Partners In Dialogue

November 2005

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WELCOME
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Dear Friends,

Winter in New Zealand has come and gone, trees have been in flower, overall, it is getting warmer again, and we have not sent out a newsletter for a while.

We have kept ourselves busy with our therapeutic work and with renovating, a good balance of mental and physical work.

In the process of formalizing our approach of working with couples, which we now call “Integrative Couple Therapy”, we have come across many old yet unpublished articles. One of them, we want to share here with you. “Making love bigger than fear” still seems relevant. This is followed by the exploration of the question “Is love ...?”, and a short article called “Grow up!”.

Our travels in Australia in July and August have been eventful and rewarding, both professionally and personally. We want to share with you some feedback that we have received after our public workshop in Lismore.

Arohanui

Rudof & Mirjam

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INDEX
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- Integrative Couple Therapy

- Gestalt Supervision Group

- Feedback

- Making love bigger than fear

- Is love ...?

- Grow up!

- Link

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INTEGRATIVE COUPLE THERAPY
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Integrative Couple Therapy
The Journey of the Heart
with Mirjam Busch & Rudolf Jarosewitsch

Introductory Professional Training Day
Saturday 18 February 2006
9:30 am - 4:30 pm, Christchurch
$100
When we help couples to relate more deeply and fully to where they already are, the soul of their relationship can breathe and make room for mutual understanding, appreciation and imagination.
In this training, we provide support, techniques and teachings that help professionals work effectively with relationship dynamics.
Our philosophy is based on the insight that difficulties and struggles in relationships can provide an opportunity for personal development and deepened connection between partners.
This training day is suitable for counsellors, therapists and social workers.
Mirjam Busch and Rudolf Jarosewitsch are both experienced therapists (MNZAC), who for the last eight years have specialised in working together with couples and developed their own dynamic and creative approach, combining a male and female perspective.
To enrol, contact:
Mirjam Busch & Rudolf Jarosewitsch, ph: 3885292
rumijabu@inet.net.nz

For more information on workshops: www.partnering.inet.net.nz/workshop.htm

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GESTALT SUPERVISION GROUP
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The Gestalt Supervision Group that has been running this year is being opened for new members to join. The focus will continue to be on experiential learning and the integration of the professional with the personal life.

This group will meet approximately 6 weekly for a day on Saturdays. The first meeting is scheduled for Saturday 25 February 2006.

It is limited to 8 participants. If you want to be considered for this group, please indicate your interest to me, a.s.a.p.

Rudolf

Tel: 03-3885292

rumijabu@inet.net.nz

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FEEDBACK
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I love that you believe in all of us – in our capacity to solve our problems: That our “problems” are our opportunities, our windows of light.

You teach me that to trust the process is to trust the people in the process.

Rob Graves

Community Worker, Nimbin

I liked seeing you work together with ebb and flow, not competing with each other, but content with first one, then the other working. I valued having both your opinions. I learned about having limits, about embracing all the parts of me and that it's ok to share all these parts in our relationship, and I loved hearing that mercy and compassion are vital in the relationship. Thank you for the work you did with us.

Jude Graves

Thank you for your compassion and sensitivity – I felt seen and also cared for by you both. Thank you for your wisdom and great insights which shows itself in your skill in working with others. I feel deeply affected by the love I've seen you share with each other and also shared with us.

Thank you for your time and wisdom. A fantastic weekend of listening, learning and sharing.

Much appreciated

Dave Moor

Thank you

I remember you saying about the breath and soul of a relationship and it rang true to me.

I enjoyed your coming and your staying. I feel a bit sad to see you go.

Sometimes the volume and power of the content was a bit much for me and I appreciated being heard when I asked for stops or breaks.

I felt validated by you encouraging me to come forward and sharing my truth.

I wish you farewell

with love

Marc

I feel honoured and blessed by your wisdom and gentleness that you both showed myself and others in the workshop. I attended the workshop in the hope of finally being able to acknowledge myself and my need behind why I go into direct and often painful conflict with Dave.

As I look back and ponder on what I wrote at the beginning of the workshop “of what I would feel” I am aware of much sadness mingled with an elated joy that everything I wrote I truly experienced. As I sit here I am overwhelmed with love for the man who will soon be my husband. He is my trigger, my lover, my partner and my dearest friend. Thank you so much for reaffirming for me my deep belief in the commitment of love and the joy we can share together.

Blessings to you both

Deb

What did I gain from this workshop on relationship?

• the honesty of the participants with sharing their feelings, exposing their relation in front of everyone

• Realising that everyone has a fear of talking in public about themselves. So I am not the only one.

• Sharing and listening to everyone witnessing their emotion and feeling in relation show me how interconnected we are. I felt in many situations like hearing my own story from someone else's lips. I had this sense of belonging to humanity especially when I could hear and sense the vulnerability!! I felt touched deep inside.

Hearing or resolving someone's issue gave and brought me more clarity of how I function in relationship. I felt compassion in the face of the wounds exposed to us. I am deeply grateful for all the being that were here on that weekend. Thank you for your truth and honesty, and thank you to Rudolf and Mirjam for facilitating the workshop

Laura Love

• I enjoyed the creative and new ways of working with couples that was demonstrated.

• I loved the idea of creating individual sculptures of each person's perspective of their relationship.

• I found it very valuable to work through each person's story and to clearly see how each can trigger the other, and to bring it back to feelings and needs – to change the old pattern and create a new dynamic.

• What also stood out for me was the power of expressing one's vulnerabilities.

Gayle Russell

Lismore Workshop 31 July 2005

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MAKING LOVE BIGGER THAN FEAR
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Love is bigger than fear. Love is all there is, it is the beginning and the end. Love is like the sun. Its existence cannot be threatened, even if it is obscured by the darkest cloud. Love is all pervasive. It is being alive. As we are alive and in touch with ‘being’, we are with love.

Choegyam Trungpa talks about “basic goodness”. It can be obscured but it cannot be destroyed. In all of us lives the “Buddha nature”, the enlightened mind, if it is realized or not.

Love is the basis, it is the “ultimate”. Fear exists on a relative level, not ultimately.

Akong Rinpoche compares the different feelings to buildings in a landscape. Fear is nothing more than one of these buildings, whereas love is the vastness of limitless space. We can get lost in fear, as we can get lost in a particular building, and all we see is this building. The rooms and corridors may seem like the whole world to us. They can seem all encompassing, and yet, when we find the way out and look at the building from outside, we regain the right perspective. We can see, it’s just a building in a landscape.

We can get lost in fear, and it can be a familiar place. It can be our childhood retreat, a place we have gone to many times before. It can give us some security, even though the walls might close in on us, and we might be worried that they could collapse.

There is always a way out. The door might be bolted and locked, as your heart might be closed. Too much hurt might live inside, so you might feel the need to protect yourself from more. No additional hurt can get through, unless it sneaks through the windows. So you might also close the shutters on the windows in your house of fear. This might lead you to believe that there is no world outside. All you can see is the house of fear. It becomes your whole world.

Yes, there are prickles outside and sharp stones. But there is also a vast meadow, forests, rivers and the sea. The sky is limitless. The clouds are fleeting. There is a lot to life, which is love.

The outside world is just there. It is not effected by you hiding in your house of fear. It was there yesterday, it is there today. It will be there tomorrow, or the day after, or in 20 years. Whenever you decide to look outside, or to walk outside, it is there. And it is much bigger than your house of fear.

This is love.

Love embraces fear. Love contains fear, as the vast landscape contains the house of fear.

Sometimes we forget.

In relationships things go wrong, if both forget. When fear meets fear, we can escalate each other’s fear and cancel each other out.

When one forgets and the other remembers, all will be well eventually. It only needs one of the partners to stay in touch with love and trust in its power.

Love is bigger than fear. This is all we need to know, especially in times of hardship and conflict. We are tested at times. Yet love is never diminished, if we stay connected to it.

We might lose touch with it temporarily, as we might lose sight of the sun, when it is obscured by a dark cloud. But love doesn’t disappear, as the sun doesn’t disappear.

The way we experience love is in acceptance of what is. This is the challenge. To accept, also the non-accepting. There is nothing to be excluded.

I accept you in your reality, and I also accept myself in my response to your reality.

Everything just is, the way it is.

As I connect with love for myself, with love for you, with love for life, I make love bigger than fear. I step into the vastness of being.

Rudolf (Lake Moana, December 1998)

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IS LOVE ...?
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Is love staying open to the pain in the sadness of our hearts and breathing it in instead of rejecting it?

Is love meeting the world wholeheartedly as it is with all of its prickles and mudponds?

Is love basic goodwill towards another?

Is love taking a deep interest in another in order to understand them?

Is love treating others with special care and kindness because they mean so much to us?

Is love thinking loving thoughts?

Is love caring for someone, wanting to be near them and wanting to share with them?

Is love a smile, a thoughtful act or hug?

Is love dropping expectations?

Is love refraining from setting goals for others?

Is love to stop asking others to live up to our ideals?

Is love helping others to walk forward inch by inch by being kind to them?

Is love not bearing grudges?

Is love giving to others what they like not necessarily what we like to give them?

Is love ...?

Mirjam

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GROW UP!
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Recently, this message has come up again and again in my therapeutic practice. People are becoming aware of feeling vulnerable and needy and subsequently tell themselves: grow up!

The basis of this pattern is a myth. It is the myth that maturation, our growing up to be an adult is a linear process. We move through developmental stages from baby to infant to young child to adolescent and then finally to adult. It used to be 21, now in most countries the legal age to be an adult is 18.

If we are middle aged or older and still feel needs from our childhood, it seems that there is something wrong with us. This then leads to suppressing any childhood needs as inappropriate.

The truth is that we contain all ages, and even if we feel childish, it does not mean that we are not also an adult.

An adult can hold a job, drive a car, make major life’s decisions, do all the things that adults do and be accountable for their actions. At the same time, the inner child with its feelings and needs does not all the sudden disappear.

The self-inflicted command “grow up!” usually leads to the habit to suppress those feelings and needs. We can feel ashamed for needing physical holding or verbal reassurance. Yet, like any other need, as the need for air, for food and water, these emotional childhood needs don’t disappear. To the contrary, especially in couple relationships they come to the fore.

They will come up and annoy us as long as they are unfulfilled, in the same way as a hungry stomach will remind us that we need food.

Maturation, then, is not a linear process where we grow step by step through the different stages, it is rather a gradual process of integrating disowned parts and attending to yet unfulfilled needs.

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LINK
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In nature, there is no waste, there are only resources.

We often have used the metaphor of turning problems and difficulties in relationships into compost. Here is a fascinating book on “humanure”, by Joseph C. Jenkins, a practical guide of turning sh*t into compost: www.weblife.org/humanure/index_chapters.html

or: www.jenkinspublishings.com

For further articles and information, plus previous newsletters, please visit our Website:
http://www.partnering.inet.net.nz

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