The following is adapted from the powerful New York Times bestseller Keeping the love you find by Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. Author of Getting the love you want
Characteristics of a conscious relationship
Do not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness
1. They recognize that their partners’ needs are a blueprint for their own personal growth. And they are committed to the process. The basic principle of a conscious relationship is intentionality.
2. In a conscious relationship, partners exchange unconditional gifts. That is, they specifically target their behavior to meet their partners’ needs and heal their wounds, without asking for anything in return.
3. Partners in a conscious relationship accept each other’s absolute separateness, their unique way of perceiving reality, the sacredness of each other’s inner world; they consider themselves equals.
4. When they feel uncomfortable or when their needs are not being met, they bring their concerns to their partners rather than withdrawing from the relationship or getting their needs met outside the relationship. In a conscious relationship, there are no exits.
5. In a conscious relationship, there is no criticism.
6. The partners in a conscious relationship accept all of each other’s feelings, especially anger. They realize that anger is an expression of pain, and that pain usually has its roots in childhood. They learn constructive ways of containing and expressing anger and other negative emotions, and they help their partners to do so in nonjudgmental ways as well. Expressing their anger in a contained way leads to its conversion into passion and deeper bonding.
7. The partners in a conscious relationship learn to own their own negative traits (their denied selves) instead of projecting them onto and provoking them in their partners. They accept responsibility for those parts of themselves of which they are not proud and learn to manage the integrate them.
8. In a conscious relationship each partner calls the other to wholeness.
9. In a conscious relationship each partner strives towards androgyny.
10. In a conscious relationship partners care for others and the world.
