My friend Tony opened a door in my conscious mind one evening when hi said, "Linda, you are really a geisha." At first I was taken aback, not knowing what it meant, and concerned geisha might have a connotation of powerless subservience. So asked Tony what he mean and I learned something.

Having been in the Orient serving in the Navy in Vietnam, Tony had experienced the geisha's very special way of relating. A gentle, respectful ever so personal attention and pampering made the geisha's clients feel cared about in a very deep and primal way. Attention to minute details—whether it be quality of touch, an offering of tea, a gentle fixing of the collar, a compassionate look in the eye— evoked a relational connection special and rare. The geisha created a non-verbal intimacy through attending to their client on the client's own terms.

I soon realized that how I related to the people I cared about in my life did resonate with the special personal attention of Tony's geisha experience. I love to cook and love to nurture my friends through this art form. However, I have realized that people's culinary tastes and passions are very personal and specific. To be a good cook, not only do I need to cook well, but also and even more importantly, I need to cook for my audience's tastes.

For example, one friend of mine loves potatoes roasted with tamari, garlic and olive oil. Another prefers the potatoes more plain with just olive oil and sea salt. And a third friend is less passionate about potatoes and prefers soup with a grain or noodles. If my cooking is truly an egression of love for my friends, the energy of love will be most dearly received when what I cook reflects back an understanding of who the friend uniquely is and what s/he uniquely enjoys. Now all three friends call me a geisha, and we make jokes about my delight in meeting other people on their own terms.

What is Real Love?

We are all familiar with images of mythical or fantasy love. Our culture offers far fewer models of grounded, present-time love. The very fact that the word "relationship" is generally used to refer only to a primary romantic partnership and no other emotionally intimate and significant human bonds is a powerful indicator of the relational ignorance and barrenness in our culture. Friendship is undervalued and often gets a bad rap. Friendship becomes what one gets rejected into when primary partnership is dismissed, cut off or ended.

Love becomes romanticized and sexualized in an ironically dispassionate and disembodied way. Sex becomes the currency of love, rather than a voice or expression of love. Attraction becomes a Hollywood projection screen, where lust becomes the benchmark of love rather than emotional intimacy, physical affection and actions of kindness. Who is lovable and who must be rejected is determined by "type"—a mental construct in many cases perpetrated by the media and our marketing culture. Love becomes objectified rather than a relational process of touching and being touched.

There is often a scarcity around love. For example, many people have a charge around saying the words "I love you," for fear it either needs to be reserved for a primary partner alone or for fear of the vulnerability that comes with saying these words. How sad that we have lost touch with love both as a spaciousness within the heart, and an affirmation of our interconnectedness to ourselves, one another and to life.

Life's most fundamental expression is closeness—physically, emotionally and spiritually. To touch and be touched. And through loving another person we receive a mirror of our own soul. In personal growth workshops I have participated in, intimacy is often defined as "into-me-l-see." Because of neglect, trauma, deprivation and all the other conditions that wound the heart, our vision becomes obscured and the mirrors we both offer and look into appear cracked. So we perceive a distorted image of both self and other, rather than reflecting and receiving the full being that is. In this sense, projection becomes what we give and receive when our heart's vision is obscured by life's wounds. The wounded heart is disconnected from pure love.

So many of our human relationships break down or become more distant because of this disconnection. While love should be easy, because we are all wounded, it is also hard work. Emotional intimacy is what brings up our "stuff"—our triggers, our uncharted parts, our unhealed historical patterns. This is often the truly charged territory of love. We run from the pain, the aloneness, the risk of abandonment, the sheer intensity of how we really feel. We run from what our lover evokes in us, failing to distinguish our own triggers from either the lover or their love.

How sad that our broken hearts often keep us from intimacy and love. To truly love, we must show up empty, with no agenda. As Dan Murphy, a member of the Human Awareness Institute community I am part of said in an e-mail, "The only way to know someone is to take the risk of not knowing anything to start." Each person is unique. Their gifts and their limits are unique. Their story is the only one of its kind. So, to truly have the space inside to see another person clearly, rather than a projection of who we think they are, and to be touched by them and take them in, we must work to heal our broken hearts.

It's Never Too Late to Heal to Heal an Empty Childhood

As young children develop, one of their needs from the adults around them is to be mirrored—to be seen, received, heard and responded to precisely for who they are. One could say a good parent is a bit of a geisha to their child. This is all done within the context of good limiting setting and appropriate boundaries. One can distinguish between a condition of emotional vulnerability which requires nurturance and a power struggle scenario requiring a different quality of response.

If a little boy asks for mommy to give him four toothpicks, and mommy beneficently get out the toothpick box and gives him four, the child's heart is validated and nourished. If mommy gets into a scarcity mentality of "Don't waste the toothpicks, one is enough," challenges "What do you need them for?" or axes the project all together, the child feels an emptiness in his heart. We may not know what the toothpicks mean to the child; however, what can be clear is that they do have meaning to the child.

Mirroring takes many forms. If a child makes up funny words and we repeat them back verbatim, the child may chortle and laugh with delight. If a child has a sad face, and we reach in asking, "Are you sad?" the child feels emotionally attended to. If we touch the child gently, both in a way and in a place they want to be touched, they feel seen and received. Offering another

The Narcissistic Wound

The narcissistic wound, which is often talked about in psychological aides, results from a lack of attention to a child's intimate needs in the way the child needed them. This creates a huge emotional, spiritual and often physical void that seeks to be filled in a desperate, unrelenting way as an adult.

The narcissistic wound colors all relationships, creating a barrier to intimacy and an experience of self-centeredness, as the wounded individual pursues an ephemeral mirror of self. Because we have not been emotionally, physically and spiritually held, we cannot hold ourselves, hold another or really allow another to hold us. Until we get loved on our own terms, we may not even know what our own terms are either generally or specifically. In this sense, narcissism is a common barrier to intimacy. And until we receive and incorporate into our being the experience of love on our own terms, we can neither be intimate with ourselves nor spacious enough to love someone else on their own terms.

In today's world, disembodied relating is more prevalent than embodied relating. E-mail has taken place of the handwritten letter. Phone calls are more common than face to face meetings. The power of seeing someone face to face is in being with them, in their energy field, their physical presence and space. With face to face relating, we can literally touch and be touched. We can use all our senses for expression and perception.

The sensory data available diminishes when technology replaces face to face. The telephone relies primarily on auditory and intuitive capacities. E-mail allows only an intuitive sensory response. There is no real time sensory interchange. As we become too busy to sit down for daily face to face dinners with the same person or people, we lose both a ritual of communion and the shared sensory experience included in tasting the food and sharing the common energy of the food itself.

I dance in the West Coast Swing dance community, where people can dance together for years and know no more about another person than their first name. People experience what my friend Helena calls "three minutes of intimacy." On the dance floor, for one song, two people meet in the body and touch, present or not. The relationship ends when the music stops. We learn to live with ungrounded momentary interactions, like emotional or spiritual one night stands. How difficult it is "connecting the dots"—meaning words spoken, feelings shared, invitations made, plans suggested that hold up from one moment to the next, that have a future beyond one moment in time.

Are full sensory relationships going extinct? We become physically intimate with substances we can eat and drink, making sensual contact with these foods in compensation for the relational sensory contact we really need. I noticed as one of my clients talked about "nursing" her cup of coffee. Nursing promotes an image of closeness and connection between mother and child. Nursing offers a primal sensory comfort. How sad that instead of nursing each other, we have chosen socially acceptable drugs like coffee and white sugar that send us on an energetic and emotional/spiritual roller coaster of ups and downs—chemical highs. We have learned to receive the anonymous holding of a substance rather than the personal, relational holding of another human being.

Restoring Our Capacity as Instruments of Perception 

A colleague of mine named Bobbie Joy, while attending an advisory meeting of the school I ran for many years made the comment, "Human beings are really organs of perception." Or perhaps the capacity to be an organ of perception is wired into us. Whether we are aware of it, develop it or use it is another matter entirely. Bobbie's comment acknowledges that we are indeed sensory beings, and that in our sensory experience is the root of love, intimacy and the soul's expression.

How do we restore this capacity within ourselves and in relationship to others if this capacity is indeed the foundation for loving ourselves and other people on their own terms? Some of this work can be done on our own. However, some can only be done in relationship to other people. Bringing a conscious mindfulness and presence to relating, having no agenda, offering no judgments and lots of curiosity support a spacious, open-hearted field of relating.

We can work to heal our obstructed vision and cracked mirrors by practicing active listening and saying yes to other's requests of us to meet their needs: Reflecting back exactly what the other is saying.... Giving them exactly what they need when we can... Showing another they are heard and understood by reflecting back the exact words and syntax of the other's speech... Touching them where they like to be touched with exactly the quality and depth of touch they want and need.... All of these ways of precise reflection allow another person to be loved on their own terms.

The juice of love is having another that makes it worth going to the other side of the dark tunnel. We can be that lover ourself. And we can choose to find a way to make those we love worthy of such courage and heart. Real love is a conscious, intentional, act of choice. It requires skill, but more so to the extent we are out of touch with our hearts. The more safely and fully we allow our hearts to heal and express, the more we can collectively heal the dark night of the soul.

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Linda Marks, MSM, has practiced heart-centered, psychospiritual body-centered psychotherapy for sixteen years.  She is founder of the Institute for Emotional-Kinesthetic Psychotherapy in Newton, and author of LIVING WITH VISION: RECLAIMING THE POWER OF THE HEART (Knowledge Systems, 1988).  She has taught and spoken nationally and internationally, and has been a leader in the emerging field of somatic psychology.  She lives in Newton, MA with her four year old son, Alexander.  Linda's new book EMBODYING THE SOUL: DANCING INTO LIFE is due for release in the spring of 2001.  You can contact her at (617)965-7846 or LSMHEART@aol.com