Soul’s Code

David Richo has a simple test for the question, ‘Should you stay or should you go?’ What you should ask, ‘Am I codependent’?

BY ALEX HAISLIP — There’s nothing more debilitating than staying stuck in an unfulfilling relationship. The need to have somebody, anybody — even an other who is just plain wrong for you — is essentially an addiction. David Richo has a prescription for curing that addiction.

His framework:

Here are the words of a codependent: “Because you please me sexually, because we have been together so long, because I don’t know whether I will ever find someone else, I CAN’T LET YOU GO — even though you do not meet me at my soul/adult level.”

Here are the words of an adult: “Even though you please me sexually, even though we have been together so long, even though I don’t know whether I will ever find someone else, I HAVE TO LET YOU GO because you do not meet me at my soul/adult level.”

Call it Richo’s brand of tough-love, or spiritual medicine. His penetrating — indeed, devastating — insights make this book both hard to get through, and hard to put down.

Richo’s work isn’t just for emotional adolescents. The book is a great guide for those who want to deepen and improve even the most enduring and loving relationship.

His five operative words have a distinctly Buddhist ring: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection and allowing. It’s a recipe is guaranteed to tune-up any relationship, at any stage.

More than anything, the book is a call to conscious action. It implores us to take full responsibility for our own thoughts and emotional states, and rise to the challenge of unconditional love. Rather than just falling in love and losing control, embrace a clarity of will and sense of Self — or as Jung might say, allow God or the Force to love an other through you.

Check it out for yourself: How to be an Adult in Relationships

[Image from FarHorizons.org]

Byron Katie goes all Zen in her second book, I Need Your Love — is that True?, published in 2005. Her approach to relationships is to get the reader to break down the sandcastle of his or her own thoughts. Thoughts are something that you create, not something that make you who you are–or at least that’s Katie’s creed. To end suffering, she invites us to out the highly arbitrary source of negative thoughts. No where is it more essential than between intimate partners.

Katie channels Hamlet with her “It is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so” approach to relationships. Think that you need someone? Then you will.

The solution proffered in the book is based on a set of four ego-eviscerating questions, starting with: “Is that thought I have about my relationship actually true?” And then: “Who or what would I be without the thought?” It’s a great technique for un-spooling loops of self-limiting thought patterns. Powerful

“Know thyself” is much easier to say than to do. Pursuing a knowledge of self is the fundamental basis of all psychology. It also forms the basis of many spiritual pursuits. Yet so many are unwilling to pursue this path.

As John Gardner writes in “Self-Renewal:”

“Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems. We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don’t want to know ourselves, don’t want to depend on ourselves, don’t want to live with ourselves. By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.”

It’s just easier NOT to walk the path toward self-understanding. Sometimes we turn away from the path because we encounter things we don’t like or are unwilling to accept. Consider the findings of Dr. Phillip Zimbardo. You’ll remember him as the author of the famous Stanford Prison Study, which segregated students into “inmates” and “guards” and watched how the two groups

Byron Katie is a post-modern mystic = someone who has realized an elevated state, and done so in the maelstrom of contemporary American society — incubated totally outside of organized religion, essentially by spontaneous combustion.

With the release of her third book, A Thousand Names for Joy, Katie receives standing ovations usually reserved for rock stars as she tours U.S. cities. But this isn’t an Oprah-ego personality cult. This material is challenging stuff — not feel-good, ratings-boosting melodrama.

An excerpt from the new book: Here is Katie’s way for un-plugging from the pain of 9/11, an American drama that lives in us with the power of a group induction or spell:

I read an interview with a well-known Buddhist teacher in which he described how appalled and devastated he felt while watching the planes hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. While this reaction is very popular, it is not the reaction of an open mind and heart. It has nothing to do with compassion.

Picking up women really is about more than picking up women… at least for these men:

The men each begin with a brief introduction, describing their current plight with women. Some are funny and gregarious, others withdrawn and demure, and they vary in levels of traditional attractiveness and professional success. But each shares a general sense of unease with themselves, a deep frustration and loneliness.

We’re not in the business of using other people’s pain as a source of entertainment. So let’s reel this out and look at it as a mirror for what happens when any one of us falls into a rabbit hole of unconsciousness.

Here is a gallery of intelligent people who took the road less traveled, so to speak. Now they’re in a conflict that first went public with the publication of the book, Enlightenment Blues, a critique of Andrew Cohen, editor of a magazine that covers mysticism and transpersonal psychology. Then came the launch of a companion blog to the book. Here’s an entry from one of the contributors:

Legacy of Scorched Earth

Reflections from a former student

By Susan Bridle

I was a student of Andrew Cohen for ten years, and worked very intimately with him for many years in my work as a writer and editor for What Is Enlightenment? Magazine and other Moksha Press publications… I left Andrew’s community a little over three years ago, and while I am busy with new academic, career, and spiritual goals, I am still “digesting” my experience of my relationship with Andrew and my time in his community. Bottom line, I experienced so much that was truly profound and transformative – and that I will forever be grateful for – and also so much that was really abusive and twisted – and that still deeply saddens me. The lightest light and the darkest dark. Both. All tangled together like miles of black and white yarn entwined in a big ball at the pit of my stomach. I guess for me, I feel my work is to digest the whole thing, tease it apart… One thing that continues to strike me with painful irony is the fact that Andrew would, almost tearfully, lament about other teachers who had shown such great promise, whose passion for the spiritual life and searing dharma inspired so many spiritual seekers to abandon “the world” and give their entire lives to a spiritual revolution – but whose abuses of sex, money, power, and other addictions in the end disillusioned thousands of seekers and instead promoted cynicism about the whole endeavor. This is, in fact, the reality of the situation now with Andrew.

Last week, Cohen launched a counter-blog featuring a five-page inaugural post. Excerpts:

Barack Obama’s memoir and manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, has echoes of The Cloud of Unknowing

BY PAUL KAIHLA — That’s the headline for the excerpt from Obama’s new memoir, which is featured on the cover of Time magazine. An accompanying news story by Joe Klein, the journalist who wrote Primary Colors, compares the junior senator from Illinois to an earlier political messiah, Bobby Kennedy.

Obama was raised by a single mother but not an overtly religious one. “She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life,” he writes.

Obama is driven by an intense intellectual curiosity – what else would you expect from a Harvard-trained lawyer? And he’s so comfortable with ambiguities and uncertainties that it calls to mind the 14th-century classic of English mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing.