We’re talking today about marriage. And marriage, really, is just a focused expression of relationships generally. I like to think of marriage as the graduate school of relationships. It isn’t all that different from our other relationships, but it’s a much more demanding and deeply focused course. And, like all of life’s lessons, the sole purpose is to help us find happiness and freedom from sorrow and suffering.
I’ve lived in the Ananda communities almost since I graduated from high school and left home. I came to Ananda in 1969, so it’s been forty-eight years, and I’ve long been thoroughly comfortable with this way of life.
I remember our first Thanksgiving celebration here at Ananda in Palo Alto. Some ninety people came to our banquet, and the next day one of our members went around telling his co-workers, “We had an intimate Thanksgiving gathering of about ninety family and friends.”
Whenever we have a “small” party at Ananda, it’s usually at least twenty-five. And it’s possible because we’ve lived together and learned to nurture our relationships for a long time.
One of the greatest lessons that living at Ananda teaches us is the art of creating harmonious relationships. And in the process, there’s a special emphasis on using our friendships to discover some profoundly fulfilling aspects of our own lives.
You can’t live in a community such as ours without learning to get along, because it’s the only way you’ll be happy. Although we have our separate homes and apartments, we’re in such close contact that it’s also the only way the community can survive.
I had been at Ananda for about ten years when I married the second time. My second husband and I were together for thirty years, and the lessons we learned were priceless.
Paramhansa Yogananda said, “Friendship is based on mutual usefulness.” And I imagine it could seem callously manipulative – “You’re useful to me, so I’ll choose you to be my friend.” But if we look at our friendships objectively, I think we’ll invariably find that our best friendships are those where we’re helping each other in some way.
So it isn’t so much that we’re getting something out of it, but how much we’re helping each other, and how we’re growing by helping the other and embracing each other’s realities.
There came a time when my second husband and I decided to go our separate ways. We felt that we had accomplished what we could through being useful to one another in a marriage, and it was time to find our expansion through other paths.
Nevertheless, the lessons of those thirty years were many and lasting. And although I’m now wholly committed to the monastic life, and I’m no longer teaching classes in relationships, or serving as a relationships counselor, I’m grateful to God and to my ex for the lessons we were able to learn together.
I married the first time when I was nineteen. I was with my first husband for five years, and then I had a nice long break of ten years when I lived as a nun at Ananda Village.
I like to think that I started out doing marriage badly, but I ended up doing it fairly well. And of course, we never stop learning to expand our hearts through our relationships. But if I’ve learned one thing in my marriages, and my relationships with many friends over the years that I feel might be worth passing along, it’s that the process of making a relationship harmonious and mutually fulfilling is absolutely a minute-by-minute job.
The best relationships are created fifteen minutes at a time. And the best way to grow in our relationships is to honor and apply a few basic principles that we can apply in every moment.
In my experience, there’s no such thing as getting a relationship set up perfectly at the start and then expecting that it will run smoothly forever. If you try to set it up perfectly in the hope that it will stay there, you quickly discover that it can’t thrive if it’s based around unrealistically rigid rules. And if you rigidly and dogmatically try to follow your little set of rules, you’ll just find that it’s a surefire recipe for sapping the life out of the relationship and killing all of the joy.
People are constantly changing, and our relationships work best when we stay adaptable and willing to learn and grow. If we stop welcoming the opportunities to learn and grow, we soon find our relationships withering and dying.
People too often want their relationships to be a comfortable place where they can settle in and turn off their brains and stop trying. And that’s just not how life works.
A healthy relationship can never be about applying fixed rules and formulas. It’s not about following a little collection of maxims out of a self-help book: “When he says X, I should reply Y.” The focus always has be on learning to work with ourselves as unique, dynamic, continually changing individuals, and finding out how we can understand ourselves and those who are closest to us.
It’s ultimately about discovering the art of understanding people. And when you get right down to it, it’s about getting to know ourselves.
Paramhansa Yogananda said that what all people are seeking can be boiled down to an irreducibly simple formula: behind the multiplicity of our stated motives, what we all want is to find greater happiness, and to escape from suffering. Yogananda said that even the murderer is thinking, however delusively, that he’ll remove an impediment to his own happiness by depriving another person of his life.
Yogananda said that the happiness that all people are seeking comes by expanding our awareness to embrace an ever broader reality. And this is the single most important principle in our relationships. It’s the greatest challenge of a relationship, and the greatest fulfillment, to learn to relate meaningfully and compassionately to the other person’s reality, exactly as they are.
Our relationships are ultimately intended to help us find happiness and freedom, by working with ourselves and our partners as we are, and expanding our awareness to embrace the other person’s reality.
I love to watch people – not with cold objectivity, but with a heart that’s fully engaged. I love to watch what happens when people behave in certain ways. And over the years, I’ve identified some of the patterns that people repeat in their relationships and that help them succeed or fail.
I think these patterns offer us important hints about what works and what doesn’t. And this is what we ultimately need to know – the patterns in our relationships that move our energy in the right direction, toward inner expansion and happiness.
In the early days at Ananda Village, there were basically two jobs that you could have. You would either find yourself working in the garden or the kitchen. No one told you where to work, but there were very few jobs available, and those were the two main options.
I remember a summer day when we received word that the gardeners needed some extra help. I found myself out in the bean field with a ridiculously simple task. Our watering system was extremely primitive, just a hose that fed water into the channel between the rows of beans. My job was to make sure the water flowed unobstructed. And it didn’t seem like much of a job, but the gardeners told me it was very important, because even a tiny rock could block the water and make it overflow the channel, and then you’d end up with a muddy mess and lots of unwatered plants.
So I had to be very attentive, and I’ve always remembered it as a concrete and uncannily accurate image for how we behave in our relationships. You’d think that we would want to water our relationships and keep the channels clear so that they would be fruitful and give us what we want.
We’re very intelligent about visualizing and verbalizing what we want. But then our energy gets diverted by a little clod of dirt, and our energy and attention flow off in unconstructive directions. And not only does it fail to water the relationship, but it spells its certain doom.
In plain English, our smallest and seeming least significant words, thoughts, and actions, and the direction of our attention, can have a tremendous influence on the health of our relationships.
I could talk at great length about how our past actions, including our actions in past lives, influence our present behavior. It’s an important and very interesting subject, because those past actions have a powerful influence on our present behavior.
Who we are is the result of our cumulative thoughts and actions in the past. And we need to understand those inner tendencies, because it’s very important to understand how they can rise up seemingly out of nowhere in a relationship and bite us hard. And once we’ve identified those patterns, we need to understand how to change the ones that aren’t helping us.
When we become more clearly aware of those barely conscious tendencies and reactions, it can have a very beneficial effect on our relationship, because it helps us become more compassionate toward ourselves and toward our partners. And it helps us understand why getting along with others isn’t as simple and straightforward as it might seem.
We need to watch out for our positive and negative traits from the past, and understand that they can be deeply rooted and difficult to change. One of the great things that our relationships can teach us is that we aren’t always fully in control of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. And it’s those involuntary reactions that can wreak absolute havoc on a relationship, unless we can begin to observe them objectively and understand the need turn their energy into more helpful channels, if we would find greater happiness and freedom.
I can’t hand you a simple method that will empower you to fix your relationships forever. But I do hope that I can help you understand some principles that will help you be successful in the journey.
In our culture, it seems almost as if there’s a curse on relationships. We’ve chosen to be born into this world at a time when the planet is emerging from an age of matter awareness, where people generally believed that the material world was the only reality, and where they tended to think in rigid, formal ways.
Until the twentieth century, people felt that following a set of rigid rules was the best way to organize their lives, including their marriages, and their social and religious institutions.
But the world today has entered an age of energy-awareness. It began roughly at the time of the scientific discovery, in the early twentieth century, that energy, and not matter, is the underlying reality of all creation.
Looking around us today, we see the tremendous effect of the new energy-awareness. All of the major inventions of the last hundred years have been based on figuring out how to use energy in countless practical ways – from the telephone, to the automobile, to radio and TV and computers and smartphones.
Many of us decided that we wanted to be born and take part in this exciting new era. We are people who love to be among the first adopters of the latest energy-based gadgets, or we’re the engineers who delight in creating them.
The fact that we’re caught between these two great ages explains to a very large extent the problems people are having today in their relationships. It explains why we’ve lost interest in the old, rigid forms, and why we aren’t completely clear about how to work with the more fluid and adaptable energy-based reality to create a happy life.
The ancient Indian teachings have a name for this new age of energy, which they called Dwapara Yuga. Sri Yukteswar expounds the ancient teachings in a book called The Holy Science, where he describes the four great ages of human history and how they rise and fall in grand cycles of 24,000 years.
Sri Yukteswar said that the new energy age began around 1894, close to the time when Einstein announced his discovery that energy, and not matter, is the underlying reality of cosmic creation.
Yogananda came with a special dispensation from God to help people understand how to work with energy to find success in their relationships, including their relationship with God.
Matter is rigid and unyielding. Energy is flowing, flexible, pliable, adaptable. Many people feel frightened and insecure to see the old, rigid forms crumbling. This is why God sent Yogananda to the West to explain how people can apply the laws of energy to create meaningful, moral and spiritual lives.
In a conversation with Swami Kriyananda years ago, he made a statement about relationships that I absolutely did not want to hear.
He said, “Relationships between men and women are never going to work until people change completely.”
He said, “Everything that people have in their mind now is subconscious. All the expectations, all the thoughts are coming out of subconsciousness.”
He wasn’t referring to the subconscious in the way psychology understands it, as the place where our memories are stored. He was saying that most people hold dreamy, highly unrealistic images of relationships based on their sentimental desires. And what’s needed, if we’re ever going to learn to adapt and survive in the energy age, is to shake off those dreamy images and start looking at our relationships with a clear and objective eye.
Our culture has adopted some terribly false myths about relationships from movies and books and magazines, and most people aren’t aware how completely they’ve been led astray by those unrealistic messages.
The confusion about relationships is a symptom of a much greater confusion about values. It’s a symptom of the transition between two great world ages. Fortunately, the yoga teachings very clearly describe what’s happening at this time, and what we can do about it.
A hundred years ago, people were still riding in horse-drawn carriages. As I mentioned earlier, all of the inventions that have revolutionized society in the last century were based on the astonishingly rapid expansion of our awareness of energy and its applications.
There’s a wonderful book that describes the natural cycles of human consciousness throughout earth’s history, and the changes that the world is undergoing today: The Yugas: Keys to Understanding Our Hidden Past, Emerging Energy Age, and Enlightened Future, by Joseph Selbie and David Steinmetz. It offers tremendous insights for understanding where humanity now stands, and where we’re going.
When the great shift began in earnest, around 1900, there was a predictable rigidity about relationships. Women were expected to marry and raise children, and men were expected to wor to support the family.
When the man came home, the woman had dinner on the table, and the children ate with their hair combed and their best manners.
When my mother-in-law was in her eighties, we browsed through an old picture album together, and we came upon a photo of an attractive young woman taken in the l920s. She wore an elegant gown and stood beside a grand piano. My mother-in-law said, “this was Mildred. She wasn’t married, and she went to New York to study piano.”
I thought, “So Mildred went to New York. What’s the rest of the story?”
But for my mother-in-law it was the story, and it was sensational. Mildred hadn’t married, but had rebelled and run off to study piano in New York.
She had to say it three times before I realized what an extraordinary thing it had been for Mildred to do. Today, we wouldn’t give it a second thought. We were born at a time when the world was being swept along by the full flood of the great transition, but my mother-in-law was already in her advanced years when the old ways began to fall apart.
It isn’t as if we started the new age with a fresh understanding of relationships, fully formed and ready to take up. We’re still very much behind the curve, and confused and conflicted about our roles, because we’ve broken the old mold and we don’t have a new one.
Nowadays, when we enter a relationship or get married, we no longer have the security of the old model that told us what to do and what it all means and where it’s going.
My first husband’s parents had a fine relationship for sixty-seven years. But my mother-in-law confided to me that the first twenty-eight years were absolute hell. I don’t imagine many couples would be willing to endure twenty-eight years of hell, but they stuck it out, and they finally broke through.
In the end, they had something wonderful, and the old, rigid form that they were trapped in forced them to make the effort.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that everyone who sticks to it will succeed. There are sixty-five year marriages that are pure hell, and there are no guarantees. But at least the old, rigid forms kept people from running away at the first little snag, and it gave them an incentive to keep working at it.
I don’t favor the old system. I don’t think it was better. It was based on a very shaky assumption that if you lived by a set external rules and definitions and got the external form of your marriage right, you would be okay. Today, people are feeling an urge to explore the inner energies of their relationships, and not just the outward form. A cosmic force is inspiring us to want to work with the inner, emotional factors, and not just try to neatly arrange the outside.
People are demanding to live by values that come from inside, and that they can understand with inner, personal knowing. We want to be authentic and true to ourselves. But at this point we aren’t quite sure what those inner laws and principles are. We don’t understand ourselves very well, much less do we understand the extraordinary responsibility that comes with looking for our own rules, instead of simply adjusting our outward behavior to a rigidly prescribed rule book.
We’re committed to going our own way, following our own star, and deciding what will fulfill us. But there’s a snag in the new freedom, which is that it takes tremendous effort, emotional maturity, self-discipline, self-sufficiency, and stoicism to make it work.
So, sad to say, there still isn’t a free ride.
When the old forms were strong in our consciousness, we had secure boundaries that we could work within. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it gave us a rather noble ideal to guide our behavior, and there was a feeling that following the rules would give us stability and security.
There was an enormous amount of sacrifice. And now that we’ve broken free of the old rules with their promise of security, what we really haven’t understood is that the level of sacrifice that’s required hasn’t changed.
The changes that have us feeling so confused today actually have nothing to do with relationships. They reflect an all-encompassing new reality that we’ve barely even begun to understand.
How can we find happiness and inner freedom? It’s a simple question with tremendous implications. And it’s the fundamental question at the heart of all true spiritual teachings.
Working to become good at relationships can be extremely helpful to us spiritually, because the principles of successful relationships and the spiritual life are exactly the same. As I mentioned earlier, the first principle is that happiness comes to us unfailingly whenever we expand our awareness and become more compassionate, kind, loving, generous, and wise in our work, our play, our relationships, and anything that we do.
What do we want in our relationships? In our mind’s eye, we see rosy-colored image of a relationship where we are able to be close, to be soft, to be intimate and open to one another, and receptive to each other’s needs. And today, a great awakening is needed, to balance the soft, receptive, happy image with a realistic view of the strength and self-discipline that it takes to achieve real expansion. Because it’s not easy.
Just a few decades ago, women approach marriage in a very conscious and deliberate way, with a very clear vision of what they wanted, and how they could get it. And it wasn’t considered calculating, because it was simply how women had to work with the reality of their lives under the old system.
“I want a nice home, and I want to raise children, because it’s my role as a woman, and I need to find someone who’s willing to work hard to support me in fulfilling my dream.”
It wasn’t considered manipulative, because it was simply the only option that most women could choose.
It’s very interesting today how so many women are extremely suspicious of that urge in themselves. And it’s a sign that we’re breaking away from the old forms.
I don’t think you should marry for what you can get out of it. But I do see two things that we need to be aware of today. One is to have a realistic picture of how much it’s possible to truly love someone. And the second is how you understand the process of making a life together.
Those are earthy, practical considerations that we need to be very clear about in the new age of energy-based relationships.
We need to understand what it’s realistically possible to get from a relationship, and how we can make a relationship work so that we’ll get it. Let’s face it, these are questions that demand to be answered in a very earthy and straightforward way, with our feet planted firmly on the ground.
This much, at least, hasn’t changed. A certain earthy practicality is still the absolute foundation for thinking about starting a relationship. We still need to think about what we can realistically expect, and how we can make it work.
The ideal of love and intimacy is very hard to achieve in the real world. But I don’t think it’s anywhere as difficult as making a life together. And making a life together is where there’s been the greatest breakdown.
Someone asked me about the idea of an amicable separation, where you love someone, but you realize it isn’t working, and you decide to let it go in as friendly and harmonious a manner as you can.
You enjoy a rapport with the other person, but you aren’t able to make a life together, because your fundamental values don’t mesh. Your natures aren’t geared to wanting the same things in your lives. And because everything today is so wide open, you have lots of options for setting up a relationship that will work for you. You have a range of choices that would have been unthinkable, just fifty years ago.
In the old system, where everyone had their well-defined role, the little, microscopic differences tended to be absorbed into the natural flow. You couldn’t run away, and if you were wise, you learned to accept the other person’s quirks. But in the new system, those tiny differences can have a huge impact, because we now have the freedom to weigh how much we’re willing to accept, and how much we won’t stand for.
Let me digress. I believe we could cure most of the world’s ills by creating communities. Most people formerly lived in fairly tight-knit small communities, but the system broke down with the new emphasis on the individual, which is another feature of the energy age. Communities also broke down and became more cold and impersonal because of the increasing emphasis on accumulating wealth.
The problem with the older type of community is that it wasn’t self-selecting. It wasn’t created by people who chose to live together because they shared something meaningful in common.
Communities of like-minded people are a giant step forward from the old non-communities where people simply gathered because it was a convenient way to earn money and get electricity and indoor plumbing, or because it’s where their parents lived.
In communities like Ananda, people have a chance to work more consciously on their relationships. They can test the spiritual principles they’ve read about in the scriptures and find out if they work. And because the people in the Ananda communities are willing to bend and change and learn and adapt, the result is that you have successful relationships that are fulfilling for the partners, and that can serve as models for others.
Another great change today is that people have deeply fragmented relationships with their families. Some people are still fortunate to have strong family ties from cradle to grave. But it’s increasingly rare – again, thanks to the new energy-based reality, where we’re able to move about and change our lives more freely, to the extent of even loosening or dissolving our ties with our own family.
And because it’s so rare to stay close, some of the nutrients in our human relationships have become diluted or lost. Meanwhile, there’s a false idea that we should rush out and try to get the missing ingredients from the first available source.
Swami Kriyananda said, not without a certain amount of sarcasm, “No two people can ever be all in all to one another unless they’re exceptionally stupid!”
You can’t expect to get all of your heart’s nutrients supplied in a single relationship. I’ll occasionally see people in a relationship that seems pretty good, until they start to bump up against the built-in limitations of any relationship.
A problem today is that we don’t understand when we’ve reached those natural limits, and so we may expect too much of our partners. In the past, people were more likely to know what they were getting into, and what the limits were, because the boundaries were widely recognized and clearly defined. So they didn’t expect to have a single, perfect relationship that would satisfy all their needs. It’s why people who tend to have a more realistic view of relationships are more likely to have friendships outside of their marriages, and mutual friends with their partner.
I’ve been struck by how well this system works in India, where they still have arranged marriages. I’ve led a number of pilgrimages to India, and I’ve been amused by how the Americans are always absolutely fascinated with the concept of arranged marriages. And the Indians, for their part, are utterly stunned by our system.
We’ve had the same tour guide for a number of years. When he started guiding us, he was twenty-four and single. He’s a dynamic, handsome, western kind of Indian, and when he finally married, he and his wife chose each other first. But several of our guides had arranged marriages, and the Americans would invariably ask them, over and over, what it was like.
I was amused by our tour guide’s brother. His parents had helped arrange a marriage for him to a very nice woman. And whenever people asked her what she thought of the arrangement, she would say, very happily, “my husband is fine, but my mother-in-law – now, she’s terrific!”
To her, it was the whole package. The husband was part of the picture, and he was fine, and she was perfectly content with him. He worked in a bank and he was a stable and honorable guy. But the mother-in-law – wow, she was the grand prize.
He wasn’t hurt by it at all. He was very happy that his wife liked his mother, because he knew it would make his life a lot easier. He knew the system, and how it would work for them together. So there was an ease and naturalness about it.
Some of the Americans asked our guide, “How can you have your marriage arranged like that, where you maybe don’t even know the woman?”
His answer was very devotional and wonderful, even though he wasn’t a notably devotional man.
He said, “God knows who my wife is.”
Meaning, whether I meet her, or my mother brings her home, it’s all under the guidance of a force that’s much larger than my little ego. If I imagine that I’m the one who’s running things, I’m just being childish. And what does it matter which human channel God might choose to give me His guidance?
Of course, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that goes along with the system of arranged marriages, and I’m not saying it’s perfect or that it always works. But there are some clear principles in it that I think would be well worthwhile to consider. And I think the key is that the nature of our relationships, and their outcome, is not always entirely under our control.
Certainly, it’s my life to do with as I please. And the circumstances of my life, also, are somewhat under my control. But my outward circumstances are not the definition of my life. They are not my happiness. They’re merely the circumstances that I’ve been given to work within.
Now, I think our American system of taking initiative, and being dynamic and changing our circumstances, and having a lot of freedom is really great. But we have to understand, very clearly, what comes along with it.