Partners In Dialogue

December 2002

Welcome to our Newsletter
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INDEX
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- Cultivating Relationships
- Relationship Ritual
- The Dream of Community
- It's All About Money
- Man and Woman in Relationship

- Feedback
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CULTIVATING RELATIONSHIP
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A relationship is like a garden which needs to be cultivated by both partners. If it is not, sooner or later, the weeds of unhelpful habits, unresolved scare stories and negative familiar expectations will overgrow it. When it has grown into a prickly dense jungle, it becomes harder and harder to negotiate your way around the garden of relationship without tripping each other up.

Busy daily life can lead to us taking each other for granted. Often couples only communicate to organise their lives or when problems strike. When there has not been enough good will created, their “emotional bank-account” (see also: www.partnering.inet.net.nz/a/bank.htm) can easily be overdrawn. Then the problems can threaten the relationship as a whole.

You can nurture and cultivate your significant relationships by developing the habit of acknowledgment, appreciation, intention and feedback. Daily rituals nourish and provide the rhythm of building good will in a sustainable way. Over time it becomes natural and second nature to share with each other in a deep and meaningful way.

In the following I would like to share a ritual that might help cultivate your relationship.

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RELATIONSHIP RITUAL
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It's easiest, if you find a suitable time, like first thing in the morning, when you meet after work for a catch-up, at night before you go to sleep.

There are four parts to this ritual.

- Acknowledge what is.

- Express appreciation.

- Develop your intention.

- Give feedback.

Acknowledge what is

An honest heart-to-heart account of your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual state in the moment. This is to let your partner know how you are. It involves a giving gesture on both sides. The person who talks gives of him/herself by sharing personal information. The other gives attention by actively listening. At times, it might be useful for the listener to summarise what has been said before taking a turn of sharing him/herself.

Express appreciation

Genuine expression of what you value and enjoy in your partner and your current situation. It can be something small, something that you easily take for granted. The purpose of this part is to focus on and develop appreciation, which builds gratitude and goodwill in your relationship. “Appreciation nurtures our energy body, while criticism drains it.” (see: www.partnering.inet.net.nz/a/bank.htm)

Develop your intention

As you acknowledge what is and express appreciation, the next step is to create a sense of where you are going. What is your intention with regard to your relationship and with regard to your life in general?

Often we can waste precious time by focusing on what we don't like and don't want. Here the task is to identify what you do want.

This process of sharing your intention with your partner helps you to generate a joint vision both can identify with. It can give you and your partner guidance and support through difficult times.

What is your guiding star?

Give feedback

During the process of sharing with each other, it is helpful to give each other feedback in terms of how you respond to each other's sharing. Are you opening up or closing down?

This is generally an indication of the honesty and depth of speaking one's truth. As we speak our truth at an intimate level, it results in generating more energy for the relationship and greater openness.

We are interested to know how you are doing with this Relationship Ritual. Please feel free to send us your response. What works for you and what doesn't? What are your questions?

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THE DREAM OF COMMUNITY
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I dream of a community where each of us can express their divine and creative individual self whilst building strong mutually supportive relationships with each other, from the cradle to the grave. This vision will come true when we together build and share local resources in responsible and sustainable ways and use the wisdom, knowledge and technology available to live in harmony with nature and with each other. Our focus on materialism and consumerism costs us our contact with nature, creates fear, isolation, ill health, lack of - purpose, - love, and - deeper meaning of life.

More than ever it is clear to me that we need each other to build functional communities. All our attempts to survive as individuals are frustrated, “because an individual can only fully express his/her individuality and divinity in well functioning local community with a social network. Here, everybody can have the freedom to create the kind of life they want, grow their own food, establish businesses with friends and loved ones, increase their security and build roots“ (Ross & Hildur Jackson, in Ecovillage Living, p. 131).

Ecovillages are these days a working expression of an integral society and they provide a model for the planning and reorganisation of human settlements in the 21^st century. There are many different versions. What they have in common is that they are grounded in the deep understanding that all living beings are interconnected and that our thoughts and actions have an impact on our environment.

Do you also carry a dream of community? Please let us know.

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IT'S ALL ABOUT MONEY
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“Money is the measure in which most economic concepts are expressed. Economists use it as merchants use kilograms and architects use metres. They seldom question the way it works and why in contrast to the meters and kilograms it is not a constant measure but varies, now, almost daily.

  This book takes a look at how money works. It exposes the reason for the constant change in one of our most important measures. It explains why money not only "makes the world go round" but also wrecks the world in the process. The huge debt accumulated by Third World countries, unemployment, environmental degradation, the arms build-up and proliferation of nuclear power plants, are related to a mechanism which keeps money in circulation: interest and compound interest. This, according to economic historian John L. King, is the "invisible wrecking machine" in all so-called free-market economies.” (Margrit Kennedy: Interest and Inflation Free Money, see also: www.geldreform.de/)

I never had much interest in money, as long as I had enough to live and not too much to get worried about losing it. Recently, Christoph Hensch awakened my interest. He pointed me in the direction of Margrit Kennedy's book. To my surprise I discovered that our money system was floored and in particular the way interest were compounded resembled a cancer growth that would over time destroy our economic system. It is unsustainable and unfair: “within our monetary system we allow the operation of a hidden redistribution mechanism which constantly shuffles money from those who have less money than they need to those who have more money than they need” (ibid.).

Is this faulty money system responsible for so much suffering? Is this the mechanism that lies behind the exploitation of environment, resources and people? Does it contribute to the apathy in young people, who just want to get rich quickly by “playing the share market”, forgetting that someone needs to do the work that produces goods and services? Are we all under the pressure of the exponential growth pattern of compounding interests?

It becomes obvious how this growth pattern is unsustainable if you consider the following example: “one penny invested at the birth of Jesus Christ at 4% interest would have bought in 1750 one ball of gold equal to the weight of the earth. In 1990, however, it would buy 8,190 balls of gold. At 5 % interest it would have bought one ball of gold by the year 1466. By 1990, it would buy 2,200 billion balls of gold equal to the weight of the earth” (ibid.). Mind boggling!

Maybe the floored money system which not only uses money as a means of exchange but also allows money to be made by money represents hierarchies that create power difference between people and undermine cooperation. Is this the reason why communities often fail? Is it time to consider an alternative money system?