- What's up you guys, happy Valentine's Day!
It's been a while since we talked about relationships.
In my 20s, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out
how to have a healthy relationship, what that looks like,
how to find the right partner, things like that.
These days I find myself thinking more about
how to make relationships last a very long time.
How do you build a life together
with someone that brings you both fulfillment
for years and years and maybe even decades?
So I just read a crap load of books,
stuff that was kind of like old school,
traditional approaches to relationships,
new agey, not my vibe but still maybe something there
approaches to relationships.
Side note, there are so many books about relationships!
Like, are we all just that screwed up?
But something that was recently pointed out to me
was that a lot of self-help focuses on
what we can GET from relationships.
How we can attract someone,
how we can get the relationship we want.
But what about how to give love,
how to be an excellent partner?
Those are just as if not more important questions
and yet there's very little, culturally that addresses that.
But there's one book that really stood out to me
in this regard and it explores a Buddhist approach
to modern relationships.
I'm not even a Buddhist.
I just really like the essence of Buddhism!
Especially, as a perspective for life's big questions.
So today I wanna go through four Buddhist ideas, principles,
that you can apply to your relationships.
(Indirect Message theme music)
The first noble truth of love is that
our relationships never become stable
in the way that we might imagine they should.
Relationships are always in flux because they're alive.
- SUSAN: I don't know about you but no one ever told me that.
You meet someone, you fall in love, it'll be awesome.
You'll have some problems you'll work them out
and then, dot dot dot,
nobody really knows what happens then.
So I discovered that, dot dot dot never happened.
- This is Susan Piver.
She's the author of "The Four Noble Truths Of Love".
She's also a meditation teacher
and a practicing Buddhist for over 25 years.
- SUSAN: Throughout a day or a week or a lifetime together,
there's this constant like rubbing up against each other.
The discomfort looks really close
to something called irritated. (laughs)
It doesn't mean that the relationship is bad,
it just means that it's never stable.
- I don't know about you guys, but I definitely,
have come into relationships with the [expectation] that
once you find your person, that you're gonna settle down
and all of the effort and friction
is just gonna kind of go away.
When you're perfect for each other that's what happens right?
Well, not really.
Even if we acknowledge that relationships
have ups and downs, we don't really talk about
what that looks like.
For instance, that might mean that
at some points in your relationship
you feel really strongly in love
and other times, you don't as much.
So the idea here is that this isn't a failure
or something that needs to be fixed. That it's normal.
So on the podcast, Susan and I talk more about
what instability means in a Buddhist context,
as well as two very important exceptions
to this truth, which is: relationships
with the presence of abuse or addiction.
Truth number two, is that the expectation
that our relationships should feel effortless
if we're with the right person,
actually makes things much harder
and can cause a lot of anguish.
- SUSAN: By the time we were like 10, I don't know, really little,
you have a movie in your head, this is what love is.
It's like, you have a lens in the middle of your forehead
and the movie's playing and wherever you look,
it just projects, whoever walks into your screen
is cast in some role.
Occasionally, if you're lucky someone walks in
that you cast them as your lover and then yay.
But the closer you get,
especially when the honeymoon starts to wear off
the more attention we pay to that movie
and the less attention we pay to the person.
- She notes that the first step is to acknowledge
that that movie is even playing
and then with that awareness,
we can learn to turn the projector off.
- SUSAN: In some ways you could say that,
that is where love really begins.
- Love begins, where our loaded expectations end.
The third noble truth of love is that
meeting that instability of life
and relationships together as a team,
is what love looks like.
Love is not necessarily just being enraptured with someone
for decade after decade.
It's finding someone who can ride the waves of life with you
and bring joy to the ride itself.
In psychology, this type of relationship might be called
companionate love, but where passion might be seen
as a positive thing in Western psychology,
in Buddhism, passion can be poisonous.
- The three poisons are classical teachings
in Buddhist philosophy, and they are called:
passion, aggression and ignorance.
I get where passion can sound confusing
'cause passion is good.
It doesn't mean that kind of passion.
It means...it's a euphemism for grasping, holding on like,
I need you to be this for me.
Sometimes you do need, I do need you to be this for me!
That's not wrong,
But, there comes a point in our relationships,
especially our most intimate relationships
where we stop seeing the person,
and we start seeing who they are to us
and what they can do for us.
That's where grasping or passion can become a poison
because every time I choose who I think you should be
over who you are, I am having a conversation with myself.
- To be able to rise to this instability
and to conquer life's challenges together,
we should start by creating
the right container for our relationship.
- The container principle is, as I was taught,
a Buddhist notion that says that
the space in which something occurs informs the something.
So it's like if we were having this conversation on a bus,
it would be a different time in history,
but, it would feel different
than the way we're having it now.
And you're the same, I'm the same,
but the space is different, it changes things.
- We can create that container in many different ways.
By keeping a tidy home together, your shared space.
Sharing food together with delight.
Spending time, noticing each other's positive qualities
and spending time together in nature.
Truth number four, bringing it all together.
Now that we've accepted
and met the instability of life together,
Buddhism offers an eightfold path to,
relationship enlightenment.
So number four is a list in a list,
but I'm gonna give you the TLDR [too long didn't read] of my favorite parts.
The first element is that we need to try
to see our relationships accurately,
which means seeing our partner exactly as they are,
not who I wish they were
and not mistaking them as an extension of myself
because they are their own person.
The second step is to have the right intentions.
Our intentions in our relationship should be to figure out
not what we can get from the other person,
but to figure out what we can give.
It reminds me of, I think it's John F. Kennedy,
"Ask not what your relationship can do for you,
but what you can do for your relationship."
The third step is to have the right speech.
That means speaking to each other honestly,
speaking to each other kindly
and communicating with intention.
To me that means, not tuning your partner out,
not speaking past each other,
really learning to listen to each other.
I'm pretty sure this stuff is agreed upon in,
like virtually all relationship advice,
so can't go wrong there!
The fourth step is to take the right actions.
This is about our behavior,
being a good person to our partner at all times,
not just when they're watching
or when other people are watching
or when we stand something to gain from it.
It's really taking each other's needs and experiences
and feelings into consideration
with decision-making and our actions.
- SUSAN: The fruitional piece of the journey
is to realize that in love,
you could try to take everything that comes your way,
good, bad, ugly, except abuse or addiction,
and view it as a way not to get more love,
but to get more intimacy,
'cause love always comes and goes.
It begins, it ends. Intimacy has no end.
And it can always deepen.
When I realized that that gave me a lot of heart,
that's something that can last a lifetime
because love I know,
or sometimes I feel that sometimes I don't,
but can I know you more?
Can I show you more?
The answer to that is always yes.
- I really enjoyed my conversation with Susan
on the podcast, she was maybe one of my favorite people
that I've talked to so far.
Like any relationship advice, or philosophy,
nothing is ever gonna perfectly apply to your life.
But I hope you can maybe take some of the things here
to think about that are helpful or interesting to you,
and then leave behind the stuff that isn't.
I'm gonna put a link to her book and the podcast down below.
Check it out if you're interested.
Thank you for dropping by my dears, I'll see you next time!