love for everyone and everything.  Your heart is open, and you know things to be perfect just as they are.  The challenge I found at that time, which turned out to be true for many other teachers as well, was not at the Satsang meetings, but at home in ordinary human relationships.  The Big Love, the love you feel for everyone, is easy.  It’s the small love, the love you feel for people close to you where we experience our habits of control, closing down, criticism and judgment.  And so it was that I found myself in my early forties traveling the world as a spiritual teacher, but not being able to hold my own marriage together.