Relative to Everything - Reclaiming Intimacy in a Time of Global Crisis

By Brian J Gleason

We are living in a time of profound transition. The world is changing in ways that will challenge us to significantly alter our business-as-usual lifestyles. In Relative to Everything. Brian Gleason suggests that the global problems we face.are actually symptons of a disconnection from each other and the natural world. Perhaps the most destructive aspect of our modern, industrialized world is how we have learned to cut off from authentic connection from one another and from the larger-than-human world.  Gleason has coined the term Separatism to describe how our approach to life leads us down a path of environmental, social and cultural degradation.

 

What are we to do?  As we can no longer rely on political, technological and financial solutions, it is time to turn our attention to how we relate to each other. In Relative to Everything, Gleason offers a direction for nourishing and evolving our inherent relationship skills, what he calls meta-skills. As a psychotherapist who has worked with couples for four decades, he suggests that most relationships suffer less from psychological dysfunction and more from living in high stress, unsustainable ways. We all need to learn from those cultures who have long-practiced reciprocal, earth, and community-based lifestyles. As our planet goes through dramatic change it is imperative that we learn to combine the wisdom of indigenous cultures with the critical skills of emotional fluency, conflict mastery, neuroscience, somatic psychology and what Gleason calls Full Self Expression. 

 

Gleason's message is simple, we can no longer afford to rely on a social structure that privileges money over human connection and human sovereignty over a felt sense of our interconnectedness to everything. Relative to Everything will open you to a paradigm that is both old and new. Here we learn to move from protection to connection, from autonomy to intimacy, from domestication to rewilding. The skills essential to your intimate relationships will become increasingly crucial as we adapt to a radically changing world.  Likewise, learning to re-integrate ourselves into the natural world will be necessary to nourish our human relationships. Gleason suggests that our goal is to move beyond approaches to personal growth that privilege the mind over the body, and learn to feel our connection to everything. This, he calls empathy. Relative to Everything invites you to reclaim empathy as your inherent nature and offers clear and practical steps we all can take. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Gleason
• Release date: Oct 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201953379

Brian J Gleason

Together with his wife Marcia, Brian developed the Exceptional Marriage, an experience-based methodology for working with committed relationships which allows couples to honor each partner’s capacity to discover his/her greatest gifts and deepest truths. This authentic, rich and powerful journey is explored in couples workshops, professional workshops, books and CDs, including recent books: Exceptional Relationships, and Going All the Way, The Heart and Soul of the Exceptional Marriage. Brian is a senior faculty member of the N.Y. Institute of Core Energetics and Radical Aliveness Institute in Los Angeles, California. He teaches internationally and is author of a book on transpersonal psychology – Mortal Spirit. Brian also enjoys a thriving private practice for individuals, groups and couples as well as providing supervision for therapists.

Book preview

Chapter One

The Big Bang

Ever since our universe exploded into existence some 14 billion years ago, it’s been all about relationship. Before the Big Bang, all there was, we are told, was a singularity. Then, poof, energy proclaimed I matter. Everything came into existence. There is, simply put, no existence, without contrast. You could not exist without something to exist in relationship to. Your sense of individuality is ironically entirely dependent on comparison to others. You are only tall, funny, determined, smart, depressed, or privileged in comparison to some standard.

The motto of the universe, then, could very well have been E Unum Pluribus. Out of One, Many. Maybe our task is to remember this so that we can embrace the mirror truth of E Pluribus Unum. All of us shared the great grandmother singularity when we met as atoms 14 billion years ago. It’s a bigger universe now then it was back then, but one thing hasn’t changed: we are all related. As David Wildcat put it, We live among relatives, not resources.

Your personal Big Bang occurred when your father planted his seed into your mother. From millions of sperm, an egg was fertilized, and you emerged, a universe of cells, organs, and organs systems working in harmony. E Pluribus Unum. Everywhere this drama unfolds. Life is exploding into existence from soil and seed. And everything is reliant on everything else. Many of us have stopped noticing. We wall off connection in the name of protection. Glorifying the brain over our skin. But relationship is fundamentally sensual.  Ah ha may be important, but not as important as Ahhh!

That we are relative to everything is our natural state. Yet we’ve become so disconnected that we hardly notice the depth of this truth. We skate along blithely unaware of how affected we are by everything we are part of. In Matter & Desire, an Erotic Ecology, Andreas Weber offers this, The idea of being cut off from the other, as laboratory researchers are from their objects of inquiry, is perhaps the fundamental error of our civilization. The delusion inherent in this idea is what makes possible our unbelievable indifference to the widespread death of the natural world. When we live life as if we were watching a movie, we forget the Unum part. Every particle, every current is in grand relationship. Presently all the star dust that has gathered together to call itself Brian lives with this sense of distinctness. But it will someday disperse and reconfigure into something beautifully new. This is what I called in my first book Mortal Spirit. The original singularity still exists, only now with stunning complexity.

The beauty of it all is that everything grows and transforms. As you scroll through these pages (and I do encourage you to take your time, read any chapter that calls to you), you will see that your closest relationships are your most vital resource for you to become more fully yourself. Just like our dear planet, you will become increasingly beautiful as you allow your potential to emerge. Brian Swinne reminds us, Four billion years ago the Earth was molten lava and now it sings opera. Not quite four billion years ago my daughter Elana was a blob of cells, and now she too sings opera. It is off-the-charts amazing.

Chapter Two

Regenerative Relationships

Not everybody is destined to be in a long-term, committed relationship. There’s no right or better way to live your life in this regard. Whatever choice you make, whatever circumstance you’re in, it’s your job to work with it. People in committed relationships miss out on the adventure of exploring multiple partners. Folks who don’t pair off miss out on a relationship that can grow deeper over time.

My path has taken me in the direction of depth over breadth. I believe it was George Leonard who once said If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one. This is not entirely true, but it does speak to me. I know I missed out on a great deal of diverse and wonderful relational experiences. I grieve that occasionally. Mostly though, I would do it this way again, with Marcia, if I were offered a redo. Let me tell you why.

Nearly every aspect of living in this western industrial culture pulls us in the direction of commodification of the self. The vast majority of our interactions are transactional, or at best, connection lite. We are cogs in the wheel of a great machine that needs us to deliver the goods. When we find time to play with others it rarely involves meaningful, nourishing connection. In truth, we barely know each other. But this is so only because we’ve learned to ignore the fleshy reality of our relationships. For sure, we all long for more intimacy. But our sensuality has been neutered through a protracted process of devitalizing nature. Amitav Ghosh in his important work The Nutmeg’s Curse, Parables for a Planet in Crisis quotes Ben Ehrenreich, Only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so.

Borrowing from the concept of permaculture, a regenerative relationship is one that has two basic requirements. First, to evolve as a couple from the innocence and fantasy of romance toward the full potential of the partnership. Doing this includes a diverse and complex relationship to our emotional, embodied expression. Second, to live in reciprocity with your environment so that you are drawing nurturance and sustenance from the source of life. In return, you offer back the gifts of your relationship to support a vital world. To be regenerative means to move toward a more harmonious balance among all participants. A regenerative relationship is one that evolves from the erotic fantasy of romance to a fully embodied emotional, sensual connection between two integrated people. It includes living more sustainably, cultivating emotional fluency, and moving toward a sensual connection to all of life.

Most of my training involved focusing on the impact of early family life on adult interactions. More recently, the insights culled from neuroscience and how our nervous system dictates so much of how we interact have added to our understanding of how we relate. As valuable and true as these factors are, they do not go nearly far enough in addressing what it takes to have a life-sustaining relationship with each other, with your children, and with the larger-than-human world around you. Our lifestyles, by and large, are not conducive to relationship.

When we fall in love we are guided by an impulse to put connection, caring, and pleasure above accomplishment, duty, and approval. Caring about another person transports us into a profoundly different existence. To operate from caring brings forth aspects of ourselves that allow us to experience our humanity. It’s largely an unfamiliar place. The reality is we often don’t hang out there very long before we retreat into the austere world of either getting things done, or avoiding getting things done. In this world, we are either in perpetual performance anxiety or we work furiously to create a Disney-like existence that's safe and shallow.

The tender process of letting somebody matter can transport us into a world where we can (and will) get hurt. But it also awakens us to the whole goddamn point of being human! That point is to feel something larger than oneself. In other words, to care. For years after Marcia and I were married, I would look for ways to convince myself that she wasn’t THAT important. It took a long time for me to stop kidding myself and to appreciate that her presence was earth shatteringly vital to who I am.

If you are in a committed relationship, I want you to try this: Simply say to your partner, "You really matter to me." Notice how it feels in your body. Can you own it? Is it performative? Say it a bunch of times. See if it sinks deeper. Is there a place where it terrifies you? Do the words catch in your throat?  Can you feel your partner’s presence? Do you feel a connection to yourself and to them by saying these words out loud? There’s no programmed right response. There is just your response. You can do this with anyone who is important in your life. For that matter, you can express it to an animal or a tree.

Caring for another throws the whole system into tilt. It is a subversive act. It doesn’t earn you money or get you the Citizen of the Month award. It shatters the fallacy that our raison d’être is to compete and win. In an ongoing committed relationship, caring requires us to keep challenging the impulses to exploit each other. It asks us to learn about and express our emotions, to move toward conflict in the spirit of discovery, to confront our most tender and often shameful places.

Almost nothing in our culture supports our caring nature. In our uncaring actions we collectively have created a world suffering from the ills of exploitation. Every one of us is living above our means, consuming more of the earth’s resources than we replenish. Only caring will force us back to a future where we live in reciprocity with our living world. All the clever ways we have learned to numb ourselves to our exploitative behaviors toward the planet show up in our intimate relationship. We have distraction and avoidance down to an art form.  Statistically speaking, people are tweeting more than they’re fucking. When our devices become more erotic than each other, we are in a world of hurt.

A long term, intimate relationship is a discipline. Like a spiritual or wisdom path, you will not advance without practicing every day. It’s not for the faint of heart. You must welcome trouble. I have felt like an abject failure in my marriage. I have hated myself and hated my partner. We both questioned why we are together in moments of profound doubt. Of course, some couples are better off ending their relationship. For me, and for many couples I’ve worked with, staying with our mates has taken us where we have needed to go. But, make no mistake, its function is to shatter your fantasies.

A long-term relationship goes through life cycles or seasons. Some part of us grows, ripens, gets old, and needs to die. If we stagnate, we turn each other into a label, a thing. She becomes a bitch. He becomes a bore. But then, if we allow the death of the old to fertilize the soil, some new part of us emerges. Some mystery becomes revealed. We see each other anew. The cycle repeats. With each repetition we grow. We become like an old-growth forest—rich and self-sustaining.

Let me lay out then, some of the basics of a regenerative relationship.

A regenerative relationship lives in reciprocity with the natural world.

It sees conflict as a vital aspect of each person’s continuing growth.

It is motivated by mutual caring.

It demands that each partner reveal their vulnerable selves.

It embraces the complexity of each person.

It opens and invites each person to claim their full range of emotions.

It values aliveness more than harmony.

It appreciates how nearly all problems in the relationship are co-created.

It is highly improvisational.

It lives interdependently with the land it shares.

It privileges connection over success.

Its primary task is to offer its unique wisdom back to a world in need.

Its wisdom is embodied.

It is a laboratory for learning how to be relative to everything.

Chapter Three

We Need to Talk!

W e need to talk.- This little sentence has caused countless knees to knock. It’s scared the adulthood right out of many of us, sending us spiraling into a childish state where our minds scramble to figure out what we did wrong. Alarm bells go off as we psychically prepare to be raked over the coals. Those four words are often a gateway to past discussions that circle around the same old dissatisfactions and rarely lead to connection. When your partner confronts you with We need to talk, it’s a trap. You are being told what you need, without even being asked. We statements have a sleight of hand quality. Furthermore, most talk of this nature between two intimate partners isn’t really designed to illuminate a troubling situation and create reconciliation. It’s too often motivated by a desire to make a point, to correct something in the other, or to assign blame. I need to talk comes closer to initiating a meaningful exchange.

Don’t get me wrong. Dialogue has its rightful place as a component of communication. It can go a long way. But it also is prone to move us away from genuine connection. We often talk as a way to avoid feeling. Bodies communicate first. Mouths follow. The words that pour forth from the mouths often obfuscate what the body is experiencing. We sense trouble in our bodies. We get tight, we feel a pang of hurt, our heart races, we feel an impulse to attack, we feel frozen.

Our bodies tell us something is not right. We would all be on safer ground if we simply noticed the reactions in our bodies and named them. Couples often seek help because of communication problems. Marcia and I like to say, Less talk, more expression. Expression means revealing what your body is saying. We take what our body tells us, let’s say a racing heart, and we translate it into expression, I feel scared.

To say, Why are you being such a jerk? is not expression. Indeed, it is not even a real question. It’s a failure to heed your body signal. Because your partner did or said something that caused a strong internal reaction, you go on the offensive. The attack protects against feeling something you don’t want to feel. To say instead, "When you talk to me with that tone, I get scared," is to express yourself. Communication problems exist because partners are not expressing themselves. They are protecting themselves, while believing they are expressing themselves. When you’re motivated by protecting yourself, you’re not listening to your body. You are following the dictates of your nervous system fight/flight/freeze response. When you express yourself, you are sharing, in the true sense of the word. You are, quite literally, giving something of yourself.

Your body is perpetually attempting to inform you of some pretty vital shit.  As you learn embodied listening, the nature of your response will evolve.

Here’s a sampling of ways your body talks to you:

●  I need something

●  I want to run

●  I want to attack

●  I feel helpless

●  It hurts me when..."

●  Something from my history is coming up because I am having a super intense reaction

●  I’m afraid

●  I’m humiliated

●  I’m so sorry

●  I appreciate you

●  My love for you is so strong.

Talking is usually shackled by linear thinking such as, I’m not going to ask you for help, because you’re never available. Cause and effect statements like this are a product of western mind’s predilection to see things in a straight, causal line. We’ll explore that idea more later. Compare the above statement to, I’m afraid that if I ask you for help, you won’t want to be there for me. This latter statement is founded on a sensory awareness that results in this person recognizing their own fear of rejection. It can be a conversation starter that opens up a whole wellspring of valuable emotional content. Every human exchange is saturated with complexity. This is how life works, with a web of activities that all affect each other. The Kalahari Bushmen referred to anthropologists as line people. As Brad Keeney tells it, because they consistently saw things in terms of simple lines (‘This leads to that’) and were blind to circularity (‘everything is connected to/woven with everything’) and the never-ending process that underlies all life.

We need to talk generally results in causal assignment of blame and the inevitable parrying of who started it. When we say, I am this way, because you are that way, we imbue the other with the power of the creator and relegate ourselves to the status of reactor. Do I need to say this is a bad approach?

Expression, on the other hand, is motivated by a desire to engage. While I know this may sound a little far afield, I ask you to indulge me here. What follows is conjecture. It is not scientifically verified, but there’s a great deal of circumstantial evidence that lends it credence.

When we lived in closer connection to the natural world, way back in the Pleistocene epoch, humans were more prone to engage each other in their embodied expression. They were motivated much more by communing with one another and the natural world that they were by debating.

As we entered the Neolithic epoch and the Earth’s climate forced a movement away from hunter-gatherer to plant and animal domestication, we began to relate to each other differently. We moved from expression and engagement into shaping our world. We manipulated the world around us to meet our needs. As James Suzman put it, ... the Neolithic Revolution transformed how people related to and worked with their environments and led to them developing a radically different understanding of their place in the world. We learned to relate to everything through a mindset of control. What typically motivates our communications now is making a point, rather than learning something