is keeping agreement that when people split up, they often give them surveys of what went wrong in the relationship.

And one of the things that a lot of people say, well, two things that really pop out is, the other person would never tell me how they feel.

So that's one thing.

A second thing is I got tired of picking up after the person, you know, in the literal and metaphorical sense, you know, monitoring somebody else's agreements, trying to get them to keep their agreements.

As if by magic, a lot of relationships will end up with a very tidy person and a very sloppy person and a very logical person and a very dizzyingly emotional person.

And having those two things finally come into harmony with each other takes a major life commitment.

Okay, tell me about 10 seconds or 10 minutes of sweaty conversation.

Okay, let me give you a 10 second version of it and then I'll tell you a 10 minute version.

It's how do I get back to the we? How do I get back to that shared safety and that let myself expand more versus I got to figure out this problem with my partner?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think that's something we need to emphasize more, I think.

In fact, I think in Conscious Loving, we talk about trading in all your other problems for just noticing when the upper limit triggers you.

It doesn't matter what the content is.

It's just the process of being triggered and going into your upper limit because the upper limit problem can take 10 different flavors, depending on what it is you're doing.

And I think also, I was just remembering my very first noticing of the upper limit problem.

Yeah.

So first question is, what were these goals? What impact and what impact did this exercise have on you as a person, would you say?

Yes.

Well, the details are in my book, Five Wishes, but basically what happened was I met a man I was at a party and I had, I'm not a big party guy, so I was back in the library sort of looking through books and I was there to celebrate the engagement of a colleague of mine who was getting married for the fifth time.

And I didn't have a whole lot of confidence in number five because I'd been there for number two, three, and four.

But anyway, I was at this party.

I'm happy to report that they are still together, by the way, 40-some years later.

So I was wrong in my prediction.

And I suppose what's coming up for me is just, where do, where do these ideas come from in your, your experience? Like how, how does, what's your relationship like with inspiration? I suppose.

So is it really that they need to find their zone of genius, or is it that they might be in the wrong setting?

setting?That's a very good point.

Almost nobody ever makes that point about being in the wrong setting.

But, you know, sometimes that's a really good thing to look at, you know.

Am I being the round peg in the square hole here? And, um, I've-- I know this is your area of expertise, but I probably had, gosh, 40 or 50 medical doctors of various specialties over the years in a state of transition where they're trying to find their genius.

Let me give the final kind of the little twist of that, uh, gentleman that I was mentioning, uh, a few minutes ago.

What he noticed also, and this is a sign for to purely pay attention to, is that there was never enough.

What's next? This is still not to the degree that I want it to be in my life." How do they then go from there to feeling like they're, they're really living in their zone of genius and not sort of tiptoeing into it?

Hmm.

Uh, as if by magic, a lot of relationships will end up with a very tidy person and a very sloppy person, and a very logical person and a very dizzyingly emotional person.

And having those two things finally come into harmony with each other takes a major life commitment.

You know, that's gotta be one of the things you're really committed to, is to have good, close personal relationships.

If you don't do that, ooh.

You know, I've had deathbed experiences where people told me things like, "I sure wish I'd been able to tell this person that I love them while they were still alive." You know? And oh, that gives me a very deep sense of ill at ease when I hear somebody talk about something that would be so easily fixable in what I call ten seconds of sweaty conversation.

Okay.

We had a woman in, um, from another country, and a fairly conservative country, and she was married to a man, a kind of a highly placed man, and she had an affair with her-- with his best friend, okay? And this was a one-night stand with his best friend when they were both at some conference or something like that.

How did you make that switch?

switch?Wow.

Well, this is a big life-changing moment in my life that happened in 1969.

And as I said, I was obese, but not only was I obese, I had a glandular problem I was born with that made me gain weight.

So I was the only fat kid in a family where everybody else was thin, and I was eating the same food.

And so I was taken around to different medical specialists and given shots and put on pills.

And anyway, but the problem never got resolved until this thing happened in 1969.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

So, there are really three big things that you have to do reliably over and over again thousands of times to have a good relationship, certainly with your beloved, but pretty much anybody.

And those three things are, you've got to get good at feeling your own feelings.

You've got to get good at knowing how you feel, because somebody's gonna ask you, a lot of times, "What are you feeling right now?" And we should be taught this in the first grade, but I didn't learn it until I was in graduate school, but there's a whole vocabulary of inner experience.

There's, "I'm angry." There's, "I'm sad." There's, "I'm scared." There's, "I'm sexually attracted to you." There's, "I don't know what I'm feeling." But there's a whole suite of things that can be said and tuned into in the realm of feeling.

So the first thing is both people, and if there's more, people have to get good at making this inner move where you kind of go inside and say, "Hmm, what's going on in me right now?" If you can't do that, well, (laughs) you know, we've had people in here in this very office who have been unable to do that, and they're suddenly, at retirement, now facing problems with their spouse or- or partner that they put off through all those years of being successful and everything.

And they always boil down to starting with, "How are we feeling inside?" The second thing that's absolutely essential to have a good relationship is telling the truth....

Hmm.