I really wanna thank Vishen and Tanya and Vina and all the Mindvalley staff for letting
me share this story with you today, because it's something I'm totally passionate about.
So here's what happened.
I woke up one morning at the age of 43 with a horrifying realization, I had forgotten
to get married.
I had created this amazing career.
I worked with all the top self health and spirituality authors.
I had created the career by prayers, processes, rituals, dancing naked under the moon, and
it worked.
It worked really well.
So over here, life was great.
But when I rolled over in my empty bed, kinda sucked.
So, I thought to myself, "What if I could use these prayers, processes and rituals to
manifest my soulmate?"
And I didn't know if it was gonna work, but I did.
I made a list, and for six months, I prayed, I chanted, I made vision boards, and the I
met him.
And three weeks later we got engaged, a year later, we had three weddings.
Then something else happened.
Did you know relationships are hard?
So I discovered I knew how to run a business, I knew how to be the boss, no partnership
skills.
Clueless how to be a wife.
And stuff started to happen.
So, for instance, I would get up in the morning, I'd go in the kitchen, I'd make my cup of
English breakfast tea, and then I'd be done and I'd put my cup in the sink.
And then my husband, my new gorgeous husband, would come in the kitchen and he'd say to
me, "Why can't you put your coffee cup from the sink into the dishwasher?"
It's like, "Well, I've been putting it in the sink for decades.
I'll get there eventually."
And then he'd say to me, "And how come there's always crumbs around the toaster?"
And I'm like, "What crumbs?"
So, this would happen almost every day, and it got to the point that when he started walking
towards the kitchen, I'd think, "Oh, am I gonna get spanked again?"
And then one morning the craziest thing happened.
He walked in and he said, "Arielle, I got up at 4:00 this morning to get a glass of
water, and I came in the kitchen, and I saw your cup in the sink, and my heart exploded
with love for you.
And when I saw your crumbs next to the toaster, I've never felt closer to you."
And I'm like, "What is this?
It's good, but what is this?"
So here's what it is.
The Japanese have this ancient aesthetic called Wabi Sabi.
And Wabi Sabi honors all things old, and worn, and weathered, and imperfect, and impermanent.
And it seeks to find beauty and perfection in imperfection.
So imagine I had a big vase right here and it had a long crooked crack down the middle
of it.
The Japanese would put it on a pedestal, and then they would shine a spotlight on the crack.
So Wabi Sabi is about learning to love the cracks in yourself, and especially those of
your mate.
Wabi Sabi love.
So, I started asking all my friends, "Do you practice Wabi Sabi?"
They're like, "What the heck is Wabi Sabi?"
And I'd explain it to them, they're like, "Oh, yeah, let me tell you a story."
So one of my favorite stories is from my friends, Jerry and Diane.
And Jerry has an addiction.
Jerry is addicted to poppy seed bagels.
And every morning, he wakes up, he walks into the kitchen, he slices his poppy seed bagel,
which of course, sends gazillions of little black poppy seeds scattering all over Diane's
white tile floor.
Sometime later, Diane gets up.
Every morning, she walks into the kitchen, she gets a paper towel and wets it, and she
gets on her hands and knees, and she wipes up the gazillion of black poppy seeds.
Now, this goes on for a very long time.
And one morning, Diane's on her knees, you know, wiping up the poppy seeds, and she thinks
to herself, "How do I have to never do this again?"
Which is followed by the thought, "Oh, that would mean Jerry's no longer with me."
And she begins to cry.
And she runs out of the kitchen to go find him and give him a big hug.
And from that day forward, every time she wiped up the poppy seeds, she felt this love
in her heart because it now meant she had another day to spend with Jerry.
So that's a Wabi Sabi shift in perception.
That's how you take something that once made you crazy, right?
And now you love it.
And I also found out that there's research, scientific research, that proves this.
So there's a woman at the University of Buffalo named Dr. Sandra Murray, and she did studies
on couples who wear rose colored glasses.
And what she found is that couples who wear rose colored glasses, I now call them Wabi
Sabi glasses, is that they have happier, more satisfying relationships.
And she calls it the Pygmalion effect, because it's the phenomenon where when you raise your
level of expectation for someone, they rise to meet that level.
You and I would probably call it a self fulfilling prophecy.
And what happens when you wear the rose colored glasses is you begin to look for what's right
in the relationship, instead of what's wrong.
Make sense?
Right?
How many of us are looking for what's wrong instead of what's right?
So I needed a lot of this, me with the no partnership skills.
So, one of the things that really drove me nuts about Brian happened in the bathroom.
I would go in the bathroom to brush my teeth, and I would squeeze...I'm a bottom squeezer.
Any bottom squeezers here?
Right?
Squeeze from the bottom, roll it up nice.
My husband, he's a mangled from the middle guy, right?
So every morning for years, I would look at my mangled tube of toothpaste, and I'd have
this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Like, "Why can't he do it my way?
Why can't he do it the right way?"
So, I got out my rose colored glasses and I put the tube of toothpaste in my hand, and
I thought, "What's good about this?
Nothing."
You know, there's got to be something.
And then it came to me, ready?
"Thank God I married a man who brushes his teeth," right?
Yeah.
So now I know as we grow old together, he's gonna have all his teeth.
Wabi Sabi love, it's a shift in perception.
So another thing that happened was one day I found myself like this.
And I don't know what I was ragging on him about, I don't remember.
But when I saw myself like this, I was horrified, and I stopped.
And I said to Brian, "The next time this happens, and unfortunately, there's gonna be a next
time, could you just kindly, gently, sweetly say to me, when did Sheila enter the room?"
Now, Sheila is my mother, and I love her to death.
She's totally cool, and she's a typical, overbearing Jewish mother.
And Brian got it instantly, and he said, "Yes.
And the next time I'm too patronizing, just say, when did Wayne arrive?"
That was his dad.
So very quickly, we found these code names to defuse what could have been World War III.
And we still do it.
He said to me last week, he goes, "I see Sheila's here."
And it's great, because I don't wanna be this woman.
You know, and he doesn't wanna hear me ragging on him about something.
And I checked in with some other friends.
I said, "Do you have any code names?
Are the things that you use and you do?'
And my friends John and Tracy told me their story.
So John, John gets really jealous whenever Tracy's on the phone talking to a man, or
at a party.
One day, they're at a cocktail party, John sees Tracy across the room talking to some
handsome man, the green-eyed monster comes up.
And John, who is a pretty conscious guy, stops himself and he says, "What can I do here?
What can I do?"
And he decides to create a sub personality for himself called Luigi.
And Luigi is this sort of slimy Italian guy with long curly hair and wears white shirts
with big sleeves.
And he walks over to Tracy and he grabs her around the waist and he says, "You are my
woman.
You are not allowed to speak to any other man.
I'm going to ravish you right now," and gives her a big hug.
And like that, they're hugging, they're kissing, they're having fun.
And any time the green-eyed monster appears, John now becomes Luigi.
So, I know some of you are out there thinking, "But, Arielle, does this work for everything?
What about if he's making me really crazy?"
And that happens.
There will be times when you hate your spouse.
Trust me, I know that happens.
But, so here's what it doesn't work for.
It doesn't work for bad behavior, it doesn't work for abuse, it doesn't work for addiction.
So, if any of those are in your relationship, you need to go get professional help.
But for almost anything else, you can find the Wabi Sabi solution.
So I have these other friends, Ed and Deb.
And Ed's this big, big teddy bear of a guy, warm, friendly, wonderful.
And his wife Deb is a real kinda get it done bottom line kinda girl.
She likes to make her to-do list, cross things off, stay on a schedule.
So one day Ed and Deb are off to the farmers' market.
And they're, you know, she's picking out stuff for lunch, and she turns around to talk to
Ed and, "Ed," and Ed's gone.
Where's Ed?
So she goes looking for him, and finds him sitting on the curb talking to a little boy
who looks quite depressed, maybe seven, eight years old.
And she gets there just in time to hear Ed say to the little boy, "How does a camel hide
in the desert?"
And the little boy looks up at him and says, "I don't know."
Ed says, "Camouflage."
And the little boy lights up and he smiles and the mother's smiling, because for the
first time all day, the kid's happy.
And Deb, Deb has this Wabi Sabi epiphany.
For the first time in 15 years, she gets her husband, and she sees that Ed has not been
waking up every morning thinking, "How do I make Deb crazy today?"
He wakes up in the morning, "How can I make somebody's day?
How can I make somebody happy?"
And she starts to cry.
And she totally gets her husband and falls in love with him all over again.
Are you seeing what this can do?
I mean, it really, you can totally shift something that once made you nuts into something that
you love.
So, I had a really hard one that it took me a long time to figure out the Wabi Sabi solution
too.
I'm a HSP, I'm a highly sensitive person.
Any other HSPs in here?
Right.
A lot of you, right?
So these bright lights are killing me, I hate them.
You know, loud noises, so painful for me.
My husband, news junkie to the max.
MSNBC is on 24/7, really, really loud.
You know, when I...people say, "Who are your friends?"
It's like, you know, Rachel, Ed, you know, right?
Right?
What's his name, the cute one?
You know, so all the people on MSNBC are our closest friends.
So anyway, every time I walk into the house, there's a TV on really loud.
And I don't know if you've noticed this, but when you complain to your spouse about something,
no matter how much you whine, bitch, and moan, and ask them to change, do they ever change?
Never, right?
No matter how much you complain.
So I'd walk in, "Oh, can you turn that down?
Could you turn it off?
When you leave the room, could you turn the TV off?"
This went on for years.
And then one day I came home, and every TV in the house was on really loud.
And Brian wasn't home.
And then I saw the remote, let's just pretend this is the remote.
And I thought, "God invented this just for me.
All I have to do is walk around the house and turn off the televisions.
It's really that simple, because I saw that this wasn't a Brian problem, this was an Arielle
problem.
I was the one who doesn't like loud noises, and now it's fixed.
It's just the easiest thing in the world."
So there was also another piece of it that I learned, and I'm gonna tell you a story
about it, but first we have to have an agreement.
So the agreement is, we're gonna leave politics out of this, okay?
No politics.
So it's a story about Barack and Michelle Obama.
So 10 years ago, they almost got divorced.
Michelle was working this really big corporate job, she had the two young girls at home,
she was feeling fat, unseen, unheard, Barack wasn't around much.
He had told his grandmother he didn't think they were gonna make it.
She had told her mother she didn't think they were gonna make it either.
And then one morning at 5:00 in the morning, she woke up and she had this really big desire
to go the gym.
She hadn't been to the gym in probably four months.
And it was 5:30 in the morning, and she was feeling guilty because she thought, "Okay,
the girls are gonna get up, they're gonna need breakfast.
You know, he doesn't know how to make breakfast."
And then she thought, "Oh, what the hell?
He went to Harvard for God's sakes, he'll figure out breakfast."
And she got out of bed and went to the gym.
And while she was on the Stairmaster, this was 10 years ago, before we had ellipticals,
she had this Wabi Sabi epiphany.
And she realized that she had been waiting for Barack to make her happy, and she realized
that she needed to make herself happy.
So when she got home, the girls were at the kitchen table with Barack eating their cereal,
he had figured it out, and she announced to the family, "We have new rules in the Obama
household.
One, I'm taking my mother up on her offer to help me with the kids.
Two, Barack, every day that you're at home in Chicago, family dinner time at 6:30.
Three, every Sunday is Family Day, no matter what.
And four, we're gonna have a date night every week."
And it transformed their relationship, and as you know, they're a very happy soulmate
couple today.
They're still in the White House with mama bear with them, too, their grandmother.
So, personal responsibility becomes really sort of the cornerstone of Wabi Sabi love.
We're all responsible for making ourselves happy or figuring out how to get to the happiness.
And unfortunately, we've all been brainwashed.
You know, we've all bought into this myth that we need to be perfect, our bodies need
to be perfect, our spouses, our kids.
HDTV would like your home to be perfect, furniture and all, and the truth is, it's impossible.
The striving for perfection leaves us sad, angry, disappointed, upset, upside down.
It's just not possible.
So, I think right now we should have an agreement to change the word perfection to pure fiction.
Right?
Because that's what it is, yeah, pure fiction.
And really coming to understand and embrace Wabi Sabi love has finally made me a good
partner.
We just had our 15th wedding anniversary, we're still blissfully in love, things are
really great, and I know that this stuff really works.
Because if you decide to shift from what I call annoyed to enjoyed, you can change conflict
into compassion.
Because I want you to think of your partner's annoying behaviors as a gift.
They're doing this so you can be a more loving, kinder, generous person.
They're there to be your teacher, to really show you how to be a Wabi Sabi artisan.
Anybody willing to do that?
Yeah.
Now, the other good part about it is, you can do it with yourself.
So if you're beating yourself up, you're making yourself wrong, just, you know, just say,
"I'm having a Wabi Sabi moment," and find something good in it.
And I'll give you an example.
I'm a really sloppy eater.
If any of you have eaten with me, you know this, when I eat I'm very, like, into it,
and my food gets on me and it gets on you.
And I'll probably eat the food off your plate as well.
So my story is, is that the way I eat is a demonstration of my enthusiasm for life.
So I no longer have any guilt or shame around my disgusting eating habits.
Got it?
All right.
So, I wanna leave you with one thought.
Sam Kean said this brilliant thing, I found it the other day, I haven't memorized it yet.
So he says, "We come to love, not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to love
an imperfect person perfectly.
Thank you.
So that's it.
Thank you.