Thanksgiving and what blocks the experience of giving thanks

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This last weekend I had the good fortune to meet with a Frenchman named Sami Cohen.  We had both been asking the same question, “How does this reality we live in work and how do I work it?” for most of our adult lives so our conversation was deep and wonderful.  The model of the ego Sami shared with me, led me to a deeper understanding of why it has been so hard for me to experience the gratitude from which giving thanks is a natural expression.

The behavior I will share is a great way to once again say, “this isn’t it” and to make yourself feel “unworthy and not good enough”: not the best space from which to give thanks!

According to Sami’s model, each of us constructs a mental “ideal self” made up of all those qualities and abilities to which we aspire.  In addition we have another mental construct of our “the way I am self”.  The gap between these two “selves” is what both motivates us and demoralizes us.

If it looks like we can close the gap between these two constructed selves, we frantically go about trying to do so.  This state produces stress, anxiety, worry, fear and dissatisfaction, not gratitude!  For all of us achievers, we never seem to realize that this “ideal self” is an ever-moving target, that can never be fulfilled as that “ ideal self” would then not survive.

Doesn’t your mind bring up justifications as you read this?  “We need ideals because it gives us something to aspire to, how else would society evolve?” “My ideals orient my actions.” Etc.  Now all of this may be true, but by focusing on the gap are you really creating a grateful, thanksgiving frame of mind or are you driving yourself into a fear based, frenzied state of self flagellation, struggle, and dissatisfaction.

In the recent rowing race I won at the Head of the Charles, I watched my mind take away the joy of the win by saying I didn’t set a new course record as some others in different events had.  Diane was such great support when she said, “Let yourself have the win, stop letting your mind take it away!”  And that ideal self was only invented after I won, not months or years before!!

If the gap is too large, we are once again reminded of our “not good enough” judgement of the constructed (supposedly real, the way I am) self.  And since the gap is too large to ever close, we might as well give up.  The pain and disappointment of this resigned state usually gets suppressed by some form of addiction whether it be drugs, alcohol, sex or as in my case the excitement of the next great project or adventure, the next relationship, or the next sport goal.

According to Cohen, these two mental constructs of the Ego are not going to go away.  They are a part of what it is to be human.  However how we view them, how we interpret the gap between them, makes all the difference in one’s experience.

Viewed for what they are by the Actual Self, the Real you that exists just the way you are in this moment, the GAP and the constructed selves start to lose their power over you – as the awake you ceases to be lost in that mental construction, your Ego. The You that can observe your thoughts and images and see them for what they are and the you that can choose how you wish to interpret what you observe, can withdraw your life energy from these forms and redirect it to some way of being that is more consistent with who you truly are.

In playing with Sami Cohen’s model, I discovered that my ideal self was a composite of different characteristics from all my best friends and I wanted to be like them in those ways.  But rather than make myself wrong for falling short in each quality, I realized that in order to recognize those qualities in my friends I have to have some percentage of each of those qualities in my authentic, Real Self.  I also realized that I didn’t want to trade lives with any one of them – even though they have each had good lives – I was happy with being me, having my life.

It does not mean I don’t have some goals and qualities I want to manifest more fully.  It is just that by seeing once again how my mind continually wants me to suffer by saying that the way it is Right Here, Right Now is not it, I am able to shift to another way of Being.

Now how to make that shift to a state of Love, Presence, Connection and Gratitude is the trick or perhaps the skill to be developed?  First it is important to realize that the mind can only think about one thing at a time.

When I find myself ‘this isn’t iting”, I stop and start to notice my breath and  follow it in and out, and to feel my feet on the floor.  This brings me into present time.  Then I look at what I can learn from that experience of feeling upset, disconnected, anxious, unhappy, and depressed, this helps me understand the mind mechanism more so I can catch myself faster next time.   Next I start to look around me at Nature and see the beauty and that brings me to thoughts about how happy I am married to Diane and having the life I have.  I am once again thankful for being alive and overflowing with Thanksgiving.

May we all find and live more out of that natural Thanksgiving part of our Real Selves.

Happy Thanksgiving and all the very best for the holidays.

Landon

A Thanksgiving wish for you…

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One of the beautiful Americana chickens from our flock...

One of the beautiful Americana chickens from our flock…

Tuesday, November 26th, 2013

The sun shines through the glass doors leading out to our deck on this chilly, late November day. I’m sitting like a cat in the sun, enjoying the warmth after hurrying along frost-covered ground this morning to let out the chickens. We can feel winter closing in day by day.

This Thursday brings another Thanksgiving, another day to stop and feel grateful for all the good that life holds.

Each night before we go to sleep, Landon and I take a moment to share what we are grateful for from the day. I most always have a list, but when I stop and look, one or two things will stand out. They are usually experiences, or involve another person—an interaction that touched me, or a moment I slowed down and admired some aspect of nature that I could have breezed past.

This morning, as I fed the chickens, I noticed how beautiful they are, with their gold, orange, black and yellow feathers glinting in the sunlight. A chubby bird with a red belly helped herself to the chicken food trough and the chickens didn’t seem to mind. The water in their water dishes had frozen over and cracked—I took all this in with just a few breaths and the openness to let it in. Those moments left me feeling nourished and alive as I walked back to the house.

I chose to live close to nature when I moved to Nevada City twenty-three years ago. When I bought this little apple farm seventeen years ago, I made another commitment to up the ante of my relationship with nature. Suddenly, I had all these living things dependent on me to survive. Both the farm and I have thrived in our journey together.

When Landon first arrived four years ago, he didn’t think I was ‘it’, but he loved my farm. He also loved the river, sleeping outside, showering outside, the quiet, the fresh apple crisp from my apples, the lake ten minutes from the house where he could row. In other words, my relationship with nature seduced him. The experience of being here, with me, seduced him. His mind, which was committed to the pictures he carried of what his partner should look like, gradually got taken over by the richness of life here.

We just put our outside bed (on the deck) away for the winter and now sleep in front of the fire again, falling asleep as the flames flicker and crackle, throwing shadows around the room. As my teacher John O’Donohue once said, ‘a fire can be good company’. It feels like another warm presence in the room as we drift off to sleep.

Our two nighttime rituals now include saying what we are grateful for and acknowledging each other for something from the day. Gay and Katie Hendricks, in their book ‘Lasting Love’ say that we should acknowledge each other five times more that we criticize each other. They also recommend practicing by trying to tell each other something positive once an hour for a while, to get into the habit. That can be a stretch, but sure will get you to start to pay attention to the lack of acknowledgement in your relationships.

It feels so good to have the last words we share, before ‘I love you’ and ‘sweet dreams’ be some way that we appreciate each other, some way that we see each other. It’s a way of saying ‘you are seen, you are loved’. We all need more of that.

So as Thanksgiving comes around again on Thursday, I’m feeling so blessed and grateful, and thankful that each day I stop to let it all in and to share it with Landon. The more I slow down and feel how rich and full life is, the more joy I feel and the more inspired I feel to express that back into life.

Love was the missing piece in my life—love with a committed partner who I loved back with all my heart. I have that now and know that a major piece of my life’s purpose has been fulfilled. Moving forward from here, it’s exciting to watch as the journey unfolds. How can we give back from all that we have? How can our joy contribute to others?

That is the ongoing inquiry that Landon and I continue to explore. Thank you for sharing out journey.

May you be blessed with love and joy on this first Holy Day (holiday) and beyond,
Diane

Below:  a flock of wild turkeys that visited the farm for a few days and then left…

croppedturkeys

Two examples of the mind machinery from Landon

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Since my last blog, I have participated in two fulfilling activities. I went to Boston and won the Head of the Charles, my third rowing goal for this, my seventieth year and I attended a reunion of the 6-Day Course staff near Kingston, NY.

After being sick and worrying about my training, I finally felt healthy and strong going into the weekend of October 19th. Two weeks prior as part of my training I had raced two head races of 5000 meters (about 21 minutes each) back to back, a double with my rowing partner, Bill Erkelens, and my single sculls event, winning both. So I was fairly confident I was on track. My major competition was my rowing partner in the double sculls from the Henley Master’s Regatta, Henry Hamilton who had won the event last year. I won in 21:20 only beating Henry by 5 seconds!!

Now I have been trying to win the Head of the Charles for 15 years since the last time I won in 1997, so I should have been very happy and as I write this I am, but at the time I didn’t think I had my best race and a number of records were broken in other age categories, so I was down on my self for not breaking a record – the mind trying to make me unhappy, taking the win away, and trying to repeat the “I’m not good enough” pattern.

Thankfully Diane was there to say, “Don’t let your mind take your win away, let yourself have it.” She would also say when people congratulated me, “Let the acknowledgement in, you won, you did what you set out to do!” I am so grateful to have Diane as my partner who is awake when I am not and with whom I can share my inner mind chatter and feelings and we can together look at the machinery of the mind. Once again I conclude that my mind is not my friend!! Sometimes a tool, sometimes a field where positive thoughts, intentions and feelings are expressed, but not my friend – as in someone I can count on.

Regarding my rowing, I won every race I entered in my single whether practice race or international regatta. I am gratified that I have a body that can perform at that level and I have learned a great deal about life through my rowing, another thing for which I am grateful. Of course, I am already thinking about next year!!!

The staff reunion for the 6-Day Course which I created while working for est in the 1970’s was an unexpected joy and validation of the magnificence of who we are as human beings – something Werner Erhard turned me onto when I first took the est training in 1972. Some of the original staff where there, people I remembered and have stayed in touch with since the 70’s, but the surprising thing was that the vast majority of the 75 people who attended I had never met as they worked at the 6-Day after I left in 1980.

What thrilled me was to see the continuity of experience people had as they stood before us and shared about their time working at the 6-Day (lots of starting in the kitchen stories) and more importantly how it changed and affected their subsequent life. It was enormously fulfilling to know that something I started and put so much of myself into had produced so much benefit in the lives of so many people – or to say it properly, that so many people had used the experience to create positive benefits for themselves.

The 6-Day Course was a very demanding and intense environment in which nothing but a person’s best efforts and highest standards was acceptable. This was especially true of the staff who were there “in service” to contribute to and make sure that breakthroughs were produced for each of the 100 participants each week. There was little time for socializing and almost every waking minute was about going beyond your previous limits. People blossomed and especially the staff.

Now to share with my reader the power of the mind, I will relate the following incident. Here we were in this reunion love fest and on Saturday evening Diane and I and Lon and Sandy Golnick were to lead a discussion on relationships. Well I started in, and something got triggered because several people shared that they had worked at the 6-Day and they were not known for who they were. In other words, people did not know their history and that they had not gotten to know each other as people regularly do in the normal world – “I’ll tell you my story and you tell my yours.” For a few people this was an enormous upset and was shared forcefully, full of anger and hurt and a bit of resentment in that it had never been addressed or completed and perhaps for the people involved even somewhat suppressed. So we, in front of the room, became the targets for this outpouring even though we had never interacted with most of these people prior to the reunion. Interesting.

What it once again showed me is that even the most evolved people sometimes get triggered and in discharging the previously suppressed emotions most often start from a position of being a victim, victimized by someone or some situation, where they felt abused, hurt, angry, etc. and blaming others for those feelings. Now this is a good start if the emotions have been suppressed and are now starting to be acknowledged so they can be dealt with. But if it simply stays at that level, the level of you or they or it did it to me, and I am just looking for agreement from others of how right I am and how wrong and bad you/they/it was, then there is no freedom in it. The upset will happen again and you and others will suffer.

But if you can use the upset (and these people were upset!) as an opening to see what got triggered, and to answer the question, “How am I creating myself being upset and unhappy right now?” Then from that responsible stance there is the possibility of great healing and increased freedom to create who you choose to be. That is the magic of being Awake and it is this process that has made my relationship with Diane to be beyond anything I could have imagined possible.

Eventually we did get to share a few things about relationships, but at the time we did not say what in hindsight would have been perfect. “Isn’t it interesting what is coming up right now as this is exactly what happens in relationships – people get triggered by something, blow their stack and blame their partner.”

May your life be filled with increasing love and happiness as you view each upset as a door to freedom.

With love,
Landon

Relationship Course

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Relationship Course for Individuals and Couples

The domain of transformation at the level of the individual involves several dynamics: “waking up” by turning on the Observer Self, shifting from a victim or at effect stance in your reality to an at cause or responsible stance, learning about the nature of your own ego and mind, and practicing Being in the moment and Showing up in a chosen way.

The domain of relationship also has its transformational dynamics, but many of us get lost in the complexity of relationships and end up at best hoping to find “the one” or discouraged and resigned about the whole arena and basically giving up on ever having what we only imagine is possible.

Diane and I have spent many years in many unsuccessful relationships in which we learned a great deal with some great partners but were unable to make the relationships work to ours or our partner’s satisfaction.  Finally after coming together four years ago and going through a very intense process which we documented in our book, “Falling in Love Backwards: an unlikely tale of Happily Ever After”, we have come to a place where we feel we have something to share of real value for people who are looking for a relationship or want to make their relationship better than it has ever been before.

If you are looking for a deep connection and expanding intimacy with another combined with a sense of greater personal freedom to be your self, come to our workshop in November.   We can promise that you will leave more prepared than ever before to take on a lasting, committed relationship.  You will understand the set of agreements and models that will transform a relationship from one of ‘trying to get my needs met’, to one of ‘expanding personal growth and mastery along with the reward of deeper connection, passion, and intimacy’.

The seminar will be held in Mill Valley, California on the evening of November 15th and continue all day Saturday and end Sunday November 17th at 6pm.  In our website: www.fallinginlovebackwards.com click on seminar.  Or call Diane or Landon with questions: 530-265-4050 H.  Landon cell: 415-250-3585

 

9/23/13 Giving up Cynicism and Resignation, From Diane

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Landon and I are coming up on our four-year anniversary since we got involved. Some folks might call that a ‘new’ relationship and I can see how they could rate it that way. But as I said in a previous blog, both Landon and I both could have been voted ‘least likely to succeed’ in relationships, based on our track record.

Mine:  I’d been single since just after the 6-day course in 1979, (led by Landon), when I realized that my marriage was lacking true communication and aliveness. My thirty-year journey after that consisted of many serial monogamous relationships, but never one that lasted more than a 1½ years. I was ready to push the eject button when things got rough and always got out.

Landon had been single sixteen years when we met and he can describe his journey, but I would summarize it as ‘going for the pictures’, which never worked out.  He was still very committed to those pictures when we met. If you’ve read our book, you know the story. If you haven’t you can get the story by watching the videos of our book signing on our website.

The whole point of our book is that we didn’t start out in the bliss and flush of ‘true love’. We started at the other end, where most relationships end. What we discovered, almost by accident, were some key ingredients to creating a true partnership and with that, the love and bliss came in too.

So for anyone thinking “yeah, yeah, what do they know, they’re still ‘in love’, I would say, ‘Yes, we are ‘in love’ now, but earned it from facing our own issues, talking authentically, trying to stay awake to ourselves, each other and the relationship’. We know how to face the rough parts, which life hands out on a regular basis.  And we’d like to make a difference with what we now know.

I was happy in my life on my own. I had great kids, sweet grand children, work I loved, a beautiful home and farm, great friends. I wasn’t lonely, but I still longed for a partner. I longed for that piece of my life to be healed.  Now that it is, I feel a new freedom and peace.

Opening up to the possibility of finding a partner, especially later in life, takes giving up any cynicism or resignation you may have about the whole arena, and there can be plenty of that. But the step forward of letting go of those two aliveness killers can create more freedom and peace in itself.

So write to us with questions and we’ll respond as soon as we can. If you’re longing for a relationship, it may be time to get on to the mat and off the sidelines. As Michelle Obama said before the 2008 campaign, ‘we’re more ready that we know’.

All the best,

Diane

09/25/13: Trapped in my body by Landon

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I realize that part of doing these blogs is to chronicle what is happening in my life, whether I have seen the big insight that unlocks the pattern door or not.  So here goes.

After returning from Europe and my rowing wins there, I was on the top of my game and started to train for my next goal for this year, to win the Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston on October 19th.  Well, several weeks into my training, I got sick – chest infection, rash all over my body and fevers at night.  I went to bed, took vitamin C, didn’t eat much, lost some weight, but the sickness kept persisting.  After a week of inactivity, I felt a little better, so went out to row hard (after so much “no practice” I was starting to panic about my preparation for the race) and my back went out.  More days off and lots of pain, until I learned about icing every 15 minutes per hour and used an inversion table I bought on sale to lengthen my back.

So now as of this writing I am almost well in my chest and my back has almost returned to normal and I did a good training piece today.  But what I wanted to share about was the feelings and thoughts I went through while being sick.

I felt so trapped in my body and a victim of it’s whims.  I could not control the situation, I was not in charge, my body was not doing what I wanted it to do – be healthy, strong and pain free.  I was angry, sad, depressed, and resigned (this had happened before a number of times – chest burning with infection and rash).  I experienced a kind of trapped blackness about me and wondered if it had something to do with the chaos I was born into and feeling trapped in my body and not liking where I was.  “This can’t be it!  It wasn’t suppose to be like this when I was born!”  I am sure that is part of what got re-stimulated and certainly points to my “This isn’t it” pattern I have had all my life.

Diane was great and very supportive, but it was hard on her also to have a partner who was listless, angry, depressed and not much fun to be with.  I have a hard time looking cheerful when I am not!

The only snafu in this whole picture is that rather than I being able to point to some aspect of my life and justify that “this isn’t it” – THIS IS IT –  I like and love who I am with, Diane, and where we live, Nevada City, CA and New Zealand, we have enough money, and our life is so good.  So I suspect, my mind is just making up a problems to keep me from experiencing the joy and pleasure of living the life I actually want.

I often heard that when you start having lots of pleasure in your life, that you could run up against your limits of what you can hold.  I never thought much about it, but think it is something I now need to explore.   How do I expand my limits?  Perhaps it is in the realm of deservability.  I notice that when I do not have a project where I am contributing or I am not bringing in money from a job, I don’t feel as good about myself.  Yet here I am at the age of retirement and while I am looking for my next project, I can actually live within the resources I have.   So I am blessed that way.  Perhaps the lack of deservability comes from my “not good enough” pattern and that set some sort of limits on what I could have and enjoy.

Anyway, this is what I am currently exploring and perhaps it will illicit some sharing of what you might have found in a similar situation.

All the best along this road of life – this exciting and challenging adventure,

Landon

From Experiment to Journey – From Diane

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September 18, 2013

From the 19-Day experiment to the ‘rest of our lives’ journey in relationship.

When I landed in New Zealand, February 15th, 2010, I had skipped Valentine’s Day when I flew over the international date line. That could have been an omen of what awaited me there, but I wasn’t imagining that. I was in the bliss of Landon’s statement that he had ‘surrendered to loving me’, in a fantasy bubble of what our time together would be on that far away and beautiful land.

The bubble burst with a very loud pop, beginning at the airport when he wouldn’t hug me because he had changed his mind upon seeing me get off the plane—ouch, that still hurts a wee bit–.

I came up with the ’19 day experiment’ to salvage my time there—I was stuck in the wilds of New Zealand, hours away from an airport. Besides, I still liked him, a lot, and knew I wanted a relationship with someone like him. He was looking for a relationship too, so if we could tell the truth, play 100%, with no commitment at the end—his caveat, what could happen? What could we learn from each other?

We could even end up together, though at times, that felt like a very remote possibility. If you read our book, you’ll learn how we journeyed from that rough start to a very happy ending, which in itself is another beginning. ‘Happily Ever After’ means there is a lot that comes ‘after’. We’re in that phase now—the ‘rest of our lives’ journey with each other.

The great part now is that we do have a commitment, we know we’re in this together, for better or for worse. Somehow that makes the ‘worse’ times ‘better’ because we know we will stand by each other, no matter what. For me that is a continuous revelation and balm. I was the one who, for thirty years of being single after my divorce at age thirty, would bail when things got uncomfortable. That I didn’t bail with Landon, when things got more uncomfortable than I could have imagined, was the first of many miracles that continue to unfold in my life.

We’re coming up on four years together, from that first encounter when he came up to talk about his book and slept out on my deck. Four intense, amazing years. The patterns that come up now are way more subtle and tricky. We both have to pay complete attention to try to catch them as they try to play out. The mind/ego is a great trickster, trying to create drama to stir things up. It sometimes feels like swatting at a pesky fly that buzzes in and out, trying to distract us from feeling joy.

My issues still stem from feeling invisible or hating it when Landon seems cold or mean. Direct lines back to my mother. All I can do is tell him how I’m feeling. The truth feels somewhere between my reality and his. When I hurt my leg on a bike ride in France and blood was trickling down, he could have been more warm and loving and less cold and what I considered ‘mean’. I could have been less sensitive—it’s as if I have antennae out for ‘meanness’ and get hooked by that. Both of our reactions are left-over from the past, making us more machines and less free spirits, which we want to be, so we’re willing to look and to talk, even when it is uncomfortable, which it always seems to be.

When things are going well, there’s the challenge of staying in the present with how good it is. To keep opening up to the harmony and love, enjoying that in our day-to-day life. Neither of us had strong role models for that kind of deep love. My parents had a downright hostile relationship and divorced. His parents weren’t hostile, but anger was not allowed, and they were not at all affectionate or demonstrative.

So what does it take to live together and love each other and feel that and show that? Where is the line between soupy and sloppy and needy and real affection and connection? We’re in that experiment now.

So the ‘better’ and the ‘worse’ both expose areas where we can learn and grow. We’re loving this journey and glad to share it with you, hoping it makes a difference. I feel that loving relationships are ‘the last frontier’ and that when we discover and conquer what’s in the way to maintaining them, we will have healed a huge chasm in the world that will help us to solve the other pressing problems.
Wishing you blessings on your lives,
Diane

Revealing my dark shadow, “This isn’t it” – From Landon

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Yesterday while I was walking on the way to the garden of our beautiful farm, I noticed I was annoyed and angry, and kind of depressed about life, and I could not find a reason for feeling this way as much as I looked at my life and what might have triggered the upset. As I started to explore the feelings more, I noticed a kind of dark shadow over my life at that moment and I was somewhat hunched over.

I thought to myself, “This is crazy, I have what I want. I live where I want to live, I am married to who I want to be with, we are comfortable financially, I am rowing competitively and able to row. What is going on?”

Normally I would ignore this feeling and just go through my day with the edge of enthusiasm missing, the satisfaction and joy evaporating. I would get involved in some activity but the shadow would remain, robbing me of the thrill of being alive and tending to make me withdraw from Diane.

Sometimes I would talk myself out of it, consciously looking for beauty, or reminding myself of my good fortune. This time I just observed the dark shadow and the anger and the lack of enthusiasm and my hunched over posture. And all of it of course disappeared.

I realized that against the backdrop of a live that I love with Diane, my old nemesis of “This isn’t it” is revealing itself for the pattern it is. My mind continually seems to want to rob me of joy and make a problem out of our good life. But now I am on to it at a new level, so I expect to see it overshadow my life less and less.

I am blessed with the good fortune to have such a supportive partner, who less and less gets hocked when I am upset and withdrawn and to have a life that I actually want which becomes a backdrop to reveal these subtle patterns. Even though often uncomfortable and “aliveness damaging” I also welcome these upsets as I know they are the door to more joy and happiness once I can observe them and they disappear.

May your life be blessed,
Landon

World Champion – From Landon

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I have recently returned from Europe where I competed in the World Masters Games in rowing and won the single sculls for my age group. With a terrible start in the final in which I was down two boat lengths from the rest of the competition, I rowed to the front and had a decisive, 1 ½ boat length, win.

It was the culmination of a very focused and intense training program plus some good coaching from Olympic gold medalist Xeno Muller. But what I want to share about is the wonderful support I had from Diane during all the hard days of training when I was tired and took naps and unavailable for hours of the day. Diane always had a supportive comment when I was discouraged, made snacks and power drinks to make sure I was eating enough and generally took good care of me.

Also we were able to organize our European trip around my regatta in Henley on Thames, England, training at Lake Annecy, France and the championship regatta in Torino, Italy. For almost three weeks during our trip Diane could practice her French making it a win/win for us both.

While it takes focus and dedication to my training regimen, I am convinced that Diane’s non-demanding support of me was a critical element in the formula for my athletic success.

Resisting Diane telling me what to do. September 4, 2013

I started noticing this as a pattern only recently. Back in February when we were in New Zealand, Diane was trying to get me to call someone to help with cleaning in preparation for the wedding celebration we were holding in Golden Bay at my house. She asked me several times and I finally did the task reluctantly. But before I complied, I got really angry and in a loud angry voice told Diane to “Stop telling me what to do!”

It was so out of character for me that she did not react and just thought, “he is really upset, something got triggered.” I calmed down, admitted that it was probably me having to comply to my mother’s expectations and the anger I had felt in complying. After all, I couldn’t really not comply, I was the goody two shoe of the family, the older brother, meeting or exceeding all my parent’s expectations. The role of the moderate rebel was left to my year younger brother. But I am sure the lack of freedom that compliance entailed, was resented at some deep level.

Then recently, it was just a little thing that Diane suggested, something that would contribute to my well-being and I closed down, didn’t like her and didn’t want to do what she had suggested. She felt she could not contribute to me and was therefore somewhat “invisible” (one of her buttons). I felt “not good enough” and noticed my mind saying, “get off my back, leave me alone, let me do it myself.” This time my response was much more subtle, but still it damaged the connection that Diane and I normally maintain.

As we talked about it, I recognized that it harked back once again to my resisting my mother’s expectations and insistence I be a certain way. Also there was a mandate (stated by my father) to not express anger towards my mother. So I think I had a lot of bottled up suppressed anger. I do remember, that I couldn’t get away fast enough to go to boarding school at 14. Finally I was on my own!

That is not to say, I didn’t get lots of support from my mother as I was growing up. In fact I was extremely fortunate – my own horse, camping and skiing trips, a calm, good family atmosphere, safe and loving. It was just these underlying expectations of who we were and how we needed to act in order to get my mother’s attention and love, that must have curtailed my sense of being freely myself. And even though I took all that training on (how to act) and now appreciate my “upbringing”, I am left with this anger that is now surfacing in the safety of my loving and authentic relationship with Diane.

In past relationship, this resistance (upset) would have surfaced as a big row. “You don’t love me, because you don’t do what I ask”, “You don’t let me contribute to you”, “Get off my back”, “Stop nagging me” and of course all the accompanying feelings of anger, resentment, sadness and the pulling away from whatever level of intimacy that preceded the argument.

I am so thankful for Diane as my partner, so that I can have these uncomfortable and potentially relationship ruining upsets come up and be able to talk about them and finally let them go. We both recognized recently that whatever patterns are still left will mostly surface and get expressed within our relationship. Thank God we have a way to deal with them!

All the best,
Landon

“Hey, it’s good to be back home again…” – From Diane

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“Hey, it’s good to be back home again. Sometimes this old farm feels like a long lost friend…” John Denver

We’re back home on our little piece of heaven, the farm, where our relationship began and where it continues to grow and thrive, surrounded by apple, peach, plum, pear and walnut trees. And now, in summer, berries, squash, juicy tomatoes, green beans and other treasures to discover each day. The pumpkins are turning bright orange so there will be fresh pumpkin pies in the fall. (Thank goodness for drip irrigation on automatic timers, so we could come home to all of this thriving!)

We loved our trip to Europe, where Landon won not only in Henley, (our last blog post), but also became the World Champion in single sculling in his age group at the World Masters Games in Turino, Italy. He also won a gold medal in an eight and two silvers in a four and a quad.

We spent the three weeks between Henley and Turino in Talloires, a little village in France on Lake Annecy, where Landon could train and I could swim and speak French. We spent some time with a friend, then in a hotel and also a little apartment on the third floor, with a tiny peek of a view of the lake.

I loved it all, fulfilling my passion for speaking French, writing and swimming, while Landon pursued his dream of training to win the World Masters Games—which he did!

Travel can bring out things that staying home doesn’t, and we experienced that. But our commitment to working it all through until it was resolved, not holding a grudge and never going to sleep angry held up, even with the changing places we were in.

Rowing and competing mean so much to Landon, and he works hard to prepare for these events. This is his time to shine and I loved supporting him in that. I also used the time to begin to prepare for a triathlon that I will be doing on September 15th,—a ½ mile swim, a 12 mile bike ride and a 3 mile run. I got so inspired by all the athletes at the World Masters Games, so jumped into the ring, so to speak, myself.

We have so much to be grateful for in our lives and remember each day to express and to feel that. In my childhood, I was never taught how to embrace the good things in life and to open up to that. There was plenty of modeling of how to suffer and lots of drama. So now, it is a practice to let in all the good, to appreciate our good fortune and to look at how we can give back to the world from there.

So in that vein, we’re very excited to offer our first seminar, The Awakened Relationship, November 15, 16, 17 in the San Francisco Bay area, Mill Valley, California. Watch for more details to come about that. In the meantime, send us an email if you’re interested.

But for now, as fall begins, what are you grateful for? And what good are you opening up to letting into your life? What area can you clean up and let go in to create space for that?

I have a BIG birthday coming up in November, so I’m cleaning out and cleaning up even more to prepare for that. I believe that when you let go of things you’re not using, and of course outmoded ideas and that kind of ‘stuff’, the universe sends you more good. There is more room for it!

Wishing all the best for you in your life,
Diane