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Kathlyn and Gay
Hendricks met in 1980, so they’re celebrating their 25th wedding
anniversary. They’ve been happily married, working and playing together
ever since. Gay Hendricks is the author or co-author of 35 books. Before
founding the Hendricks Institute, he was a professor of counseling
at the University of Colorado for 21 years. He holds a PhD from
Stanford. Katie Hendricks pioneered the field of mind-body and has
taught in graduate programs at major universities. She is the co-author
of 10 books and leads seminars for business and health professionals.
She also holds a doctorate.
phenomeNEWS: Their
classic book, Conscious Loving, is in more homes, on more coffee tables
and in more hearts than possibly any other relationship book that’s out
there and it continues to be a good seller.
Kathlyn Hendricks: Yes, indeed.
We’re very grateful. Everything in there comes out of what we learn and
process ourselves and continue to process, so we also benefit from it.
We are very honored to have you with us
today. We’re on a planet where we are really relationship conscious,
more than ever before. When you were first married, did you have a
conscious relationship or how long did it take you to work into it?
Gay Hendricks: That’s a great
question. We had a vision of it, but it took us probably two or three
years to get to where we could really practice the things we were
preaching. When we started out, we were very interested in creating a
new kind of relationship that neither one of us had seen before. We had
to have a relationship where we could speak to each other honestly about
our feelings. So if we were angry or scared or hurt or something, we
could talk about that with each other rather than hiding our feelings.
So that was important.
The second thing is that we wanted to
create a relationship where both of us could take responsibility for
what was happening in the relationship rather than blaming the other
person, because both of us had grown up in families where there was a
lot of blame going on. We wanted to see if we could eliminate that. We
also wanted to create a kind of relationship, too, where both of us were
actively engaged in our own creative process, that we were both open to
and expressive of our creativity. We’d also grown up in a lot of
situations and seen a lot of situations where one person or the other in
a relationship wasn’t expressing their creativity so they were kind of
resentful about it.
We had that vision early on, probably in
the first six months or a year of our relationship. But doing things
like learning and training to tell the truth all the time and training
yourself to take responsibility all the time are things that take a
while to master, so I think it took us a couple of years to really get
those things working for us. It pays off, though, because now it’s been
well over 10 years since either one of us has spoken a blameful or
critical word to the other person can’t even remember the last time. It
gets easier as you go along.
Katie: When we first met and we
recognized each other, there was a very deep level instantly in
recognizing the great spirit in each other. We set our intention very
early on to create a relationship that ran primarily on positive energy,
that didn’t go through what we had seen all around us, of the up-down
cycles that feel good and then break an agreement and feel bad or feel
good and then criticize each other. Actually, it was a big adventure. We
didn’t know if it was possible. We’d never seen it. But we thought,
“This is the big adventure that I want to take in my life, to see if it
is possible to bring into being a relationship where the fuel is
appreciation and creativity.” Claiming ownership of what’s going on and
using all of that energy that happens when two people get together
creates something that is expanding in love all the time.
So the particulars that we’ve invented,
explored and shared with others over the years have come out of that
recognition and that vision. I think that the most important first step
that we took was to commit to it. We both got fully in. We decided,
“Yes, with my whole heart and my whole body, this is what I want.”
Excellent! Then with both of you on the same page, it worked.
Gay: Yes. That’s important. It is
possible to create a change in a relationship. It is possible to create
a conscious relationship where there’s only one person who wants to do
it. It’s possible, but it sure makes it a lot easier if both people are
at least willing.
Katie: And a lot more fun along the
way. One of the most important things for me, personally, was moving
into a relationship where I saw (and see) Gay as my ally, my partner and
am able to stand with and play with having all of that extra energy to
propel us forward into what we really want. This was very different than
what I saw all around me growing up and as a young adult, where
relationships devolved into power struggles, control struggles and all
that energy in the relationship got wasted. It was very exciting to
realize that, “Oh, this other person can join with me and be an ally in
moving forward in the world.” A lot more fun!
Sure sounds like it. So you were your
own first guinea pigs!
Katie: Yes, indeed. And we continue
to be. We’re always experimenting with new things. We decided that if we
were going to speak to people in the world about what we recommended
that we wanted to have a level of alignment and integrity about actually
doing what we were asking other people to do.
Excellent! What would you define as or
is there such a thing, as an ideal relationship?
Gay: The word ideal, very often it
seems like an unattainable goal to me, ideal. After working with several
thousand couples to help them create conscious relationships, as well as
our own, I can tell you what people are most happy with, that I’ve seen.
One is if people in a relationship feel like they have the freedom to
not only think out loud but feel out loud.
Katie: That’s nice.
Gay: Thank you. I was comparing
that phrase, thinking out loud, the other day and I was realizing I have
the freedom in our relationship to feel out loud. You know, if I feel
happy, I say I’m happy. If I feel sad, I say I’m sad. I don’t even think
about editing or hiding or anything like that any more. I think I spent
probably the first half my life, up until I was 30 or so, pretty much
hiding all of my feelings. I think an ideal or healthy relationship is
where both people have the freedom to think and feel and the freedom to
express those feelings and thoughts to the other person.
Another aspect is a complete absence of
blame, a complete absence of chronic criticism. That’s important because
chronic criticism and chronic blame in many research studies has been
found to be the number one thing that erodes the good feeling in a
relationship and causes the eventual decline of the relationship. We’ve
done our best to eliminate criticism and blame and it’s one of the
things I feel proudest of, because there was so much criticism and blame
around when I was growing up; it was almost built into the relationships
I saw around me. That was considered what you were supposed to do, is
kind of nag the person all the time and that kind of thing. I can’t even
remember what that feels like now, it’s been so long.
The positive flip side of that is to
create a relationship where there is a steady flow of appreciation,
where both people are speaking appreciations to the other person, but
also appreciating the person in other ways. You know, a touch on the
shoulder as you pass or a hug or a kiss. A kind word or a gesture of
helpfulness, doing something that would be useful to the other person.
Those kinds of things are appreciations and that’s the positive side of
what begins to happen when you begin to cut down on the amount of
blaming and criticizing that goes on.
I can’t speak highly enough of creativity,
though, because to me, one of the major things that goes wrong in
relationships is that people get too caught up in the daily stuff of
relationship. You know, getting the upstairs toilet fixed and getting
the house re-landscaped and all of those kinds of things. They forget to
make an effort to express their own creativity that wants to be
expressed. It could be writing a symphony or it could be making a good
soup. Whatever it is, it engages the person’s creativity. Couples need
to encourage one another to express their creativity. Those kinds of
things are very key to creating a very healthy, conscious relationship.
Katie: I agree with everything that
Gay is saying and I’m just thinking about how both of us, coming from
families who were extremely critical and how many people I’ve known who
really believe that criticism is necessary in a relationship and
actually don’t have a template or a map for what you’re going to do if
you’re not trying to criticize your partner. How are they ever going to
improve or become a better person? And what I realize in hearing you,
Gay, is that our daily lives are a symphony of creativity and
appreciation and how much actually is accomplished in a very real way in
the world and in our communities and making a contribution when there’s
no energy that’s sucked up by blame and criticism. I don’t think people
realize the enormous cost of that particular addiction. They get a hit
of adrenaline. They get a moment of being right from blaming and
criticizing, but the cost is really enormous and if people make a
commitment to end blame and criticism and instead focus on creativity,
co-creativity and appreciation, their lives will change very quickly.
Once they get a better idea, people are very smart and will start
gravitating toward living their lives in those streams of appreciation
and gratitude.
That’s great! How do each of you
individually express your own creativity?
Gay: Lots of ways. I’m a born
writer. I love to write and so just about every day I put in an hour or
two of writing. Sometimes it’s for books and things like that. But some
of it’s purely self-expression, writing poetry and writing a blog just
for my own use, not for other people to read, but for me to think out
loud.
Katie: And I’m a born mover so I,
almost every day, will do several minutes of spontaneous moving – how’s
my body want to move – because I, along with lots of other people, am a
kinesthetic learner. If I’m moving, I think better and when I’m moving I
get lots of ideas. Then I turn those into processes that I can share
with students and I turn that into poetry. And sometimes I just move for
the joy of moving and feeling the flow of energy in my body. I also love
to cook, so one of the things I do almost every day is create something
over lunchtime, which I hear and I sense. I hear what Gay might like and
I sense into myself kind of the ideal or perfect thing for lunch today
and then it’s great pleasure for me to create that. That sense of
creating something out of different ingredients is a very creative
process for me. And we dance and we talk to each other.
I find speaking to Gay about whatever is
going on one of the most creative things I do, because when I speak to
him, then it makes real what’s been going on inside. There’s something
about expressing in an un-edited way to another person that brings
something into being that hasn’t been there before. So I think our
talking to each other is one of the creative acts that I most enjoy.
That sounds fabulous!
Katie: It is fabulous! The
experience is pretty fabulous.
You mentioned that you take a spiritual
approach to your work and you define it as organic spirituality. What is
organic spirituality?
Gay: A lot of times people think of
spirituality as something to do with their beliefs. You know, one person
believes in reincarnation. Another person believes that they’re going to
go to heaven if they’re good and hell if they’re bad. A lot people
associate it with kind of a mental or theological level of things. When
we talk about organic spirituality, it is spirituality that you can feel
inside yourself, that doesn’t have anything to do with beliefs. It’s
deeper inside yourself than the level of beliefs or things that can be
argued about. You can always argue about theology and that sort of
thing. People have been arguing about religion for thousands of years.
We’re not really interested in that kind of thing.
What we’re interested in, is if you do the
kinds of things that we do in conscious relationships, you begin to feel
a kind of organic spirituality. This is where you feel connected to the
cosmos and you feel connected to yourself and you feel connected to the
other person. You feel how we’re more than our thoughts and more than
our beliefs and we’re more than who we think we are. We’re connected to
the whole unfoldment of creation and so, in a nutshell, what we’re
talking about is a kind of spirituality that’s felt uniquely inside
yourself, just like you can experience uniquely a deep breath, where you
breathe in and you breathe out. You don’t have to think about it. It’s
just there.
Katie: Beautiful! I was thinking
that the flow of warmth and openness and availability to life and a
sense of connection with others, of connection inside. This is reminding
me of what I’ve been learning recently through caring for my father and
mother who are elderly and have been going through some health issues.
Realizing that neither of them, in growing up, really had the
opportunity or the direction to develop an inner life. So when the
physical body begins to deteriorate, there isn’t anything to draw on to
continue a sense of a flow of connection to life. I was feeling grateful
for the opportunity to develop that myself, an inner life and to be able
to share that with others. It’s not something that needs to be inserted.
More, it needs to be uncovered, that people are connected. What’s going
on inside me is reflected in what I see in my partner and if I’m open to
learning and open to learning what my moment-to-moment body sensations
are, I can continue deepening my experience of connection, that deep
sense of unity with life that really is our birthright as humans.
You have many similar views. What do you
feel about the phrase “like attracts like?” and are you like each other
now? Do you have differences that complement each other?
Gay: We’re very different,
actually. I think we’re very different in personality level. We’re very
unified, though, on the things we most want, the deepest intentions we
have. Those are the kinds of things that help with “like attracts like.”
One of the things I recognized in Katie early on was she had a real
openness to learning. She really was committed deeply to learning as
much as she could about everything. I feel that in myself. I don’t feel
that I’ll ever stop that. So with things like that, that are very deeply
inside ourselves, I think we’re alike. On the personality level, I think
it’s kind of “like attracts opposite,” because if you attracted the same
kind of a personality to yourself it would be a bit boring. I don’t know
how I would describe the differences in our personalities in a word or
two. What would you say, Katie?
Katie: I’d say that you’re more
introverted and I’m more extroverted. I think that’s something that
people could relate to on a personality level. I love to be around
people and party and talk to people and Gay can do that for a certain
amount of time and then he likes to go off and be by himself. That’s
very nurturing, for him. That refuels Gay to be by himself, where I get
more refueled by going for a walk with friends or going out dancing.
Gay: That’s a good example, because
if I had attracted another introvert into my life, then I wouldn’t have
anything I could learn from. Relationships give you an opportunity to
bring a person into your life where you can learn something that doesn’t
come naturally to yourself. Like Katie can be at a party for a couple of
hours and talk to 50 different people and have animated conversations
with each of those people and I have to gear up for something like that.
Then I take it in smaller doses. If I have animated conversations with
three or four people, then go into the kitchen and stand around and suck
tea for a while, then go back into the fray again.
Katie: One of the things that I’ve
learned from Gay is how to be directly in touch with life, directly in
touch with the universe myself, without going through anybody else. The
value of stillness, the value of being alone. Those are enormous gifts
that people can give to each other, which is one of the reasons that
people get into relationships, is to open those opportunities to expand
who they are and what they know. One of the great challenges of
relationship is that many people mistake getting into a relationship or
getting married as license to try and change or control the other person
rather than an invitation to open up to learning what they can learn
from being together, that they couldn’t learn in any other way.
That’s good. You complement each other.
That’s a whole different definition of relationship than perhaps what
most of us have witnessed, as you’ve said, when we grew up. We got the
white knight on the horse image.
Katie: Yes, that you’re incomplete
until somebody comes along to complete you. At the center of our
understanding of responsibility is that each person is whole and each
person brings their wholeness to the relationship. Each person is
creating what is occurring, not one person being a half and the other
person being the other half and you leaning on each other or struggling
with each other. Problems can be solved very quickly if each person
steps in with their wholeness and goes, “Oh, humm. I wonder how I am
creating this and how I would like to be creating instead.”
Gay: This brings up a really
important topic, too, that we see so many times in our seminars and
relationship counseling. Typically what will happen that’s causing a
problem in a relationship is a couple will come in and one of them is
very logical and one of them is very emotional.
Katie: That’s very common.
Gay: Yes, very common. And if they
were looking at it from a cooler perspective they would say, “Well,
gosh. Here I am a logical person. The universe has done me a big favor
here by sending a person into my life who’s very emotional. That way I
can learn about my emotions and then I won’t be just logical. I’ll be
200 percent. I’ll be both logical and emotional.” And the other person,
the highly emotional one, would say, “Wow! I’m getting a real favor here
from the universe because the universe has served me up a very logical
person, which is not something I’m very good at. So maybe I could learn
to be an extremely clear thinker as well as a good feeler.” If they were
both sane and clear-headed, that’s what they’d see. Typically what
happens is they’ve both kind of dug in their heels and made their way of
being the right one and are criticizing the other person’s way of being.
We find that, in a relationship, what
makes things really work well is you have an openness to learning what
the other person has to say and who they are. You have an openness to
learning from who they are rather than trying to criticize them for who
they are and re-make them in your image. A lot of times what happens is
both people are convinced they’re right and that the other person’s way
of being is wrong, so they don’t ever learn from each other and they end
up like two dogs chasing the other one’s tail around all the time and
never look each other in the eye and say, “Wow! What a genius I am for
attracting a person different like you so I can learn from you.”
Katie: See the other person as
whole and genuinely appreciate them. I like to work with people to have
them understand that appreciation is probably one of the most magical
steps that people can take and one of the quickest ones to create
intimacy. Appreciation has a couple of different qualities. One is to be
sensitively aware. If you went into an art museum, one of the great
pleasures of the art museum is being sensitively aware of the
peculiarities of a certain work of art and how that is, itself, a unique
being in the world. Each person is their own becoming work of art and to
see your partner with that kind of sensitive awareness really creates
magic in relationships.
There’s a great deal of research now about
the power of appreciation, that is, focusing primarily on the positive.
Another way of saying that would be focusing on what is actually
working, focusing on what is positive in that person and between you.
The more you focus on that, the more you grow, which is another aspect
of appreciation. Your house appreciates in value. Well, your
relationship can appreciate in value as well. You can continue to grow
in value as you focus on and cultivate very specific appreciation. We
have these verbal Valentines and they don’t take very long. You can
deliver one in 10 seconds. Something that you genuinely appreciate about
a person’s qualities or skills or contributions. Like, I appreciate so
much, Gay, the way that you can translate something that’s very
complicated into clear words that really touch people. I admire that
ability of yours.
Gay: Thank you.
That was nice! We’re smiling!
Katie: The great thing about
appreciation is, it doesn’t matter whether you’re giving it or receiving
it or in the room when it’s happening, everybody gets the benefit.
Everybody glows!
Katie: Yes.
Some people say we have to face our
dark shadows before we can have any kind of healthy relationships.
What’s your opinion on that?
Gay: My opinion is the act of
labeling it “dark” and “a shadow” makes it painful and difficult.
Unnecessarily painful and difficult.
My way of saying that is that we need to
be open to discovering and expressing whatever is there, but if you take
a generous, open-hearted attitude toward yourself and a generous,
open-hearted attitude toward the other person, the material that comes
up could be the very same, but you don’t have to label it as dark or
shadowy. The truth is that all of us have things inside of ourselves
that need to be opened up and talked about and communicated about, but
they don’t need to be regarded as scary or threatening.
Here’s the thing, though, if you open a
closet that you haven’t looked into or cleaned out in 30 years, if you
go into it with a flashlight and just look around, with the light of
awareness, what you’re seeing is one thing after another. Some of it
needs to be cleared out and some of it needs to be ironed and pressed
and hung up… you don’t have to really feel bad about any of it. It’s
just stuff. The problem is that if you go into it with your eyes wide
shut, if you go into the closet and start looking around with your eyes
closed and a closed heart, what you’re going to find is you’re going to
be tripping over stuff, stumbling over stuff, banging up against stuff
and of course it’s going to be painful then. Or if you you look at you
say, “Oh, no! Why is that there?”
Katie: “Why are you doing this to
me! Why couldn’t you have taken care of this?”
Gay: Yes. So it’s the act of
regarding it as dark that makes it a shadow.
Katie: I’ve learned a lot about
that from different kinds of body work that I’ve experienced, where my
participation with what is happening really changed it. If I was getting
a massage or a Rolfing, I would hold myself and say, “This is really
going to hurt,” and it did. When I got curious about it, “Humm, that’s
an interesting sensation,” and I would let my awareness be right with
what was happening and got interested in it, the actual physical
experience changed. So the experience of what I could call pain really
stopped being painful. I’ve not only experienced that personally in
relationships, but seen that hundreds of times when people open up their
awareness, particularly to be present, to be fully present, then
whatever is there, whatever is emerging is life, more energy and more
flow of connection.
We see people go through all kinds of
memories and things that have happened to them, things that have
happened to their parents, just about everything that you can imagine
that human beings have done to each other. When people are really open
and present in experiencing what’s right there, even very deep, deep
experiences, they flow through those ease-fully and come out more
vibrant, more deeply loving of themselves and others and more deeply
available to live their lives fully. So I’m a great fan of going into
and going through whatever is there. I call it facing.
In fact, one of the processes that we
teach in our longer seminar we call FACT. Gay wrote about a version of
it in the book The Corporate Mystic. It’s facing. It’s like going into
your closet and opening it and looking around, rather than ignoring it
and going past it year after year and going, “Oh, I’ll bet there’s a
really horrible thing in there.” And then loving and accepting what’s
there and out of loving and accepting, you can make new choices and take
new actions. So what we call FACT – facing, accepting, choosing and
taking action – is a wonderful tool and process that allows people to
bring awareness. The big payoff is that you get to be more and more
present in your life right now, while it’s happening.
Have either of you had an experience or
comments about teenagers? It’s a time of discovering who you are and
they seem to have difficulty with relationships.
Katie: Oh, yes. We’re grandparents
now. We created a blended family when we got together, my son and Gay’s
daughter and we have grandchildren. We are now two years away from
having one of our grandchildren be in the teenage years. So we have some
personal experience with teenagers. One of the things that I appreciate
most about teenagers is they are, seems to me, going into the closet of
possibilities, of possible roles and ways of being in the world and
trying on one thing after another to see what fits, what fits me, not
like my parents. It’s a great time of experimentation and I found that
one of the useful things that I could do when our kids were teenagers
was to be there for them, to hold a space of supporting them in finding
what they really wanted. What do you really want and how can I support
you in moving there? And standing really firmly in what we’ve learned
about integrity and how much integrity allows a teenager to build a
very, very solid foundation to be able to be successful in the world.
Those are the things that we’ve been talking to you about, about feeling
your feelings and being able to speak about things straightforwardly.
Being able to take genuine, healthy responsibility and keep agreements.
Those are really the cornerstones of integrity. If you put love and
integrity together, you have really the tools that you need to be able
to guide teenagers through the rapids of that time of life.
Beautifully put!
Katie: I can remember talking to my
son about feelings just about the time that he could talk, so by the
time he was 3 or 4 he could identify his feelings and could recognize my
feelings. So he could say to me, “Mommy, are you sad today?” That kind
of background and foundation starts when they’re very little and then
you really cash in on it when they’re a teenager. If your teenagers will
talk to you about what’s really going on with them, then you can really
assist them.
That’s important. You mentioned that
you have a new project, Illumination University. Tell us about that.
Gay: One of the things that Katie
and I have been doing over the past few year is looking around the world
and saying, “What does the world really need right now to make this big
transition we’re all making to a more conscious world?” And one of the
things that we did was become a business partner with a good friend of
ours, Stephen Simon, and we created the Spiritual Cinema Circle, a club
that has thousands of members now in 70 countries where people get
uplifting, inspiring movies every month on DVD. It fills a need that we
thought was missing in the world, because a certain segment of the
population want to have movies that are insightful, maybe not as noisy,
but they’re really about important subjects and touch people’s hearts as
well as being just darn good stories. So that’s why we created the
Spiritual Cinema Circle.
The next thing we’re working on, which is
just launching, is Illumination University. This is a global, virtual
learning center. It’s a center where people anywhere in the world can
access the very best in learning about things that really matter –
relationships, spirituality, self-esteem, conscious manifestation – the
kinds of things that people are most concerned with. They can learn 24
hours a day through self-paced cyber courses or you can take live
teleseminars where you get to hear the best teachers and speakers in the
world. One of my colleagues calls it transformational learning in your
pajamas. You can sit in your home and it’s the very same, top of the
line learning that you could get from an expensive trip to Esalen or
Omega or something. One of the reasons we created Illumination
University is because people are liking to travel less so we thought why
don’t we create a worldwide, low cost learning alternative. No matter
where you are in the world, you can have access to the best
transformational teachers there are.
What a great idea!
Gay: One of the most fascinating
things that happened as a result of the Spiritual Cinema Circle is that
we get emails from people. I got an email from a woman who says she has
to travel 25 miles in Pakistan to get to a library where there’s a video
player where she can watch our Spiritual Cinema movies every month. She
says she always makes this trip because they’re a way for her of
connecting to the whole universe of conscious people around the world. I
was so touched by that, that it made everything worthwhile, that there
was this person out there who wouldn’t be able to do this otherwise. We
have another person who’s a member of the Spiritual Cinema Circle who
lives near the Arctic Circle. There’s nobody around for 40 miles or
something like that. He has a satellite connection to the Internet so he
can stay in touch. I’m so excited to be able to communicate with people
like that in the world. We do have this large, worldwide community of
conscious people and so we want to find ways to connect them all up
together.
Katie: So they can communicate with
each other, network, create new projects, solve problems in their local
communities, celebrate the possibilities of being human, recognize the
connection of all living things on the planet and learn how to really be
with each other, learning from each other, on a global scale now rather
than just on a local level.
The Internet has connected us through
more than just visual ways. It’s connecting us through hearts, also.
It’s very beautiful.
Katie: Yes.
We want to mention that you have a
fabulous website.
Katie: Thank you!
Hendricks.com. It is so refreshing and
it is easy to navigate. And, when you ask a question, you can hear the
answers.
Katie: We want to help people
through all kinds of different senses, so that it’s an enjoyable
experience and one that keeps getting refreshed. We’re always changing
things on the website. There’s lots of different things there for
people.
There are so many innovative ideas that
you two are coming up with that we totally applaud and appreciate. It is
so wonderful to talk to people who are living it, walking their talk and
are proving that you can live happily ever after!
Katie: People should also know that
we didn’t see this when we were growing up. I didn’t see it. I had no
models. So we basically said we’re going to invent this. We know if we
can do it, others can.
You are absolutely being it, for us and
everybody else in the world. We appreciate you! Thank you so much!
Katie: We appreciate your time.
You’re contributing in the world and connecting people.
Gay: You’re going great work. We
appreciate it!
Thank you! |
