Creating Relationship 

Here's one of Mark's experiences of working on his own growth and development through Integrated Awareness. 

After nine years of working with Integrated Awareness, Mark tends to process things more quickly than people who are new to it. If we were working on a topic like this with a client, it would probably take a number of sessions over a couple of months to work through.

"I had been frustrated for a long time by my patterns in intimate relationships.  It always seemed when I was in a relationship that I wished I were with someone else, and that when a relationship ended, I wished I could rekindle the relationship I had just lost.  Somehow the grass always seemed greener on the other side.

One day I decided to explore this pattern while designing a workshop on self-sabotage and success.  I held my desire to create a lasting, intimate relationship in mind while making a movement to reach for the relationship I wanted.  As I reached, I looked for barriers to the movement in my body.  I found one on the back of my left lung, near my seventh rib:  suddenly I felt intense sadness there.  At first I thought it was sadness about my mother's death (she died when I was 21), but as I explored more, I found that it's root was much younger than that. 

When I was little, my mother worked long hours and I had a nanny.  My mother was caring but not very warm and my nanny was very warm and loving.  I discovered that somehow, when I was two, I had picked up that it would be disloyal to my mother if I received more love from my nanny than I did from my mother.  The rule that I had discovered, hidden in the back of my lung, was that I was not allowed to receive more love from anyone else than I did from my mother.  It was a very painful moment in my discovery.

As I explored the rule more, I realized that it had evolved as I had grown older.  The childhood version was “I’m not allowed to receive more love from others than I receive from my mother – and I don’t receive much love from my mother.” The adult evolution was “The relationship I’m in isn’t as good as the relationship I could be in with someone else.”  That evolution may not make much sense to the rational mind, but it's how the unconscious mind and the body work.

For the first time I understood why the grass always seemed greener on the other side.  The woman I was with took on the emotional role of my mother, while the women I was not allowed to be with took on the role of my nanny.  As I completed my exploration, it seemed that the pain and loss from past relationships were just floating up and out of my body.

Since that experience I’ve had a much deeper relationship with my girlfriend.  And I find that I’m delighted to be with her rather than wishing I were with someone else.”

- Mark

Other client experiences: