A personal comment from Craig, Mary's husband.

I come from a very well educated family.  I have degrees from Ivy League colleges.  I was a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) for many years.  I laughed at these "woo-woo" practitioners who claimed that 'faith heals' and 'you become what you think about.'  If I couldn't see it, touch it or test it, I wouldn't believe it.  I was an "impiricist," one who determines truth by testing theories with experiments that provided "impirical evidence" that something existed or worked in a particular way.  If you couldn't prove something this way, I was very skeptical.  Math and physics were things I believed in.

In my middle years, I began to read that physicists couldn't explain everything they were observing in sub-atomic particle theory and astro-physics.  I had been opening up to the fact that there might be something to this "woo-woo" stuff that you couldn't prove, but which seemed to be true, based on our experiences.  The more I looked into these things, the more I learned that there is a point in every area of scientific inquiry at which the leading experts run out of explanations for what they are observing.  The better we get at measuring and mathematically predicting phenomenon, the more we get unpredicted results.  Some examples:

Galileo tested and described gravity in the 16th century.  We all know what it is, and if you ignore it, you could get hurt by a falling object, right?  There are mathematical formulas for measuring it and predicting its effects.  Artillery telemetry and rockets to the moon depend on these formulas, so we pretty well know what we're dealing with, right?  But what is gravity?  How is it created?  Nobody knows.  The greatest scientific minds can't tell you why two physical bodies are attracted to each other.  This is the glue that holds everything in the universe together, holds galaxies together, holds the planets in orbit, keeps us from floating off into space.  But nobody understands how it does this.

To add to the mystery, the astro-physicists are now even questioning their understanding of gravity on the inter-galactic scale.  The Pioneer Space Probes are gaining speed as they get farther away from Earth, and they can't explain why.  Whole galaxies are spinning faster than they "should" be, based on our understanding of gravity.  They invented the concept of "dark matter" and determined that there must be a lot of it around to account for what they are seeing.  But they haven't been able to find this "dark matter."  Now they are looking at the assumptions they had been making about gravity.  If the Pioneer probes are accelerating and the galaxies are spinning too fast, maybe gravity increases with distance!  That's a mind-blower.  So we know less and less.  One scientist said recently: "We don't know anything about gravity.  Nothing."

Electricity and magnetism are other things we all take for granted.  They can be measured, controlled and put to use, but nobody can explain why they exist or what they are made of.  In 1920 a Russian physicist invented a musical instrument that you play without even touching it, called a thereminvox.  You've heard it played in many old sci-fi and horror movies, and in the Beach Boys' song 'Good Vibrations.'  It is a whining sound like a high-pitched voice and a violin combined.  It is an electronic device with two antennae.  When you hold your hands close to these antennae, you can control the pitch and volume of the sound.  How does this work?  What is the connection between holding your hands close to the thing and the sounds?  There is something going on here that goes beyond what you can see and touch.  It started me thinking that there might be something to these "healers" who wave their hands over a person to do the healing!

Medical doctors have developed very elaborate diagnoses and procedures, but when it gets right down to it, they will admit that they cannot cure diseases.  They can create the optimal conditions for curing diseases, but it is our bodies that ultimately do the healing.  For example, when you cut your finger, if you clean it, disinfect it, possibly even stitch it up, and bandage it, you've done just about everything you can do.  The rest is all done by your skin.  It "knows" how to create the cells that will bind the cut edges of skin together.  How do they know how to do that?  The medical experts run out of explanations at this point.  They can see these cells dividing under the microscope, and they can even break down the DNA that they know controls the process, and they can mess it up by adding or eliminating certain chemical compounds, but they ultimately cannot explain why or really even how it all happens.

There are also very reputable doctors doing studies that prove things like "prayer, touch, companionship, belief, visualization and laughter all improve survival rates."  Woo-woo.  Puts a new light on the "miracles" performed by the Man from Nazareth, doesn't it?

Then I met (and married) Mary Robinson.  She has done much more research than I have into these "unexplainable" areas of scientific inquiry.  And she has taken the results of her research and put them to good use in her work with people in crisis.  But she can't prove why what she does works.  Years ago, I would have dismissed her as a "kook."  Early in our marriage, I fought her for every inch of ground between my old paradigms and the way she lived her life. 

I wanted her to keep track of every dollar that she spent and stick to a budget, while she was in the habit of closing one bank account when it got too far out of whack and opening a new one to start over.  It worked for her, but I couldn't stand it.  (She now does it my way.)  My parenting style was based on my upbringing in the authoritarian model of "children are to be seen and not heard," while hers was based in what looked to me like "airy-fairy" lack of discipline and structure.  (Her son, who was four when we started dating, is now an incredible young adult - I soon began doing it her way with my two young daughters as well.)  My way of relating, especially in areas of conflict, was to be sarcastic and cutting.  That's they way my family did it when I was growing up.  Mary stood her ground (too firmly, I thought) and fought me for the respect and kindness she deserved.

I have been asked by many people who are using Mary's "Stay Married" program to tell them why I came back to the marriage (after filing for divorce after seven years - read about that in the course) - what made the difference?  I have to admit that I can't explain it.  I think that the time we spent apart gave us the space we needed to let the energetic communication do it's work.  I was removed enough from the daily pressures of living and working with Mary, struggling to make my way work while she stood firm, that I was "seduced" by the energy she was holding.  It felt at the time like she had "softened," but I now know that we both let go of the struggle.  She had "set me free" emotionally, so I was able to see her in a new light, the light of love.

Again, I don't have any explanation for why I called Mary and told her I was willing to sit down with her and talk, after I had told her so many times that it would never happen.  She seemed like a different person from who she was before I left, but I also felt different, so I don't know whether she had changed or I had changed.  Almost the instant we touched each other in that first meeting back together, my only thoughts were about how to manage getting back together with her.  It wasn't completely smooth sailing at first, as we continued to work through our differences, and I let go of my "position" as the superior, rational thinker.  But I had a new sense of respect for her - and commitment.

Now I have edited her completed program, and I am humbled to say that she has proved to me that these things do work, by using them to bring me back into our marriage after I had left and closed the door by "shacking up" with another woman.  I am now living my life in a new way, based on the paradigm that Mary taught me, namely that there is more going on between people in relationship on an "energetic" level than what is put into words, that "attitude speaks louder than words."

If you read and listen to the testimonials from many of those who have followed Mary's instructions in this course, one thing that consistently comes through is that they are almost thankful that the "train wreck" happened, to shake up the marriage, because things are so much better afterward.  The same is true for me.  I don't know why it had to be the way it was, or why I had to leave and file for divorce.  I do know that my life has never been more worth living than it is now, and I thank Mary often for holding on to the vision of what we are building now together.

You'll have to ask her what she saw in me that made her stick to the vision of the marriage we have today, but I'm glad she did.

Craig Reynolds