Undefended Love

Jett Psaris

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• Publié par: New Harbinger Publications
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781608822553
• Langue: English

Extrait

This beautifully written work is a stunning breakthrough in the field of books on relationship. Its vision of direct, unmediated love could not be more original.
—Patricia Holt, former Book Review Editor, San Francisco Chronicle
Undefended Love is an invaluable resource for both identifying the major obstacles to intimacy and offering powerful modern and ancient tools for becoming undefended partners and our essential selves in all of our relationships.
—Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., The Four-Fold Way and Signs of Life
There is a new paradigm of relationship emerging from the shattered marriages of the past forty years. For the authors the key is a new kind of love, a love that is not burdened by the host of selves that are designed to keep us safe and separate from each other. Most of all, Undefended Love is about a totally new kind of intimacy that is possible when one’s heart is opened to the deeper possibilities of conscious relationship.
—Hal and Sidra Stone, Embracing Ourselves and Embracing Each Other
If intimacy is understood as stripping away your outer, more public ways of being and sharing your inner life with another, then Psaris and Lyons have written the definitive guidebook. Their description of the conditioned self and the journey to authenticity is not only precise and thorough, but extremely readable as well. For anyone on a journey to intimacy, this book will be a great delight to read.
—Susan Page, How One of You Can Bring Two of You Together and The 8 Essential Traits of Couples Who Thrive
Our deep and aching desire for enduring love drives many of us repeatedly into relationships that offer little chance of lasting fulfillment. In Undefended Love , Psaris and Lyons go straight to the heart of what is most important to all of us: how to be in an intimate relationship that nourishes and sustains us and our partner. Undefended Love calls us to an expression of the courage and compassion needed to authentically know who we are and fearlessly share that truth with another person, to come home to ourselves, and experience the powerful joy of truly intimate loving. It is a jewel of a book.
—Mary Manin Morrissey, Building Your Field of Dreams

Publisher’s Note
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books.
Copyright © 2000 by Jett Psaris and Marlena S. Lyons
New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
5674 Shattuck Avenue
Oakland, CA 94609
The image on the cover is derived from a sculpture titled “The Dance of Love” by artist Never Chihumba.
Image courtesy of Zimbabwe Sculpture, Inc. ( www.spiritsinstone.com )
Cover design by Poulson/Gluck Design
Edited by Jueli Gastwirth
Text design by Michele Waters
ISBN 1-57224-208-6 Paperback
All Rights Reserved
epub ISBN: 9781608822553
New Harbinger Publications’ Web site address: www.newharbinger.com
This book is lovingly dedicated to Gangaji. Blessed one, our gratitude is eternal.
Intimacy—direct, unmediated, heart-to-heart connection with ourselves and with others—can only occur when the heart is undefended . To cut through our personal differences, to reach the unveiled part of ourselves that is deep enough to express the most profound and untamed aspects of our being means learning how to love and be loved without defenses and without obstructions. It means cultivating the capacity to be emotionally present even when we feel exposed or vulnerable; learning to relinquish the many strategies we have employed to feel safe and in control; and finding the courage to love without guarantees or requirements. Through developing the capacity for intimacy in this way, we discover love as an abiding presence in the emotional center of our being, our heart, and we can never again feel emotionally disconnected, incomplete, or unloved.
Contents
Foreword
Personal Thanks
Introduction
Chapter 1: A Flame in Our Hearts: The Longing for Intimacy
Chapter 2: The Essential Self: The Heart of Who We Are
Chapter 3: Who Do You Think You Are?
Chapter 4: Beginning the Journey to Undefended Loving
Chapter 5: Yearning for Closeness with Another
Chapter 6: Yearning for Connection with Ourselves
Chapter 7: Moving Beyond the Impulse to REACT
Chapter 8: Relaxing the Need to Have Our Needs Met
Chapter 9: What Do You Want—Finally?
Chapter 10: Dissolving Our Defenses
Closing Thoughts: The Liberation of Undefended Love
Bibliography
Contact Us
Foreword
Humans demand more from love every day. We want love to save us from loneliness, to make us happy, and to give us a purpose in life. We want love to make all the difficult decisions disappear. In short, we want love to do it all.
Human beings created romantic love—it’s only been around for the last three hundred years or so—and have been loading it down with more baggage every day. Before the days of chivalry, there were alliances, there was property, there were bonds, and bonds broken, but there was no romance as we practice it. Today we are so inundated with images and hopes about love’s promise that we can easily miss love’s true purpose.
Also, humans love to be in love while secretly bad-mouthing love to ourselves and our friends. We want to be romantics, but the daily reality of “happily ever after” leaves a residue of cynicism on the rosiest cheeks. Most people we’ve surveyed assume that love doesn’t last, that love disappoints, and that only compromise and settling for less have any possibility of success.
Jett Psaris and Marlena Lyons recognize that the modern love dance doesn’t work. They have spent years helping people untangle themselves from the underbrush. Undefended Love clears the gnarled bramble of all our romantic illusions, a thorny patch that currently traps many of us, resulting in more than a 50 percent divorce rate.
In Undefended Love , Marlena and Jett unwind some of the most tangled beliefs that bedevil relationships, and the result will thrill and challenge you. You will find that they have made a home here in undefended love and have roamed the territory personally. They know that love’s true purpose is to free the essential self.
Most of us hope that love will save us from “the worst thing” we can imagine about ourselves. For some, the worst thing is being alone. For others, the worst thing is being found worthless. Each of us hides this deepest wound from our partners and often from ourselves, while simultaneously craving love’s absolution.
Undefended Love takes us right into the thicket of the worst thing, and it fairly skips along with the bone-deep certainty of knowing that true intimacy frees us. True intimacy utilizes fear and scythes through illusion to leave us, as Marlena and Jett have discovered, “at ease exactly as we are. We are at peace. We are peace itself.”
In the twenty years that we have been collaborating to create relationships based in the essential self, we have heard one question more than any other. “How can I be myself and be fully with another?” Undefended Love describes the daily alchemy of essence that simple choices can create. Its ideas are simple, but not easy. For example, move toward your emotional discomfort rather than backpedaling away from it. Follow your experience to its source.
Why would any sane person choose to go into pain, to go into the unknown? Jett and Marlena know that freedom lies beyond understanding. They know that human beings want to be free more than they want to be safe. Freedom dances out beyond the reflex to defend. In Undefended Love , each page opens space unerringly and gives clear markers for the adventurous reader.
Imagine if you didn’t have to defend yourself at all, ever. Imagine if your every interaction heralded discovery and more intimacy. Imagine that every day you could remember less and less and know more and more. Undefended Love makes the imagined real.
Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks May, 2000
Personal Thanks
We’d like to thank the members of the Cutting Edge Group, Cultivating the Spiritual Warrior Within Group, Inner Work Group for Men, Inner Work Group for Women, and Living Truth Group where many of the concepts and methods contained in this book were refined. Your tireless dedication and courage to your healing and emotional liberation is an endless source of inspiration. Thanks also to all clients; students; and workshop, seminar, and retreat participants who have worked with us over the years. We thank you, we love you, and we are deeply honored you chose to share your personal journeys with us.
Rumi wrote: “Friend, our closeness is this: that wherever you put your foot, feel me in the firmness under you.” Many friends selflessly gave of their time and energy to read and offer feedback at various stages of the manuscript’s development. We felt the firmness of your support each time we lost our balance or faltered. Jenifer McKenna, Jennifer Welwood, Barbara Burdick-Zelnick, Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, John Psaris, Terry Ryan, and David Schwartz. Thank you for your generosity and love.
A special debt of gratitude goes to Caroline Pincus, our bookmidwife, who guided us through the search and selection of an agent, was an endless source of encouragement, and helped put finishing touches on the manuscript itself. We also wish to express our deep gratitude to our structural editor, Shoshana Alexander. She showed us how to give the manuscript a form and, to the extent that we have been able to follow her advice, she taught us how to write.
Others whom we would like to mention for their editorial contributions are Amanita Rosenbush, Priscilla Stucky, and Laura Woodlief. Our thanks to Patrice Wynne, Suze Orman, Patricia Kelly, and Pat Holt wh