Beyond The Ecstasy of Love & the Agony of Relationships:
The Emotional Architecture of Intimate Relationships
Friday, June 23
7:00 p.m. - 10:30 p.m.
Kamm Hall Room 215
BW's Berea Campus
*Please bring a snack with you to eat during breaks.
RSVP to whylifesucks3@gmail.com.
While we may be focusing on the formal dimensions of our professional life, the reality is that our contentment as human beings is influenced significantly by the quality of our personal lives beyond the workday. This monologue will bring you perspectives on relationships drawn from some remarkably brilliant and loving mystics from the East like Osho whose profoundly transformative contribution to rejuvenating relationships may otherwise never reach your shore. One of the biggest mysteries of relationships is that when we fall in love, we seem to be momentarily in sync with the divine and with the sublime, the poetic and the profound. For many people, as the relationship progresses, however, the sublime dimensions disappear only to be replaced by an enormous sense of the mundane. Poetry becomes prose, the profound evolves into the shockingly cosmetic, the spontaneous degenerates into the ritualistic, the sublime becomes mundane and the relationship itself is pretty rapidly turned into a prison of repressed transferences, reminiscent of the feelings and struggles left over from childhood in relating to our primary caregivers. The lightness of being kindled by the magic of romance is soon replaced by the oppressively mundane "committed relationship", culminating often in marriage. The enchanting mystery of discovering "the other" disappears, only to be replaced by institutionally mandated rituals, responding to seemingly oppressive expectations and attending to the practical challenges of "putting up" with each other. Soon we arrive at a compromise that is best represented by the resigned state known to many as being in a "fine" marriage or relationship, with the "fine" representing a cover for everything brewing below the surface. Despite these realities, there are existential truths and powerful insights known to mystics that can help us understand deeply how these relationships that inspire the soul unfortunately evolve into relationships that deaden the spirit. The phrase 'you have to work on your relationship' is a testimony to the ways in which the phenomenon quickly moves from the realm of "play" into the domain of "work". In our everyday world, we often become mechanical in relating to the people most important to us and never tap fully into our own potential to love and experience each other deeply. The perspectives in this seminar are a wake-up call to help caffeinate our relationships so that we become more consciously aware of the ways in which we, as human beings, sabotage our own capacity for love and connection through a variety of self defeating strategies that we are not even consciously aware of. Over time our relationships become so full of judgments, resentments, resignation, and emotional distances building up slowly and incrementally that our centers, the core of our beings, never really touch, move and inspire each other anymore even as we sit and argue over painfully practical matters and family budgets. At worst, by attending this session, you will have wasted 3.5 hours-you won't because you can leave anytime you want! At best, you will leave, moved and inspired by insights from faraway lands and distant historical periods that can actually transform the fundamental quality of how you are relating to the most important people in your life.
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About the Speaker
Dr. Param Srikantia, a Professor in the School of Business at Baldwin Wallace University, is a former television host in India who is well acquainted with the art of energizing a live audience. Dr. Srikantia has recently embarked on public seminars based on non-traditional ways of unleashing human potential that have now grown to a contagious level of popularity reaching over 6500 attendees in Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Washington DC and the New York metropolitan areas. He was selected by an international training organization with a global outreach that feature "cutting edge" thinkers in management, to offer seminars to their membership base of Fortune 500 companies nationally. Additionally, his public outreach seminars have attracted practicing managers, entrepreneurs, physicians, attorneys, social workers, nurses, psychotherapists, public policy practitioners, labor leaders, and teachers. These ten public seminars embody an unusual form of education not currently available in most U.S. universities or corporations as they invoke very diverse methods and perspectives discovered across the world for tapping into the deepest reservoirs of human potential. He has authored over 35 scholarly papers in Management, Organizational Behavior, and Globalization that he has published or presented at conferences in the United States, Europe, Asia, South America and Africa. He holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University and Master’s Degrees in Business Administration, in Human Resources and in Organizational Psychology. Param has worked for the World Bank Group, Arthur Andersen, the Unilever Group, the American Cyanamid Company, Lederle Laboratories and the Tata Group of Companies. He has taught as Lead Faculty at the Weatherhead School of Management, at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio and as Visiting Faculty at the School of Public Policy, George Mason University, Washington D.C. He has also taught at the business program at the University of Iowa in the U.S., at Jamnalal Bajaj Institute in India and FAE Business School in Brazil.
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