Couples striving to live a shared life together face unique challenges and complexities.
Never before has there been so little support from the older generation, society, and religions. Almost all the old social and economic paradigms about a lifelong marriage have been destroyed.
Even the old impulses to have children, continue the lineage, and pass on the family name no longer work.
For the first time in history, relationships between sexual partners have lost their unambiguous direction, religious context, and any kind of social significance.
Until recently, the roles of a woman and a man, and the marital union as a whole, were clearly defined by family, religion, and society.
Once upon a time, the family had veto power over their child’s choice of a marriage partner. Marriage held a central position in society and had a stabilizing effect on the social order. If a marriage turned out to be unhappy, it was maintained under societal pressure.
Only in the last couple of generations has the situation fundamentally changed. Now, marital bonds have lost most of their traditional support, and couples have found themselves cut off from society, family, and values that have become a thing of the past.
Only a few compelling reasons remain as to why a couple should walk the path of life together…
Only the quality of their personal connection sustains their forward movement together.
For the first time in history, each couple is left to their own devices to discover what healthy relationships are and to form a vision of how and why to be together.
Those of us who seek answers to questions about love and intimate relationships in marriage are pioneers on territory that has never been explored before. It is important to realize how new this situation is for humanity, so as not to blame ourselves for the difficulties we encounter.
In former times, when a person chose the path of deep spiritual development, they would renounce worldly life, enter a monastery, and abandon family ties. But today, it is precisely personal, close, intimate relationships that are the space that brings us face to face with our Gods and Demons.
We are called to free ourselves from old habits and blind spots, to develop the full spectrum of emotional depth within the framework of ordinary earthly life.
See also [Interactive Article] Man and Woman in Relationships
Into a New Version of Intimate Relationships in Marriage
Why was traditional marriage stable? It served a specific function.
Modern relationships are based on feelings, not functions, and that’s why they’re so unstable. Romantic feelings, while inspiring, are notoriously fickle. Long-term relationships need a foundation beyond social duty and a romantic agenda.
Humanity now needs a new vision and context to help find direction and inspiration.
If we want to be engaged in close relationships within marriage, we must accept and acknowledge the powerful driving force of these relationships — the opportunity to awaken our true nature.
When relationships thrive, they show us who we really are beyond our family, social, and personal masks. Relationships can only be based on who we truly are, not on some specific form, function, or feeling.
This is a real challenge, as it invites us to explore the deep nature of the human being. Connection with a loved one is one of the best tools for this journey. In this context, relationships become intimacy and spiritual development.
Marriage is a conscious relationship that connects Heaven and Earth. The Greek myth of Eros and Psyche suggests that conscious relationships facilitate a journey inward.
Eros becomes Psyche’s lover at night on the condition that she must never try to see his face. For a while, things go smoothly between them. But never having seen her beloved, Psyche begins to wonder who he really is. One day, curiosity completely overtakes Psyche.
When she lights a lamp to see his face, he flies away, and she must go through a series of trials to find him again. When she finally overcomes these trials, she reunites with him, only this time much more fully, and their love can continue in the light of day.
The myth points to the conflict between consciousness and erotic feelings. Traditional marriages were once like love in the dark.
The Nature of the Path
THE PATH is the great challenge of our existence, the need for awakening, the call to greater possibilities and to attain the fullness of the human essence. To achieve the fullness of human nature, one must work with the conditioned nature (Earth) and the unconditioned (Heaven, Spirit). To become whole, a person needs healing.
On one hand, we ourselves have developed habitual patterns that cloud consciousness, distort feelings, and limit the capacity to love. We originally shaped them to protect ourselves from pain, but now they have become dead weight, hindering us from living fully.
The nature of the human heart is unconditional presence, care, openness to reality, curiosity, and a thirst for new experiences.
Within each of us, two forces are at work:
- Wisdom that wants to blossom from the depths of our being
- The weight of karmic patterns
From birth to death, these two forces are always at work, meaning the spiritual journey involves working with both sides.
Intimate relationships in marriage work with both sides and are therefore ideal as a PATH. When we are in deep connection with another person, the heart naturally opens to a new world of possibilities.
Relationships inevitably confront us with the most painful unresolved emotional conflicts from the past. They bring out the worst: fears, neuroses, obsessions.
If you focus only on one side of the relationship, there will be no forward movement, no growth. It’s easy to fall into the trap of bliss: “Love is so wonderful!”, “I feel so good!”, “Let’s get married, everything will always be this amazing!”.
Feelings are beautiful. The distortion is that we start to imagine that love can solve all problems, provide endless comfort, save us from meeting ourselves, from loneliness, pain, and ultimately death.
Attachment to the high-vibrational qualities of love ultimately leads to harsh disappointments when we are inevitably forced to face real problems….
The next distortion is the safety trap. A relationship is a living process, not a finished product! When we want a relationship to fulfill our need for security, we lose the sense of adventure. The relationship becomes monotonous, like a business deal.
A predictable, routine life cannot satisfy the deep longings of the heart. Once a couple falls into this trap, they may try to fill the resulting void: watching TV, buying expensive things, climbing the social ladder.
After twenty years of marriage, one of them might wake up with the thought: “What have I done with my life?” and suddenly disappear in search of what was missed. The illusion of eternal heavenly bliss lifts us up for a while, and then inevitably brings us back down to earth when the relationship falls apart.
The illusion of security, on the other hand, firmly glues us to the ground so that we never dare to go beyond ourselves.
Love transforms by bringing the two sides of life into direct contact. The heart can begin to purify karma. The hard places we have hidden come to the surface and are healed in the burning warmth of love.
When faced with difficulties in a relationship, the heart opens and expands in a new way. From the perspective of pleasure and security, relationships are simply terrible, because we don’t want to look at the hidden, unhealed parts of ourselves.
But from the perspective of the Path, there is no better opportunity. Intimate relationships can help us free ourselves from karmic entanglements by showing us exactly how and where we are stuck.
The pure essence of a relationship is the ability to unite Buddha nature and karmic conditioning, the conditioned and unconditioned mind, intuition and consciousness, masculine and feminine, self and other, to heal inner and outer divisions.
See also Why You Choose the WRONG Men, or Karmic Relationships
I Am — the Manifestation of the Qualities of Being
Cleansing old subconscious patterns frees up a huge potential of energy that we can direct toward working with our personality. Qualities such as generosity, tenderness, humor, strength, courage, patience — allow us to be more human, giving us the ability to experience everything life presents.
Each of these resources allows us to work with different aspects of reality. The more access we have to them, the more fully we live life, in its joys and pleasures, as well as its difficulties and sorrows.
By birthright, we have access to all qualities, states, and experiences. However, a person usually develops disharmoniously. We are one-sided and imperfect. In close relationships, we are often drawn to qualities in a partner that we ourselves lack.
As masks and patterns burn away in the fire of intimate relationships, we come closer and closer to our true nature. When we stop “defending” ourselves from a loved one, we can feel completely naked and vulnerable.
However, this nakedness makes our true nature more transparent to ourselves. The less we hide, the more we reveal ourselves. A deep connection opens access to a resource, to the Source we most need. This is how the Alchemy of Love works.
See also: How conditional and unconditional love manifest in relationships
Three levels of the path: evolutionary, personal, sacred
The path of conscious love has 3 dimensions:
1. The Evolutionary Path
At the collective level, it has evolutionary significance. Millennia of imbalance between the masculine and feminine have left a deep mark on the human psyche.
No one is able to escape the consequences of a trauma that permeates our entire lives. Internally, we experience this as a split between heart and mind, feelings and thinking, tenderness and strength.
Externally, this manifests in the war between the sexes, which endangers the Planet. Until human consciousness transforms the conflict between masculine and feminine into a creative union, we will remain unhealed, at war with ourselves, as individuals, couples, societies, and races.
Close relationships in marriage are a step toward eliminating the age-old split and uniting the two halves of humanity, for the evolution of human consciousness.
2. The Personal Path
At the personal level, relationships are a movement through individual barriers toward openness and intimacy. Contact with deep levels of being, opening access to the full spectrum of human resources.
Intimacy perfects the personality and makes us fully developed human beings.
3. The Sacred Aspect of Love
Relationships can become a sacred path, healing the alienation from life, other people, and parts of ourselves. Close relationships in marriage are not a complete path and do not exclude spiritual practices.
However, with a conscious approach, relationships themselves can become a powerful tool, helping to come into contact with the Truth.
In this context, the difficulties couples face when merging energies are not just personal suffering. They are an invitation to discoveries, to a sacred play of the known and unknown, the visible and invisible, to truths born in close contact with the great mystery of life itself.