Partners In Dialogue
NZ Summer
January 2005
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WELCOME
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Dear Friends,
Welcome to another year.
The time of the change of years is usually a time of reflection. We now share some reflections with you.
Enjoy reading
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INDEX
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- Why are we still together?
- Learning to Weave
- Sexual Healing
- Gestalt Group
- Links
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WHY ARE WE STILL TOGETHER?
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In our times of uncertainty and change, it becomes more and more the exception than the rule that couples stay together. Here we want to share a few points that have helped us to stay together in an interdependent connected way. What nourishes our relationship?
Initially, we made a commitment to a healing relationship, to love and accept who we essentially are. We share the responsibility for healing, exploring together what closes our hearts and how each of us contributes to a conflict.
We work together. This includes, thinking and acting collectively, mutually and cooperatively. We learn with and from each other.
We enjoy doing something of value to others and feeling that we are contributing to make the world a better place.
We balance time together, time apart, work and play, routine and creativity.
What also bonds us is shared interests, like the natural world. We both enjoy gardening and walking in nature. This feeds our soul and provides a shared activity beside work.
We take an interest in each other. We create time every day where we stop, look at each other and explore what is important to each of us. In that, we share our own unique worlds with each other, accepting and valuing our differences and genuinely care about our own and each other's well-being.
We read inspiring books together, share rituals, meditation and contemplative times. This feeds our spiritual connection.
Shared holidays, projects and meal times provide rhythm, meaning and continuity in our lives.
We spend time separately and together with friends. The company of our own gender and the company of other couples who make their relationship work is inspirational. When in need, we reach out for support.
We have the willingness to forgive each other, giving each other opportunities to make up when we have hurt each other out of ignorance, frustration, hate or fear. We discovered that we provide triggers for each other, and are not the cause of our pain. We learn to examine with mercy and compassion internal messages, emotions and reactions.
We support each other through personal crises and help each other find meaning within them.
We also can fight; usually it is short and intense and is motivated by the need to connect. We can laugh together at the idiosyncrasies of our lives. We can cry with each other and be vulnerable.
We live our sexuality as an expression of our love and need for connection. It means, taking our time being intimate and being sensual with each other.
We express our appreciation, don't take each other for granted and value the gift that we are in each other's life, as source of happiness and as challenge. We trust that all difficulties provide opportunities for growth.
We focus on virtues, acknowledge or request those. We let each other know what we do want.
We take care of our bodies, eat organic food, exercise, and enjoy fresh air.
We support each other's development, our ability to become more loving, to mature and to grow.
Mirjam Busch & Rudolf Jarosewitsch
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LEARNING
TO WEAVE
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This last year I have learned to weave. I had tried it before, taught myself from a book, but it never worked out. It was either too loose, the gaps too wide, the tension not right or the strap not strong enough to hold.
This last year, as I reflect on my achievements, I went to class: three courses at successive levels, four long Saturdays each. Now I can weave Harakeke, the native New Zealand flax.
It was a pleasure to be in class: the soft, gentle guidance of our teacher, her never ending patience and readily available encouragement, the camaraderie amongst the students, the willingness to help and inspire each other, soft, gentle Maori music in the background, a relaxed atmosphere and a tangible result at the end.
It didn't matter that I was not Maori myself, one of the few men in a class of women of all ages.
We always started with a Karakia – a prayer – to focus our minds, to reflect our connection and our place in nature and in the scheme of things. We always ended with a Karakia, to practice thankfulness and appreciation. We were encouraged to be respectful to the plant and only cut the outer leaves of a Harakeke bush, never the three middle ones: child in the middle, parents on both sides, and to be respectful of the work, always step around it never over or onto it.
Like all good work, weaving starts with preparation. We were taught how to produce strips of pliable material out of freshly cut leaves. Good preparation facilitates the weaving process, it makes it easier. We were allowed to make mistakes and learn from them, never being told off or humiliated. Respect was ever present; for the people, the plant, the product, the old tradition and the passed down knowledge of the ancestors.
Learning to weave was a blessing and an achievement. It gave me more than just another skill and some finished mats, baskets, bags, flowers. I practised present-centredness and getting lost in the task. I became one with the material, suspended in time and place.
Weaving is a metaphor for life's complexity. Several strands coming together, overlapping continuously, and in their embrace supporting and strengthening each other.
Having learned to weave, I am a fuller person now. It was a learning from experience with the willingness to embrace rituals, rhythms and a notion of the sacred. I feel encouraged to embrace more fully rituals, rhythms, and the sacred also in my work with clients, individually and in groups.
Rudolf Jarosewitsch
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SEXUAL
HEALING
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An advantage of rainy days during your holidays is that it gives an excellent opportunity to get stuck into books, especially if you look after a friend's house who has an extensive library.
A book where I found inspirational thoughts is Paul Pearsall's “A Healing Intimacy” (New York, 1994). The beginning is a bit dry and the end feels a bit contrived, but in the middle, he makes some valuable points.
What spoke to me most was when he talks about the “Sex Syndicate” that has shaped our thinking about sexuality. I have always wondered if it is sensible to separate sexuality from the relationship, as in “sex therapy”. Is this not yet another compartmentalisation of the person?
The focus in the times of “sexual freedom” had become the “what” and “how” of our sexual expression: “By the mid 1970s, we thought we knew how often and how we should be having sex, and we had a sex syndicate to keep reminding us” (p.108). And “the sex syndicate code is clear and to the point: Sex is natural, the only unnatural sex act is one you cannot do, the more sex the better, too much thinking about the meaning of sex gets in the way of the mechanics, and the more you master the secret spots and techniques and keep your mind and concerns with the meaning of sex out of the bedroom, the more sexually functional you will be. ... Sex is a raging impulse within us all, and it is best to let it out often and in the functional ways suggested by the sex establishment” (p. 109). The “real meaning of sex” was seen to be “self-pleasure and joy”. With the focus on “self-fulfillment” and “gratification”, a loving relationship becomes the mere vehicle for our sexual drive.
Pearsall promotes “sexual healing” as an alternative. As a psychoneuroimmunologist, he explores the healing power of sexual connection. Intimacy increases immunity.
“Sexual healing is intimacy for the enhancement of the total health of both partners, and, because of its deep meaning and enduring connection, it ultimately enhances the lives of everyone – the family, the society, and the world.” (p. 110) Sexual healing involves “mindfulness”, it exceeds the technically focused, release driven performance sex. “Orgasm is more than genital and muscular contraction. It is as much mind as body because mind and body are one.” (p.111)
Excitement through external stimulants, as promoted by the sex syndicate, is replaced with “intimate connection”, where the focus is on the partner and not the technique. “Sexual healing looks for the healer between and maximises the power of intimate connection between two people who choose their inner healers, to seek meaning in life together, and to express their connection physically.” (p. 139)
Pearsall is sceptical of sex therapy: “Sex therapy almost never works. It is impossible to separate our sex lives from our whole lives. Sex therapy techniques are mechanical methods rather than the means for merging. ... Sexual healing is a matter of togetherness and meaning, not techniques and gimmicks.” (p. 114)
Sex can become another addiction, where “the thrill seeker is motivated by sexual attraction and under the influence of stress chemicals which can overstimulate the immune system” (p. 152f). When the stage of infatuation is left behind, the “love junkie” usually has to move on for another fix, the thrill of a new relationship or an affair. This provides a risk to one's health rather than the healing qualities that a consistent loving relationship offers. According to Pearsall, backed up by research findings that explore our immune system, we stay healthy and generally improve our well-being, when we manage to stay loving with our partner and are not afraid of intimacy and connection.
“From the sexual healing perspective, sex is not just an expression of love. It is a means of expressing your sense of connection – the totality of your awareness of your feelings of oneness with everything and everyone.” (p. 151) “The sex of sexual healing reclaims sexuality from those who regard it as a means of mechanical self-pleasure. Rather, sex is a means of healing the number one disease of our time: the individual's lack of profound and prolonged contact with another human being.” (p. 238)
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GESTALT
GROUP
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A Gestalt Supervision Group is in the process of being formed. The focus will be on experiential learning and the integration of the professional with the personal life.
This group that will meet 6 weekly for a day on Saturdays. The first meeting is scheduled for Saturday 19 February.
If you want to be considered for this group, please indicate your interest to me.
Rudolf
Tel: 03-3885292
rumijabu@inet.net.nz
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LINKS
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Check out this free internet journal Gestalt! (www.g-gej.org) for articles on current issues in Gestalt.
For further articles
and information, plus previous newsletters, please visit our
Website:
http://www.partnering.inet.net.nz
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