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  “Drawing equally from spiritual and psychological traditions, Perfect Love reads like a book of philosophy: the ideas seem sound enough, though there’s no way to prove them. Welwood is most compelling when he gets practical. . . . His approach is also noteworthy for its emphasis on learning how to receive love as well as give it. . . . Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships offers both grand theories and useful practices for incorporating these lessons into your life.”

  —Body & Soul

  “Welwood skillfully identifies the fundamental obstacle in relationships and offers a clear, attainable, and transformative solution. Everyone should read this wonderful book.”

  —Harville Hendrix

  “This book skillfully and eloquently describes how our deepest longing for love is in fact the key to healing our personal wounds and the woundedness of the world at large. John Welwood’s message echoes the Buddha’s, showing us how we have direct access to the love and happiness we most long for, as our very essence.”

  —Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

  “Full of practical wisdom and divinely inspired insight. A marvelous guide for any seeker choosing to walk on love’s path.”

  —bell hooks, author of All About Love: New Visions

  “A profound guide to healing our hearts and our world. No larger social transformation is possible unless it is simultaneously accompanied by this kind of personal healing, one individual at a time. Every social change movement should encourage its participants to take time to follow the steps outlined in this extremely valuable and important guide to psychic health.”

  —Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun and author of The Left Hand of God

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  While most of us have moments of loving freely and openly, it is often hard to sustain this where it matters most—in our intimate relationships. Why if love is so great and powerful are human relationships so challenging and difficult? If love is the source of happiness and joy, why is it so hard to open to it fully and let it govern our lives? In this book, John Welwood addresses these questions and shows us how to overcome the most fundamental obstacle that keeps us from experiencing love’s full flowering in our lives.

  Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships begins by showing how all our relational problems arise out of a universal, core wounding around love that affects not only our personal relationships but the quality of life in our world as a whole. This wounding shows up as a pervasive mood of unlove—a deep sense that we are not intrinsically lovable just as we are. And this shuts down our capacity to trust, so that even though we may hunger for love, we have difficulty opening to it and letting it circulate freely through us.

  This book takes the reader on a powerful journey of healing and transformation that involves learning to embrace our humanness and appreciate the imperfections of our relationships as trail-markers along the path to great love. It sets forth a process for releasing deep-seated grievances we hold against others for not loving us better and against ourselves for not being better loved. And it shows how our longing to be loved can magnetize the great love that will free us from looking to others to find ourselves.

  Written with penetrating realism and a fresh, lyrical style that honors the subtlety and richness of our relationship to love itself, this revolutionary book offers profound and practical guidance for healing our lives as well as our embattled world.

  As a psychotherapist, teacher, and author, JOHN WELWOOD has been a pioneer in integrating psychological and spiritual work. Welwood has published six books, including the best-selling Journey of the Heart (HarperCollins, 1990), as well as Challenge of the Heart (Shambhala, 1985), and Love and Awakening (HarperCollins, 1996). He is an associate editor of the Journal for Transpersonal Psychology. He leads workshops and trainings in psychospiritual work and conscious relationship throughout the world.

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  Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships

  HEALING THE WOUND OF THE HEART

  JOHN WELWOOD

  TRUMPETER

  Boston & London

  2011

  Trumpeter Books

  an imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc.

  Horticultural Hall

  300 Massachusetts Avenue

  Boston, Massachusetts 02115

  trumpeterbooks.com

  © 2006 by John Welwood

  Cover photography by Gary Bartolini/Getty Images

  Case studies drawn from the author’s private practice have been significantly altered in order to protect privacy.

  Excerpt from I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz (Sufism Reoriented, 1996), copyright 1996 by Daniel Ladinsky. Used by permission of Daniel Ladinsky. Excerpt from The Essential Rumi (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1995) reprinted by permission of Coleman Barks. Excerpt from “Heartbeat” on the CD Songs for the Inner Lover (White Swan Records) reprinted by permission of Miten. Diligent efforts were made in every case to obtain rights from copyright holders. In a few instances, the efforts were unsuccessful. The author and publisher are grateful for the use of this excerpted material.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Welwood, John, 1943–

  Perfect love, imperfect relationships: healing the wound of the heart / John Welwood.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN 978-0-8348-2275-7

  ISBN 1-59030-262-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  1. Love. 2. Interpersonal relations. I. Title.

  BF575.L8W45 2005 158.2—dc22

  2005009288

  This book is dedicated to peace in the world.

  May all beings know that they are loved—

  so they may live at peace with themselves and all others.

  Jump to your feet, wave your fists,

  Threaten and warn the whole universe

  That your heart can no longer live

  Without real love!

  —HAFIZ

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue: To Feel Held in Love

  1. Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships

  2. The Mood of Grievance

  3. Letting Grievance Go

  4. From Self-Hatred to Self-Love

  5. Holy Longing

  6. The Love That Sets You Free

  Epilogue: Who’s Holding You?

  Exercises

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  E-mail Sign-Up

  Introduction

  A night full of talking that hurts,

  My worst held-back secrets:

  Everything has to do with loving and not loving.

  —RUMI

  THE WORDS “I LOVE YOU,” spoken in moments of genuine appreciation, wonder, or caring, arise from something perfectly pure within us—the capacity to open ourselves and say yes without reserve. Such moments of pure openheartedness bring us as close to natural perfection as we can come in this life. The warm and radiant yes of the heart is perfect, like the sun, in bringing all things to life and nourishing all that is truly human.

  Yet oddly enough, even though we may have glimpses of a pure, bright love dwelling within the human heart, it’s hard to find it fully embodied in the world around us, especially where it matters most—in our relationships with other peopl
e. Indeed, for many people today, risking themselves in a love relationship has become a frightening proposition, a near-certain prescription for overwhelming pain or emotional devastation. Scratch the surface of our sex-and-romance-crazed culture and you find a sense of disillusionment in many people where they feel, as one pop song puts it, that “love stinks.” Or, as a young woman in one of my workshops expressed it: “If love is so great, why are relationships so impossible? Don’t tell me I need to open my heart any more. My heart is already too open, and I don’t want to keep getting hurt.”

  So right alongside the truth of love’s perfection, there stands another, more difficult truth—the flawed, tangled web of human relationship, which gives rise to tremendous frustration, sorrow, and anger everywhere we look. One minute you’re in touch with the love in your heart—you feel open, caring, and connected. And then the next minute, before you know it, you and your loved one have become embroiled in a conflict or misunderstanding that leads to shutting down or behaving in a heartless way.

  Thus even when our love is genuine and real, something often seems to block its full and perfect expression in relationships. “I love you, but I can’t live with you” is the classic statement of this painful gap between the pure love in our heart and the difficult relationships we inhabit. This disparity presents a maddening riddle, which each of us must “solve or be torn to bits,” as D. H. Lawrence suggested.

  This riddle shows up in many different guises. Even though love forever arises anew, most of us walk around feeling deprived of it, as if starving in a land of plenty. And while love can bring tremendous joy, our love life often brings our greatest suffering. Even though there is nothing as simple and straightforward as the warmth of the heart, still, “for one human being to love another, this is the most difficult of all our tasks,” as the poet Rilke wrote. And while in one sense love conquers all, war nonetheless remains the governing force in world affairs.

  The sense of loneliness and deprivation afflicting many people’s lives is not because love is in short supply. For you can find love everywhere you look, in one form or another. Every smile and most of the conversations and glances you exchange with the people you encounter every day contain at least a few grains of love, in the form of interest, appreciation, consideration, warmth, or kindness. Add up all the interchanges you have with others every day and you will see that your life is sustained by a flow of interconnectedness, which is the play of love at work. “There is no force in the world but love,” as Rilke writes.

  Yet if love is the greatest power on earth, the force that sustains human life—which in some sense it certainly is—why hasn’t love’s radiant warmth been able to banish the darkness engulfing the world, and transform and uplift this earth? Why is it so hard for love to permeate the dense fabric of human relationships? If love is our greatest source of happiness and joy, why is it so hard to open to it fully and let it govern our lives? What is the problem?

  These questions took on particular urgency for me soon after September 11, 2001, when the world was once again plunging into war. As the bombs rained down on Afghanistan in retaliation for the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the world felt especially fragile to me, and perilously close to collapsing into hatred and violence. After America’s political leaders embarked on what appeared to be a war without end, I felt an imperative to take a fresh look at why it’s so hard for what is best in the human being—the warmth and goodness of the heart—to take hold in this world.

  I have previously written two books on conscious relationship—Journey of the Heart and Love and Awakening—that show how to embrace and work with the challenges of relationship as opportunities for personal transformation and spiritual awakening. This book takes a different tack. It focuses on the root source of all relational problems, “the mother of all relationship issues”—our wounded relationship to love itself.

  The Mood of Unlove

  There are hundreds of books on the market that offer relationship fixes in one form or another. Some of these techniques can be quite helpful. Yet at some point, most technical fixes turn out to be patches that fall off, for they fail to address what lies at the root of all interpersonal conflict and misunderstanding—whether between marital partners, family members, friends, fellow workers, or different ethnic groups in the world at large. All the most intractable problems in human relationships can be traced back to what I call the mood of unlove—a deep-seated suspicion most of us harbor within ourselves that we cannot be loved, or that we are not truly lovable, just for who we are. This basic insecurity makes it hard to trust in ourselves, in other people, or in life itself.

  Not knowing, in our blood and bones, that we are truly loved or lovable undermines our capacity to give and receive love freely. This is the core wound that generates interpersonal conflict and a whole range of familiar relationship tangles. Difficulty trusting, fear of being misused or rejected, harboring jealousy and vindictiveness, defensively stonewalling, having to argue and prove we’re right, feeling easily hurt or offended and blaming others for our pain—these are just a few of the ways that our insecurity about being loved or lovable shows up.

  The mood of unlove often shows up in the form of sudden emotional flare-ups in reaction to any hint of being slighted or badly treated. It’s as though a reservoir of distrust and resentment were ready and waiting to be released, which the tiniest incident can trigger. Even caring and compassionate people often carry within them a fair share of unlove and righteous grievance, which can suddenly erupt under certain circumstances. For some couples these explosions happen early on, blowing a budding relationship apart in their first few encounters. For others, the mood of unlove might not wreak its havoc until well into a seemingly happy marriage, when one or both partners suddenly wake up one day and realize they don’t feel truly seen or known. It’s not uncommon for long-term spouses to say something like, “I know my husband loves me, but somehow I don’t feel loved.”

  Sometimes the mood of unlove shows up in the form of endless bickering and petty irritation, as though both partners were continually looking for reasons to grumble, “Why don’t you love me better?” For example, one couple I worked with described the following incident that led to a weeklong estrangement. The woman had just made her husband tea when he became upset with her for putting milk in it: “Haven’t I told you before that I don’t want you putting milk in my tea for me, that I like to let it steep for a long time first?” The only way to understand how something so trivial could trigger a major conflict is through recognizing what her action signifies for him: In his eyes, she has shown once again that she is not attuned to him and his needs—like all the other women in his life, starting with his mother. And for her, when even making him tea becomes an occasion for blame and resentment, this shows, once again, that no matter what she does, she can never win his love. Lurking in the background of this petty incident is the age-old pain of feeling uncared for and unappreciated, which both partners are reenacting once again.

  As a practicing psychotherapist, I have been intrigued by the tenacity and intransigence of the mood of unlove, which can live on in the psyche in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary (even when people in our lives do love us) or in spite of many years of psychotherapy or spiritual practice. What’s worse, the mood of unlove has the power to repel, belittle, or sabotage whatever love is there. Somehow the love that’s available always seems to fall short—it’s not sufficient, not good enough, or not the right kind. Somehow it fails to convince us that we are truly loved or lovable. In this way the mood of unlove—as an expectation that we won’t or can’t be fully embraced or accepted—makes us impervious to letting in the love that might actually free us from its grip.

  As a result, “You have two choices in life: You can stay single and be miserable or get married and wish you were dead,” as H. L. Mencken wrote with a flourish of wry, black humor. Reciting this line at relationship workshops always evokes peals of laughter as peop
le feel the relief of naming this basic human dilemma. When under the spell of the mood of unlove, living alone is miserable because we feel bereft or abandoned. And yet marrying is no cure for this misery, since living with someone every day can further intensify the sense of unlove and make it feel even more hellish.

  How then can brokenhearted people like ourselves heal this woundedness around love that has been passed down through the generations, and set ourselves free from the strife that dominates our world? This is the most crucial issue of human life, both personally and collectively. It is also the central focus of this book.

  The Nature and Significance of Love

  I would define love very simply: as a potent blend of openness and warmth, which allows us to make real contact, to take delight in and appreciate, and to be at one with—ourselves, others, and life itself. Openness—the heart’s pure, unconditional yes—is love’s essence. And warmth is love’s basic expression, arising as a natural extension of this yes—the desire to reach out and touch, connect with, and nourish what we love. If love’s openness is like the clear, cloudless sky, its warmth is like the sunlight streaming through that sky, emitting a rainbowlike spectrum of colors: passion, joy, contact, communion, kindness, caring, understanding, service, dedication, and devotion, to name just a few.