Don’t Add Fuel to the Fire
It’s not meditation’s fault if you don’t like what is coming up. If horrible feelings about your relationship are coming up, let them. If suddenly you detest your life, so what? Maybe you need a safe place to have these thoughts, so go ahead and give yourself permission to let them out. The trick is to not judge the thoughts or add fuel to them or attach a story to them or make a case against your husband or wife or partner because of them. Just acknowledge them. Then see what happens.
Start with Yourself
Meditation won’t repair a broken marriage in 90 days or less. What it will do is shine some light on the real issues. You can’t look at your marriage or your life until you’ve looked at yourself. Once you’ve looked at and sat with your own baggage, then you will be able to see what you are bringing to the relationship and to the world. That’s a beautiful starting point.
But remember, you will not fix someone else by forcing him or her to meditate with you, so don’t even go there, especially with your spouse or partner. People change all the time, but only because they change themselves. You will not and cannot change someone else. If there’s one way to make the other person resist and shut down, it’s to expect or demand change.
Work on you. The magic of meditation is that when you change, so does everyone else around you. If they come to meditation on their own or get inspired because of you, that’s great, but don’t forget your job is to get you to meditate, and if you do it enough, you won’t worry so much about what your spouse or partner does or doesn’t do anymore anyway.
Happy People Create Happy Relationships…
One of meditation’s greatest benefits is that it shows us that we need to let go of the desire to control people and events that we have no control over. Trust us, they will see the difference in you, and everybody wins. Your spouse, partner, significant other, and probably others close to you (even your pooch) will benefit greatly from your meditation practice because it’s one of those gifts that loves to give . . . in such ways as: You will probably be a whole lot more patient, present, available, kind, generous, loving, connected, and compassionate, and others will reap these rewards.
From the book JUST SIT: A Meditation Guidebook For People Who Know They Should But Don’t by Sukey and Elizabeth Novogratz. Copyright © 2017 by Sukey and Elizabeth Novogratz. Published on December 26, 2017 by Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.