A Furnace for Your Love

The Furnace     

I have been touched by your emails telling me how enriched and inspired you have been by the Bedroom, Match conversation/blog. After the first blog about the Bedroom I received many emails saying, “That’s me! Thank you so much. You gave me such an understanding of myself!” However many of the same readers also wrote after the Match blog, “ That’s me! I’m a Match.” I suspect that this week I will receive some more emails with the same message, “That’s me! I’m a Furnace.”

We are never just one thing. We may have a proclivity toward a certain type, but we all have times of being Bedroom-like or Match-like. Certain situations and people can provoke a Bedroom to act in a Match-like way.

But as you will see, of all the types, the Furnace is the one we desire to be – or to be with – in our lives. So here goes.

“When somebody loves you
It’s no good unless he loves you, all the way
Happy to be near you
When you need someone to cheer you, all the way

Taller than the tallest tree is
That’s how it’s got to feel
Deeper than the deep blue see is
That’s how deep it goes, if its real

When somebody needs you
It’s no good unless he needs you, all the way
Through the good or lean years
And for all the in between years, come what may

Who knows where the road will lead us,
Only a fool would say
But if you’ll let me love you
It’s for sure I’m gonna love you, all the way, all the way”
Sammy Cahn, James Van Heusen

Whenever I hear Frank Sinatra sing this song I tear up. It gets me every time. For me it perfectly describes the 3rd type: The Furnace. But what makes a furnace? And how does someone know how to love “all the way.” Although I have used romantic relationships as a way to unpack these types, I am not just talking about romantic relationships here.

Unlike the Bedroom and Match types, Furnaces will need you, “all the way”. They have developed a healthy relationship to their needs so they are not ashamed to need, and they need in a healthy way, rather than a co-dependent, neurotic way.

What I also find compelling about the Furnace is their ability to trust Existence in the face of the unknown. So even with the uncertainty of where the road will lead, their trust does not falter because it comes from inside of them rather than the external world.

My sense of Furnaces is that they come from a family where there was an emphasis on relationship. I was talking to a childhood friend recently and in catching up with her she talked about how her adult children had very healthy marriages. She told me, “I always emphasized to my kids that we were a team.” They knew how to be there for each other, as opposed to a dysfunctional family where it’s, every man for himself.

Because love is a constant in their life, a Furnace is able to remain loving through the good and lean years. In other words, they know how to show up and keep their word. They’re reliable like a Furnace that makes you feel safe and warm on a cold winter’s night.

And although I’ve been discussing a person who developed into a Furnace having experienced fairness, justice and sensitivity in their family, I have also seen wonderful Furnaces who have come out of horrific childhoods. This can only be done when a person takes the lead in learning from those tough experiences and goes through the alchemical process in turning the lead of childhood trauma into the gold of a Furnace’s compassion, forgiveness and love.

So becoming a Furnace is an evolutionary process, and the Furnace represents our most evolved self. I will go into how the evolutionary process unfolds in future blogs but for now you can recognize a Furnace, and the Furnace in yourself as one who has taken on the passage from the human self to one’s divine self.

While immersed in the world of activity of our human self, the Bedroom and Match forget that they are connected to a Soul. They are convinced that everything in front of them is real, whereas the Furnace remembers that they are actually a Soul having a human physical experience.

So for the Bedroom and Match types, safety and security are of utmost importance even at the cost of their aliveness and oneness. In relationship, they have difficulty moving past their own selfish agenda to a shared agenda of a team, of oneness.

There is a maturity with the Furnace that enables them to feel into those places where they are at odds with themselves and awaken from those patterns. They take on the evolutionary journey from merely pursuing human desires and preserving the status quo, to challenging it and risking the loss of human security.

To understand the dips and curves one travels through on the evolutionary journey of relationship, it might be helpful to see it through the eyes of the Bedroom and Match and Furnace.

When it comes to relationship, Bedrooms and Matches are only interested in survival, security and comfort. It may start from a place of, “I’m alone, you’re alone, you look a lot better than being alone, so let’s hook up.”

As you evolve into a Furnace’s perspective with a remembrance of your eternal soul, you move beyond the priority of security to love and spirit. It’s what I like to call Two Wings to God, where your wing joins your partner’s wing and you fly to God together. WIth this higher perspective, those “issues” that come up in relationship simply become grist for the mill on our way back to the Source, to Oneness. In other words as you begin to discover where you trigger one another, these become opportunities to wake up to who you are instead of evidence for indicting your partner.

Bedrooms and Matches can fall in love, while Furnaces seem to rise in love; finding ways to move into higher octaves of love and awareness. Where the Bedrooms and Matches try to fulfill their individual needs and desires as a couple, the Furnace has only one agenda, one religion: Love.

Taller than the tallest tree is
That’s how it’s got to feel
Deeper than the deep blue see is
That’s how deep it goes, if its real

Inquiry into the Realness
To get a feel of your Bedroom, Match and Furnace levels, ask yourself the following questions and rate them on a scale 0 – 10, 0 indicating the lowest, 10 the highest.
How important is it for me to maintain the status quo?
How easy is it for me to risk?
When I have a conflict, to what degree do I withdraw.
When I have a problem, do I look to the past to resolve it
When I have a problem, do I look to the present and future for new ways to resolve it?
Do I blame my external world for difficulties?
Do I avoid difficult truths?
Do I lean into difficult truths and face them head on?
Am I driven by fears?
Am I driven by higher aspirations?
How focused am I on just myself?
How focused am I on that which is beyond self
How close am I to throwing this phone/computer/ipad across the room right now?

I understand.

To move toward that kind of realness with yourself and another can be quite a challenge. If you are facing some of those challenges now and would like to deepen your inquiry, give me a call. I’ve been helping people emerge from their Bedrooms and ignite their Furnaces for 30 years.