Couples Work
I most often define my experience of a committed relationship (marriage in our case) as the hardest most rewarding work I get to do.
My wife, Samantha Tan, agrees.
“Sometimes you don’t want to do the work, you just want to be right and you want the other person to change. But the more we do it, the better our relationship becomes. Couples work has tremendous potential - to unleash the true pleasure of relationships, to create healthier families and to unravel the patriarchal narratives that hurt all of us.”
All of my work is animated by the conviction that we need to take an evolutionary leap. And it is a leap towards a new sense of “We,” towards a collective consciousness. Committed relationships provide a very unique set of conditions for practicing better ways of being-with.
Couples tend to do this work alone, or at best, with a counselor. We don't have community space where we can get better at being a couple. But as Esther Perel says, this is the first time in history that we expect our partner to fulfill all the needs that a village used to fulfill. It’s a set up. And we need a better way.
On Saturday, September 9, Samantha and I piloted our first Couple’s Workshop.
“You know you are walking your truest path when your offerings to the world are received as precious gifts. Grateful to both be a recipient of those gifts and for the model you and Samantha set which inspires me to walk my own truest path.”
We come into this work humbly. We have to work at our relationship. We've gone through some really hard times, and like most couples, we still get caught in conflicts that take time and care to overcome.
We have picked up some awesome tools along the way. We are both serious about our spiritual practice. Samantha is a coach to women executives and we are both trained facilitators. We are offering “Couple’s Work” because we want to build community, and we want to share what is working for us.
We piloted a one-day workshop because we want to offer a Couple's Retreat in the spring of 2018. We’ll run our next one day pilot on Saturday, December 2. This is the spirit of Evolutionary Leadership, a commitment to relentless experimentation.
Our first foray was beautiful. Seven courageous couples joined us in our commitment to relationship and the work of being a couple. It was a rich, fun and intimate space.
We learned together. We breathed together, we experimented with ways to exchange energy, we talked about what works and does not work. We took a look into what it means to take radical responsibility. And we explored the power of what becomes possible when we each remember what is essential about our own dreams.
Here is to the work of love.
Are you interested in participating in our next pilot workshop on December 2, or an extended retreat in the spring?