Marriage as a spiritual journey
Jun 02, 2020
As my meditation teacher, Bhai sahib ji, would say,
“Marriage is a bed of thorns so we must Let the CAT out of the bag. “
C- Compassionately compromise
A- Acceptance of each other’s spirit
T- Tolerance of our shortcomings.
Your partner is there to smooth out the rough edges”
35 years ago when he gave that answer to a gathering of married couples they all laughed at this.
My idea’s of marriage at 17 years old was what I saw on those Indian Hindi movies, they fall in love and the man fights to love you for the rest of his life, and he adores you. (Those of you who have watched Indian movies know what I am talking about).
And I believe still everyone deserves to have a marriage that is soulful and alive.
As a women, I want to feel swept up into a great adventure of life with my husband, and know that I am the beauty in his life.
It’s ingrained in men since childhood to want to be the “hero” in the story, I look at my son he always playing something that involves “beating the bad guys” or he is being daring and rescuing something so he’s the hero. A man’s soul wants to be the hero, and therefore he wants to be the hero of your story.
As do women, men have dreams about their partnership too.
Somewhere along the way we moved from dreams to this “dutiful” role.
Not that this is not important, it is.
However our soul’s long for more then duty.
Duty to our partners, families, kids, work and duty to our spirituality.
Feeling stuck, paralyzed and unable to move, we then tend to turn to look at each other’s character. The wounds come, and with it a message is ingrained in our psyche which gives rise to the false self.
My husband and I follow the same religion, I taught his cousin, one of my closest friends, meditation that starts from the spirit. (A meditation that is based in all the sanctified scriptures of the world, a way to truly surrender and let go).
She taught him and brought him to our meditation group, which I lead. We became good friends and ended up getting married (I will leave the details of that story for another day).
Here we are, both meditators, both spiritually attuned to a similar destination. My closest friends look at us as the “spiritual couple”.
One day a friend was going through some things with their spouse and said to me, well why can’t we just have what you guys have. I looked around the room, Oh…she’s talking about Manjeet and I. I asked her what is it that you think Manjeet and I have? She goes that spiritual connection.
I paused and wondered how is it that I could break it to her, that yes we have a spiritual connection, but we still sat in that bed of thorns my meditation teacher was talking about. And so I just said exactly that.
She was quite surprised…I said spirit connection only get’s stronger when you allow for those thorns to poke you, to make you grow.
There are days when Manjeet drives me crazy and I have no idea why he didn’t do his meditation today (or so I think he didn’t do it) or why he is resisting my “noble talk” on spirituality. I wonder why he isn’t listening to me, I am just trying to help him grow be better for himself.
Well that’s Lie! What I mean is, sure I want to help him grow, I want to help him be better for himself, but let’s just say there was something I started seeing to much of the “I want”.
I was telling myself I am experiencing so much growth, I want him along my journey, there is nothing wrong with that, however there is something I failed to see…that he is already on my journey with me.
He is not lower then me or higher then me he is my equal on my journey, a soul that is working towards growth in the way that works for him.
When I surrendered this “I” this “me” to God, divine, or universal creative intelligent life force within. And I thought how can I have a Unity of one soul in marriage when I see us as two?
So how do I close the gap of what it looks like to be spiritually connected in my marriage?
Spiritual connection may feel like it happens instantly with someone in the beginning, and it does, because the first states of love is in that alpha brain wave which sits in the spiritual world.
However to go deeper it needs to be nourished, watered with the life force that runs within, with the spirit.
We nourish our body with exercise, we nourish our mind with knowledge and being mindful, but what do we really do for our spirits?
This principle is one that my whole life is based on and so I went back to that nourishing my spirit.
When I nourish my spirit, I nourish the connection I have with myself, and then that connection with my husband and others flourishes.
It’s not easy to give up the “I” the “me”, especially when I so badly at times want to “fix” my husband.
The awareness grows to see that our spirits are the same, there is no fixing, the more I let go to my spirit the more we grow.
Everyone is on their own spiritual path and journey, all we can do is walk along side them, and if they want us too guide them.
But I have found that more then guiding, the biggest results are when we cultivate the needs of our own spirit, it is truly powerfully contagious, I have seen it over 20+ years of teaching surrender to the spirit meditation, the power of that life force within is felt in the home, because you so strongly radiate it.
Trust your journey, Trust his journey, and open your heart to the possibility of oneness together by oneness with yourself.
This realization is reinforced for me each time I surrender in meditation.
As we grow up we forget to discover what is the secret of our soul.
What we have in common is we all question Who am I? What am I made for, and Where am I destined to go?
10 years into my own marriage, I understand why my wise meditation teacher said, marriage is a bed of thorns, he wanted us to remember roses grow on that vine, and with compassionate compromise, acceptance of our spirit’s and Tolerance of our “short comings” we actually create a bed of roses where the thorns add to the beauty.