The Secrets of a Soulful Marriage: Creating and Sustaining a Loving, Sacred Relationship

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Contents

Introduction

1. Getting Personal

Taking on Your Inner Work

2. Breaking Loose

Replacing Unwanted Habits with Positive Patterns

3. Speaking and Listening in a Dance

Mastering Soulful Communication

4. Respecting and Cherishing Your Beloved

The Seeds of Sacred Relationship

5. Light Your Fire and Bask in the Warmth

Exploring Sacred Intimacy

6. The Power and Beauty of a Balanced Life

Honoring You, Me, and Us

7. Sustaining Your Soulful Relationship While Parenting

Cultivating Couple Care

8. Vision for the Future

Expanding and Elevating Your Love

Invitation: The Promise of Love

Notes

Suggestions for Further Reading

About the Authors

Copyright

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Introduction

The message on an anniversary greeting card that we enjoyed receiving:

Current Marriage Trends—"Staying single is chic. Divorce is in vogue. Living together is common. And here YOU are, happily married.

Hmmm—kinky!"

Having been soulfully married since 1970, we are proud to be a kinky exception to the trends cited in that cute anniversary card.

Our purpose in writing this book is to enhance and enrich couples’ relationships by sharing our personal experiences and those of other deeply committed spouses. Also, we want to offer useful perspectives, tools, and practices that we have acquired over forty years of experience as marriage counselors and, more recently, as coaches for soulful couples. We are passionate about fostering beautiful, sacred relationships. Moreover, we envision a powerful ripple effect emanating from love-filled marriages to the evolving consciousness of humanity.

Over the course of human history, the structure of a man and a woman living together has evolved from primarily being an effective means of survival to forging an emotional and spiritual bond. Prehistoric humans joined together as couples to procreate the human species and to meet basic needs in a cooperative hunter-gatherer society. Contemporary marriages have become multidimensional and much more complex than those in ancient times. In recent decades, the roles of men and women have become less well defined. For example, many men are homemakers or primary child-care providers and numerous women are corporate executives. Our ancestors’ partnerships were purely based on survival. Our modern relationships offer the possibility to support our individual life pursuits, as well as our fulfillment as couples.

What Is a Soulful Marriage?

In a normal, healthy relationship, you may get along well with your partner in the practical aspects of life. What about expanding the spectrum of your experience to include sacred and spiritual aspects? Imagine the facets of a diamond engagement ring gleaming in the sunlight. You have the potential to make your relationship as brilliant and dazzling as a precious, polished diamond.

In a soulful relationship, you are dedicated to being true to yourself and to supporting your partner’s overall well-being. You commit to doing personal growth work, expanding your ability to love yourself and your partner. You open yourself to your partner by being vulnerable, real, present, and proactive. You need not hide your blemishes and weaknesses. You work to accept who you are—learning to laugh at yourself can be freeing. You grow in awareness of who you are. You maintain your individuality as you join with your partner in the quest for mutual personal and spiritual evolution.

Soulful relationships are a haven for creativity, growth, exploration, and inner peace. You are a well-wisher and witness to each other’s unfolding personal growth. Listening and speaking with love and respect are cornerstones of a healthy relationship.

Being together as a couple takes on even more dimensions when you share your visions and dreams with each other. Building the life you long for is profoundly fulfilling. When you are feeling good about yourself and your relationship, you handle the stresses of everyday routines and challenges with more balance and grace. Your life becomes more meaningful and purposeful.

Do you hunger for a spiritual connection that is personally nourishing for you and your partner? This book may whet your appetite for more! Secrets of a Soulful Marriage, based on our Coaching for Soulful Couples program, is dedicated to sharing the ancient and current wisdom of transforming your ordinary partnership into an exquisite masterpiece. The power and beauty of your love has the potential to ripple out for generations to come.

Embarking on the Journey as a Soulful Couple

An ambitious intention of this book is to help you view your individual and couple life through the lens of your soul. Creating and sustaining a soulful marriage is an ongoing journey. Our key premise, our highest ideal for soulful couples, may be stated as follows: You are spiritual beings having human experiences on earth, each with your own purpose. You support each other to fulfill your individual and shared purposes.

Each of you holds the secrets of what really works in your relationship. Perhaps you have not thought about or expressed your secrets. In reading this book and participating in soulful couples activities, you are likely to tap into your dormant wisdom and gain the courage to unlock those secrets.

In the pages that follow, we reveal the secrets that have helped us to be more loving and powerful as individuals and as a couple. Interspersed throughout the book are vignettes from couples who share their experiences on a soulful marriage path. You are not alone. You can draw from the shared wisdom of other committed couples to enrich your relationship.

Our hope is that you use this book to better articulate the secrets of what works in your relationship and what you each long for in your marriage. How can you live as best friends, lovers, roommates, healthy partners, parents, and spiritual beloveds? Learning to become more soulful as a couple is a lifelong process.

In this book, we guide you to be realistic about what is involved in creating and sustaining a soulful relationship. In the opening chapter, Getting Personal, we encourage you to learn more about yourself and commit to your own growth. Transforming yourself and evolving take courage, commitment, and compassion. Doing the individual grunt work is crucial for viable, healthy relationships. Identifying old wounds and releasing your fears allow you to experience love, passion, joy, and satisfaction as a couple.

As you probably realize, when you expand your perception and envision what is possible, your long-held resistances come to the surface—together with fears and warnings about proceeding on this unknown path of change. How can you heed your concerns about changing and still proceed into the uncharted territory of sacred relationship? We guide you to master this paradox!

The practical guidelines and tools in chapter 2, Breaking Loose, help you identify the defensive, often primitive survival patterns that have brought you to this present moment. We know that to be available to truly love and be loved, you need to examine your past and address any unhealed hurts or traumas. Self-awareness and healing are integral to developing a sacred relationship. Bookmark chapter 2 to use as a toolkit whenever you feel stuck in old patterns.

Enhancing healthy communication with your partner is the hallmark of a long-lasting and satisfying relationship. Chapter 3, Speaking and Listening in a Dance, focuses on identifying and overcoming blocks to effective communication and offers numerous skill-building tips for strengthening your marriage.

Honoring and adoring your spouse is the theme of chapter 4, Respecting and Cherishing Your Beloved. Learn simple ways to touch your spouse’s heart in your daily life and to spiritually elevate your love. We encourage you to acknowledge and accept your individual styles of giving and receiving love.

If you are hoping to reignite your passion for each other, you will enjoy chapter 5, Light Your Fire and Bask in the Warmth. Don’t we all want more quality time together, romance, and satisfying lovemaking? Sparking and sustaining intimacy are among the true joys of marriage!

In chapter 6, The Power and Beauty of a Balanced Life, we illustrate the importance of honoring the you, me, and us in your relationship. We offer suggestions for finding the spiritual center of your life and for recognizing and honoring your inner nature. Taking time each day to clear your mind, relax your body, and restore your soul provides an antidote to the pressures of overwhelming busyness. You serve your family and all those you influence by slowing down and creating inner harmony, ease, and centeredness.

Vital attitudes and skills for soulful parenting (and grandparenting) are highlighted in chapter 7, Sustaining Your Soulful Relationship While Parenting. With the indescribable joy of raising children come strains on your resources and time. We show you ways to support each other to maintain your soulful relationship amid effective parenting. You will learn how to bring your own inner peace into your daily relationship with your children so that you function as a soulful family.

In chapter 8, Vision for the Future, we present evocative imagery that inspires you and your mate to further expand your love and to extend it beyond your family. As a soulful couple, you are invited to consider what legacy you can leave to your children, your community, and perhaps even to the world. You’ll learn to evoke your essential nature and clarify your vision for your future.

We conclude with The Promise of Love to open your perception and your heart to what is possible. The reality of relationships is that the initial bubble of romance eventually bursts under the pressures of everyday life. But when you cultivate a soulful relationship through compassion, self-care, couple care, and communication, you find that what develops after the bubble has popped is a deeper, more intimate, enduring love.

We are delighted that you have agreed to take this journey with us to new dimensions of soulful marriage. Here is a backpack of supplies you’ll need:

a willing heart

an open mind

eagerness to learn

discipline to practice new skills and attitudes

patience to persevere through rough terrain

this book as a map of the territory

a sense of direction and purpose

a moral and intuitive compass

a calendar to structure times to do the personal and couple practices and to plan in-house and out-of-the-house dates and activities

a journal to record progress and milestones along the way

gratitude for taking the journey with your partner

Shifts in Consciousness

To illuminate your path to a soulful relationship, we clarify some aspects of the shifts in consciousness that many of you may experience along the way. We describe prominent shifts in beliefs about relationships—from the conventional model to the evolving soulful model. These shifts often reflect changing cultural norms or debunk myths about what romantic partnership is or should be.

Personal Practice and Soulful Connection

At the end of each chapter, we offer practical exercises designed to enliven and enrich your marriage. We recommend that Personal Practice exercises be done alone and Soulful Connection exercises be engaged in as a couple. You will find practices for understanding your personality style, managing anger and other emotions, seeing issues from different perspectives, and cultivating compassion and forgiveness for yourself and each other. These are designed to help you reflect on past and present experiences, improve communication, and enhance intimacy. Be sure to set aside time for in-house dates to complete these Soulful Connection activities.

As individuals and as a couple, we have explored the world’s religions and many cultural beliefs and practices. We provide a sampling of spiritual practices from various faith traditions. Not everything we offer will be right for you. Allow this diverse presentation to help you clarify your own spiritual belief system. We encourage you to discuss your own religious or spiritual beliefs with your partner. Be willing to make shifts in your consciousness as you learn and grow.

If your marriage is foundering or you have not established a high level of trust, we recommend that you do some of the challenging or confrontational exercises with a professional counselor, coach, or spiritual director.

Some Notes on Style

Since this book is primarily intended for all sincerely committed couples, including same-sex couples and those involved in civil unions, we use the following words interchangeably throughout this book: spouse, partner, mate, dear one, beloved. Also, to avoid gender bias as simply as possible, we alternate between male and female pronouns.

To keep the book accessible to people of all faith traditions, we refer to the Divine as God, Spirit, Universe, Divine, Great Mystery, Creator, or Beloved when referring to the sacred dimension. Please feel free to insert other names for the Sacred if you don’t find your chosen name within these pages.

We realize that as coauthors we write very differently and we have decided to let our differences shine through. We outlined each chapter together and worked side by side to write much of the text. However, we also assigned ourselves some separate sections, then edited each other’s writing. Both of us made an effort to accommodate the other’s writing style. We hope to demonstrate that people who are very different from one another can effectively collaborate to create great books—and wonderful marriages.

Practical Uses for This Book

Feel free to read this book alone or with your mate. Read at your own pace to best grasp and assimilate the material. Writing in a personal or a couple’s journal can help you process what you are learning. Jotting down notes, emotional reactions, and breakthroughs may help you gain clarity and develop a sense of excitement about your relationship and your progress. Journaling about the exercises at the end of the chapters may elevate your awareness and clarify your insights. Responses given the first time you try an exercise may be dramatically different from future repeats, after implementing what you have learned. Your journal may be a source of inspiration to continue the process of deepening your love.

Some couples designate a date night to read this book and to do the exercises together. We invite you to frequently engage each other in meaningful and powerful ways, realizing that building your relationship requires rigor and focus, and is not always fun. Ongoing mindfulness, sincerity, and commitment create and sustain your soulful marriage.

You will benefit from reading and working with this book when your relationship is progressing smoothly, as well as when problems arise. You may selectively read topics that speak to you or that are relevant to issues you are facing.

Discussing the chapters and exercises in Secrets of a Soulful Marriage with other committed couples in a book club or couples group can deepen everyone’s learning. How potentially powerful to join with others as you progress on your journey of living as a soulful couple!

Since growth is usually a gradual process, we suggest that you regularly return to this book to discuss and apply just a few ideas, tools, and practices at a time. If you are working with a counselor, coach, guide, or spiritual director, you may want to let her know about your engagement with Secrets of a Soulful Marriage. She can enhance the progress you are making on the path of soulful connection.

The Power of Story

As you pursue your journey to develop a soulful marriage, it is important to remember the beginning, where the relationship started. What is your story? How did you meet? Did your family or friends introduce you? Did you meet online or do you believe your meeting was arranged by cosmic forces? Life is so mysterious. What do you each recall about your courtship? Those early experiences of being together provide the foundation of your relationship, and the cornerstones on which you have built your marriage.

Love is often colorful, dramatic, and playful. We have had the pleasure of hearing many thrilling and outrageous stories of how happy couples met. Ours is one such story, which we would like to share to encourage you to recount the magic of your own beginning.

Our Wild Beginning: Jim’s Version

In the fall of my senior year of college, my apartment roommate, Alan, asked me to speak on the phone to his sophomore blind date to answer some questions for her about a class that I had previously taken. Although our conversation was fairly brief and ordinary, I had the strange thought that I should be going out with her because I was less than two years older than she was, whereas my roommate was four years older. A week or so later Alan reported briefly meeting her and that she was