Spiritual Divorce--Debbie Ford

This is a great book I've referred lots of my clients to. It can be good to read before you get married, or while you are still married and hoping to find a way to stay that way too. But relationships change and sometimes divorce in inevitable and it can be a good and positive change. Divorce is a big deal though and this book offers some great insight on how to use your divorce to actually heal your relationship both with yourself and with your partner. Healing a relationship through divorce? Yep, it happens.

Unstoppable Friendship

What love requires is the willingness to know and understand intimately the conditions for the arising of suffering and the commitment to resolving a problematic existence.

From An Awakened Life:

This chapter talks about compassion and how living with an open heart comes out of awareness, deep sensitivity, and looking directly at the actualities of life. The author talks about how true friendship is a powerful force for healing and change and implores us to wake up to the existence of suffering. We all have our theories and ideas about how life is, or should be, about how relationships should go. And then here we are, in the midst of the real thing, not our concepts and preconceived ideas, but the actuality of it all. And that's what needs to be dealt with.

Authentic love comes from a mind that doesn't turn away. It comes from a mind that faces the possibility of not getting what we want, of losing what we have and being separated from whom and what we love.

The practical application of love is paramount. "What we see, hear, or read may touch our heart, but this inner response may fade quickly as other priorities and concerns enter our mind." Rather than just leaving love at the level of a feeling, we need to take appropriate action. I'm reminded of a parenting class I used to teach where I used the analogy of love being a verb rather than a noun. These were parents of troubled children, many of whom felt unloved and some of whom had been taken away from their parents and were in foster care. I explained how all parents love their children, at least all of the parents I've met do. But having the feeling of love for one's child and actually doing what it takes on a daily basis, to make that love obvious is another thing altogether. Love as a verb, takes action. It's what we do to show our love that counts. We have to be "committed to resolving a problematic existence". We can insert the word relationship here to take the place of existence.

We have to be committed, to do whatever it takes, to resolve a problematic relationship.

Authentic love requires the intention to do whatever it takes. This is what gives substance to love. Authentic love requires us to be available and supportive of another. It requires us to be responsible, to respond wisely in painful situations. What does being responsible in love mean? I have always appreciated this definition of the word responsibility:

Responsibility = Response and Ability = The Ability To Respond

Problems arise in human existence. Problems arise in relationships. We must be willing to understand the situation intimately. We must be willing to know the truth. We must be willing to be available and supportive and to resolve the problem whatever it takes. We must be willing to learn to respond with great ability. Authentic love demands this of us. This is true friendship.

Choosing to love can be difficult. We all want to love and be loved in return. But authentic loves asks for nothing in return. It releases the attachment to getting back that which we give out. It requires nothing from another.

It is an extraordinary thing to feel the power of love, to make life as much as possible one long act of unstoppable friendship.

I find the last quote from this chapter to be extraordinarily profound:

If we wish to lead a genuinely awakened life, we may well have to open our minds to teachings and practices outside of our respective faiths. Sometimes we are reluctant to do this. We feel we are betraying what we have put so much faith in. To explore does not mean a loss of faith: it is an act of faith to open our heart. If we are open to this exploration, we can experience a genuinely deep love without limitations. That's what counts. That's what we need to be very clear about.

More Jenny Block

Josie Schoel from Sadie Magazine does a great interview, Opening Up the Conversation with Jenny Block. I really resonate with this statement below--

...because I think that visibility is imperative if any of these things are ever
to be accepted as reasonable, normal ways of being.

It totally speaks to my passion and what I've been doing in my personal and professional life--making myself visible.

At the same time, in another interview with a publication called Quick, Jenny explains that's she does not see herself as a grand social changer, who advocates that open marriage is for everyone. She says that the only thing she advocates is honesty.

You go girl. You are a refreshing breath of air and I haven't even read your book yet.

Jenny Block--Opening Up

I've been reading all the buzz about Jenny Block's new book called Open--Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage for awhile now. I just ordered the book today so I can't offer my own review.

You can order the book from Amazon here.

You can check out her website here.

Here's what Seal Press has to say:

Finally, a book about open marriage that grapples with the problems
surrounding monogamy and fidelity in an honest, heartfelt, and non-fringe
manner. Jenny Block is your average girl next door, a suburban wife
and
mother for whom married life never felt quite right. While many books on
this topic presuppose that the reader is ready to embrace an “alternative
lifestyle,” Block operates from the assumption that most couples who are
curious about or engaged in open marriages are in fact more like her—normal
people who question whether monogamy is right for them; good people who love
their spouses but want variation; capable parents who are not deviant just
because they choose to be honest about their desires. In Open, Block
paints a down-to-earth picture of how an open marriage can work, and
specifically why it works for her and her husband. In dissecting other
people's strong reactions to her choice, she explores the question of why
cheating is more socially acceptable than open marriage. In part, she
concludes, the lack of models for successful functional open marriages is
such that the general public is not yet equipped to handle treating it as
anything other than abnormal.Open challenges our notions of what
traditional marriage looks like, and presents one woman's journey down an
uncertain path that ultimately proves that open marriage is a viable option,
and
one that's in fact better for some couples than conventional
marriage.

Read her blog entries at the Huffington Post.

Read her weekly column about love, sex, marriage and open relationships in Tango Magazine here.

Tristan Taromino--Opening Up

The Cunning Minx at Polyamory Weekly (Responsible Non-Monogamy From A Kink-Friendly, Pansexual Point Of View) interviews Tristan Taromino on her new book, Opening Up--A Guide To Creating And Sustaining Open Relationships. I think this podcast was 30 minutes long and it's a good one. Here is the link to it, podcast #159.

Also, if you listen to the podcast or check our her livejournal by clicking on The Cunning Minx link above, you will find the offer code coupon secret word to enhance your shopping pleasure Adam & Eve for 50% off your purchase.

Tristan says:

"So much of open relationships is challenging and about letting go of expectations."

She talks about how her interest used to mainly focus on the sex and now her focus is on the people who are having the sex.

"Who are these people that run in these non-monogamous circles?"

She interviewed 126 people from all over the country, from all types of backgrounds and it's their voices that drive the book. Her purpose is to offer practical hands on advice on polyamory and other non-monogamous relationship styles. One thing that she offers in the book is identifying different particular styles of non-monogamy. She has created an outline to help people conceptualize their own relationships and to fill in the details for themselves. She has done her research and lays out all the different ways to do non-monogamy without the rules of coloring within the lines.

One section in the book offers a variety of new relationship structures along with the pitfalls of each relationship style. These are just a few:

*partnered non monogamy--two people who are partnered, committed to one another with their partnership at the center.

*mono/poly combo--one partner ismonogamous and the other is polyamorous. This is a common but very under represented group.

*solo poly--this may be a temporary situation such as when all of a person's energy is devoted to grad school, or raising their children or it might be a lifetime commitment. These people don't want to be in a couple by choice.

The solo poly is an interesting style in our society in that most people naturally tend to couple and we don't understand people who aren't in a couple. She offers a quote from her book from a woman with multiple partners but no primary partner:

"I struggle with the stories I was told while growing up about what it means to have a fulfilling life."

Don't we all struggle with this? We need to challenge these old worn out messages from parents, peers, t.v., society...

One message of the book is that everything is an option. There are also monogamous people represented in the book. People who have gone from monogamy to polyamory and vice versa, from polyamory to monogamy. The point is for you to custom design your relationship for you and for the people you are involved with.

Do do this we need to question the norms, actively and consciously, to make our own choices. She encourages us to not do monogamy by default, simply because it's expected of us. Any decision we end up making is fine. One way isn't better than the other. Monogamous or poly, doesn't matter. What matters is that we do it consciously. Also, to remember that the choice we make may be "for now", whether it is poly or mono, straight or queer, the choice is for now.
People change.

Don't do monogamy by default.

Ah, that reminds me of one of the lessons by my teacher, Abraham. It covers all aspects of our life--living actively, consciously, mindfully. Living on purpose.

In the interview Minx mentioned that she had read that Tristan doesn't like the word bi-sexual, and Tristan admits that she doesn't. She says she identifies as queer and equal opportunity. She says that the strict definition of being bi-sexual is: that you love and have sex and are romantic with people of both, two genders, male and female. The problem with this is that she believes there are more than two genders. Using the word bi-sexual reinforces this gender binary and what she is interested in doing is totally disrupting and challenging this construct. She says there are multiple gender expressions and gender identities. When will this be a mainstream obvious?

"Being queer is not just about who I love and who I have sex with. It about my culture, my community, my politics, it's about the way I see things and the way I walk in the world...Queer just feels so much more inclusive to me."

There is a lot of kink represented in the book. She says, "the great thing about kinky people and open relationships is that it's about the community. It's part of S/M culture. Sometimes it's about mentoring--playing with someone, learning skills from them. Kinky people have more clearly defined roles. Partners have a very specific niche, a unique role that they fulfill in a particular relationship and in doing this, kinky people tend to feel very secure in where they are in their relationships. In the kinky community, people's different needs are more readily recognized."

For monogamous people who have strong passions in their life, if these passions don't match with their potential partner's passions, it's easier for this to cause a rift in the relationship, or to be a deal breaker "well you aren't the one for me." But at the center of relationships with people in open relationships is the acknowledgment that we can't be everything to everyone.

She talks of Daphne Rose Kingma's book, The Future of Love, which I have written about before. It's a book that I have referred lots of people to. Tristan says:

" Her book is critical to my thinking about open relationships. "

It totally speaks to me too. I recently pulled it off the bookshelf in my office, feeling drawn to reading it again. After a few pages in I knew I was supposed to give it to one of my friends to read who got so much out of it that he bought another copy and gave it to his girlfriend. I don't know what she got out of it. I still need to get another copy for myself so I can reread it. In this book, the author makes the point how we expect people to be 100% compatible with us--sexually, parenting style, values, to be our personal and financial institutions. The assumptions we make and want from one person is of course, totally unrealistic.

Tristan said, "It's like going to your gynecologist and asking them to perform foot surgery. Not a good idea."

And then there was a little digression about feet in the pussy...

Next week's podcast will be the second half of the interview when Tristan Taormino talks about the future of the polyamorous movement.