Relationship

I think if I look back over the last twenty years, I have to say that the effect has been to drive me more deeply into honesty with myself, about my personal relationships.

'Headlessness' makes the underlying separative tendencies more obvious, and leaves you with a more direct and sensitive orientation, one in which one holds the other in your heart as fundamentally equal to yourself.

But, this is hard won, for most of us, and there has to be a continual effort - the effort of the inward (or backward, if you like) glance. Some say it is difficult this inward glance, but I think there are two factors here: a) the glance isn't painful, but the mind's pain is seen, and b) it's not difficult, it's laborious.

So in the long-term it has deepened my inter-personal relationships, bringing a capacity for detachment (which is truly intimacy), that gives room for others to be fully who they are - warts and all. C.M. Australia.

For me I am aware of two selves. The little one who struggles, soars, breezes, stumbles through his relationship with K. Quite often being dragged screaming and kicking! The early days were quite frightening. Emotions were a strange commodity and I was fearful of them. I think in those days the little me would have preferred to run away from them. Somewhere along the road I started "seeing". The big me awakened. Two things happened. Firstly I began to trust the void, the stillness, that thing that is closer to me than my breath. It makes me feel totally safe, in the sense that whatever comes, 'good' or 'bad', it is okay. I stopped worrying about what was going to happen and started to 'be' what was happening. I stopped being frightened and began to flow with it.

The second thing that came was that I swapped heads with K. Amazing! It totally changed the way I looked at her!! I suddenly had capacity for her, for what she was saying, for what she was feeling. Suddenly it wasn't a battle, with two sides camped opposite. There was/is only one being, with one head and two bodies.

The little me still has his moments fighting away in his own corner -some well-engrained habits seem hard to change. But the 'seeing' side of me seems to be more present more of the time. It is a great joy. As my relationship with K grows deeper and more rewarding, there is a feeling of stillness and great stability that comes from trusting in the process.

I have also been using seeing in my relationships with my three children. Now there's a challenge!! Some days it is so wonderfully natural and effective yet on others it seems to be the hardest thing in the world. However I have found that being headless, being capacity for them especially in times of conflict has been the best course of action. It is hard. There often seems to be no rhyme or reason to the outburst yet being there for them, open, wearing their heads, creates the space and calm for a dialogue even with the very youngest. And, as with grown ups, headlessness has this total loving quality to it. An unconditional love. I am total capacity for you. As C. said "warts and all". A.L. UK

I recently attended an Insight Dialogue retreat in Ireland. There were several opportunities to practice the Headless Way with other retreatants. One woman from Sweden got the "pointlessness" of the face-to-no-face experiment so well that we pretty much sustained our insight dialogue from this vantage point for nearly three hours! Aloka.

Regarding relationships, something that has not yet arisen in the discussion is the difference between a relationship where one is aware of his or her true nature, and a "relationship" where both are aware of Who they are. Any info on this would be appreciated. D. USA

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