We need to feel connected to the sacred: through feelings of devotion, through tears-streaming-down-the-face-gratitude. We all of us need to feel that, as much of the time as possible. To disconnect from devotion to the sacred is a death sentence for the spirit, which has become sadly all-too-normalized. And, yes, you do need some kind of focus for your devotion: it’s natural to want to give it human form as a statue or a human representative, because it’s more relatable.
Now here’s a radical idea:
Maybe the very best focus for your devotion, as an icon for the Great Mysterious Spirit which gives us all life, lies in the human being on the other side of your bed. This means to get interested in seeking out God, not only in religion or in a charismatic teacher, but in your own intimate partner.
Whoa… whoa… whoa… buddy. Hold on now. Now you’re telling me you want me to worship Karen? W O R S H I P? Karen who can’t get herself unglued from Instagram? Karen who keeps nagging me about taking out the garbage? Karen with the varicose veins? That Karen? Now you want me to worship her?
Most couples have serious objections when they first hear about this idea. We’ve got so used to focusing on the pettiness, the nagging, the forgetfulness, the sloppiness, the little secrets and the lies, for many people their partner seems like the ultimately unsuitable candidate for expression of awe-inspired reverence.
But remember when we talked about the statues. When you bow down in devotion to a statue of Jesus carved from wood, you’re not worshiping the wood itself. You’re not going to go to a lumberyard and make offerings to all the 4 by 4 Doug Fir planks on sale. You are worshiping what the statue represents. It’s an icon, it’s a way to use something material, visible and tangible to connect with something vast, mysterious, and more subtle. Whatever the icon on your altar, you are not worshiping the stone, or the brass, or the wood. They represent something invisible.
It can be just the same with your partner. For a few precious moments, you look beyond the conditioned habits of the personality, and you see with freshly awake eyes into their essential innocence. Your partner becomes a window into the vast mystery of feminine or masculine wisdom, divinity and love, rather than a fixed static object with which you have become all-too-familiar.
When you worship a statue or a guru, you bow down, but the object of your devotion doesn’t bow back to you. It’s a one-way street. When you cultivate this practice of shared devotion with your partner, it can go both ways. You bow down to each other, so the flow of devotion becomes mutual.
You may have already felt this kind of deep reverence and connection when you first fell in love. You hadn’t yet gotten entangled with their predictable personality traits, so it was possible back then to look through the eyes of innocent love into the eyes of loving innocence looking back at you, and then to immediately be struck in awe. Oh my God, you are so, soooo beautiful. You are literally shimmering with radiance!!! I’ll do anything for you. Let me be your servant and devotee in Love. Later, after you got married, and bought the house, and had the kids, you might have felt like an idiot. I was so blind. I didn’t see this trait, I didn’t see that. It’s true, you were not focusing back then on the personality traits when you were in love, but you did look from the eyes of love into the eyes of love and it was overwhelmingly beautiful. It felt so real.
Some couples get back into that way of seeing their partner – through the eyes of devotion – using a psychedelic like MDMA together. Some stumble into this in heightened moments of lovemaking, or shared creativity, or unexpectedly in special moments. Sadly, many couples never return to those euphoric peaks of shared deep cherishing.
The more that you look with the eyes of devotion into the Essence of your partner, the more possibility there is for that Essence to wake up in them. Whatever is seen and recognized and named tends to come forth.
The importance of these kind of peak moments have been recognized in mainstream relationship psychology. “Cherishing is such a powerful change agent in a relationship,” says Terry Real. “I believe this one winning strategy is equal in potential to all of the others combined. It’s a spiritual principle.”
“The best advice I can offer any couple isn’t about the science of making successful repair attempts,” says John Gottman. “It is to revere each other and be grateful that you are in each other’s life.”
“We do not usually talk about transcendence and transformation in the world of clinical psychology,” says Peggy Kleinplatz, “even though this may be exactly what people are yearning for.”
In order to transform your relationship into a temple like this, you’re going to need to radically and dramatically upgrade your expectations. Like… a thousand-fold. You’re going to need to reflect on all the ways that you have settled together in compromise and comfort and not wanting to rock the boat, and see if you both want to start over.
A lot of couples are wary about placing these kinds of lofty expectations on their relationship because of the fear of disappointment and failure. When that happens, I love to text them both this quote from Dr. John Gottman, and I make it very, very clear that this is a clinical psychologist speaking, a researcher, and a respected academic. This is not coming from a Tantra teacher in Northern California named Blossom Rainbow Dust.
“Some marriage experts claim that a significant cause of unhappiness in marriage is that husbands and wives have overblown expectations of each other. By lowering these expectations, the argument goes, you become less likely to feel disappointed. But Donald Walker of the University of North Carolina has debunked this idea by studying couples’ standards and expectations of each other. He has found that people with the greatest expectations for their marriage usually wind up with the highest quality marriages. This suggests that by holding your relationship to high standards, you are far more likely to achieve the kind of marriage you want than you are by looking the other way and letting things slide.”
I’m going to repeat one sentence for emphasis here:
“People with the greatest expectations for their marriage usually wind up with the highest quality marriages.”
In my forthcoming book, The Tao of Deep Intimacy, I am shooting for the moon with those “greatest expectations.”
