Romantic relationships are one of the most life-affirming and exciting experiences that a human can have. They also make you grow. David Schnarch, PhD, author of The Passionate Marriage, calls marriage (or a committed relationship) a People-Growing Process.1 Part of the way this process does its job is by triggering the heck out of you and uncovering the unconscious material that had been neatly tucked away while you were single. A good relationship should chew you up and spit you out as a wiser, kinder, and more awake person.
I see romantic relationships as one of the great teachers and healers that we have. They can bring you right back to your humanity and heal your deepest emotional wounds with a sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce grace. Every partner I’ve had has taught me something valuable and ultimately lead to deeper healing. In that way, I find that every lover and every sexual encounter thrusts me into a new layer of awakening.
When you see your romantic partners as part of your psycho-spiritual growth, you begin to value them more. Even the moments of conflict become an opportunity to awaken more fully, love more deeply, and heal more completely.
There are many opportunities to get the maximum juice out of a relationship, even if your current partner doesn’t turn out to be your lifelong partner. By being mindful at the very beginning, you’ll give yourself a chance to make the most of the beautiful and messy thing that romantic love is.
She was a sexy soft butch. From the moment I saw her—surrounded by admirers in a badly lit bar—I was hooked. After a few weeks of her kisses and cunnilingus, I was obsessed and crazy over her. All I could think about was her and our possible future together. Would we travel through Europe, making love in Italian hostels and smoking fine hash in Amsterdam? Would she write me poetry and love beach camping as much as I do? I was writing a romantic novel in my head.
The high I felt when she called or when I was with her was exquisite. The lows, when our dates ended or when she didn’t answer my calls, were extremely painful. After spending a weekend together, mostly in bed, I was spun out like I’d been doing blow for days. I needed more. My heart was pounding out of my chest and my mind was going a million miles a minute. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate on anything. I was high on Love Drugs.
The excruciating pleasure and pain of the first flush of love is like nothing else (well, some studies have shown that it’s remarkably similar to cocaine addiction).2 Until I was a meditation practitioner, I was all too willing to completely lose my mind during that time. I loved to completely check out of my life by getting lost in the insanity.
You know how it goes. You are on the freeway, madly texting the object of your desire, risking your life and the lives of others to send just one more witty response. You are missing work because you haven’t been able to practice basic self-care, and you’ve come down with a Love Flu. You are checking your phone fifteen times an hour, looking back over the old texts if a new one hasn’t come in yet. You think you see them everywhere, and each time your heart starts speeding and your skin gets hot. They don’t text back and it feels like someone has pulled your plug and emptied you out. Your lover is all you can think about.
It’s one thing to enjoy this experience. It’s another thing to use it as a way to check out. As you wake up more and more through your spiritual life, you don’t want to go back to sleep in your daily life. Your spiritual life and your daily life become one and the same. Staying awake means being willing to change the way you relate to everything, including the extreme highs and lows of romantic infatuation.
What if, instead of losing our minds over a new relationship, we stayed awake during this process? What if we opened ourselves up to a whole new way of experiencing new infatuations? Love Drugs create a great opportunity to work with craving and attachment in a very hands-on way.
The first time I worked mindfully with the agony and ecstasy of attraction, it took all of my skills. I found it incredibly challenging to simply observe the thoughts and emotions that were arising. Building a new set of tools takes time and practice. I had been getting high off of Love Drugs since I was a gangly, wild-haired eleven-year-old, and those grooves in my brain were deep. At that age, I had things going on in my life that were too painful to be present for. The massive crush on the boy with freckles who lived in my neighborhood or the excitement of skinny-dipping with my pretty best friend gave me a reprieve from the chaos at home. Infatuation with a love interest was a useful way for me to avoid uncomfortable emotions for many years.
As I started to wake up, my meditation practice asked me to give that up. But I started to get the sense that letting go of my attachment to Love Drugs would be hard, and I didn’t want to do it.
My writing, teaching, and personal practice is all about letting go and waking up. I deeply believe that this is what I am here to do. This letting go and waking up allows me to truly connect with others and live authentically. And sometimes it sucks. Sometimes spiritually evolving means losing things you really don’t want to lose.
In my case, seeing through the Love Drugs meant letting go of the part of me that could still get high off of them. It meant coming out of hiding a little bit more and giving up the escape that an intense crush can bring.
Eventually I asked myself: Why would I stay unconscious around this? It may feel like losing something, but I’m only losing a false reality. So, I’m not actually losing anything at all. Part of having a spiritual awakening in our sex lives is about being willing to let go of who we think we are and what we think we know. It’s about giving up the option of checking out or escaping through sex and romance. If love looks a lot like addiction, then it’s no surprise when a person uses it a lot like an addiction to escape unpleasant realities. And it was time for me to end that.
Then something remarkable happened. Once I stopped being able to consistently get high off the love/sex experience, it began to seem crude, disruptive, and even silly. It’s important to be open to all of our experience, so I tried not to resist that either. I laughed out loud when I felt that chemical rush through my body. It was so predictable. The less I was pulled into the intensity, the more I could just witness the rise and fall of sensations and thoughts. They stopped being “me,” and I stopped needing to do anything about them.
That doesn’t mean that I didn’t continue to have fun texting, flirting with, and fucking my new love interest. Rather, I was able to let go even more into the experience because I was not grasping so much. This brought a deeper connection with the other person and allowed me to interact from a place beyond the stories my mind generates. I saw the other person as a unique and spectacular human, not just as a way to get high and check out.
This shift changes things. If you are someone who gets a big “fix” from romantic and sexual intrigue, be ready to lose that. It’s not going to be the same once you see through the chemical, emotional, and psychological response. You won’t be able to get high in that way anymore. It will take time to discover what your sexuality looks like without the attachment to the highs and lows of Love Drugs.
Here are some quick and dirty tips for taking the first few steps to letting go of Love Drugs:
Being attached to the Love Drugs moving through our bodies, or the stories in our minds, creates a separation. When we no longer hold on to what we want or brace ourselves for disappointment, we get to be right here right now. There’s not much that’s hotter than that.
Conflict is unavoidable in romantic relationships. If you are conflict-avoidant, as I have been at times, you’ll need to take a look at that. Intimate relationships ask us to roll up our sleeves and get in the mud.
If you find that you are faced with tons of conflict within the first few months of a relationship, you may want to reassess. Ideally, those beginning days of a relationship are a time for fun and exploration. If there are already a bunch of red flags, perhaps you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Or maybe you are just taking it too seriously. Relax and enjoy the ride. There will be plenty of time to dig into the challenges of merging your life with another human.
As your relationship matures, it will be time to put a different kind of work in. Here are a few key things that I find incredibly helpful when navigating relationships, especially in the first few tumultuous years.
Eventually, the Love Drugs will wear off and you will be left, sober, with each other. This is when all the cute, neurotic things about your partner start to annoy you. The way they eat, the humming they do while driving, the throat-clearing, the way they leave the toilet paper sitting on top of the toilet instead of putting it on the roll, how fast (or slow) they tell a story about their day, their “lucky underwear” that have holes in them but cannot be thrown out. All of this becomes downright irritating, and you know that the honeymoon is over. Or is it? If experienced mindfully, this stage of a relationship can actually be fertile ground for personal growth and deepening intimacy with your partner.
When we are feeling uncomfortable about something in ourselves, it’s common to start noticing what we don’t like about our partners. The moment I get annoyed with some trivial thing that my partner does, I can be sure that there is something going on with me that I don’t want to look at. It’s easy to avoid or resist our own shortcomings or unconscious material when we are picking apart our partner. This is when you need to put away the magnifying glass and take a look in the mirror instead. In this way, the things that annoy you turn into opportunities to grow. As soon as I take a look at myself and figure out what I’m trying to avoid, my irritation almost always vanishes.
If you are ultra-focused on what other people or institutions are doing wrong, you may miss what you could stand to improve in yourself. There may be times that you are sure you’re right and they are wrong, but don’t be so sure. Judgmental black-and-white thinking, even about things that seem obviously wrong, will keep you safely separated from your own shadow side. Mindfulness asks us to pause when feeling agitated, angry, or defensive. In that pause, you have a chance to look within and get down to the heart of the matter.
When your partner is doing the thing that most bothers you, it can be hard to stop on a dime and look at your part. But that is exactly what is needed in those moments. It takes humility and skill to be willing to see our part, especially when we are feeling triggered and defensive. We can gain that skill through practice, just like we gain any other skill.
You can practice in the moment, which can be challenging at first, and you can also practice in writing and meditation. If you make this exercise a regular practice, your relationship will benefit greatly.
It is possible that your part could be simply showing up for mistreatment. Then you’ll need to continue to explore and find out why you think you deserve to be mistreated. It could be that you are not being so nice to yourself, and therefore finding others to replicate that. I did that for years. I treated myself terribly and then wondered why I often fell hard for people who didn’t treat me very well. Once I started treating myself with love and respect, the scenery around me changed quite a bit. Work on you and nurture your self-love, and the rest will take care of itself. There is an exception to this: If you are in a physically abusive situation, the first priority is to get somewhere safe. Once you are out of danger, you can take a look at your part.
A powerful way to work with conflict is to send positivity to the person you are at odds with. In doing this, you begin to wire your mind toward a loving and positive attitude, rather than an angry, blaming, or annoyed one. You’ll find that when you send loving kindness to others your perspective of them changes, as does the way you interact with them. This version of the POSITIVITY BOOST can be used with anyone: a boss, parent, friend, or even a politician you don’t like! At first it can be hard to think kind thoughts for someone you are pissed at, but it’s worth working through the resistance.
When I was in my mid-twenties, my girlfriend and I broke up after a year and a half of a super dysfunctional relationship. My feelings were deeply hurt when she immediately began dating someone I had always suspected she had a thing for. I felt so rejected and brokenhearted and all I could think about was the two of them together. Someone suggested that I try praying for them. I translated that into a kind of positive meditation for them and practiced it for three months anytime they came to mind. At first it was really hard, I couldn’t even get through it, but eventually it got easier. Then I bumped into them at an event. After all those months of focusing on kind and loving thoughts about them, I actually felt good when I saw them. My mind had been trained to think positive thoughts about them. It was a smooth and painless interaction and it made me a true believer in the power of positivity.
If you are experiencing resentment toward your partner (or anyone else), try this practice daily for at least a week and/or anytime you feel resentment.
Depending on the person and situation, this can be really challenging. It’s an advanced practice, but it will also advance your practice.
I used to agonize about whether I should stay in a relationship or leave. I had a lot of dysfunctional relationships, so I spent a great deal of time thinking about it. Then one day someone wise said something to me that changed my life. She said, Water meets its own level. We tend to partner with people who match our own psychological awareness levels. Until my own sea level changed, I’d keep finding myself with people who mistreated me.
This can be difficult to hear, and difficult to express without edging close to victim blaming, but in an abusive relationship, it’s not always just the abuser who needs to work on themselves. The abusive behavior comes from some sort of unconscious fear, insecurity, or trauma. And it can be the same thing with the person who takes all of the abuse. They might have some unconscious material that makes them believe, on some level, that an abusive relationship is what they deserve.
I’ve been on the receiving end of abusive relationships: jealous fits, broken windows, bruises, blood, police, jail, all of it. While abuse is never an acceptable response, at that time of my life I had a huge amount of work to do on myself. I was bringing my own share of dysfunction to the table. Relationships like that allowed me to ignore myself and put all the focus on my partner and how terrible they were. This made it possible for me to be lazy about the personal work I desperately needed to do. Once I started to address what was going on with me and why I felt drawn to abusive partners, the people that came into my life changed. My water level had shifted.
If you are waffling about whether you should stay or cut and run, here’s the simple truth. If you put the focus on your personal growth, one of three things will happen: (1) your partner will grow with you and you’ll continue on in the relationship; (2) your partner will grow but it will be in a different direction and you’ll break up; (3) or, your partner will drag their heels, not grow much at all, and you will move on easily. You will have moved to a different water level and it just won’t work anymore. You no longer have to think about it—just keep working on you! Remember that you can’t make your partner grow, or grow in the way that you want. Focus on making your own changes and let things take care of themselves.
This philosophy is not limited to romantic relationships. It goes for friends, therapists, teachers, and work too. If I put the emphasis on my own emotional, psychological, and spiritual growth, all of my relationships change for the better. Some of them end, or morph into a different type of relationship, depending on if the other person is growing too, or growing in a similar way to me. If I continue to grow, and to treat others and myself with kindness, the transitions are never dramatic and don’t create suffering.
Even so, sometimes it takes a while before you are sure of what wants to happen next. Perhaps you’ve been working on yourself, but your relationship hasn’t shifted. You are in the “Should I stay or should I go” hallway, and you just want a door or window to open and show you the way. You could hang out in that hallway and suffer, or you could try a little something I call the Just Be Nice Campaign.
When someone comes to me unsure if they should end a relationship or stick it out, I always suggest that they try just being nice. If that seems simple, it is. But sometimes simple is not easy. A big part of waking up is realizing how very simple life can actually be when we aren’t stuck in the stories in our minds. Deepening simplicity in your life is a sure sign that you are on the right track.
So, how do we Just Be Nice? Well, there are a few simple instructions for the Just Be Nice Campaign:
I’ve done this myself a few times. I was just nice. When I got annoyed, scared, frustrated, felt not heard, got triggered—I was just nice. Sometimes that meant leaving the room for a moment, but no matter what, I was just nice. I focused on being the best partner I could be and took any focus off of what I thought the other person was doing wrong. I still spoke to someone and/or wrote about my feelings, but I didn’t take problems or negativity to my partner. I got more clarity on what was actually a problem versus me simply being reactive.
Many of your complaints and criticisms about your partner don’t actually need to be expressed. These are tiny issues that can actually be solved through just being nice. You can use FOCUS ON SELF to explore the uncomfortable feelings and thoughts. This gives you a chance to deconstruct the selves that arise in response to irritation or anger. There can be a lot of angry little selves that want you to believe them to be solid. They aren’t. As you watch them crumble, most of the issues you have with your partner will crumble right along with them. When you don’t point negative emotional energy at your partner, you get to actually look at it. You might find that you don’t want to carry around all the negativity anymore.
I don’t know anyone who loves conflict, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary sometimes. Conflict is a natural occurrence in relationships and shouldn’t be avoided just because it’s uncomfortable. I find that it comes up when some part of the relationship is ready to expand and evolve. It’s our job as mindful people to see past the surface of the conflict, into the underlying reasons behind it.
One of the reasons conflict is scary is because it reminds us that the relationship is not a solid, unmoving entity. It could change. It could end (spoiler alert: it will end one way or another). For some, even a little conflict triggers an end-of-the-world response. That’s how I used to be. I couldn’t tolerate even mild conflict in my relationships. When it inevitably came up, I would either crumple into a shut down mess, or try my best to destroy my opponent as if we were in a fight to the death, Game of Thrones style. I’m still working on how to be one hundred percent mindful in conflicts with my partners, but I’ve come a long way thanks to my meditation practice and skilled couple’s therapists.
Impermanence is a fact of life, and it extends into your relationships. Your relationship is not permanent. Even in the best-case scenario, short of a freak accident that takes you both, one partner will eventually die, leaving the other one. Ideally, you and your partner will change over the years. If you’re not changing, you’re not growing. The ways you change won’t always compliment the ways your partner does. There will be illnesses, deaths and births, career successes and failures, and hopefully many spiritual awakenings. All of this will create change in your relationship.
Here is a meditation designed to get you in touch with impermanence.
This is a practice that is wonderful to do in nature with your eyes open. You can sit down and easily witness impermanence. The movement of leaves in the trees. The rustle of some furry creature in the bushes. The sounds of birds calling to one another. The workings of nature are a clear example of impermanence, and you only need look and listen to understand.
Once you are comfortable with impermanence, you no longer feel it necessary to cling so tightly to anything. You know on a deep level that everything is constantly changing. That includes ourselves, our partners, and our relationships. This helps make conflict feel less threatening. When you understand that everything is changing, you know that the conflict won’t last forever. That makes a disagreement or awkward phase with your partner much less of a big deal. The phrase, This too shall pass, takes on true meaning, not just something people say when someone is going through a tough time.
As much as conflict can be a bummer, it can also be a sign that you are on the right track. Like I mentioned, conflict is often a sign that some expansion wants to occur. I’ve seen this in relationships, and also with individuals. For me, when I come up against a sense of conflict within myself, it means it’s time to wake up and pay attention. If I stay present and mindful, it’s easy to allow myself to grow through the conflict into the next version of me. Sometimes that can take minutes and sometimes it takes years, but eventually conflict gives way to something else. Again and again, you will see that there are no problems, only solutions, as John Lennon said.3
It’s important to appreciate the tough times, but you don’t want to become so accustomed to conflict that you can’t grow without it. As a person who respects and appreciates conflict, I’ve needed to come to terms with my own attachment to it. There was a time that I created and gravitated toward conflict just to avoid myself. I drummed up a lot of melodramas in my heyday! Eventually, I had no interest in intentionally creating conflict, but the personal narrative I clung to was centered around how I was growing spiritually as a result of conflict.
Most of my conversations were about the challenges I had worked through, was currently working through, or would be soon working through. I deeply identified with my relationship to conflict and while it was helpful, it started to drain me. I still felt drawn to conflict because I believed that was what would make me grow the most, and the fastest.
A friend mentioned that I used the word trauma a lot and asked what it might be like if I dropped that word when talking about myself. It immediately struck a chord with me and I thanked him for pointing that out, and went about untangling from the self who was in love with personal growth through conflict. My recovery from trauma is one of my proudest accomplishments, but at some point you’ve got to set down your gloves and step out of the ring. Letting go of my attachment to conflict and my trial-by-fire personal growth attitude freed me up to have more joy and ease in my life.
Whether you are conflict-avoidant or totally attached to conflict, it can be hard to realize the potential of your relationships. Conflict is inevitable, but it’s not constantly required. It’s both something to open up to and something to let go of, depending on where you are. Be honest with yourself about what is needed for you.
Not all partners are going to be your forever person. Break-ups happen and so do broken hearts. The first time I had a broken heart was shocking and unbearable. I was seventeen and had been dating this guy I thought was really cool. He read obscure literature, listened to obscure music, and shot heroin. I would ride the train into the city to see him in the various one-bedroom apartments he shared with whoever would have him. I was really attached to this guy. He was kind enough, but being a drug addict made him perfect for my relationship pattern of choice. News flash: He didn’t stop doing heroin out of his undying love for me and prove once and for all that I was loveable.
I was underage, so he would buy me beer. We would sit on the floor, smoke cigarettes, and seek mutual oblivion. We had been attempting a relationship for about a year when I, as he put it, “dropped the L-bomb.” He informed me that while he enjoyed my company, love was the last thing on his mind. Looking back, it was the last thing on my mind too. I had no clue how to love myself, let alone anybody else. But at that time all I knew was that I was being rejected and it hurt like hell. All the parts of me that believed I was unlovable and inadequate came to life. I cried all night at his place, cried all the way home on the train, and walked into the apartment I shared with my dad, puffy, red, and still crying. My dad thought someone had died, and I felt sure it was going to be me.
For days I could barely move. The tears came in a torrential downpour. I couldn’t believe how much it physically hurt. My chest felt hollow and filled with cement at the same time. The ache was so intense that I thought maybe a broken heart could actually kill me. My brain wouldn’t shut up. It reminded me of how devastated I was, how “heartbroken” I was. Whenever I would start to feel better, there would be a surge of mental talk retriggering the intense physical sensations. I took everything my mind said personally; I believed all of it.
I needed to make it stop. I started calling friends, asking what to do. Everyone told me that I had a broken heart, and that the only thing to do was to wait it out. What no one told me was that suffering through a broken heart is totally optional. In addition, having a broken heart can supercharge your spiritual and emotional evolution.
After that first one, my breakups became more and more dramatic. Each time a relationship ended, no matter how dysfunc- tional, I would lose it. I would stop eating, stop sleeping, roll up in a ball on the floor for hours, make really creepy shrines in honor of my lost love, go on two-month-long pill popping, black out binges, create musical soundtracks to keep me as miserable as possible, drink until I could no longer actually get drunk, have really embarrassing rebound relationships, and tell the story of my broken heart over and over and over again to anyone who would listen. These symptoms could go on for months. I started very seriously considering suicide. I was suffering more than I could bear. At the same time, I was addicted to my suffering.
Somewhere along the line, I started to dip my toes back into the meditation pool for the first time since I was a kid. Someone gave me the Pema Chödrön book, When Things Fall Apart. I began sitting for five minutes at a time, here and there. I noticed that there was a voice inside my head that wasn’t very nice. I didn’t yet understand that my body was full of sensations, many of them emotional. I felt the emotional pain in my chest and throat, but it was completely tangled up with my thoughts. After a while, those five-minute sits every once in a while became thirty to sixty minutes every day, and that’s when my relationship with my mind and body changed dramatically.
About four years later, I had a chance to try out my new skills on a broken heart. What a difference a daily practice makes. Was I sad that my relationship hadn’t worked out? Yes. Was there a lot of chatter in my mind about it? Yes. Did I experience unpleasant emotional sensations in my body? Yes. Did I suffer? No. Well, maybe a tiny bit, but we are talking about five minutes here and there. It was a huge difference. There was no pill popping or shrine building this time.
The night the breakup occurred I cried for a bit and meditated on the emotions in my chest and belly. Then I tried to get some sleep, but my mind was racing. It kept telling me all the things I could have done differently; all the things I should have said or not said. Over and over it replayed the final interactions with my now-absent lover. I would fall asleep and the mental talk would literally wake me up.
I did what I had been trained to do: mindfully attend to the mental talk with as much concentration, clarity, and equanimity as possible. I was amazed at how my brain created and re-created the problem. I was not asking my brain to do this (in fact, at moments when I lost my equanimity, I really wanted it to stop), but it kept going like a powerful computer, crunching the facts.
I also worked with the flow of the mental talk. It rose and fell in waves. It was very much like being rocked by the ocean. It started to become soothing instead of uncomfortable. It was waking me up, but it was also putting me back to sleep.
By five in the morning, when the talk woke me up for the fourth time, I laughed. It was hilarious and almost endearing or cute. Later, I talked with some close friends about the situation, but my mind was relatively quiet. I had let it do its computing, without judging it or resisting it. I knew that eventually I would get some sleep, and that the chatter would stop when it was ready to. By allowing it, but not taking it personally or wallowing in it, I had a complete experience of it. It passed through me and was gone.
As for the physical sensations, I enjoyed working with them. Emotions in my body tell me that I’m alive. I am learning to let go of attachments to “pleasant” or “unpleasant,” and instead to explore sensation as sensation. Waves, vibration, heat, cold, contraction, expansion. When you mindfully contact the experience of a “hollow ache” or “physical exhaustion,” without the mental label of “broken heart,” it’s just sensation.
I’ve had more than a few people ask me how meditation can help with the pains of a relationship ending. In my own experience, I’ve seen that it can help a lot. The main trick is learning to separate the emotional sensations in the body from the thoughts in the mind. You can do this by using FOCUS ON SELF. Once you can do that, you are able to deconstruct the sensations and the thoughts into smaller more manageable pieces. That’s easier said than done in the midst of a broken heart, but with practice, you will find that it becomes automatic.
I got a lot out of that last broken heart. The emotional pain gave me direct access to some aspects of my consciousness that had been long buried. By fully allowing all my feeling and thoughts about the breakup to occur, I was able to heal much older wounds. I saw myself change very quickly during that time. I became more open, more available to others, less defensive, more alive. Really leaning into your meditation practice during tough times brings great rewards.
For a lot of us, a broken heart is very romantic. We see it in movies, hear it in songs, and revel in the drama of it. It can be so addictive. We have an idea of what it is like when our heart is broken and we hold tight to that idea. Our neural pathways are programmed. This is what the end of a relationship should feel like. This is how I should behave. We don’t realize that there are many ways of experiencing a breakup, not all of which include big blowouts and months of suffering.
For me, it was a matter of life and death to find a new way of being brokenhearted. Even if it’s not that dire for you, why not try a new experience?
My relationship with the idea of a broken heart has changed. I have felt the emotions move through my body and vanish. If I get stuck in mental talk or put a value on the sensations in my body, then—bam!—I have a broken heart. If I simply and openly observe what is happening, it’s just what’s happening, one moment to the next.
One big insight that I gained from my last broken heart is this: A broken heart is an open heart. This sounds a little cheesy, I know, but it was true for me. When I fully experienced the many facets of my heartbreak, I found expansive open space. Instead of becoming jaded and afraid to love again, I realized that within all that space was room for more love than I ever imagined.
I’m not excited about the prospect of going through another big breakup. I hope I don’t have to, but I know for sure that my heart will be broken again. This is part of being human. People you love will die. Natural disasters will occur. Wars will rage. You have a choice about how much you want to suffer and about how much you want to perpetuate suffering. Let your heart break open and meet life openly and with love.
Shinzen Young talks about how if you choose to be in a romantic relationship, rather than celibate, it can serve as your own personal monastery.4 You can do this by treating your relationship as sacred, and allowing it to be a container for your evolution. This is a way that you can, as a regular, nonmonastic person, develop a monastery. All you need to do is make your relationship a part of your spiritual practice. In the same way that you can bring mindfulness into washing the dishes or driving to work, you can bring mindfulness into your relationship. Aim to become more present and clear with each interaction. Find ways to incorporate more mindful communication into every day. Practice meditation together. And bring mindfulness into your sex life.
As we have explored thus far, there are so many ways to be mindful about sex and sexuality. If you want to create a monastery within your romantic relationship, sex is a great place to start. Begin to think of your sex life as a place to expand your limits and discover new ways of experiencing your spiritual life. Don’t forget that mindful sex can be any kind of sex. It can be fucking, not just making love. You don’t need to create a binary between spiritual sex and non-spiritual sex. It’s all spiritual! The way you can tap into the inherent spirituality is by greeting all aspects of sex with mindfulness. It can be as simple as allowing yourself to breathe and relax into pleasure. Over time, with practice, mindful sex will become the only kind of sex you have.
Turning your relationship and sex life into a contemplative space won’t always be easy. Being mindful and awake doesn’t mean never making a mistake. Choosing to live and love with true mindfulness is a brave and vulnerable thing to do. You are opening your heart and mind to the world (and your lovers) in a beautiful way when you make a decision to wake up. Not just anyone will be able to partner with you once you begin this journey to awakening. You will be so bright, so free. You will be capable of loving and being loved with a gentle bravery and authenticity, and only those who are doing the same will be able to meet you in a partnership. This goes even for a casual affair. Your lovers will be living from a paradigm that matches yours, and true connection, however fleeting, will be the new normal.
When a relationship is like a monastery, you and your partner are each other’s greatest teachers. I believe that people come together to experience a healing. This can be the case with any type of relationship, but it is especially true in romantic relationships. You can easily figure out what it is that wants to be healed in you by paying attention to your buttons—the buttons your partner is always pushing that can provoke a reaction. Those tender spots give us access to deep and unseen emotional wounds. If you are willing to be mindful and take your awareness past the surface sting of hurt feelings, your buttons will lead you straight to insight and healing. You always have a choice: Do you want to have a pointless argument or use a moment of conflict to grow? You and your partner can help each other wake up by continuing to make the choice to grow. Each time you do this, you’ll expand the possibilities for love and connection. Your monastery can give you a chance to do that every day.