In the fast-paced world of today, how do you keep a check on your anxiety when it comes to your marriage? Constantly multi-tasking, we find ourselves looped into numerous responsibilities, decisions, and relationships that are hard to keep track of. With all of this, do you expect a confused mind to make the right choices for you and your partner? Well, that hope alone shows how bewildered you are! If you don’t want to turn your home into ‘Gotham City’ and you are wondering how to improve your marriage, then you need some serious meditating!
Meditation is an amalgamation of many sages’ wisdom that transcends space and time. It is a practice developed to make the utopia of ‘living in the moment’ a reality. The human mind is like the water in a pond; when it is restless, it becomes hard to see, but if you let it settle, the solution to your problems becomes crystal clear. Clarity of mind helps you to advance your communication skills, cultivate creativity, rejuvenate and harmonize. Since meditation helps you to unite your body, mind and soul, a marriage, which is the union of two souls, definitely needs meditation. In short, changing your mind will change your marriage!
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Enhancing your relationship with your spouse requires you both to develop certain rituals, which will help in reconnection despite the chaotic modern life that we lead! Meditation has deeper and enduring answers to how to improve your marriage. Let’s have a look at a few. 
1. Art of ‘Loving’
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Marriages today are stressful because there is always ‘too much to do but too little time’! Mindfulness exercises and meditation, popular in healing circles, teach us how to be fully present in every second. Like in a marriage, meditation calls for both attendance and attention. Loving in halves is not an option when you have vowed your life to somebody, right? Meditation will help you realize the need to be fully available to your significant other. You will be attentive to their needs and wishes and, at the same time, be aware of what you want instead of always being on autopilot. The memories you make with them will be only half as treasurable if you stop living and loving the moments! Marriages usually fall apart as a result of neglect and carelessness. Anything that can amp up attention, such as meditation, keeps a marriage healthy and receptive.
2. Journey of a thousand minutes
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To reap the benefits of anything brilliant, you need to take action! Meditating is the most inexpensive of ways to improve your marriage. However, very few couples realize this and thus very few are genuinely happy. All you need to do is to find a place comfortable enough where you can relax for at least ten minutes a day. You need to draw your entire attention to your breath. This lets you free yourself from all the thoughts that boggle you or are weighing heavily on your mind. Quite naturally, it takes you from being reactive to being creative! The significance of being innovative in any relationship cannot be ignored. It is this quality in you that will make life remarkable for the two of you. So turn off your mobile phones and sit together to meditate. This new practice and way of being together will teach you to be more patient and understanding of one another, which is a prerequisite for a happy marriage.
3. 50 Shades of Grey
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Meditation, as we know, is strength training for the grey cells. If you practice meditation, you tend to grow more folds in the external layer of the brain, which has been proven to make you more intelligent. There is a directly proportional relation between intellectual compatibility among couples and marriage gratification. If one partner is always becoming smarter while the other remains intellectually lazy, this can cause a rift between the two! Ironically, how to improve your marriage is a deeply intellectual question in itself, don’t you think?
4. Spaces in your togetherness
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To be able to enjoy your own space even when you are together is bliss only possible through meditation. Meditating in each other’s company teaches you how to be two different individuals and yet complement one another. The constant fight between couples for not being given their respective spaces will no longer be an issue. To quote Gibran speaking on marriage in, ‘The Prophet’: “Stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart/, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” When you meditate with your beloved, there is an emotional reconnection between the two of you. This rewiring is built on the understanding that you both are individuals with your own hopes, aspirations and ambitions, but also part of a couple with joint motivations and accounts. Your love is now more matured and complete.
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5. Every man for himself!
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The benefits of meditation include self-sufficiency, which in a way helps build a better bond. How, you may ask? Well, while you learn that you are in charge of your happiness just as much as your significant other is, you also learn the same about your sorrows. You stop blaming them about all your misery, which makes it easier for you to let go of the past. Meditation may also serve as the doorway that lets you heal those wounds from your childhood. And when you do this with your companion, it enhanced you love even more. As a result, meditation escalates the happy emotions and reduces the blues! The longevity and expansiveness of a marriage depends on two key ingredients: love and respect, for oneself and also for one’s other half. Meditation helps you improve both of these standards, according to Sri Sri Ravi Shankar who founded the Art of Living.
6. “Trust me and open up your heart. We can overcome this hand-in-hand”
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All the hang-ups and shyness that prevent you from talking freely to your partner are erased once you both start meditating. Effective communication is vital in every relationship, especially in a marriage. You may talk to your spouse for hours but still somewhere there is a barrier between the two of you that averts you from reaching a spiritual level. Meditation will help you pour out your heart to one another. It will be your Pole Star and guide you towards your higher connection. Meditation not only helps you open up to your darling, but it also prepares the latter to be receptive to your disturbing thoughts and empathize with you. It ensures that you are open to the thoughts, sentiments, and well being of each other. “I don’t ‘get’ him or her”, a phrase quite popular among couples, can be dealt with ease! For many pairs, long term meditation is an experience that creates an ‘intimacy from which they never recover.’ This intimacy is more cherished than intercourse!
7. “Don’t just de-clutter, de-own!”
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In a marriage, you do not need an addition of new ideas, but instead a subtraction of old distractions! It is important to learn new things and perform them as one, but also to rediscover how simple it is to just be! Our minds tend to get cluttered over the years and, while we clean out our closets of our mind and give away the unnecessary, we forget to do the same with our material belongings. Don’t possess so much that you would be more than happy if your house caught fire! Meditation helps us extend this ‘minimization drive’ to our lives and properties too. Stripping yourself of the unnecessary by reducing your wants and focusing on your needs will teach you to value what is important and will enhance your vitality. Here comes in another vital concept of charity that, when done in concert with your husband or wife, will tie you so close to one another that no external power can ever dare come between the two of you!
8. No one night stand!
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Like marriage needs a commitment, so does meditation. In both, you have to trust in the everyday evolution of your ritual. You have to free yourself from the sorrow that originates from the attachment to particular outcomes. This is acquired only through discipline and devotion. While discipline will help you in being faithful, devotion will take you to the most sincere sphere of love, in meditation and in marriage. When you are saturated with the emotion of true love, your marriage becomes more of a mystical experience, beyond the understanding of other people in your life!
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In a marriage, people often fall in love quickly and then fall out of it over several years without even realizing it. Meditation allows you to identify this impending split and then facilitates a ‘re-falling in love’; doesn’t this remind you of the process of learning, unlearning and re-learning? Well, that is how meditation works! According to Swami Sivnanda, “Meditation is painful in the beginning but it bestows immortal bliss and supreme joy in the end.”
On a lighter note, Osho holds that, “Marriage creates so much misery that one has to meditate; meditation is a byproduct. Without marriage, who will bother to meditate? For what? You will be already blissful!” If none of my arguments compel you to start the brilliant practice of meditation with your partner, then this will! 😉
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