With Great Marital Responsibility Comes Great Love

Distress in your marriage becomes peace and joy —when you take responsibility for your own thoughts and feelings.

Inside yourself is the only place to find the clarity and centeredness required to create an optimal intimate relationship.

We can live in love and joy but only from the inside out. Inside ourselves is where we can be free of disempowering emotions.

I am not saying ‘take responsibility’ because it is your job to fix your intimate partner. Quite the contrary — the way we are all trying to fix each other IS the problem. 

Our culture teaches us to fix our problems by fixing everyone else, by thinking we know what is best for them. By thinking they are the problem. 

But you don’t end a war by finally forcing the other party to behave. Getting others to behave is how you create a permanent war zone — a toxic marriage. 

Fake sticky sweet love and compassion is not spiritual either. 

Fierce love is powerful. Disempowered victimized anger is throwing gasoline on the fire.  

You can powerfully, ferociously, stand for peace and love. Your ability to say ‘no’ is powerful when it comes from love. 

Not when it comes from disempowered anxiety and fear.

When you have the courage to go inside to end the war, it dissolves into care, bliss, love. 

Being grounded in love and benefit for both of you is the opposite of fixing our intimate partner. 

You can have a win-win marriage or a lose-lose marriage. There is no such thing as one person being the ‘winner’ in a marriage. You are either both winners or both losers. 

Anytime we treat our loved one like they need to behave better, we are doing to same to ourselves.

We don’t know that by criticizing him, it hurts our heart —more than we know. It holds us down. Prevents us from seeing ourselves as a piece of the divine, keeps us from knowing how precious you are.  

In the twentieth century, criticism was the tool our top-down authoritarian society kept its organizations running smoothly. 

And we do the same in our homes. We’re trying our best to keep everything running smoothly. But it’s exhausting, and it hurts our hearts. 

And criticism is how we try to control things — first ourselves and then by extension, our intimate partner. 

Our job right now as a human species is to re-educate ourselves in self-love and self-compassion. 

Our job right now is to learn to love and trust ourselves and by extension, automatically, spontaneously our intimate partner.