Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks on Finding the Right Partner (Interview Archive)
A moment stands out for me. About a year after some of the early work I did, I had an experience one morning that reorganized how I understood myself. For the first time I could sense all the way down through the layers, past the emotions, into the part of me that isn't shaped by circumstance, pure awareness, the quiet center. After that, everything got simpler. It was as if I'd pointed a flashlight into a dark room, so when I felt angry about something I could actually name it and sit with it.
Before that, though, I wrecked most of my relationships for one reason: I was never really present. The genuine version of me kept missing the appointment. And I couldn't locate anyone who was fully present either, probably because I wasn't.
By the time I met Katie I was 34, and I'd grown up enough to be useful to another person. I joke that I'd already committed every mistake available in a relationship. The one thing I hadn't done was stop and ask myself a plain question: what do I want more than anything? When I sat with that, the answer came clearly. I wanted a woman I could keep growing with across the years, someone devoted to honesty, someone willing to own her own life, someone following her own creative work. Two creative people walking through life holding each other up instead of wearing each other down.
Katie: Right.
Gay: That picture became a kind of mantra for me, and I only carried it around for about a month before Katie showed up. Once I got specific about what I actually wanted and held it steadily, there she was. It turned me into a lasting believer in manifestation. If I could find this extraordinary woman after roughly ten minutes of visualizing, anyone can pull off something like that.
So I'll say it plainly: wherever you happen to be in a relationship, you're about ten seconds away from a shift. That's really the heart of our work, the fast kind of change that becomes possible the instant you do what your body is asking of you. When fear shows up, your body is trying to tell you something. But most of us collect so many rules along the way (don't feel what you feel, don't listen to your body, keep it together) that by the time we reach adulthood we barely register sensation at all. Clawing back through that takes effort. I promise you the payoff lasts a lifetime.