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Cheri Huber
Talk about it: Be the Person You Want to Find
Cheri comes from the Zen tradition (if Zen can be said to be a "tradition") and is also mentioned here, in the Spiritual Giants User's Guide. Her book Be the Person You Want to Find is the only one she has written that focuses primary on relationships, with all her works focusing on spiritual and/or psychological issues such as depression and self-acceptance. Be the Person You Want to Find is a good book, very sound and solid. She combines a great deal of potentially complex and confusing thinking together in a way that is very direct and simple. In her own words, "In this book, we aren't going to give you tools, techniques, and formulas for trying to avoid or fix difficult situations in relationship. Our interests are awareness and self-knowledge, freedom and mastery." Her premise is one shared by many others (including Roy Masters, John Gray, Harville Hendrix and others) is that a very important factor in relationships is the influence of one's past, or childhood conditioning. While she speaks about overcoming the conditioning and programming of childhood that interferes with relationships, she does not get overburdened in psychological jargon and "healing" work as seen in, for example, the otherwise very good work of Hendrix. And like Roy Masters, and Barry Long, she recommends meditation and stillness as a way to free oneself of or "burn away" conditioning. On the very minor negative side, the cartoons and crayon-like format of the book along with it's pencil drawings may be irritating to some, soothing to others. This is a minor point except that the principles outlined are somewhat common-sense and deceptively simple . . . almost too simple, in fact, such that they make perfect sense while one is reading them, but in a way, are easily forgotten as soon as one puts the book down and gets absorbed once again in "conditioning." The truly hard work is in applying the principles and carrying them over into real life. In addition, because she is apparently not claiming or trying to write a comprehensive overview of relationships, she makes no mention of certain other practical matters, such as key male-female differences (as mentioned by Gray, Hendrix, and others). Thus, if Huber's message is used as one's primary or sole approach, the a wife may, for example, practice "centering" or "mindfulness" to deal with her irritation at her husband loving football games so much, rather than truly understanding what is behind it (as Deida might say, her lack of trust in his purpose, direction, or "presence."). Further, the basic premise behind much of her material is written toward the end of the book on page 186: "I can take care of myself, meet my own needs, make myself feel better, be who I want to find." Translation: "I am an independent, self-contained, not-dependent island that is not affected or made unhappy in any way by whatever anybody else does." This isn't exactly the most heartwarming, toe-curling description of "love", and is rather a very accurate description of "Stage Two" relationships in the work of David Deida. Once a person has developed this, is living with this mindset for some time and has started wondering "is this it?", they might want to look into the "Stage Three" work of David Deida Be the Person You Want To Find is a very good introduction to the basic principles of deep relationship dynamics, and even better if they are successfully taken to heart and practiced. Talk about it:
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