“My wife makes too many demands on me ”

The following dialogue is between Byron Katie and a man from her book, I Need Your Love, Is That True?  We can all learn something from this conversation. 

MAN:  My wife makes too many demands on me. 

KATIE:  Is that true?  Who lives the life that says yes when he means no?  How does she make you do the things that she demands?

MAN: I feel I have to do them. 

KATIE:  Another words, you say yes to her.  You lie.  You give her what you don’t want to give.  And you hurt yourself when you do that and then you call it her fault.  If you are honest to her, you might even say, “I want to want to do that for you honey and the truth is that I don’t want to do it yet and I may never want to.  I’m working on it.”  OR “I don’t want to do that.  Can we put our head together and find another solution?”  There are so many kind and honest ways to say no.  But you say yes to her because you believe you need something from her and you do it because you are afraid that she’ll withhold it from you.  Egos don’t love.  They want something.  You lie to yourself and to her when you say yes and you mean no.  You lie in order to get something that you want her to give you.  So who’s more demanding?  Your wife or you? 

MAN: I see that. I do demand her approval. 

KATIE:  She could make demand of you one hundred times a day and you could say, “I love you.  And no.”  And if she says, “If you don’t do it, I’ll leave you” and you could say, “I understand.”  And then wait to see what happens.  Will she leaves?  Will she stays?  But if you tell her yes and you mean no, you’ve lost your integrity.  You’ve lost yourself.  If you say yes to her and it’s a lie, you loose yourself sweetheart and you may loose her anyway.  My ex-husband could make any demand he wants of me and if it wasn’t right, I would tell him the truth.  I would say, for example, “I love you and I am not able to do that.”  I didn’t have to tell him the part where it wasn’t within my integrity to do that.  Often he’d yell and curse and threaten to leave me and I’d say I understand that.  And he’d say, “You’ll be sorry.”  And I’d say, “You could be right.  I love you and I can’t do what you are asking.”  But if I’d have told him yes when I mean no, I’d have lost myself again.  And I am the one I live with.  If I’d say yes to him and it was a lie, I’d have lost my marriage to myself.  And he would have been living with a façade of a wife. 

MAN: My wife has an expectation or wish about what she should get from me and she expresses that and I want her to love and appreciate me so I fulfill her expectation.  If I try to stop that whole cycle, then she could leave me and that’s extremely scary.

KATIE:  Yes.  But you’ve lost her anyway.  You’re not living with anything but an illusion.  You’re living with a monster in your mind, the one who will leave you if you don’t do everything she wants.  You haven’t even met your wife yet.  You’re just living with a story of who she is.  It’s the story that scares you, not your wife. 

Arrogance

Arrogance comes from hanging on to the reference point of me and others.  I may be a wonderful daughter, a devoted wife, a good mom, an understanding friend, a generous giver; I may feed the homeless, give money to various organizations, volunteer for activities I deemed important, and regard these as my personal accomplishment, I am  missing the point.   

Being a good person and doing good things for the community is an act of love and humility.   Instead of becoming loving and humble, I could become extremely arrogant.  “I trim-tab is a wonderful daughter because I call my parents every week.  I am a devoted wife because I attend to my husband’s needs. I am a good mom because I am active in my children’s affairs.   I am an understanding friend because I listen with love, kindness, and compassion.  I am a generous giver because I give 10% of my earnings to various organizations.  I am a good person because feed the homeless and do volunteering activities.  I am beginning to accomplish something.  I am good. I am better than most of you. ”

The purpose of being a good person and doing good deeds has to do with the concern for others.  Concerning for others does not mean comparing our progress against our spouse, brothers, sisters, friends, and neighbors.  It does not mean keeping a score board of who’s better or more virtuous.  That is not the point.  The point is to provide a better place for existence.  The point is to communicate our respect, love, kindness, and compassion for others. 

Are you comfortable giving yourself without conditioned?  Are comfortable giving your time, money, love to your spouse, children, friends, and your community without expecting them to do the same for you?  Without your criticisms that they should be like you?

The Love Seeker

If I am looking for love by making demands on the other person, I am pushing love away.  The harder I seek and the more I try to control, the more inaccessible I become to the presence of love. 

The love seeker doesn’t know how to love because she goes into her head and closes down her heart.  She is concerned with what she is getting.  She doesn’t care to give.  Yet until she gives love, she will be miserable.  Love cannot be withheld without destroying the lover.  And when the lover is destroyed, all that remains is the small-mindedness of the ego. 

The question is will you go beyond selfish, conditional love, or will you continue to insist on a love that meets your ego’s needs?  If you listen to your ego, you will meet love in vain.  No matter how many partners you try, you won’t find one who will love you the way you want to be loved because all your seeking is a demand for the love you alone can give. 

When it doesn’t feel that my partner is meeting my needs, I call myself back to the heart.  And there I learn to see the sparkle in my beloved eyes that hides beneath his pain.  He did not show me his pain at first, but I knew it was there.  I knew it was there because it is there in me.  It is there in you.  It is there in everyone.  And I am not surprise to find it in my beloved. 

Look and see through the pain, to who your beloved really is and what s/he really wants.  That is the true beloved, the one who can lead you home.  Not the one who pretends to have no pain.  Not the one who promise to love you perfectly.  Look at the real person.  The one who is vulnerable, who hurts, who asks for love in convoluted, neurotic, controlling ways.  Look to him (or her) and hear the call for love behind the wound.  That is the voice that will lead you home. 

I often experience sadness.  It comes and it goes.  It is not the sadness of feeling sorry for myself or feeling deprived.  It is hard to describe.   It comes with tenderness.  It comes when I experience something that is authentic, especially when I feel alone. 

When do you experience sadness and what do you do when it comes?   

Growth and Experience

Reflecting life, I can say that every experience is my teacher.  I am in constant dialogue with it.  When I am willing, I can learn a great deal from it.  And this is true whether or not I like my experience.  In fact most of what I have learned and will learn in this lifetime has to do with coming to grips with the aspects of my experience I have trouble accepting.  This is where my growth is. 

Learn to understand that your experience is perfect for you.  In spite of what you may think or others may think, there is nothing wrong about you or your experience that needs to be changed.  In spite of other experiences you read from others’ improvement books and advise columns,  they are still others’ experience and not yours.  Besides, we don’t need alot of words.  The more words we have, the more we argue about what they mean.  And the more we argue, the less we understand. 

People are interesting.  We want a dog but get a cat.  So we spent years trying to train the cat to bark.  We stubbornly hope that one day the cat will learn how to bark.  Then one day, we tell the cat to bark and the cat looks at us and says, “Meow.”  We get disappointed thinking that the cat is the problem.  Some of us also get disappointed thinking that we are the problem too, that somehow something is wrong with us because we can not teach this cat how to bark.   How distorted this is.  What a waste of time and energy. 

See reality for what it is and not for what you think it ought to be. 

False Responsibility

It is always flattering to have someone ask us for our opinion about something.  But if we offer our opinion without being clear that it is our experience and interpretation, and that it may not work for that person, then we have not acted in a responsible way. 

Many people try to get us to agree with them or confirm their way of thinking.  Our agreement seems to give their decision a sense of legitimacy.  But what they are doing is asking us to become an authority for them.  If we become the authority, then whatever happens—good or bad—is our fault.  If it’s good, we are put on a pedestal.  If it’s bad, we are crucified. 

People who ask us for confirmation of their decisions are having difficulty taking responsibility for their own choices.  Conversely, when we have a pattern of being an authority figure for others, we often live vicariously through others and postpone the decisions we must make in our own life.

When we say “I know” we are saying that we are an authority for ourselves, if not for others too.  When we say “I don’t know,” we are clear that we cannot be an authority for anyone else.  We recognize that we cannot be an authority figure even for ourselves, for what has been true for us in the past may not be true for us now. 

If you want to know how it applies to you, ask yourself “How often do I make my own decisions and encourage others to do the same?”

The Extra Mile, Part 2

By Anthony de Mello

Is there a way out?  Yes.  You are not going to be able to change your programming quickly, or perhaps ever.  And you don’t even need to. 

Try this:  Imagine you are in a situation or with a person that you find unpleasant and that you would ordinarily avoid.  Now observe your computer instinctively becomes active, insisting that you avoid this situation or try to change it.  And if you stay on there and refuse to change the situation, observe how the computer insists that you experience irritation or anxiety or guilt or some other negative emotion.  Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions.  They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad.  It is your computer that insists on your reacting with negative emotions.  You will see this better if you realize that someone with a different programming when faced with this same situation or person or event would react quite calmly, even happily. 

Don’t stop till you have grasped this truth:  The only reason why you too are not reacting calmly and happily is your computer stubbornly insisting that reality be reshaped to conform to its programming.  Observe all of this from the outside so to speak and see that marvelous change that comes about you.

The Extra Mile, Part 1

By Anthony de Mello

If you take a look at the way you have been put together and the way you function you will find that inside your head there is a whole program, a set of demands about how the world should be, how you should be, and what you should want. 

Who is responsible for the programming?  Not you.  It isn’t really you who decided even such basics as your wants and desires and so-called needs; your values, your tastes, your attitudes.  It was your parents, your society, your culture, your religion, your past experiences who fed the operating instructions into your computer.  Wherever you go your computer goes along with you.  It insists that its demands be met by life, by people and by you.  If the demands are met, the computer allows you to be peaceful and happy.  If they are not met, even if it is not your fault, the computer generates negative emotions that cause you to suffer.  

For instance, when other people don’t live up to your computer’s expectations, it torments you with frustration, anger, or bitterness.  When things are not under your control, your computer insists that you experience anxiety, tension, worry.  Then you expend a lot of energy coping with these negative emotions.  And you generally cope by expending more energy trying to rearrange the world around you so that the demands of your computer will be met.  If that happens you will be granted a measure of precarious peace.  At any moment something is going to be out of conformity with your computer’s programming and the computer will insist that you become upset again. 

And so you live a pathetic existence, constantly at the mercy of things and people, trying desperately to make them conform to your computer’s demands, so that you can enjoy the only peace you can ever know—a temporary respite from negative emotions, courtesy of your computer and your programming. 

Is there a way out? 

Show No Partiality, Part 1

By Anthony de Mello

Look at your life and see how you have filled its emptiness with people.  As a result they have a stranglehold on you.  See how they control your behavior by their approval and disapproval.  They hold the power to ease your loneliness with their company, to send your spirits soaring with their praise, to bring you down to the depths with their criticism and rejection.

Take a look at yourself spending almost every waking minute of your day placating and pleasing people, whether they are living or dead.  You live by their norms, conform to their standards, seek their company, desire their love, dread their ridicule, long for their applause, meekly submit to the guilt they lay upon you; you are terrified to go against the fashion in the way you dress or speak or act or even think.

And observe how even when you control them you depend on them and are enslaved by them. 

People have become so much a part of your being that you cannot even imagine living a life that is unaffected or uncontrolled by them.  As a matter of fact, they have convinced you that if you ever broke free of them, you would become an island—solitary, bleak, unloving.  But the exact opposite is true. How can you love someone whom you are a slave to?  How can you love someone whom you cannot live without?