In this environment, each partner will begin to open up, go beneath reactive and
secondary emotional expression and begin exploring and sharing underlying vulnerabilities and deeper emotions.
Abandoning these Western values based in individualism and hierarchy, Gaines further described how his epiphany occurred when he turned away from the Western canon as a young man and began to investigate Muslim and Buddhist traditions of artistic practice, in which individual
expression and
emotional affect were
secondary to systematic, mathematically derived formal investigations.