When was the last time you looked at your partner—really let your gaze linger and take them in? What is it to really see your partner, to hold them in your gaze and attention. Try it. Let your gaze linger just a little longer and notice what happens.

The last few decades of neuroscience have revealed much about the inner workings of the brain, and raised tantalizing questions about the nature of mind. Yet, long before the evolution of science, there was art.

Movies like Love Story, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and the more recent Her, all present relationships that develop, grow and change forms within a complex web of culture, family and personality.

Most of the world’s religions and cultures have a great walking story. Jesus and the Buddha are both said to have walked on water. Many tribal communities send members on a Spirit walk of one kind or another.

Mindfulness has been a part counseling practice and the psychotherapeutic lexicon since at least the 1970s and became more widely accepted as a valid component of mental health treatment in the early 90’s with the popularity of the so called third wave behavior therapies

The ability to turn towards your partner is connected to the practice of turning towards your self. Turning towards your self means inviting awareness of your own thoughts, feelings, behaviors, needs and body sensations, even when they are uncomfortable or undesirable.

Being itself is like this—round and seamless.  We see it in the many spherical objects of nature, we hear it in the looping sounds of bird calls and streams, sense it in the circle of human life, where birth and death seem to emerge from a single, mysterious point.