Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Over the past seven or eight years I have read a number of books on relationships and Thomas Moore's book SoulMates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship is one of my favorites. Moore is a successful author who has an interesting background which includes 12 years in a Catholic monastery. He nows travels extensively throughout North America lecturing on a wide variety of topics. Before taking to lecture circuit Moore served a number of years as a psychotherapist and wrote numerous best selling books which include Care of the Soul, Dark Nights of the Soul, and The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life.

Moore's style is very different from most books one may read on relationships because they are not intended to provide the reader with "specific" answers on how to find a mate or how to solve one's relationship problems. So,if you are looking for a book that spoon feeds you the answers to the myriad of relationship dilemmas that exist than Moore is not for you. However, reading Moore will stimulate your mind and imagination in regards to the purpose,nature,essence, and mystery of relationships, in other words, your assumptions and perspective on relationships will be challenged. For me, I experienced numerous aha moments which made a lot of sense to me. I also found Moore's style interesting because he "integrates" and weaves his background knowledge of religion, spirituality, mythology, and philosophy into his understanding of relationships in a way that makes him unique.

While reading SoulMates may not "directly" help you find a mate, if you are looking for one, or solve your current relationship problems it may just contribute and enrich your current or future relationships in profound ways. I'll leave you with a some quotes from Moore's book SoulMates to give you a sense of his perspective.

Our love of love and our high expectations that it will somehow make life complete seem to be an integral part of the experience….It makes little difference that in the past love has often shown itself to be painful and disturbing. There is something renewing in love…So, maybe it is better not to become too jaded by love’s suffering and dead ends, but rather to appreciate that emptiness is part of love’s heritage and therefore its very nature. It isn’t necessary to make strong efforts to avoid past mistakes or to learn how to be clever about love….

Relationships are a paradox, when you feel a strong desire for union, an opposite desire lies in the background. The more you press for connection, the more you may settle yourself up for disconnection. It isn’t enough just to be aware of the paradox. You have to give something to both sides. If you get married or live with someone, you might also give serious attention to your need for separation from time to time. You don’t hold back your love and involvement, but you understand that you need your solitariness and individuality as well. You have to be subtle, loving your partner and loving yourself, or very soon you may find yourself in a dark night.

Apparently it isn’t enough to make a human marriage. In order to fulfill its need for divine coupling, the soul needs something less tangible than a happy home…In marriage we may not all need a fully functioning home, several children, a hefty bank account. These human goals may even stand in the way of the more mysterious needs of the soul…and….oddly, the attempts of many married people to create an affluent environment might even be the cause of marital failure, because the point in marriage is not to create a material, human world, but rather to evoke a spirit of love that is not of this world.

Couples who sense flat and cool moods descending on them might ask each other not why this is happening, but what is it asking of them…If we can see our relationship problems as signs that the soul is trying to move, we might give them more positive attention, leaving behind attitudes of repair and mendings and our whole feeling about the relationship may remain loyal and attached, even when it seems to be in trouble…Pathology is the voice of a god or goddess trying to get our attention…Dealing with pathology in relationship requires enormous faith in ourselves, and in the process of soul, and in the person we love….

Romantic love is one of the most powerful means for pulling us out of literal life into play. In the trance of love of love, we may neglect life duties and obligations, we may make heroic efforts to be with our beloved..To be in love is to be in play, to be taken by it’s illusions….From the point of the view of the soul, romantic love is trustworthy because the literal concerns of life are set aside. The soul has room to go into action, and its action is always in the nature of play...and…in our childish attachment to romance we are championing the way of the soul, its thirst for pleasure, and its inescapable need for experiences that may or may not be conducive to productive lives...and…no matter how unrealistic in relation to the structures of life, no matter how illusory and dangerous, romantic love is as important to the soul as any other kind of love….

The soul wants to be attached, involved, and even stuck, because through it is through such intimacy is nourished, initiated, and deepened…It is also important to remember that it would be a mistake to honor attachment as the “only” inclination of the soul in relationships. As strong as the yearning for attachment is, there is obviously something else in us that yearns for solitude, freedom, and detachment.

Unless we deal with the shadow of love, our experience of it will be incomplete. A sentimental philosophy of love, embracing only the romantic and the positive, fails at the first sign of shadow…Love finds its soul in the feelings of incompleteness, impossibility, and imperfection.

Intimacy doesn’t appear ready-made, it must be refined into something truly valuable…Intimacy and intuition about the soul, is raw, and if we understand this, then, we might forgive ourselves and others for not being quick to handle relationships with grace. We might see that many problems are not due to one person’s maliciousness but to the law that the soul stuff is given in unrefined lumps and requires a long process of sorting, shaping, refining, and even transmuting…

The soul of a relationship doesn’t ask for the right ways of acting. It wants something even more difficult, respect for its autonomy and mystery. The soulful relationship asks to be honored for what it is, not for what we wish it could be. It has little to do with our intentions, expectations, and moral requirements. It has the potential to lead us into the mysteries that expand our hearts and transform our thoughts, but it can’t do that when our primary interest is in pursuing our cherished ideologies of love, family, marriage, and community. The point is a relationship is not to make us feel good, but to lead us into a profound alchemy of soul that reveals to us the many ways and openings that are the geography of our own destiny and potentiality.

Focusing exclusively on life, we may give too much value to compatibility. Differences between people may give more to a friendship than what is held in common, precisely because the soul is so unique.

Soulful intimacy is not to be found in clean, well-structured, meaningful, unperturbed, ideal unions, if such a union even exists. Perfection may well appeal to the mind, or to the part of us that craves spiritual transcendence, but soul doesn’t establish a home there. For some perverse reason, it prefers the colors, the tones of mood, the aberrations of fantasy, and the shades of disillusionment.

In the final paradox, if we want to light the fires of intimacy we have to honor the soul of the other. A relationship demands not that we surrender to another person, but that we acknowledge a soul in which the parties are mingled and respect it’s unpredictable demands…

Conversation does not have to be confessional in order to be soulful…Sometimes people who are psychologically aware feel compelled to speak whatever is on their mind or in their heart too directly and innocently…But soulfulness is not created by naïve exposure. What matters is not how much you expose about yourself in conversation, but that your soul is engaged. Two people working on plans for a house or immersed in a recipe can be caught up in a soulful conversation---the topic doesn’t have to be personal.

It is futile to try to simplify your partner and make them fit your expectations. Without real, complicated people as partners, there is no marriage anyway…To honor the underworld of marriage, one has to appreciate the irrationality and mystery in both you and your partner…You have to have your eyes on the promise of bliss, but you have to be prepared for the dark.

The soul needs true pleasure and genuine joy, just as much as the mind needs ideas and the body needs food and exercise. It asks for abandonment to its illusions, its serious playfulness and its purposeful games.

Humor and wit are also signs of the soul. Humor allows two people to enjoy each other’s company even as they consider some of the serious and painful aspects of everyday living without falling into despair. People who have to be perfect, or who can’t admit to each other the difficult or impossible situations life presents, can hardly be intimate. Humor allows us to entertain failure and inadequacy in life without being literally undone by them.

Sometimes at the end of a relationship a person may think, there is something wrong with me. I can’t have a lasting relationship. Other people are happy together, while I am doomed to lonliness…But to sink literally into these feelings could interfere with the initiation that is offered. Rather than say, “I am not able to be intimate---a narcissistic sentiment that goes nowhere---we might say, “My soul is asking more from me in relationship. I have the opportunity now to be close to another in a more profound way”

Marriage is a vessel of transformation. Marriage makes you a better person, though not necessarily a happier one. One hopes it offers moments of bliss, but you can be sure it will entail unexpected ordeals. Together, moments of bliss and periods of struggle make it a humanizing force, a way toward personal fulfillment that paradoxically involves an immediate concrete, and felt transcendence of self. You are forced to move beyond self-regard and seriously consider another person.

Pain and difficulty can sometimes serve as the pathway to a new level of involvement. They do not mean necessarily that there is something inherently wrong with the relationship: on the contrary, relationship trouble may be a challenging initiation into intimacy.

Imagination is critically important in relationships….and internal diversity, the capacity to hold opposite desires in creative tension…For example, isn’t it possible to be both solitary and wedded, hardworking and relaxed in relationship?



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