This was the first email in a Wildmind course called “The Conscious Couple.”
Our intimate relationships are a crucial part of our lives. Every day and every moment, they give us new chances to practice kindness, love, and compassion. They help us practice forgiving others and seeking forgiveness ourselves. Through them, we can cultivate honesty and improve our communication skills. They also provide opportunities for giving, receiving, and learning more about ourselves and our partners.
Intimate relationships often challenge us. They reveal our emotional weak spots, highlighting insecurities and failings that can feel unsettling. However, this discomfort can be spiritually beneficial; it helps bring to light areas that need transformation.
These relationships can also inspire and motivate us. Wanting to live in love and harmony with another person, to truly know them and let ourselves be known, can drive us to become better partners, lovers, and individuals.
While many know that the Buddha described intimate relationships and the desire for them as major distractions in spiritual life, fewer recognize that he also praised lay practitioners for their deep spirituality. The Buddha commended couples who lived harmoniously together, describing their lives as divine. Numerous householders achieved various levels of awakening, proving that family life isn’t an insurmountable barrier to spiritual progress.
There is no contradiction in the Buddha’s views on relationships as both hindrances and practices. The spiritual community included a monastic wing, which embraced a simple lifestyle (no work, no kids, no marriage) to focus intensely on meditation, study, and teaching. For monastics, romantic and sexual relationships were distractions. However, there was also a householder wing composed of people who worked, married, and raised children, and who could still practice deeply.
This 28-day online course aims to help us explore how our romantic relationships can deepen our spiritual practice and how our practice can enhance the intimacy we share with our partners.
There were many ways to structure this course, but we chose the Buddha’s Eightfold Path because it’s an essential framework for integrating practice into daily life. Each post will include a “map” of the Eightfold Path with the current phase highlighted.
In the next email, we’ll focus on cultivating Right View, which involves examining the ideas, opinions, assumptions, and models we apply to our relationships. We’ve already begun this exploration by discussing views about the relationship between married life and spiritual life.
Cultivating Right View means aligning our perspectives with the Dharma. This doesn’t mean blind conformity but rather recognizing that some views hinder the development of love, intimacy, and honesty. These views may be unconscious or we may not see their harmful effects. To avoid causing suffering to ourselves and our partners, we need to bring these views into consciousness. We should nurture perspectives that foster a deeper, more harmonious connection with ourselves and with the person we cherish most. We need views that help us become a conscious, thriving couple.
Homework: For the next 24 hours, simply observe your interactions with your partner (or in other relationships). Notice moments of kindness and love, as well as times when these qualities are absent. Try to make these observations without judgment—avoid self-criticism or dwelling on interactions. Feel free to take notes and share your observations in the online community accompanying this course.
Guided meditation: This brief guided mindfulness meditation can be done with a partner or alone.
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