love- its all in your head

8/18/2019 LOVE- Its All in Your Head

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LOVE: It's All in Your Head

This article on Mindful Loving and Henry Grayson by Mark Matousekappeared in The Oprah Magazine, April 2004

In his heretical book,Mindful Loving, Henry

Grayson, an eminent New

York psychologist, relates astory that perfectly captures

his mind-altering theory oflove. A despondent patient

had come to Grayson'soffice, complaining about

being married to "theworld's biggest shrew." As

patients frequently do, Jon

seemed to want

commiseration from hisloyal shrink.

Grayson isn't that kind of doctor. "What are you willing

to do?" asked the therapist, turning the tables back onJon.

"Anything," he replied. Grayson's instructions were oddly simple: The next time Jon

became anxious over his wife's behavior, he was to focus on his own upsettingthoughts, replacing the inner wife-hating voice--She's ruining my life!--with a

tender memory of the woman he'd once loved. At first Jon couldn't recall such awoman; finally, a happy moment oozed up from the distant past. He promised

Grayson he'd give it a try.

Jon was confused at his next appointment. He told Grayson his wife seemed moresubdued somehow. "She must be coming down with a bug," Jon said.

"Try the experiment again," Grayson suggested.

At the following session, Jon was genuinely suspicious. He and his wife had spenttheir first tirade-free weekend at home in years. Perhaps she'd begun to see a

therapist, Jon said, still failing to connect the dots. But a week later, Jon realizedthat the internal shift in his attitude had created the external shift in his wife's

attitude.

The notion that relationships succeed or fail according to how we think about themmay seem far-fetched. The science of relationships has tended to emphasize

modifying outward behavior--which is why, according to Grayson, most couplestherapy doesn't work. "It's like trying to clean up a river downstream rather than at

its source," he says, settling in his rangy, handsome self--think Mr. Rogers much

better dressed--into the nook of a pale leather sofa. "We have to go upstream towhat we're thinking--to the beliefs and behavior that come from our thoughts--

instead of trying to change our emotions or, even worse, other people's behavior."


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This principle applies to all relationships and not merely to the ones we call special.

Specialness makes loving more difficult, Grayson claims--counterintuitive though

that may sound--since casting people in the role of lover, mentor, spouse, or bestfriend raises expectations, which leads to fantasy, heartbreak, and pain. We suffer

at the hands of those we love the most--that's the conundrum. "So muchexpectation," says Grayson, "blinds us to love."

There are two forms of attachment, apparently, both of which are known by the Lword but which, in fact, are very different. "There's ego-based love," he tells me,

using ego not to denote the Freudian sense of self that's indispensable to

negotiating daily life but to refer to the illusory armor that suffocates and cuts usoff, the self-obsessed me that renders us so unspeakably lonely, stripped of the

feelings of belonging and connection. "That's the irony," Grayson says. "First weimagine our separation from others, then we spend our precious lives trying, and

failing, to bridge this false divide."

Spiritual love works on opposite principle, he continues. Instead of the doomed

attempt to "complete" ourselves through another person--the ego being chronically

hungry, unworthy, unsatisfied--spiritual relationships hinge on the knowledge thateach of us is already whole. "We're complete," Grayson insists, joining his fingers

to form a circle. "We are made from the very same energy as the rest of creation--love, as it is called in the gospels--in its myriad forms. Our essential nature is

divine. In other words, we are already this wholeness, this love, that we seekoutside ourselves."

To appreciate how an agnostic scientist came to this

mystical understanding, we need to trace Grayson'spilgrim's progress from choirboy to quantum clinician.

[Born…] in Alabama, he'd planned to become aProtestant minister till a few months in theology school

convinced him that he had no faith--not of the church-

approved kind, anyway. "I had stopped believing in thetraditional concepts of a medieval, flat-earth ‘sky-God',

a deity that was far removed from us humans here onearth," he writes in the preface to his book. Grayson

completed his studies, nevertheless, earning degrees in psychology and pastoralcounseling, then worked briefly as a parish minister, struggling to reconcile

traditional teachings with his desire to help his congregants feel God in "everyaspect of their lives."

The strategy failed, at least for Grayson. Neither church nor advanced psychological

studies satisfied his need to address what he calls the "massive problem of humansuffering"--no less to enable our birthright of "indisturbable joy and peace." It was

not until he found himself at a lecture in physics that a theory of how to heal themind--and in turn solve the riddle of love--finally emerged in his thinking. "DavidBohm turned my life upside down," says Grayson, referring to the innovative

physicist who wrote, among other things, the classic Quantum Theory." Bohmhelped me understand that the reality we perceive is a tiny fraction of the universe

as it really exists. At an invisible level, everything and everyone is interconnectedin a most profound way, not only as human beings but as energy, mind, and

matter."


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With the barriers between inner and outer, self and other, cause and effect

expanded in this prismatic light, Grayson came to see all relationships as being, in

large part, an "inside job." Our core beliefs lead to thought constellations, whichlead to perceptions, give rise to emotions, and cause, domino-like, outward

behavior. What's more--and here's where Grayson's theory requires thinkingoutside the box--the behavior stemming from our own thoughts may manifest in

the people around us. Jon's wife acted differently once he'd found a new way ofviewing her, proving Heisenberg's principle that objects, including human ones, are

changed somehow by the very act of being seen.

Lofty as this may sound, Grayson is a pragmatic man for whom ideas matterbecause they help people. "This means," he says, "that everyone is our soul mate.

We share the same last name, which is God." In his popular tape series, "The NewPhysics of Love," as well as in his book, he offers advice on how to apply this

cosmic law to our everyday lives. We start, he says, with awareness of our ownminds and the development of the inner "witness," either through formal

meditation or simple self-reflection. By stepping back from our thoughts, noticing

how they tumble toward feelings, trigger opinions, and cause knee-jerk reactions,we learn to interrupt this sequence, to crack the ego's prison so that love can pass

more freely between us. By learning to better navigate our mental terrain, we'rebetter able to choose how we think about the world around us, to alter the frame

through which we perceive our lives, ourselves, and our challenging loved ones.

What's more, there are reliable litmus tests for distinguishing counterfeit love from

the real thing, Grayson says. Infatuation, the need to control, confusing love with

worry, ensnaring someone as "special"--these are signs that ego, rather than heart,is driving a relationship. This counterfeit path is marked by potholes most of us

recognize all too easily--demanding that love be earned, trying to change another'sbehavior, becoming addicted to someone's presence, and wanting to punish the

other for disappointing us. The big giveaway to ego-based love, however, is thespoiling presence of fear. "For the ego in love," he tells me, "the greatest fear is

losing the other person or losing yourself." Terrified by the threat of loss, we oftenfulfill our own prophecies.

The only remedy is commitment to practicing self-

awareness. This starts with realizing once and for allthat we vastly underestimate our capacity for love

and are more profoundly interconnected than we canpossibly know. The only thing blocking our

awareness of this is ego's self-protecting harangue.

"Love never hurts," Grayson tells me, having arrivedat this wisdom through his own two marriages.

"When my feelings are hurt, it's nearly always my

interpretation of what has happened that causes thepain." Just think of the last time you misreadsomeone's innocuous action as all about you. "I've

come to understand my wife as a kind of mirror ofmy inner life. She's far more likely to be critical of me when I think critically of

her."

By turning attention away from our partners, over whom we have little control, andfocusing on this inside job, we begin to make love a path of enlightenment. This is


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Grayson's primary goal. "If the purpose of relationships is understood to be

cultivating our own true nature and supporting our partners in finding theirs"--as

opposed to sharing the bills, say, raising kids, or having a lot more sex--"then thelabel we place on the form love takes becomes secondary." Indeed, his chapter on

"spiritual divorce" is likely to surprise some readers; according to Grayson, even"unhappy endings" can deepen--indeed transform--a continuing bond between

once-married couples.

Knocking down more boundaries, Grayson claims that "once we're aware of who we

really are, there's no big difference between giving and receiving. If I'm generous

and attentive, it's because I want the best for you. This brings me joy andfulfillment rather than the drain that comes from a feeling of obligation. That's the

kind of love that empowers, without desire for payback. If I want love," he says,"the best thing I can possibly do is extend this desire into the world as a loving

thought--such as ‘may all beings live in peace'--within my own mind.

The shift to mindful loving begins with acknowledgment that infatuation isn't real.

"The bad news about ‘falling in love' is that it isn't genuine love," he says. "It's

based on an illusion, a fantasy of who someone will be. When the other persondoesn't fulfill our dreams--which, of course, he or she never does--all sort of bad

things happen. You realize you've been living in a dream state, something you needto awaken from in order to love as your true self."

But, we protest, we want to find comfort in romantic love. Don't take l'amour away

from us, we groan in adolescent despair. Love seems to be the last respectableplace, in our too-grown-up lives, where we allow ourselves to be idiots, ridiculous

messes, dramatic, impulsive, less than our p.c. best. Grayson's cure may seembitter to the die-hard romantics among us. But one might ask, Do we need more

grief and fear, more isolation, illusion, and heartbreak, in our love-starved world?Or do we need a change of mind, a liberated vision? Shall we whitewash the fences

we build with our egos, or wake up to the glaring fact that love, according to every

sage from every single wisdom tradition, is already here?

If Henry Grayson prevails over Hallmark, the answer will be clear as day.

Copyright © 2005 by Henry Grayson, Ph.D.

love- its all in your head

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