Relationship: "A Vehicle for Waking Up"--Comments from Bruce Tift

ContemplativePsychotherapy.net: What do you believe are the cornerstones to a happy relationship?

Bruce Tift:Perhaps the most important capacity for a healthy relationship is the ability to keep one’s heart open at all times regardless of what we’re experiencing.  Of course, this is a practice, rarely an accomplishment.  Relationships, in my experience, are inherently provocative, disturbing, unresolvable, and guaranteed to bring out any unresolved issues we have about intimacy.  They are also incredibly rich, satisfying, and probably the most powerful vehicle of waking up that our culture has.  It is very hard to be more intimate with one’s partner that we are able and willing to be intimate with oneself__ which requires the never-ending counter-instinctual practice of disciplining ourselves to keep our heart open to our own worst pain and greatest fears.  On a less obvious level, we may also find it’s not so easy to keep our hearts open to our passion and joy, as many of us dampen our positive experience as a type of protection.  Engaging with the complexity of intimacy, we can always ask ourselves:  “Will this behavior close my heart or help it open?”