In this episode, Catherine Pawasarat Sensei and Doug Qapel Duncan explore the dynamics of conscious love in relationships. They dive into how cultural and family conditioning influences how we relate to our romantic and life partners. Examining these patterns highlights how shifting our perspective can lead to more mindful love in relationships. This episode, part of the Conscious Love audio course, discusses practical steps for creating intentional partnerships and cultivating enlightened love. Sensei and Qapel reveal how intimate relationships offer opportunities for awakening through love, transforming unconscious patterns into conscious awareness. Download the full course for free at planetdharma.com/podcastlove to learn how spiritual love connections can deepen your journey toward greater relationship growth and fulfillment.
In today’s episode, Catherine Pawasarat Sensei and Doug Qapel Duncan dive into intimate relationships and explore the skills needed to make a partnership truly work. They look at how our cultural and family conditioning plays out in how we relate to our romantic and life partners. Qapel and Sensei also highlight some ways we can begin to shift our incomplete views about how relationships should be so we can use them to become more conscious truly.
Today’s recording is part of a full audio course called Conscious Love. In the 4-part course, Sensei and Qapel cover a wide variety of topics related to intimate relationships. They explore the conditioning that impacts our relationships and how we experience our partners, including imprinting in the womb and our early experiences with family. And most importantly, they show us how we can use what our relationships show and teach us to wake up. Podcast listeners can download the entire course for free at planetdharma.com/podcastlove.
Welcome to Dharma If You Dare. I’m Christopher Lawley, Planet Dharma team member and producer of the podcast. In today’s episode, Catherine Pawasarat Sensei and Doug Qapel Duncan dive into intimate relationships and explore the skills needed to make a partnership truly work. They look at how our cultural and family conditioning plays out in how we relate to our romantic and life partners. Qapel and Sensei also highlight some ways we can begin to shift our incomplete views about how relationships should be, so we can use them to truly become more conscious. Today’s recording is part of a full audio course called Conscious Love. In the four-part course, Sensei and Qapel cover a wide variety of topics related to intimate relationships. They explore the conditioning that impacts our relationships and how we experience our partners, including imprinting in the womb and our early experiences with family. And most importantly, they show us how we can use what our relationships show and teach us to wake up. Podcast listeners can download the entire course for free at www.planetdharma.com/podcastlove. And now here’s today’s recording:
Qapel: Now relationship implies two. So we have swordsmanship, we have craftsmanship, we have horsemanship.
Catherine Sensei: In horsemanship the other one is the horse!
Qapel: But the ship, it implies skill. The word ship, in this case, implies skill or method and in a relationship, the key is relating. We have not been taught anything about relationship our entire lives. The only study course we did for relationship, was mom and dad, as kids, right? So the only thing I know about women is my mother and the only thing I know about men is my father, in terms of how this thing works in tandem. So all my women…
CS: This is due to the nuclear family that we’ve got now.
Qapel: All my relationships with women are colored and coded, to somehow… around this nucleus thing called my mother whose name was Grace. Right? And then my relationship to how men should be and how men should act and what men are about is this guy named Willis. So I think it’s kind of poetic that my mother was Grace and my father was Will. Maybe it motivated me to get more awake, I don’t know.
CS: So this is a really unnatural situation that we all find ourselves in because relationships are not binary, right? And humans are not binary. And if you’ve ever had the chance to be in a community that’s living, I’m not sure how to put it closer to the land, it’s not like ours is in North America. An entire village looks after the children. They’ve got a lot of different role models for what a male and female are like. Everybody, you know, a kid comes along and everybody older than that kid is kind of the parent at that moment and then the kid keeps going, and then you’re not.
Qapel: Huge.
CS: That’s a much more natural way of being and it’s one that we have to kind of re-create for ourselves as adults because of how our society is now.
Q: Yes. I lived in Inuit communities for years. I was working in the arctic and I was in this one little town with 108 people, mostly Inuit. And I had this Inuit young guy working with me and I said ‘Well where’s your brother?’ Who was, like six. He says ‘I don’t know.’ I said ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ He said,’I don’t know, he’s not living at our house.’ I mean 108 people and you don’t know where your brother is? He said ‘Oh I think he’s living with his friend now.’ So this six-year-old kid had decided he just wanted to live in this other house and he just went over and lived in the other house, and the parents of that house added him to their roster and you know, and then this other kid went over here. So the kids were like almost independent adults, and where they chose to live and who they chose to be with, they weren’t tied to this modeling. So as Catherine said, basically the boy, in this case, has 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 different men as models for maleness and the girl has 50, 60 different women as models from different ages for femaleness, right. And so they get this fuller view. Now, so we don’t get that, at least in my experience, but more importantly or equally importantly, is there no course – did you learn how to read? Have you learned how to write? You learned relationships. Was that on the curriculum somewhere? No? How about marriage? Any, like courses on marriage? Like you need a driver’s license to drive a car. You know you have to know how to do it, you gotta know how to fly a plane.
So the two most important things, arguably the two most important things in life: Children and relationships – and there’s no education about it. Maybe it’s changing now. But if it isn’t, there’s fundamentally no academic rating, which means in terms of our society how important is it? Not. And yet as people, we consider these things to be very, very important. But society says it is not important at all because we don’t give any education. Because we’ve got a very strong problem in the West, as the single most important factor in Western civilization is the strong ego, the big man, the big woman, the alphas. And in Asia it’s the group.
CS: Strong ego or weak ego?
Q: Well in the end it’s a weak ego. But you know, individual.
Q: So relationship implies two people: self, the great me and the other, the insignificant her. The great I, and this other thing that’s supposed to be doing what I want her to be doing, right? We get up in the morning, who do we think about? Mostly ourselves. When we go through our day, what are we thinking about? Mostly ourselves. Almost our entire day is spent self-referencing. So when we get to relationship, what are we going to do? Self-reference. Everything’s going to be how it affects me, how it.. whether I like it, whether I don’t like it.. Me, me, me, me, me all day long.
CS: This is important. It’s basically a habit, right? And it’s a really strong habit. Just because I get together with a new partner and it’s amazing and it’s wonderful because I’m falling in love. But that doesn’t mean that all of a sudden I’ve got new habits. Just habits don’t work that way.
Q: So there are two kinds of awareness here. There’s self-awareness, me, and there’s other awareness, you. And how much time do you really think or spend contemplating what the other person’s awareness actually is? Even in relationships you’re mostly thinking about how you’re being affected ,you’re not necessarily thinking very much about what they’re going through or what they’re being affected by what’s going on in their world or what they’re like. You should be interviewing their parents. I want an interview with your parents before I get together with you. And in fact, in India, it’s called arranged marriages and they are relatively more successful because they don’t let you be in charge of it. ‘NO, we’re in charge of you.’ Your parents, your grandparents and everybody else to go, ’You’re not gonna work out well with this guy.’ We’re not preaching arranged marriages, we’re just saying there’s some study or some examination that goes into this process. Other than like, learning to drive a car or something, when it comes to being a human being, meaning me, learning is not what you do unless you intentionally intend to learn who you are as you, which we don’t do. Generally we try to keep it habitual.
CS: So this is especially pronounced today because our societies are so diverse, right? So when we’re talking about ‘we’re bringing our parents’ and the subtext there is also our grandparents and our great grandparents, but we’re bringing really very foreign cultures that don’t necessarily get on well together. Like I knew a woman who was half English and half Italian and I was just like, wow, that must be really, must have been really interesting growing up in that kind of environment. But of course, if you go to the same high school together and you’re both in this case, you know, speaking a common language, you’re not really thinking of that, right. That you’re bringing in Downtown Perugia with sort of rural Herefordshire, right? But that is kind of what, when you really get to know people, at some point you’re sort of like, whoa, I did not know this is what I was getting into, right, and that’s where it’s so important to be able to step into that, because what we’re doing is really kind of an amazing cultural and psychic alchemy. Getting these things to work well together
Q: It’s important to remember you were your mother. I mean you weren’t you with your mother, you were your mother until you were two years of age. And even then cellularly, biologically your mother is with you until you die. Your dad kind of falls out of the picture when he dies. He doesn’t have the same impact, but you were biologically, emotionally, psychologically at every level, mentally, your mother for three years before you ever got to be you. And if you want to awaken. (CS: Before you realised you’re separate from her.) Yeah, and if you want to awaken, you have to make that part of the journey conscious, because it’s that part of the journey that just knocks you into first stage escapism, because it’s not conscious.
CS: That part of the journey you, mean the separation?
Q: Before the separation. From separation to conception – and you can’t do that by study and you can’t do that by courses and you can’t do that by reading books. The only way to do that is to go through it experientially, and the best way to do it experientially is through meditation because the mind can’t reach below two, there is no ego before two, and there’s no way you can think your way through this process you must go through the process, meditation is the way to do it. Call it something else if you like, but it’s fundamentally a meditative journey, and it has to be a conscious meditative journey. You have to do it with intent because otherwise, the ego will just push you back into that cycle. And it’s not hard to do, really. It isn’t really that hard to do. You just have to make that choice rather than running to your addictions or your distractions thinking that they’re important. And they’re important relatively, but they’re not important absolutely. Because absolutely what you’re after is liberation. That’s everything you’re doing, everything you’re seeking. Everything you’re involved in is a mirror to what you’re really after which is this thing called awakening, your liberation, and all the Saints have been telling you this forever And it’s where your contentment lies. It’s where peace lies. Because you’ve transcended the story, you transcended the fable. You transcended the history which now makes you capable of writing your own history, freely.
That’s a huge, huge thing. And it’s not hard, please, please. The Saints have been trying to tell you forever. It’s not hard to awaken. It’s hard to be you. From everybody else’s point of view, we put up with you. I hope this is clear. Your friends put up with you, your partners put up with you because they don’t want to be alone either. We love each other because we’re terrified of being alone. Be awake and then you’ll love everybody and everybody will, well sort of, love you. Except when you tell them, right, what we’re telling you. If you can meet it, just as it is, without dialogue, without commentary, without feeling sorry for yourself or angry or irritated or attached to a view or opinion or whatever: you just see it, let it arise, breathe and be absolutely quiet in the face of it without trying to get rid of it or change it for 90 seconds, it goes through your system in 90 seconds.
And that takes training because the subtlety of the ego to try to get in there and muck around with it is big. And just while we’re on the subject, meditation won’t awaken you either. Meditation won’t awaken you unless you have the intent to use that to become more conscious and aware. And if you do, then it will. When we get in a pair bond relationship, we’re doing basically two things. One is we’re trying to resolve the mother-father dialogue and two, we’re trying to get through the traumas, we’re trying to go through the traumas of separation and we’re using our partner as a mirror.
CS: Or a catalyst. And that’s especially with going back to what you said, that’s especially with that trauma of separation when we realized we were separate from our mother. And it’s terrifying, right? Because we felt so safe and then we feel so unsafe, in that moment. We feel so vulnerable and that’s where the control element comes from: we’re trying to get it safe again.
Q: So when we do this, resolve the mother-father, male-female… Basically the mother-father dialogue is the male-female aspects inside ourselves. We have to integrate the female and the male in ourselves. And when we do that marriage ends and conscious relationship begins.
Christopher: We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma If You Dare on your favorite podcast app to help more people find and benefit from these teachings and don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content sent directly to your device. Today’s recording is content from Sensei and Qapel’s audio course, Conscious Love. The course explores many aspects of intimate relationships, including the unconscious patterning that influences them and how to turn partnerships into opportunities for deep transformation. Podcast listeners can download the entire course for free at planetdharma.com/podcastlove
See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
