When you start a relationship, something special becomes possible, something unique that the world has never known before. However - how do you figure out what that “something special” is? And how can your love be a vehicle for actually helping us evolve? This episode is an invitation to you to step into an experience of “shared consciousness” - what happens when you’re able to explore the space created between you and another person. Our guest is Patricia Albere, founder of the Evolutionary Collective and author of Evolutionary Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Mutual Awakening. Patricia has been guiding others on this path for years, exploring the edges of how consciousness shifts when two (or more) people step into it together. In her book, and in this episode, we talk about the practical aspects of her work - how it translates into higher levels of connectedness, personal growth, healing, feeling supported, and supporting others. And we also talk about some of the fundamental principles that are required when you want to explore and experiment with your partner (or others in your life who are up for the journey).
Here is a link to the first appearance of Patricia Albere on Relationship Alive: Episode 6 - How to Deepen Intimacy through Shared Consciousness.
And, as always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it!
Resources:
Check out Patricia Albere's website
Read Patricia’s new book, Evolutionary Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Mutual Awakening
FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide
www.neilsattin.com/patricia2 Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Patricia Albere
Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out
Transcript:
Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. What we're trying to do with this show is create a change in culture, and for the purposes of our conversation here, most of that change has to do with how we relate to our partners, our lovers, our spouses, our boyfriends and girlfriends and other friends. That's the foundation of the conversation that we're having here, and we're part of a larger conversation about how we relate to each other in the world in general.
Neil Sattin: In order to talk more about that and where our relatedness is going, how to take conventional relationships and actually turn them into something that's deeper, more fulfilling, more enlivening, and part of the evolution of our species and our culture, I brought in someone really special who was here in the early days of the podcast. Her name is Patricia Albere and she is here on the heels of releasing her new book, Evolutionary Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Mutual Awakening.
Neil Sattin: She was on Relationship Alive way back in episode six, and if you're interested in hearing that episode you can go to neilsattin.com/patricia and that will take you there so you can hear what we talked about the first time she was on the show. We may take a moment this time around to talk a little bit about mutual awakening and how to do it, which is something that we talked about back then, but otherwise we are going to dive even more deeply into the skills of relatedness and how to create something even more amazing as you explore the shared consciousness created between you and your partner, or you and someone else with whom you feel that spark of an evolutionary relationship. We're going to talk about what that means in just a moment.
Neil Sattin: If you are interested in downloading the transcript and action guide for this episode, you can do that at neilsattin.com/patricia2, that's the name Patricia and the number 2, or as always, you can text the word PASSION to the number 33444 and follow the instructions, and that will get you all the information that you need. Okay, I think that's it for now. Patricia Albere, thank you so much for joining us again here today on Relationship Alive.
Patricia Albere: I am just smiling, I'm just so happy to be with you and to be able to have another conversation about something that we're both passionate about.
Neil Sattin: Yes. I don't want to set an unrealistic expectation but I will say that after our last conversation, I just remember this so clearly. I got off Skype and I went and found Chloe, my wife, and I was just like, "That was probably the most powerful conversation I've had up until that point." You know, it was just so expansive and it's such a treat to be able to have you back here today.
Patricia Albere: Thank you.
Neil Sattin: The title of your book, it's called Evolutionary Relationships, and I don't think we can really talk about the practice of mutual awakening and all of the activating principles - we will hopefully cover some of those on today's conversation - without talking about what you even mean about evolutionary relationship. How is that different than the kind of relationships that we're used to having and why is it so important?
Patricia Albere: Great question. Evolutionary relationship, you can approach it from a couple of different angles. One is evolutionary. We are lucky enough as human beings to be conscious of the fact that evolution exists, that we're actually headed somewhere. For thousands of years no one had that concept at all. I mean basically we were just on the planet, we were living, we were doing whatever we were doing, and for the most part time and the movement of time was very ... It looked like things weren't even changing. Like most people's children did the same thing they did.
Patricia Albere: If you think of thousands and thousands of years, the sense of no change was pretty strong. For us, we are now living at a time where the quality of change and how everything is moving is so crazily intense. Every day scientists are discovering things, there's technology. I mean it's like the newness of what is occurring and how we are hooking up and even consciousness itself is evolving, that to be connected to the fact that your relationships too are evolving, love is evolving.
Patricia Albere: We think love is just some eternal expression between human beings that has been the same forever, and actually love itself is evolving. For relationships, the evolutionary quality of relationships, I talked about in the first chapter, first or second chapter, I can't remember, talking about Maslow's hierarchy. If you look at relationships from Maslow's hierarchy of needs, some relationships, none of it is bad or good, it's just different. You can have a romantic or a marriage type relationship where in a way it's at the basic needs of Maslow at the bottom, it turns into logistics.
Patricia Albere: Sex is kind of very basic, you have a home together, you take care of things, you get food, you have meals, you get a new car, there can be a quality where much of the relationship starts getting devoted to just the survival needs of what it means to live together. Just even saying that sometimes you're like, "Ooh". You can feel when your relationship is sort of slipped into, that that becomes the dominant.
Patricia Albere: Even if you're doing it at a high level of going on vacations and getting another fabulous car, or something else, it becomes kind of on a survival level and the relatedness is not very awake and expanded, and there aren't tons of potentials that are going to show up between you.
Patricia Albere: Next level up you would move into safety and security. Most people navigate that in their relationships to feel safe, safe psychologically and physically with each other, and secure and able to trust. Next level up is belonging, a sense of being loved. Some relationships never get beyond sort of like third level up which is just that just to be loved and to feel like you have a sense of belonging, you belong to one another, is the scope and the territory of the level of relatedness which is also important and wonderful, but it isn't on the edge of evolution.
Patricia Albere: Evolution is always pushing into the newness into what's possible for human beings. An evolutionary relationship is like where our human potentials and possibilities are evolving into, moving into. As you move up the scale, I went through the whole thing, but on that higher levels, there's the two higher levels, one is called actualization. You can be with a partner where you experience empowering one another to really actualize your potentials to both be successful in the world, to make a difference or whatever it is that you have a value for in that way, and to love each other from more of a place of abundance rather than need.
Patricia Albere: Instead of just "I need this" or "I need a relationship for the various things", you start to feel like an overflow, like you actually have a lot to give and you can give to one another.
Neil Sattin: Right. In our first conversation we talked about how in that kind of relationship you can even be taking a stand for each other, like, "I'm taking a stand for you being the best you could possibly be."
Patricia Albere: Yes, definitely. I think a lot of the current things, you know, the courses and conversations, and the things that you can do are very much about empowering that sense of actualization where you have two independent human beings who are self-authoring. They're trying to really fulfill themselves, their higher purpose, their sense of self, their interior sense of self, and that you have two people loving each other from being more actualized whether it's in the world or also in your own consciousness and development.
Patricia Albere: The evolutionary relationship is taking it a step further which is something that not everybody needs to do but some of us need to. If evolution is going to continue to move, the thing that is worth knowing is that it isn't just about relationship, evolution itself is happening through human consciousness and human relationship at this point. We aren't creating new creatures, in fact we're eliminating many of them.
Patricia Albere: Evolution isn't fooling around with "how do we have new species", where it's interested, where the push is in the entire movement of billions of years of evolution is human consciousness is where it's happening. Where it's happening in human consciousness is no longer with just people's individual consciousness, that's been being worked with for the last few thousand years. Individual enlightenment, personal transformation, individual salvation through like religion and stuff has been -
Neil Sattin: Right, that's old news.
Patricia Albere: Kind of. The way I see it, that's been going on. We've been doing that for a few thousand years, somewhat, I guess okay, and we're failing in a lot of it, but that's not new. Science is pointing to that we're not separate objects, that actually the only thing that's real is exchanging. There's no there there, there's no atom. We think there's little billiard balls that we're made of. When they go down to the root of the root of what's there, they don't find anything, what they find is exchange. These little balls of exchanging energies. If you want to translate that, that is relating. What that is, is relationship and relating.
Patricia Albere: Ultimately, all there is, is relating on the most fundamental levels, and the way that humans can begin to push the consciousness, awaken to and begin to be a part of, being able to manage the kind of consciousness that we need to start to get access to, kind of like atomic fusion, is what is the space between us, what is actually happening in the space between humans and how can we lean into and become awake to, and sensitive to reality together.
Neil Sattin: I'm curious to know a couple of things, one is do you recall when you first became aware that that was what was happening? That there was this space between a shared consciousness that was where evolution was taking us. Was there like an "aha" moment for you around that?
Patricia Albere: Yes. I didn't know about the evolutionary part until later, but my path has always been I'm like taken into experiences and then 10 years later I understand what happened. I guess I'm mystic at heart, I'm willing to not know. I'm sure I probably shared a bit of it on the first conversation that we had, but it happened in a relationship. There was a man named Peter who was a beautiful German mystic, and we fell in love and came together. His obsession for awakening and for enlightenment was from the moment he woke up all the way through his sleep. He never was interested in anything other than that and he never stopped paying attention to awakening, to consciousness, to being fully present in every moment. He was pretty obsessed.
Patricia Albere: For me, I had had a background of working with thousands of people and I think my heart, my ability to love was very developed. I had a childhood that ... A great mom. My heart was very available. When we came together and I am convinced that he is my twin soul, it was one of those things that you couldn't not recognize and you couldn't not be in. The magnet that pulls us together was not ... There was no choice, it was choiceless.
Patricia Albere: Our being together, what happened was was as we said yes to one another and we were so focused on each other and the space that was happening between us, and with his meditative consciousness and my capacity and attunement to love and the energies and what's going on there, and then just the way we felt about each other, we were so made one, and 24/7 we were always aware of what was happening. There was never a moment where he was unaware of what was happening with me, what was happening with us and vice versa. We never were separate, we never went in to like, "I'm just me over here, and he is just him over there, and I don't really know what's going on."
Patricia Albere: Most relationships, if people look are pretty separate. There's times of relating, it's always sort of there, but a lot of the time we're functioning on two separate tracks a lot. Especially in that actualized level, you're very focused on your own separate track even though you love each other and you're supporting each other. This was being what I call interpenetrated, like we were completely inside each other and inside of this relatedness that we were together.
Patricia Albere: I had four years of that before he was in a car accident, and he was brain injured, then eventually he died. I was in something where we were opening and being taken somewhere. Evolution was definitely having a field day with us. I felt it, I felt like I'd look at him sometimes like we'd make love or something would happen and I would look at him and I'd go, "Oh my god." I felt like love itself had just gone some place where it had never been before.
Patricia Albere: Sometimes it felt more like it was just beautiful, and full and amazing, but there were times where I could actually feel the newness of existence finding new pathways because we were so available. Just like if you were two great tennis players, like if you're two genius tennis players, sometimes tennis goes some place where tennis has never been before. It was pretty exciting to have that in the level of relatedness.
Patricia Albere: For me when I later found out many years later about evolution and about the edge of evolution, and about consciousness, I could see that what I had experienced with him was part of the future of where we were headed. Where not just couples were headed, but that the multiple beloved. There is a way to be connected that has that mystical dimension, that has our divinity being evoked as much as even more than just our humanity and our limitations. That's pretty exciting.
Neil Sattin: Yes. When I hear that what I am brought to is thinking about the capacity that we have to experience the miracle of life, the blessing of interrelatedness to bring that into even just our simple day-to-day interactions which brings a quality of aliveness that once you experience it I think it's challenging to be like, "Yeah, I'm just gonna go back to paying the bills and pretending this doesn't exist."
Patricia Albere: It's true. There's even a more, to me, kind of exciting opportunity in all of it for those of us who are drawn to love, drawn to pay attention to relatedness as you are, as we are, and I'm sure the people that are obviously listening to this. The thing that's so exciting that I didn't know when I was with Peter was the quality of the consciousness that we were developing was different than nondual consciousness. Those people who have done a lot of meditation and a lot of work in nondual quality of consciousness which is usually what people consider being enlightened or awake.
Patricia Albere: It's completely different than that. There's actually a new kind of consciousness that's absolutely enlightened but it's not that. When they do brain studies they can actually see that when you're meditating which is by yourself with your eyes closed in silence, you are learning how to let go of thinking, you're learning how to move into a certain state where they find that the mind when they measure it, you're letting go of your particular relationship to the world. You go into a deep state of relaxation and the brain goes into a certain place.
Patricia Albere: When you're doing the kind of practices that we're doing, that I'm practicing and working with people where it's like super focus with the other, with the space between, your brain goes into this amazingly other place, it ignites different lobes and parietal. I don't remember the names of all of it but it activates your brain in such a way that it goes into a place of flow, it goes into a place of like joy and positive love, like different kinds of experiences and energies that lift people. Lift their mood and lift their stabilization there, and it also allows them to be incredibly engaged in the world.
Patricia Albere: Like you're in contact with this kind of intimacy, and love and care for the trees, for your kids. The feeling of intimacy, like everything is touching everything, like you feel like you're inside your cat when your petting their fur, like you're both the fur and the cat. It makes sense because ultimately with love or lovers, people that have studied tantra, you experience your lover, you're like inside them experiencing their experience, your experience and then something else simultaneously. This consciousness is that.
Patricia Albere: I think it's way more attuned to eyes open, moving around in this world, and it is what is necessary. It's a kind of flow state rather than just being in yourself, focused on your higher purpose, focused on how you feel, grounded in your body. All of that is good but it's so separate, and it's not like, "You know, as long I am completely focused on my own subjective experience, and how I feel, and how I'm moving, and what I want and where I'm headed and all the rest of it", I'm not all of that related.
Patricia Albere: That makes a certain kind of flow not possible, it also makes the fact that 7.5 billion people right now moving towards 10 billion in 2050, to me, evolution is not that interested in everyone individually really knowing themselves only, it's not going to really work.
Neil Sattin: It's going to be a lot of life coaches.
Patricia Albere: Oh my god, we're going to have a problem. We need to learn how to be like those sports teams, and the people that, well we see them become like one organism, and then spectacularly empowered to be individuals within it. Like the way basketball team that's really got that oneness, all the team members are like knocking it out of the park but they're not operating individually, there's this oneness of the way that they're flowing and moving together that's tastable. My work is about ... We've hacked into how do you bring people into that level of consciousness and relatedness without having to have like a basketball or a violin.
Neil Sattin: There are two places I want to go right now, one is giving you listening a taste of what we're talking about, like how this actually happens, and then there's the question that's in my mind around like how do you know if a certain person that you're interacting with, how do you know if this evolutionary potential is there between the two of you?
Patricia Albere: Interesting. The first thing would be, as we've talked about, people can download a couple of chapters of the book in evolutionarycollective.com. You personally need to first go, "What is she talking about? And who am I in relationship to this?" If it starts to make more and more sense, if you feel like you're a candidate or maybe you're quoted for this edge of evolution, to understand more about it and to begin to experience it for yourself.
Patricia Albere: There are ways that we take people into the practice. There are certain practices like meditation that give you a very powerful experience of being in this consciousness with another human being who's also interested in being the consciousness with you, because you need two people that are mutually interested which is one of the great things and it's one of the problems because you can't do it by yourself. You can't just do it with anybody. If you have somebody sitting across from you who's kind of going, "I don't really wanna do this and I don't really wanna be here", it's not going to work.
Patricia Albere: The first thing is find out for yourself, then from there ... You read the book together, you could start to do the practices, you could then begin to invite someone into like, "Would you be willing to experiment with me and see, and see what happens for us?", like you and your wife, and start to see if something begins to open in a way that is compelling for both of you.
Neil Sattin: Actually you were just mentioning talking about the brain activity that might be involved in this kinds of practice. We just released an interview with Alex Katehakis who, she focuses mainly on addiction, and sex, and love addiction, and the power of relatedness in healing the pathways that went offline and that created an opportunity for addiction to emerge in a person. I can imagine this practice will have an enormous healing potential for connection, like if you're in a place that feels really disconnected from your partner if you can invite them into it in a way where they feel like, "Yeah, I'm willing to give that a whirl."
Neil Sattin: The kind of presence with each other that we're talking about, and we'll get a little bit more into that I think, offers a healing experience when you're bringing those parts of your brain back online. This is total speculation, but it must be that when you set up that kind of resonance that's what allows this shared consciousness to happen.
Patricia Albere: Yes, definitely. It was so amazing. I just came from teaching for like almost eight days or nine days which isn't usual, I mean normally I have some breaks in between. We have the people that are very, very interested in what can happen between people who are really inside this way of practicing and want to work together instead on their personal work. We have 100 people who are doing these kinds of practices with each other and just spent five days together in a retreat.
Patricia Albere: They're practicing all year long and we meet a couple of times a year, so we're building this quality of the beloved, of this amazing ridiculous-like levels of our nervous systems getting hooked up. What you're saying is, like the people that understand attachment theory and the various kinds of ways in which people develop, this is first of all like when people are inside of something that's large like that and the level of connectedness is so absolute, the pathways around not having had healthy attachment, and not being able to trust, and not being able to relax literally start getting handled without even paying attention to it.
Patricia Albere: So you're not actually processing that stuff, you're actually in a larger nervous system that's already stabilizing and harmonizing and regulating you which is crazy powerful as far as healing people. We're not doing it for that reason but that is happening. The other thing ... One of the most exciting things that's happened at least up until this week, the group is from all over, everybody came. There are people from Japan, and Australia, and Europe, and New York, and Vermont, and California.
Patricia Albere: We were all together and we've all been working together for anywhere as from one to eight years, there are people that have been in that. What started to happen, we were all together is you know how like when you're working with someone, and consciousness-wise, they can all of a sudden shift their consciousness and become totally silent or totally focused, or they could drop into a certain kind of depth reliably? You can just point the there and they go, "Whop", and they kind of go there.
Patricia Albere: Our collective being, because it actually feels like something that's bigger than us, literally has new skills. It was amazing. We could be in this powerful sense of unification, and focus and depth of love, and then if I said something you could tell if somebody started to think, there was a tiny bit of fragmentation, I could just point to it and it would just be like, "Woo."
Patricia Albere: The level of unity. One of the women shared this morning, we had a call earlier, she said she's always felt like a little bit afraid to speak up for herself in certain situations that are challenging. She always thought she should and blah, blah, blah, and she said there is something that is so powerfully in her now that she can't not. Almost like something was, some strength was placed - in her level of not being alone, her level of this consciousness connection that we have, she's standing on something that she never stood on before and it's changing her behavior. Which is kind of cool!
Neil Sattin: Yes, very cool. Bringing that back to the context of romantic relationship, it's very common that the battles that emerge are around actually fighting for connection, fighting to prove that you're not alone, and it can feel like you're really alone. Again, I can just imagine how creating a backdrop of connectedness has such a powerful impact on the level of trust in relationship as one example.
Patricia Albere: Yes. Part of what the practices are, I mean there is a main one but there are some different things, is where you learn to make the connection is not on the surface, it's not on the personality level, it's not even on that subtle connection level where you're feeling your heart, and there's like a deeper place that people usually are trained to connect from. We're actually moving it from the subtle to this causal dimension which is the deepest origination point of that particular human being and yourself.
Patricia Albere: When I can work with people I can get them to drop into this place, and from that place you're not solid. You're like this opening of who you are that's very particular but it's not a solid object, it's like what the scientists are saying - you're like this space of potential as Neil. When you and I connect from that deepest opening that you are, and you can see into the deepest place of where I am, and we literally start to connect from there, two spaces could connect, two fragrances can connect, two stones can't. Things that are solid can't actually interpenetrate.
Patricia Albere: When you start to build that level of the we, like you literally become a new kind of wine. Your grape and my grape, we become Merlot. When you're deepening and deepening into that, now does it mean that your personality and the crazy things that drive each other crazy go away? No. We still have separatenesses that are still going to operate but we have that to ... That becomes louder and louder and a place to return to and stand on. So that when you're dealing with the things that are different and challenging, you don't lose each other, you do it from being connected instead of separate.
Patricia Albere: Most arguments are completely separate. That's why people love having fights and making love because when you make love and you all of a sudden go, "Oh, it's you, it's me. You know, I remember you. You know, you don't look like the evil guy who's making me crazy." You go back to that place where the real connection is, and we have a very sophisticated but powerful way to just have humans find that, nurture that, deepen that because that's also where divinity arises from.
Patricia Albere: We include our human limitations and failings, but there's some source that I know Peter and I found where I felt myself as more beautiful, and more powerful. It was like I was almost witnessing her as he was. It was like some way of me being myself that I had never experienced nor had I ever been received in that way. My work is really devoted to deepening that for people, exploring that not as a spiritual bypass kind of thing but as making that louder and louder, and clearer, and more rich and substantial so that the other levels of us are kind of put more in their place. They're not everything.
Neil Sattin: Yes. We have had Jett Psaris on the show, one of the authors of Undefended Love, I'm not sure if her conversation will have aired by the time. We may do this one first. One of the places that she comes from, I'm not sure if you're familiar with her work at all is basically getting couples to the place where they're able to be totally open and vulnerable with each other.
Neil Sattin: When we're young we start out from a place like that and then we end up suffering some wound or something happens that creates a crack in the veneer of everything being one and perfect which gives us a really hard emotional internal experience. From that our personality emerges which she talks about as basically all of our ego structures that are about protecting us from the experience, from what we're afraid will happen if we're that vulnerable again.
Neil Sattin: Her practice is a lot about going inwards when you feel that fear happening, that closing happening. I love that this is almost like the equal and opposite approach to very similar way of getting at the essential self. Like what is there beneath the veneer of personality.
Patricia Albere: Yes. It's interesting because as you're speaking I'm realizing the direct access to the core which actually is findable - interestingly - I don't know why but it's almost like giving people ... Like if you're doing remote viewing and you give them coordinates. The coordinate of finding this deepest place in oneself is actually findable even though people think they can't, they find it.
Neil Sattin: Is that something we could talk about now?
Patricia Albere: I'm just saying when you find that and you deepen into that then when stuff comes up there's a way in the way that we practice where we turn towards whatever is there together. If I'm feeling defended, I'm feeling hard like cardboard, and I'm sensing into like the phenomenological reality of feeling separate. That would happen with Peter, sometimes we'd go, "Wow, it feels really flat." We'd go, "Yeah, it does, doesn't it?" we were like kids, like we were so curious about whatever was there, we didn't have like a certain kind of preference that it had to be always profound or deep.
Patricia Albere: Whatever was there, we were like we wanted to be close to that, and we wanted to be close together with it. When you turn that way towards whatever is there even if it's a weird defensive thing, it seems to unravel, it tends to show itself without you trying to do anything, and it tends to, in my experience, the power of things dissolving in the face of "the two" being with it instead of it's just my process and and it's my stuff. It's exciting because it moves very quickly and it feels different when you're not just by yourself working on your stuff.
Neil Sattin: Yes. It feels to me like there's alchemy in the space.
Patricia Albere: Yes, that's a good way of saying it, interesting. Yes, definitely. Part of what I'm excited about too, I mean I've worked for 40 years with people with their individual work, and I love people, and I've always been committed to people being able to express their highest, deepest selves and why they're here. For the people who are able to not make it all about them and want to explore the edges of where evolutionary relationships could go and what's possible together, what I find is that the kind of activation and healing, and empowering people to move forward is just a hundred times more powerful, and it makes sense.
Patricia Albere: If I was creating the universe, instead of having everybody selfishly working on themselves individually forever as the fastest mode, that wouldn't make sense. It makes sense that if we somehow find a way to come together that everything goes faster, that we're rewarded for that makes sense to me.
Neil Sattin: Yes.
Patricia Albere: It's more efficient, it's kind of like I can't build a house by myself, if we're like a hundred people we can do it.
Neil Sattin: Honestly, I'm also thinking about the power, like in the power of relatedness. I was just reading a book by Deborah Tannen about friendships among women, and it was talking about this girl who, she was on the autism spectrum, and seemingly incurable and getting worse. No amount of therapy, no amount of intervention from a teacher, like nothing was helping, and then she made a friend who actually accepted her. I think they connected around horses or something like that, and did this amazing turnaround where she went from being completely shut down to being open, socially engaged.
Neil Sattin: It was like the power of healing that was there in the relatedness versus trying to fix something, or cure something.
Patricia Albere: That's so beautiful. Here's another thing I'll throw in that you'll probably appreciate. I don't know if everyone will appreciate this. In this evolutionary piece, when you think about evolution there are jumps to evolution. We went from nothing to matter, so there was geosphere, there was just this dead planet here, and then from a dead planet life showed up which is kind of crazy, like how did that happen. There are jumps that just are completely miraculous. From dead matter to life, and then from life, from single celled creatures, we have Einstein, we have geniuses and human beings, and plants, and birds and everything come to life, and then humans with consciousness which is just a miracle.
Patricia Albere: From humans, we have what he calls the thinking layer. Teilhard de Chardin called that the noosphere , he said we go from the biosphere which is life and human life, to the thinking layer which is the noosphere which is all of culture, and language, and art, and philosophy, and psychology, everything that you're talking about on your show, and love. All of that he called the noosphere, and you can see it in the internet, you can see the physicality of this noosphere, hooking up, hooking up, hooking up, so that we have omnsicience. We can know anything anytime, we can contact each other.
Patricia Albere: If the aliens land outside my house like in the next five minutes, if I captured it on my phone, the whole world will know in about 10 minutes. If it was real, but it was compelling enough, billions of people would be focused on the same image and the same words in a heartbeat. It is unbelievable. That didn't even exist 10 years ago, and we are hooking up, hooking up, hooking up, right? People have it on their phones.
Patricia Albere: The noosphere was the next layer that evolution was innovating and is obviously pretty excited about. The next one is what I'm going to call the spondic sphere. Spondic love, the term is this experience of I am, may you be. In the way that we practice there's this experience of love, and when you love someone, it comes from some place that's deeper than your personality loving them. There's almost like this cosmic energy that wants to just go, "Ha, I want you to have everything. You know, like I love you, I love you." You just want to imbue them with everything. We feel that for our children. Sometimes our heart bursts into this kind of empowerment that is deeper than just human love.
Patricia Albere: You can feel it when you're on the other end of spondic love, it is palpable, you actually feel like part of your life just got made because this person loves you from a place that they're in and for you in a way that's real. This mutual spondic love which is also part of the consciousness that we're working with and the consciousness that I think is next, I think that the next place of innovation will be that kind of love where we, instead of being separate, instead of not being even neutral towards each other and just surviving on our own, or competing or actively using each other and stomping on each other.
Patricia Albere: This spondic quality of love and connectivity will be the foundation for a ridiculous amount of miracles, innovation, creativity, coming together, working together, doing things that can't be done, et cetera, et cetera, that's going to be the next explosion of where evolution is going to be working.
Neil Sattin: I'm going to ask a hard question here which is what's the place of monogamous relationships in the birthing of this interconnectedness and this evolutionary consciousness.
Patricia Albere: I think when you are in fact with your twin soul, it doesn't happen a lot, but when it happens, there is nowhere to go, there really isn't. Even if they ended up marrying someone else they are yours. You are so one and there is nowhere you want to be. The kind of sexuality, the kind of love and the depth that's shared, there's no desire for anyone else because the newness of love, and the depth, and the profundity of what's there is just crazy unfolding between you. You'd have to be crazy to want to actually go and try to be with someone that you didn't have that with. Maybe you eat the best food in the world and then you decide to go have a-
Neil Sattin: Have a burger.
Patricia Albere: McDonald's hamburger. I don't know why did I even want to do that.
Neil Sattin: It's just interesting because it sounds like the experience, because we're talking about being able to evoke this kind of consciousness in an exercise with a partner, and yet it is creating the experience of deep, deep love and interconnectedness.
Patricia Albere: There is still a discernment. The thing that I find with the groups of people is, what happens is because everyone is so starving for being seen for any kind of real depth and relatedness, the moment someone sees you deeply you think you want to have sex with them or that you love them. It's so pathetic, I mean we're so starving as humans, and it's nobody's fault. We live in a world of separation. People don't look at each other, we literally live in so much separation and isolation that we don't even realize that it doesn't have to be normal.
Patricia Albere: What happen is is like in the people that I'm working with intensively, I remember two people and they're both married to other people, they did a practice and they went somewhere, and they both came out and you look at them and you were like, "Whoa, what just happened?" They've gone to a level of love and depth that they didn't ever even experience with their partners.
Patricia Albere: Initially they were kind of like, "I don't know, you know, what do I do with that?" It was a man and a woman, and I just said keep allowing it, keep holding, and then more of that started to happen in the group. Part of what comes through then as you begin to create these deeper connections and you're being so nourished and so seen and you realize how abundant that is, you can then bring that to your partner. You don't have to go being, what do they call it, polyamorous.
Patricia Albere: Polyamory is a lot of work, to try to juggle. You have to have no life I think. To navigate one relationship is hard enough as you know, if you're trying to navigate with depth, and with openness, and transparency and honesty, two relationships or more, that takes a ridiculous amount of real energy and work. I respect it, I think that there is some newness, something that's opening there and people are learning and growing within that, so I'm not condemning that, I'm just saying I don't think that ultimately that's where we're headed, not at all. Because you can experience profound connection without having to have sex with everybody.
Neil Sattin: Thank you.
Patricia Albere: You're welcome.
Neil Sattin: This really makes me want to dive in to some of your activating principles.
Neil Sattin: Great. Patricia, like I mentioned in our first episode together, we talked about the mutual awakening practice. Could you give us just a quick like 30 second rundown. If you're going to try it with your partner, this is how you try it. Then we can talk about some of the principles that make it so unique in terms of your approach and how to really deepen in that experience.
Patricia Albere: I honestly, I can't do a 10-minute version of how to do it, I can't because it wouldn't really help and if people tried to do it from there it wouldn't work anyway. You need to know enough of where to come from, you need to take the time because otherwise ... People do it from the superficial level of self, it's pointless, it wouldn't do anything. Again, if they just go to evolutionarycollective.com and they at least download the first three chapters that will start them on their way. If they listen to the other interview that we did that will help as well. If they're genuinely curious, they're going to need to invest some time and energy in actually discovering what this is and how it works for real.
Patricia Albere: The activating principles which are in the book, the chapters in the book are basically mostly dedicated to not only how to do it but then how do you turn it on, how do you continue ... If you were to do it with your wife you would start to learn how to do it and then you could take a chapter and work with that for awhile to open it, to make it even more full, and to continue to work through the pieces.
Patricia Albere: One of them is engagement. It's simple but when your turns towards each other, to really recognize how fully engaged are you and how much more can you open and give yourself into the connection. If people just think about that for a moment, the next time they listen to their small child...how engaged are you? Are you just sort of passively listening, being polite, being a good parent and hoping that it won't take too long, or do you actually go over where their enthusiasm is, get inside their little six-year-old consciousness, try to really enter into them and engage fully in what it is that they're actually experiencing? That's one of them.
Patricia Albere: In life, you don't have to know how the practice works, to just pay attention to the engagement not as someone as separate but can you get inside them, can you be inside their world and then connect. That turns something on. When people are, when you're inside their world with them and then getting engaged, something happens that's different than if you're just listening from over where you are.
Neil Sattin: Can you talk about how that interacts with the next activating principle of commitment in terms of your committedness to staying inside as you work through whatever comes up.
Patricia Albere: That's a little bit bigger. If you created an evolutionary relationship, if you are practicing with each other, if you're entering into this interpenetrated consciousness, consciousness where instead of ... Most people have a subjective experience where "I feel this", and if I'm vulnerable I'll let you in on how I feel, I'll share it with you and you compassionately listen and usually relate to it from yourself - from the way you feel like that - which is still we're very separate.
Patricia Albere: Interpenetrating is where you learn how to place your consciousness. This is like against all the boundary stuff, but you actually go inside and you feel the other as they feel themselves. You feel me as I actually feel myself. There's a way that I guide people into how do you actually do that. When that level of relatedness is being developed and built, from there and from a commitment to each other, then the committed-ness make sense.
Patricia Albere: Like if something happens or if you do something that's driving me crazy, instead of me working it out in my head by myself and then announcing to you how I'm going to deal with it, or announcing to you that I'm leaving you, I'll let you know what I worked out for myself. I stay inside with you and I share with you, and we kind of go in together into what the resistance is, what the concern is. We do it from being inside the commitment to each other, and to the relationship, and to the experience that's actually there. I don't do it as a separate something. Does that makes sense to you?
Neil Sattin: Yes. What you're committing to is that you're involved in a process that you're co-creating, and so the act of going off on your own to figure something out is a step away from what could emerge if you gave that thing to the process that you're in.
Patricia Albere: Yes, right, and that we'll share it. It doesn't mean anyone is going to be perfect, it doesn't mean that we won't disturb each other in different ways, but that we bring it forth, and we bring it in, and we bring it towards, instead of that it's a function of separation. When you have that spondic relationship too, when you activate that in and for each other, that also makes it a lot safer.
Neil Sattin: Then you can actually be invested in the truth without it being something that's about separating.
Patricia Albere: Yes, totally.
Neil Sattin: Obviously we won't have time to talk about this whole topic but I didn't want to end this conversation without being able to talk for a moment about trust. I love the way that you articulate the different levels of trust. The level that you call basic trust, how that feeds into the way that we trust each other, and then the generative trust that leads to your trust growing and the expectation of it being potentially a little messy that's included there.
Neil Sattin: I'm wondering of you could just explain, because I think what would really be helpful for our listeners is if they could come away from this with a sense of what basic trust is, and then let's see where that takes us as we wrap up this conversation.
Patricia Albere: You keep asking me for the one-minute version of something that takes like-
Neil Sattin: I'm bad, I know I'm so bad.
Patricia Albere: The basic trust is obviously - there's one of the chapters that goes through that, relative trust and generative trust. There's a course that I have online that's in evergreen that people can buy that has two whole sessions dedicated to the basic trust part. To do the very simple version is basic trust is something that we have when we're born, until it's disturbed there's this sense of being connected to the flow of life where we feel like ... It's without thought, it's like things are going to work out.
Patricia Albere: If you get fed, you get off, you get a little frustrated and you get fed, and somebody picks you up. Different things are happening without too much frustration, you tend to grow up to be a human being who has some sense of being relaxed in life. Even if something is hard that's happening, you kind of sense that it's going to work out or you're going to figure out a way through it.
Patricia Albere: The people that have basic trust interfered with, they constantly are not getting what they need, they tense up and their egos are wired to try to make it all happen themselves. Ultimately, when basic trust is restored, you relax and life unfolds. Actually, faith, true faith, the kind that saints have, is basic trust restored, and that's full relaxation. You actually feel utterly okay being in the world that even when things don't go well.
Patricia Albere: It's unbelievably important, it shapes your relationship to absolutely everything, and it's one of those concepts that when you find out about it and you begin to work with it, it can change your whole life. It's super important. Obviously with the hundred people, that is what is partly being restored.
Neil Sattin: Right. That feeds into, if you can operate from that place then it makes that that much easier to have relative trust which you talk about as the way that two people learn to trust each other based on their agreements, and their humility, and their expectations. Again in your book, Evolutionary Relationships, it's such a compelling read because for one thing, it's not like an entire book about trust, but it also distills it in such a way that I think makes it really real and practical for you to examine.
Neil Sattin: This is an area like for instance, "my relationship has tons of trust based on our commitment, but we don't actually have the capacity to communicate in order to keep our trust intact", and so we have to increase our capacities. I love how you do that. What I love too is how it evolves to this generative trust and I think this is one of the hardest things in relationship because people expect like, "Oh, we're going for it and we're really deep and we're connecting, and we're interpenetrating with each other, then all of our problems are gonna go away."
Patricia Albere: Yes, not so.
Neil Sattin: How did that emerge for you, that concept of generative trust and why that's so important.
Patricia Albere: Having worked with people forever and just having been in relationship, I mean the clarity around that was just given. Because you have to manage all of it. The relative trust is also important. If you have somebody who never keeps their word no matter how deep the connection is, you're not going to trust them and you shouldn't because they're not trustable.
Neil Sattin: Right, or if they don't have the humility to be open to influence.
Patricia Albere: Absolutely. People have to also take responsibility for having character, and I think that in some of the post-modern work everybody's working and dealing with their limitations. We get to a point where we just assume everyone is doing the best they can, and people are following the flow. They are following their subjective experience individually, but they're not taking responsibility for being related and actually showing up and having character, and dealing with the impact of a certain lack of integrity in certain ways. That definitely gets addressed in the book.
Neil Sattin: Yes. It's funny that there are people like Dale Carnegie who write on and on, and on about how to become trustworthy, how to be someone that other people will turn to for influence. You sum it up pretty well in one chapter.
Patricia Albere: Cool, thanks.
Neil Sattin: Well, Patricia Albere, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today on Relationship Alive to dive more deeply into the question of what makes an evolutionary relationship, what's possible. Again, you can visit her website, evolutionarycollective.com where you can download the first three chapters of Patricia's book, Evolutionary Relationships, and also find out more about her work and her trainings. We will have links to Patricia's book and website in the detailed transcript and action guide for this episode which you can get at neilsattin.com/patricia2, or you can text the work PASSION to the number 33444 and follow the instructions.
Neil Sattin: Like I said, our first episode together, episode six, we do talk a little bit more about the actual mutual awakening process and I encourage you to check out that episode that we did together as well. In the mean time, thank you so much for joining us, Patricia. Is there anything else? Maybe you could just mention you do in person intensives where people can come and learn this.
Patricia Albere: Yes. People that are intrigued by the possibility of being with a cohort of other human beings that are really interested in this quality of relationship, there will be a three-day in New York in April, the 13th through the 15th, we only do those twice a year, it's kind of special. If they sign up for the book, they'll have access to knowing what's happening and then people can, from the menu of what's there, see if something serves them. Thank you and thank you Neil, you do such a good job with this and with bringing just a myriad of ways to empower people with relatedness which I really respect.
Neil Sattin: Thank you, I appreciate your saying that.
Resources:
Check out Patricia Albere's website
Read Patricia’s new book, Evolutionary Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Mutual Awakening
FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide
www.neilsattin.com/patricia2 Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Patricia Albere
Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out
