One Two ONE: A Guidebook for Conscious Partnerships, Weddings, and Rededication Ceremonies
Lila Sophia Tresemer, David Tresemer

Every year, over two million couples get married in the United States alone. Many more millions come together to explore relationship. How many grasp the fullness of this opportunity?

A marriage or a deeply committed relationship provides an astonishing opportunity for growth. It opens a portal toward understanding Love—how to create Love and how to receive Love. We capitalize "Love” (and "Beloved”) in this book because we recognize the astonishing power of this wonder, this cohesive and cocreative energy of the universe itself. In our consultations with couples, we have advised and witnessed many relationships, some lasting and some not. But all of them resolved in a commitment to learn and grow from the experience, which in itself is a great success.

We intend to share our best discoveries on how to create a lasting, fulfilling relation-ship. This text can help you navigate into cocreative partnership or toward the design of a conscious marriage ceremony.

People are drawn to relate to each other, especially in a one-to-one primary relationship. A friend of ours has the job of assimilating refugees from war-torn African countries. She reports from her initial interviews that, even after losing everything, after living in horrible conditions on the edge of starvation and surviving a difficult journey by boat from the site of conflict, her clients tell her, "On the boat I met this guy, and he was really cute. What do you think?” Even in the most difficult circumstances, we are drawn to relationship.

Relationships are easily the most challenging, promising, compelling, and misunderstood part of our lives! Some people who have had near-death experiences report that one of the questions of the final exam after a life is, "How have you learned to love more?” Whether you believe in near-death experiences or not, it's an interesting inquiry about the purpose of a life. Because relationship is the way we grow Love at our deepest foundations, we offer this book to create more consciousness in the crafting of relationship, and therefore of Love. Excellence in any art or craft requires practice. The exercises here will offer you and your partner that opportunity. Whether you are planning a wedding or simple dedication ceremony, you will find useful tools for that. You can also see these tools in action in our companion DVD on relationships, titled Couple's Illumination: Creating Conscious Partnerships (along with its predecessor, Brain Illumination). But while we focus on the design of ceremony or ritual, we dedicate this book and our work towards the pursuit of deeper clarity and expression of Love.

The word "relationship” has in it a genius. The prefix re- means bringing back, or coming back to. The lat comes from latus, meaning something you bear or carry. The next part, the suffix -tion, confers on the word a thingness, as in a state or condi-tion or ac-tion. You keep coming back to this thing, whatever it is, that you are bearing. The -ship part comes from the old Proto-Indo-European skap, meaning to create or ordain. You create or ordain or recognize a thing that exists within every Two, and you keep coming back to it. The word itself collects reminders about what relationships are, and what their possibilities can be.

In this book, we emphasize the one primary relationship/partnership in your life. However, nearly everything we say here can be applied to the many relationships in the numerous branches and areas of your life. We are interested in increasing your level of consciousness (con meaning "with,” scious meaning "to know,” and, -ness meaning "a state,” thus a state of knowing with oneself or another) so that you can make use of these possibilities and not come to regret opportunities missed.

We are also interested in helping you find and create the magic in that great occasion of the conscious wedding, whether it's your first wedding, your second, your third or more, a rededication of an existing marriage, or a commitment ceremony to a relationship that does not involve legal or religious documents. "Wedding” comes from older words involving a pledge, a covenant, a promise. We will guide you to better understand what a pledge means to your being, and to that of an apparent other.

There are other workbooks on relationships. What makes this workbook different is the ways it can help you to experience your relationship and your wedding as sacred. The short-term rewards of relationship may seem important, but the long-term—and the very long- term—rewards are even more important. In service of this sacredness, we offer the notion that ceremony or ritual can add vitality and depth to relationship. Our culture has largely lost touch with the power of ritual and ceremony as an enactment of transformation, its stimulation and confirmation. We help you plan an event that becomes a reflection of the values and vision of your relationship. A ceremony is like the seed of the tree you are choosing to grow—it has all the information in it to get the tree growing in the best way. Some people may say, "Let's have great music, good wine, all of our friends, beautiful clothing—the rest of the ceremony will take care of itself.” In our experience "the rest” won't take care of itself. You have to take care of it. We have found that the wedding's success and its memorability rely on the foundation of your knowledge of yourself and your partner. The exercises in this book can help you increase this knowledge. Then your wedding becomes an honoring of the beauty of your union, which can bring healing to yourselves, your family, your community, and, honestly, to every living thing.

In the past we have circulated this material among friends who were preparing for marriage or rededication, to help clarify their goals, visions, and aspirations. They did the suggested exercises, and then developed their appropriate ceremony. We have included some of their experiences in the text.

Whether you are planning a wedding or wishing to deepen your relationship without a formal ceremony, this workbook will be helpful to you. Committed couples of every sort—indeed, partners in every relationship, no matter what the gender or the age—can see the tools and processes in this book as the vessel or the ship that will carry that partnering, the relation-ship, into new territory. Dedicating time to crafting that ship together will support its strength and integrity. Making agreements now about how you will choose to maintain the ship will help ensure a vessel more likely to weather storms, even to be strengthened by them.

The process we present can—and likely will—bring up difficult places in the relationship that a couple has avoided addressing. Our basic philosophy is that these challenges should be celebrated, as they create the opportunity for expansion. Some have spoken of "relationship as guru,” meaning the process of relationship is a teacher of your development. Very few experiences will bring us face to face with limitation, denial, exhilaration, and ecstasy as clearly and perfectly!

If you're already technically or legally married, but find that both you and your partner have changed after some years have passed, you may wish to create a rededication. Then much of Part One will also be useful to you. Or you may simply wish to enliven your present relationship by doing some of the exercises with your partner. That in itself will be rewarding. We highly recommend you each buy a personal journal for this work. Use these journals throughout the recom-mended exercises. What you will discover by tracking your own experiences can serve as a basis for your cer-emonial design. We recommend that you make a commitment to spend time together on some or all of these exercises, especially if you are planning a formal wedding or ceremony, because you will be cocreating this event with one another. We intend to respect your individual belief systems, so don't worry that we are trying to coerce you toward a specific design. The workbook will allow you to make choices with full respect of your faith and what is sacred to you. We are sharing tools to help you create the design that will be most fulfilling, given your goals, dreams, and visions.

Relationships, ideally, are all about lifting the veils of illusion to rediscover truth. Our culture has many notions of relationship that can create illusions between you. You put on the rose-colored glasses and your partner sure does look rosy! Some think that working on relationship means finding ways to maintain that illusion. We don't approach relationship that way, and haven't seen any couples who can successfully fool themselves for very long. If you connect to your soul and to the soul of the other, the veils will lift and something extraordinary happens. You come into relationship with a living, breathing, life-filled inspiration of soul! The question is how to accomplish that. How do you lift the veils and become authentic with one another, deliberately and by choice? The communication tools in Chapter Six are one good place to begin, and you can go right there if one person resisted getting this workbook. This resistance may stem from a fear that some rose-colored bubble of relationship may be popped. We suggest that the reality is far more dazzling and wonderful than the illusion, so pop the bubbles, and enjoy more fully!

We call this a workbook because it takes work, and leads to transformation. Without someone to relate to, you could easily stay the same. Relationship provides a compelling opportunity to transform.

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