0:00:06.8 Juan Alvarez: Would you like to be a better parent or a partner? Are you ready to break free from unwanted habits and get over the burden of the past? Maybe you would like to develop a healthier relationship with money or with food, or be able to lead with compassion. In all those matters, Mindfulness can be a catalyst of change and the resource that you can always tap into. My name is Juan Alvarez, and I’m an executive coach and a mindfulness teacher, a teacher and a guide or a companion for people looking for attainable ways of being more present, peaceful and conscious in their lives. I’ve dedicated my life to exploring how mindfulness and meditation improve our relationship with the world and with the people around us. So tune in if you want to build a solid meditation routine and learn different techniques that will also enhance the only practice that truly matters when it comes to being purposeful, life itself. Welcome friends to Life is the Practice. My intention with this podcast is to share with you the most useful side of the practice of meditation and mindfulness, the intersection of the practice with real life. Because in the end, all of this is about living better, in communion with life and those around us.
0:01:31.4 JA: The practice helps us overcome difficult situations, live with more confidence and less fear, be more present and recognize the abundance of life within ourselves. Ultimately, the practice enable us to live more united with others. In this episode, we focus on relationships. We will talk about the benefits of sharing the practice as a couple, how it helps us navigate differences and arguments with compassion and kindness. We will also explore some of the ways the ego creeps into our relationships. To help us bring all these ideas to life, today we’re joined by Krista and Phil Franks, a couple I’ve worked with over the past few years, partners in life and business. They are the co-founders of Owl & Key, a Lifestyle Design company and co-hosts of the Unlocked podcast. Let’s go.
0:02:24.6 Krista Franks: So it was really wonderful to start as a couple to see, wow, this gives us a shared language. It helps us to see each other in a whole different light. We were going through like in growth together, inward growth, inward, and then both fighting the same challenges.
0:02:42.6 JA: As Krista observes, being on the mindfulness journey with our partner help us develop a common language to communicate and share our experiences. Another advantage is that we can support and motivate each other, make it as more consistent in our efforts. Sharing the practice with our partner also offers an ideal setting for the practice. Much of the personal development work we do in practice consists of becoming aware of our egoic patterns, mental and emotional loops that holds us back in life and prevents us from showing ourselves as we are. Our partners can become valuable allies in helping us resolve these patterns by highlighting what we may not notice, thus enabling us to work and grow in these areas.
0:03:28.9 KF: To observe and say, “I’m seeing something. Is that true for you?” Because some of those times are very frustrating when the other person “called us out,” and point it out. You might be in a loop or you might be in your egoic state. But it was so valuable.
0:03:45.8 Phil Franks: The partner then learned how to approach the situation with that who is triggered. ‘Cause me, I was very, very bad at it early on, where I would prescribe. I would come in and say, “You are angry,” and I would force this prescription of what I thought she was. And over time, through conversations and through reflections together, we learned that the curiosity through love was the best gateway through that where I can be curious of her state and supportive of her state, feeling that there’s definitely a misalignment in her, but give her the chance to tell me what’s going on in her world, by me just giving that hand and saying, “Hey, I’m here. I see and feel something. If you wanna let me know what’s going on, I will give you space you need.” But now, it’s never a prescription, it’s never a judgment. It is a merely a loving observation.
0:04:40.5 JA: One of the obstacles I often see when guiding people in my coaching sessions is the difficulty of integrating the practice into our busy lives. It is essential, but often challenging to prioritize the practice. When we are in alignment with our partner, however, it helps us create the space we need to work on our personal and spiritual development.
0:05:02.1 KF: I think there’s also courage in asking for the time and the space you need to do the work. One thing that Phil and I have committed to, is you have to make the time. That’s one of the first courageous acts. It’s not just gonna be handed to you, to do the practice. You have to intentionally build it in and make sure that it’s something that you start doing, so that when times do get harder, you already have the practice in you.
0:05:32.4 JA: While we want to make sure that each of us has the necessary space for our practice, it is also positive to create a space to communicate and share with our partners what we are learning and experiencing. It unites us, thus reinforcing the couple and the practice.
0:05:48.6 PF: If you think about a normal life, maybe more in the West than other places, most of us are two working parents, career driven, going home, maybe you have kids, maybe you don’t, and you’re going off to your independent ventures in life. Getting stimulus and triggers from your own experiences and coming back and sharing, caring for things, making dinner and then going to bed or watching your favorite show. That doesn’t allow for a lot of space, and maybe I’m stereotyping a little bit more momacroaly, but that idea of carving out a system that allows you to become intimate with each other’s emotions, patterns, triggers, the things that you want to share, creates awareness for yourself and your partnership to sit down face-to-face, create intimate time to share your experience and let the other person see what you’re going through.
0:06:41.0 JA: Now, we will explore how the practice provides us with a system to relate in healthy ways and helps us resolve conflicts and differences consciously. Krista and Phil remember some of the behaviors and challenges they experienced before integrating the practice into their relationship.
0:06:58.5 KF: We would get in a fight over stupid stuff. The little things that most people get in fights about and it would take days to unwind from it. We would either engage, which was much more rare, or we would just not engage and just not hold space for it. We didn’t know how to manage it, we didn’t know how to support that deeper conversation.
0:07:18.6 PF: Per the point of sweeping under the rug, because of the lack of competency or even the lack of being able to be aware, it would be very easy for people that have more dynamics in their relationship, a lot kids, a lot of demanding career to use those things as crutches, to sweep things under the rug and then that kind of just compounds over years and we did it in our own way. But now that I have children, seeing how easy it is to go to them as a distraction from that thing, it could be one of those things that happens in coupleships.
0:07:54.2 JA: Our partners often push our buttons activating our negative emotional charge and when we are not aware, we tend to blame them for our emotional discomfort. This happens because we’re not trained to process our emotions consciously. Instead, we react by unloading our negativity on the other person. Learning to become aware of and process these situations is an everyday skill I help my clients develop, often illustrating these situations with a story I learned from one of my teachers at a meditation retreats many years ago. It is said that there was a monk who wanted to retreat and meditate to do some deep work and so decided to go to the center of a lake in a boat away from the world so that no one would bother him. A few minutes into his meditation, he felt someone crash into his boat. He got up full of rage and ready to yell at the person for spoiling his meditation. When he turned around and opened his eyes, he realized that the boat was empty, it was drifting. There was no one to yell at. At that moment, the monk realized that in reality the anger and rage were alive within him and that there was no one to blame. The point is to realize that this is always the case. The boat is always empty. Our emotional reactions are our responsibility and we cannot unload them on anyone else. The negative emotional charge is mine. It is within me. I have to process this before I can respond.
0:09:29.9 KF: In a partnership, right? The boat story, he’s getting frustrated because someone’s running into his boat and then he realizes it’s just another boat. But he had already gotten so worked up and that’s what you do to your partner all the time. Like it’s their fault, it’s their fault, it’s their fault. And then you realize it’s not, and you detach from that and realize, “oh no, these are just my emotion being triggered inside of me. Ooh, I need to do the work to be present with those.”
0:09:56.5 JA: Once we become aware of our inner experiences and take responsibility for our emotions, we can integrate them. To do this, we follow a process called the emotional processing tool, a technique that consists of three steps and allow us to integrate negative emotional charges that might otherwise remain unconscious. I received this wisdom from Michael Brown, author of the book, The Presence Process. The first step is dismiss the messenger, which invites us to pay attention to ourselves and take responsibility for our inner state. The second step is get the message. It is about focusing on and identifying where in the body this experience is happening. The third step is feel it to heal it. We become present to this emotion and accompanied with attention, letting it happen until it’s integrated. Once we have restored our inner harmony with the emotional processing tool, we can respond to the situation consciously instead of getting carried away by our negative emotions, which is usually not beneficial for anyone, and in many cases leads us to do and say things we regret and feel guilty about afterward.
0:11:18.0 PF: One of my egoic patterns used to be blaming her for everything. The mirror metaphor where everything in your reality is merely a mirror for you, specifically in coupleship. I realize now fully that anything like that is actually something in me, a vital experience or a trauma that I need to address and be with and letting it take its course. Anytime I am triggered by anything, if my wife is that triggered, my children, whatever it might be, one of my first things is release the messenger. Release the messenger. That phrase, that phrase has been like almost had become a mantra for me.
0:12:00.8 JA: Let’s look at examples of how this works in practice and how we can work with compassion and kindness as a couple. Being more aware of what is happening inside of us frees us from the egoic need to project responsibility onto others. We become aware of our negative emotional charge and humbly integrate it, saving ourselves from many unnecessary complications.
0:12:24.1 PF: I think the delicate balance of a relationship is that you don’t always need to share with your partner that it was them that triggered you. Because there are moments where she might trigger me and I don’t necessarily need to tell her that she’s been the trigger, right? Because then that I might send her down her own path of guilt or shame or her own triggers that are associated with my behaviors and my emotional response.
0:12:50.9 JA: Other times we realize that we have become the messenger for our partners, and something we have said or done has activated their negative emotional charge. In these moments, we dissolve the egoic tendencies to personalize or blame ourselves and we become a conscious space in which the situation can evolve. Again, this saves us a lot of trouble for the couple.
0:13:14.3 KF: Last night I knew I triggered him and it wasn’t anything big, it wasn’t anything intentional, it was just like, I know that he likes organization. I was the one who disorganized. So then that got him into a state and then he really owned his space and said, “I am working through this.” And then I could fully, even though I knew my actions were a part of this triggering process, I didn’t take ownership of it. I didn’t dive into it with him and then let my ego go like, “oh, but it was me and that da da da da.” And instead I said, “okay, have your time. Take your process. I know you’re gonna work your way through it. And then if we need to, we’ll talk about it.”
0:13:56.5 JA: It is about dealing with our inner state, neutralizing our egoic tendency to personalize situations and giving the other person the space they need to navigate their process without interference.
0:14:10.7 KF: Phil has shared this language with me over the last year probably, where he’ll tell himself if I’m kind of going through a pattern or working through something or in my state, he’ll say in his head, “she’s going through an experience. I don’t have to go in it. I don’t have to attach in to it and try to go in with her.”
0:14:26.6 PF: Yeah. It’s because for me, one of the things was that harmonization. And so I would go in and make that about me. My ego wanted that to be about me. So to work out of that and say, this is an experience that she’s having and I’m okay with this experience.
0:14:45.0 JA: Other times the gift of working together is to offer the physical space and time our partner needs to focus on their process. Again, without the hassle of egoic tendencies.
0:14:57.2 PF: You can create space for it. Whereas before that person might feel guilty or they might feel like they shouldn’t step away or they can’t. So when she has that, it’s almost a non-negotiable or when I have that and it’s almost a non-negotiable now to say, okay, barring the situation that we’re in the form, I’ll take over and you go do your thing. Take 10 minutes, take a half an hour, take an hour, do what you need to do, holding space and creating space for the other. Whereas before I would’ve thought,”oh, what did I do? Was that my fault? Is she mad at me? I need to fix that.” Or, “wow, I’m mad at her for being selfish for taking this hour when I’m doing all this work.” Blame, blame, blame. And now it’s so much more spacious and that system’s been amazingly impactful for us.
0:15:51.0 JA: In short, when we act more consciously, we process without entering into the drama of the ego. We detach from the need to be right or explain our good intentions, feel guilty or project guilt onto the other. We allow ourselves to process what needs to be processed without fast and with humility, without personalizing the energetic moment we are experiencing. And we do all of this with compassion and kindness towards our partner. Something we all experience when we live trapped in the egoic state is a permanent feeling of existential scarcity, which manifests in our thought processes as a narrative of “I’m not good enough.” Our inability to recognize ourselves as one with all life activates a future need to search out there for something that completes us. This impacts our relationship as a couple, since we often unconsciously project this need onto our partner in order to validate our existence and make us feel complete. And of course, since it’s not possible to find completion in another person, this leaves us with a sentiment of dissatisfaction.
0:17:03.0 JA: When we learn to take responsibility for our experience and come into conscious alignment with life, we learn to complete ourselves and free ourselves from the desire to seek fulfillment externally. This also frees our partner, and our relationship enters a stage of the spiritual maturity in which we journey together into the abundance of being and enjoy our shared experience without the annoying demands of the ego. If you want to learn more about the ego, please listen to episode five where I explain this subject in depth.
0:17:37.3 KF: We were very much trying to complete each other and when we weren’t and when we were not affirming each other or validating each other, it felt like we didn’t support each other, we didn’t love each other, we were tearing each other apart. It felt competitive. I mean, I have a very strong, and not enough story that I’ve had to work through over the years and needed Phil to tell me I was enough. But with the work and with the meditation over time, I’ve been able to detach from that with his support because he knows I’m working through that so he can hold space for that. And then we’re not attaching to each other. So now I don’t feel like, “oh, I’m just completely not enough.”
0:18:18.1 JA: Dissolving our egoic state helps us release our dependence on others to feel complete, thus freeing them from expectations. Feeling full and loved by life and not needing the other to validate our experience allows us to operate from inner abundance instead of a state of permanent scarcity. We reach a new depth in our understanding of life, allowing us a more profound and pure connection with our partner.
0:18:46.0 PF: One of the things that really stands out for me about our relationship through this journey is that our connection has only deepened through, even through these hardest of times we’ve continued to deepen our relationship. The love and connectivity that I feel with her is so much deeper in it, and I think that shift has been the biggest thing for me where it’s like, I don’t expect anything anymore. All I expect for her to do is to be her and to be herself and to do the things that she needs to do to be well inside and out. And I have so much more space now to give because I’m not doing that to myself and then not to her anymore. And so I’d say that that just like deep, deep spacious empathy exists now because by going through that trial by fire and going into the fire numerous, numerous times with my partner and using these things in practice, in integration, we’ve only deepened ourselves and thus our relationship.
0:19:52.5 JA: Just as we develop an individual egoic identity throughout our life experience, we also develop a collective identity as a couple, an ego of the couple. This can condition our behavior and our relationship with others based on patterns of the scarcity, separation and insecurity, classic expressions of the egoic state. Learning to recognize and integrate the ego of the couple is another one of the beautiful jobs we can do in partnership. To start wrapping up, we’re going to listen to an excerpt from the conversation I had with Krista and Phil, which illustrates an example of the couple’s collective ego.
0:20:30.0 PF: There have been many moments where we found ourselves going into compare and contrast mode where our egos were kind of combining and playing this collective ego together where we each were being victim to a circumstance or where we were.
0:20:47.2 KF: Like, one of them that comes to mind immediately is that if we start saying, we don’t feel support, we don’t feel support, and then we’ll start like as a couple talking about like, we don’t feel supported by our family. Now we’ll laugh about it because we’re like, “wow, this is our story that we built as a family.” We created that story, our combined ego as a family and then we’re feeding into it.
0:21:11.2 JA: The scarcity mode, like that we don’t feel supported, like there’s an expectation that we need to receive something from our family that we are not getting and that’s constantly, “I’m not good enough and I need something from you to complete me and I’m not getting it. And you’re very bad ’cause this is your fault.” Yeah?
[laughter]
0:21:29.9 KF: Yeah. And then we’re actually saying the words, we feel like we’re on an island, bing, bing, bing, like independent ego trying to be, oh whoa is us victim, right? And then when we see it and we go, oh my gosh, first of all we haven’t asked, second of all we are supported in so many ways. Look at all these ways, so when we actually step out of it and we observe it and we realize like we’re not on an island and do the same practice just as you where as an individual but as a family. And that’s given us space to kind of share that openness and support and love and compassion and empathy with our family to be able to have deeper, more connected relationships with our parents, to free them from that and to be like, “that’s not your job. Even though you’re my parent.”
0:22:22.0 JA: As usual, I want to remind you that behind the examples of conscious living that I illustrate with this podcast, there is a solid commitment to and consistent work on the practice. As they have mentioned several times in this episode, when I first met Krista and Phil, the way they related to each other and the world was very different. Thanks to their dedication and work, they have dramatically improved the quality of their life experience in just a few years. Although you have to learn the practice properly, the various techniques and exercises, what truly changes our lives is the work we put into it.
0:23:00.9 PF: The biggest thing that I’ve gained from this work is being able to catch it, to catch the cycle. Your mental and emotional patterns, there are likely governing your experience, but doing meditation over time and the small interest building compilation that happens over time for me to now be able to like catch that and see it and detach from it and watch it. Like that skill, I do think that is the greatest skill that a human can have.
0:23:40.1 JA: If you would like to learn more, you can find all the information about how to work with me on my website. You can find a link in the show notes. Dear friends, thank you so much for your overwhelming and continued support for listening to and sharing the episodes and for your ratings and your reviews. All of this is extremely helpful for the podcast. We’re growing more and more, and I am full of gratitude for your encouragement and often this place of affection. I will meet you again in our next episode. Until then, be well.
0:24:16.6 PF: Oh, I feel connected to you. I like you. We are intimate together now we’re married, we have kids, and that becomes your bonding agent. These form-based experiences become your bonding agent rather than this deep, intimate realm of getting to know yourself and then allowing someone else to do it for themselves, that is intimacy. And when I get to go there with my wife, that for me is love.
0:24:48.8 JA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Life is The Practice Podcast. If you found it valuable, please subscribe. Leave us a review. You might help others live better. And if you want to learn more about the practice, please explore the online course that is available to you at lifeisthepracticepodcast.com. Thank you and be well friends.
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