Joyful Living Important To Fulfillment
When I was a boy, an elder mentor told me that living my life joyfully was the most important thing I could do. He told me it was the soul work behind being a “good” boy, a “brave” boy, a “helper.” He warned me that if I tried to be “brave, truthful and good,” as Pinocchio was advised to be, without seeking joy and grace, my courage, my integrity, my morality would miss the mark.
These were highfaluting concepts for a boy who hadn’t hit puberty yet. In fact, they went right over my head. For almost 30 years, I thought about joy as a kind of saintly emotion, or a momentary high. I heard my culture talk little about it, so I talked little about it. During my growing up, my family was what is nowadays called “dysfunctional” - joy was not an emotional or spiritual goal during my boyhood.
As a professional adult writer, teacher and counselor, I found myself very able to help others explore their woundedness, their dysfunction, their pain. I was good at helping people descend into the dark underground of human emotion. I was good at giving them tools to educate and heal themselves. I was not very good at helping people ascend toward joy. I was not very good at finding joy in my own soul.
Recognizing this was a huge moment in my life. It occurred a few years ago during an intense spiritual moment of prayer and transformation. I peered into my own soul and saw a strange lack of light there. I realized that I had initiated myself into my youth and my manhood through the spiritual work of woundedness. “Being a man” meant, for me, being in constant naked touch with my psychological wounds, and working to heal them. I still do this work. It is, of course, never done. The dark night of the soul is as much a fertile ground for the mystic’s quest as it is for anyone’s.
But I’m looking for a kind of balance now between light and dark, between woundedness and joy, between power struggle and equilibrium, between descent and ascent.
My new book, just published, is about this quest. “Love’s Journey: The Seasons and Stages of Relationship” traces 12 stages of love, both the descents and ascents, the terrors and the joys, of fully loving oneself and another.
Before writing the book I searched for Love’s Journey in world cultures, myths, stories, religions, anthropological and sociological data, psychological material; I did field research in cultures overseas; I explored brain and hormonal research from the United States and Europe. The core ideas that rose out of this effort were: There are more stages of relationship than our culture tends to notice, and in each of these stages we can experience not only personal and relationship development, but also an evolving spiritual joy, a grace that connects us as individuals and couples to Nature, the Universe, and the Divine in humble, powerful ways.
In this model Romance is only stage 1 of a 12-stage journey through the landscape of love. Power Struggle, where most of our love relationships get stuck, is only stage 3.
Over the next few months I’ll explore Love’s Journey in this column, bringing you pieces of the material I’ve discovered. I hope you’ll write to me about your experiences as I bring to you stories from people’s everyday lives, and myths and stories from cultures everywhere.
“Love’s Journey” is a new model of spiritual and relationship growth, but of course it is not new at all - its paradigm has existed throughout time, and can be found in the age-old wisdom of our own and other cultures. The quest for joy is as ancient as the first mystical breath. So, for me, discovering myths and ancient spiritual texts that teach the quest has been more like finding a manuscript in a forgotten cave than exploring a new planet.
I hope you’ll go with me, over the next months, on Love’s Journey and participate in it as fully as you can with your letters and insights. This journey will encourage you, above all, to create relationships that include times of romance and power struggle, but that go far beyond these to become accepted, by each participant, as an integral part of a spiritual path.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Michael Gurian The Spokesman-Review