This was the first email in a Wildmind course called “The Conscious Couple.”
Our intimate relationships are essential for personal growth. Every day and every moment, they present us with new opportunities to practice kindness, love, and compassion. These relationships teach us to forgive and seek forgiveness, enhance our honesty, and improve our communication skills. They offer chances to give and receive, helping us learn more about ourselves and our partners.
At times, intimate relationships challenge us by exposing our emotional vulnerabilities, insecurities, and shortcomings, often causing discomfort. However, this discomfort is also spiritually beneficial, as it brings to light the areas that need transformation.
Such relationships can inspire us. The aspiration to live in love and harmony with another person, to understand them deeply and to be understood, motivates us to change for the better. We strive to become better partners, lovers, and individuals.
While many people know that the Buddha described intimate relationships and the desire for them as distractions in spiritual life, fewer realize that he also praised lay practitioners for their deep spiritual practices. The Buddha commended married couples who lived harmoniously, stating that they led a divine life. In fact, many householders achieved various levels of spiritual awakening, demonstrating that family life is not an obstacle to spiritual progress.
There is no contradiction in the Buddha’s view of relationships as both a hindrance and a practice. The monastic community practiced a simple lifestyle, free of work, children, and marriage, to focus intensely on meditation, study, and teaching, treating romantic and sexual involvement as distractions. However, the householder community, consisting of people who worked, married, and raised children, also practiced deeply.
This 28-day online course aims to help us explore how our intimate and romantic relationships offer opportunities to deepen our practice. It also shows how our practice can enhance the intimacy we experience with our partners.
There are many ways we could have structured this course. We could have had no structure and just shared reflections, but we chose to follow the Buddha’s Eightfold Path. This path is a crucial framework for integrating practice into daily life. Each post in the course includes a “map” of the Eightfold Path, highlighting the current phase.
In the next email, we will start with the cultivation of Right View. This involves examining the ideas, opinions, assumptions, and models we have about our relationships. We’ve already begun this exploration by discussing views on the relationship between married life and spiritual life.
Cultivating Right View means aligning our views with the Dharma, not through blind conformity but by recognizing views that hinder love, intimacy, and honesty. We might not be aware of these views or the harm they cause. Bringing our views into consciousness is necessary to avoid causing suffering to ourselves and our partners. We must nurture views that foster deeper and more harmonious connections, enabling us to be part of a conscious, thriving couple.
Homework: For the next 24 hours, observe your interactions with your partner (or in other relationships) without trying to change anything. Notice moments of kindness and love and times when these qualities are absent. Try to make these observations without judgment, avoiding self-criticism or overthinking your interactions. Feel free to take notes and discuss your observations in the online community created for this course.
Guided meditation: This brief mindfulness meditation can be done with a partner or alone.