The Arranged Inner Marriage

By MFT Steve Lee

What is the inner marriage?

The inner marriage is the relationship with our vast range of feelings from ecstasy to despair, from love to hate. The inner marriage is

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books Fluent
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781953865632

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the arranged

Inner

Marriage

How Inner Relationship Affects Outer Relationship

steve lee, mft

Copyright © 2022 Steve Lee.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

ISBN: 978-1-95386562-5 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-95386563-2 (eBook)

ISBN: 978-1-95386564-9 (Audiobook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022917474

Books Fluent

3014 Dauphine Street

New Orleans, LA

70117

This book is dedicated to Amy

Contents

Introduction

Inner and Outer Relationship

What Is the Inner Marriage?

What This Book Is About

How Do We Live With This Arrangement and Evolve?

Why Is This Topic Important Now?

Outer Marriage Meets Inner Marriage

Friends on the Path

Our Partner as a Mirror

Meditation, Psychotherapy, and Psychedelic Plant Medicines

Three Paths of Inner Relationship: Meditation, Psychotherapy, and Psychedelic Plant Medicines

Meditation: Working with Our Innate Nature

Relaxed Focus Meditation and Being Meditation

Relaxed Focus Meditation

Relaxed Focus on Breath and Body Meditation

The Problem of Too Much Thinking

Using Imagination in Meditation

Being Meditation

Meditation in Activity

Psychotherapy: Working with Our Innate Naïveté

Process of Psychotherapy

Distinguishing Psychotherapy from Spiritual Practice

Psychological and Spiritual Interplay in Psychotherapy

Clarifying Soul and Spirit

Psychedelics: Revealing the Soul

Soul Medicines for Universal Human Problems

Intentional Journeying with Psychedelic Plants

Working with Fear and Ecstasy During a Journey

Trauma and Psychedelic Visions

The Art of the Inner Marriage

Voice from Within

Beginning to Understand the Language of the Inner Unknown

This Dream is About All of Us

The Imaginary and the Real in Relationship

Imagining Our Partners to Be Something They are Not

Personalities Within

The Inner Bully

Using Blame and Projection as a Way Back to One’s Self

Getting to Know Our Particular Arrangement

Living with Emotion and Thought

Looking Into Blind Spots

A Couple in Therapy

Walking Through the Door

The Way In

Mind/Body Medicine

Symptoms

A Way of Life

Four Practices to Refine Awareness

Nonjudgmental Awareness/Self-Love

Reflective Awareness

Spiritual Awareness

Dropping Off Unrealistic Expectations

Finding Spiritual Traditions and Practices That Work for You

Spiritual Bypass: Don’t Mistake the Finger for the Moon

Beginner’s Awareness

Introduction

We have an inner life. How we relate to this inner life makes all the difference in the world. Dreams, feelings, thoughts, memories, fantasies, and insights are the voice and activity of the inner life. It is alive with experiences, changing moment to moment. Sometimes it appears to us in ways that seem very foreign or weird, gratifying or ecstatic, and painfully over whelming.

We did not choose our mind or body with all the thoughts, feelings, and instinctual hungers. We were born into a particular situation in life that we had no control over. However, we have a way to make the most of this arrangement.

We have an opportunity to learn inner love and understanding, which affects those around us. And we can learn how to better endure the emotional pain of life and minimize the harm we might do to ourselves and others.

I am writing this book for those who are interested in their inner life and how that inner life is expressed with others.

When I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy in 1970, I had a moment. General Olds, one of our commanding officers, said to the entire cadet student body, You know, men, Vietnam isn’t much of a war, but at least it’s a war. As a twenty-year-old, I woke up to where I was and what I was participating in.

I quit shortly thereafter, married, and moved into Sonoma Mountain Zen Center in Santa Rosa, California. This included daily meditation at 5:30 a.m. for an hour and a half and another hour and half in the evening, with silent meditation retreats once a month. My wife and I lived there for nine years along with our two boys. We continued to practice meditation in various Buddhist traditions until today, fifty years later.

After about fifteen years of Buddhist meditation, I began to realize the limits of spiritual practice and meditation. Meditation helped me stay calm and present, but I did not know how to be a husband or partner to my wife, in any depth. Problems would occur out of nowhere. My unconscious was being activated but I did not know how to think about it or talk about it with my wife. The same was true with my sons. I felt there was a much better way to parent but did not know what that might look like. So, I began studying psychology, getting a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy.

After practicing as a psychotherapist for awhile, I began teaching. I was an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco, Santa Rosa campus for over ten years, teaching in the graduate program for counseling psychology. I also taught mind-body medicine and couples communication at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Santa Rosa for about ten years.

During my early twenties, while I was still attending the Air Force Academy, I began using psychedelic plants and medicines, including cannabis, because I wanted to find out why these substances had become so important in our culture, to so many people.

Externally, psychedelics helped me to see a much bigger picture of what was changing in our country during the time of the Vietnam War. As a culture, we were stuck in an age-old problem: how to evolve as human beings. The symptoms included political corruption, violence toward the environment, and violence toward women and people of color. An ancient work in progress evolving slowly.

Internally, psychedelic substances helped me to realize I had an inner life. I realized I had a self that wanted to live a meaningful life. But how? The plants helped me move toward meditation, in-depth psychotherapy, and learning how to integrate what I discovered during plant journeys into all my relationships.

This book is about how to bring psychological and spiritual work together and how psychedelic plant medicines can help that process unfold.

Meditation, psychotherapy, and psychedelic medicine, used intentionally, showed me a voice from within. And showed me how to listen to that voice, which comes in the form of feelings, dreams, sensations, memories, intuitions, and all the myriad activities we experience through this mind and body.

Part One:

Inner and Outer Relationship

What Is the Inner Marriage?

The inner marriage is the relationship with our vast range of feelings, from ecstasy to despair, from love to hate.

The inner marriage is our relationship with thoughts, ranging from irrational to clear objectivity.

The inner marriage is our relationship with dreams at night, daydreams, and fantasies of any sort.

The inner marriage is our relationship with longing for people, situations, or anything.

The inner marriage is our relationship with bodily sensations, from the most painful to the most pleasurable.

The inner marriage is our relationship with intuitions, from the most simple gut feeling to psychic vision.

The inner marriage is our inherent relationship to life.

What is the inner marriage for you?

We are married to our inner life, for better or for worse, until death do us part.

I am proposing that this symbol of the arranged marriage is useful because it points to our real-life situation. We are in a marriage with ourselves that we did not choose. That relationship has direct consequences, positive and negative, on our outer relationships, which I will go into later.

What This Book Is About

This book is about how to fall in love with the most rejected part of ourselves.

This book is about uncovering our felt life and spiritual life.

This book is about the relationship with our inner life.

This book is about standing on our own two feet, living in our own skin.

This book is about the marriage of reality and imagination.

This book is about the relationship with others.

This book is about an inner marriage with oneself and how that affects our outer marriage and long-term partnerships.

How Do We Live With This Arrangement and Evolve?

Actual arranged marriages have been a part of culture for thousands of years in many, many cultures throughout the world. Usually, the marriage was chosen by parents, family members, or other authority figures, such as religious and political leaders. The marriage may have served the families, the tribe, cultural traditions, or religions, but many, many times it did not serve the individuals, especially women.

The arrangement usually had a great deal to do with financial, social, or political reasons. Two people were brought together for life, without choosing and many times without knowing each other. Sometimes the individuals in an arranged marriage came from countries or tribes where the language and customs were very different. Or a child bride was married off because of poverty, so she could attain a better social situation. Presently, in most situations, arranged marriages have given way to personal choice, but we still feel the pressure inside, from parents and from culture, to marry the right person.

We live with our changing emotions, thoughts, instinctual urges, dreams at night, and fantasy daydreams from moment to moment to moment, and yet we generally know very little about them or what they mean or how to make sense out of them. It is as if we are living with a stranger inside, which can sometimes be quite enjoyable and then turn on us as our worst enemy.

I am proposing that this symbol of the arranged marriage is useful because it points to a relationship that has been arranged for us. We could say arranged by Nature, arranged by Life, arranged by Spirit, arranged by God, arranged by the Gods, however one likes to think about this. We are in a position to have a relationship, have a friendship, have love with our conscious and subconscious mind.

Observing, listening, experiencing whatever comes up is the doorway into a deeper relationship with ourselves and each other.

We can learn to listen and understand the language of the inner life. And we can learn how