Published February 11, 2026 12:05PM
Yoga Journal’s archives series is a curated collection of articles originally published in past issues beginning in 1975. This article first appeared in the March-April 1991 issue of Yoga Journal.
Love is just the damndest thing—and so is the relationship advice that comes when things go sideways.
At the start, you catch each other’s eyes. You get to talking and laughing together, and pretty soon you’re falling into that altered state where everything feels both perfect and dangerously out of control. The past dissolves, and you’re swimming together in a world made new again.
This is it! Real love! Isn’t it?
So you rearrange your life to spend the maximum time together. Eventually, you decide to set up house and the good stuff keeps on happening. Then, things begin to slow down. Little flat notes of normalcy creep into the symphony of your magnificent passion.
Still, things seem to be going along OK—until your partner does something strange and completely out of character. What’s going on here? It’s time to have some serious conversations, and before long you’re making it clear that your needs aren’t getting met. Unpremeditated harmony gives way to tense negotiations. You need more time by yourself or with friends outside “the relationship.” Strangers start to look good again.
But you’re the conscientious type, so you get yourself and your partner to seek out relationship advice, perhaps even couples therapy. That turns out to be the mistake of a lifetime, because the counselor is obviously bent on destroying the very wonderful balance of your relationship. Where do these professional meddlers get their ideas, anyway? Compared to other couples, things between the two of you don’t look so bad after all.
So what if you’re having an affair, or your partner is spending more and more solo time at meditation retreats? These things happen, no big deal. You’re still pretty good friends—or good lovers. Or, it’s so hard to find a decent roommate that you might as well stick it out. Your parents stuck it out, didn’t they? Maybe you should have kids—that might help. Or you could always split up. That’s what your partner’s parents did.
And so it goes. Stumbling from desperation to elation and back again, you wonder whether somebody out there doesn’t have some answers, just a few key pointers to help you navigate love’s treacherous and unpredictable terrain.
Conscious Relationship Advice: Unexplored Territory
Those of us raised on the quasi-religious notion of romantic devotion don’t always appreciate its novelty in human history. As psychologist John Welwood points out in his book Journey of the Heart: Intimate Relationship and the Path of Love, pairings of the past were more often dictated by family and society than by the free choice of couples in love. As our society became more atomistic and peripatetic, community pressure and a sense of duty was rapidly replaced by more subjective and individualistic concerns.
“Now that couples are increasingly removed from family, community, and widely shared values, there are few convincing extrinsic reasons for a man and a woman to sustain a life’s journey together,” writes Welwood. “Only the intrinsic quality of their personal connection can keep them going. … It is important to appreciate just how new this situation is. We are all pioneers in this unexplored territory.”
When traditional definitions of intimate relationship began to disintegrate in the late ’60s and ’70s, the territory looked boundless and tantalizing to many. But the headlong charge of the “sexual revolution” led into some unexpected thickets, as free love got snagged in the dense underbrush of patriarchal inequalities and biological realities. The ’80s saw a tentative return to notions of commitment and fidelity, but the change seemed more of a retreat from danger than a new understanding of love’s purpose.
Now, a small but growing number of relationship counselors are suggesting that there is a way out of endlessly cycling between self-serving “freedom” and fear-driven “duty”—a cycle that arises from the unconscious human tendency to swing back and forth from desire to disillusionment. This spiritual relationship advice begins with a conscious choice to question traditional assumptions about our experience of relationship, and leads inevitably to a mystical sense of purpose that transcends the personal needs of two people in partnership.
This new perspective on intimacy is coming largely from veterans of meditation practice and other self-awareness disciplines, but the hunger for a higher vantage point can be seen in the popular culture as well. Last summer, for instance, adult movie audiences disdained the high-powered, violent summer blockbusters in favor of Ghost, a story of romantic devotion with overt (if unsophisticated) spiritual overtones. Perhaps nearly everyone senses that intimate relationship could be much more than we’ve made of it—but relatively few have begun the journey into the heart’s new territory of conscious, spiritual intimacy.
Seven Steps for an Intentional Partnership
From conversations with John Welwood, meditation teacher Stephen Levine, and couples therapists Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, I’ve gleaned and synthesized seven essential pieces of relationship advice found along the spiritual path. These steps should be viewed not as objectives to be achieved at some future time, but as interrelated processes of growth that require deliberate initiation. Each of them, in fact, will likely require repeated initiations by most couples—because the unconscious inertia of old habits and conditioning is formidable.
These seven steps always require that couples must be willing (if not yet able) to:
- End withholding, blame, and projections.
- End codependent bargaining and replace it with mutual responsibility.
- Trade in the comfort of stasis for the uncertainty of growth.
- See through surface problems for underlying patterns of consciousness.
- Make problem-solving a collaborative growth process rather than a power struggle.
- Grow out of problem-solving into positive evolution and service.
- Accept and develop a spiritual purpose.
Following is a detailed discussion of this relationship advice, along with commentary from the therapists I consulted.
Step 1: End Withholding, Blame, and Projections
For many couples, the most difficult part of the first step toward conscious relationship is to realize the extent to which they do withhold, blame, and project onto each other. As therapists Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks note in their new book, Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment, there is a “centuries-old conspiracy” that keeps the human habit of withholding in place. “To see and say the truth means that you have to throw over generations of negative conditioning,” the Hendrickses write.
“People have been beaten and otherwise abused for simply noticing what was going on in their families and speaking the truth about it. So we have inherited a tendency to pretend not to see and to swallow the truth.”
When the truth has gone too long unspoken, it starts to come out in confused and distorted forms of blame. And a prime target for such projections is likely to be our intimate partner. Virtually all couples struggle with negative projections originating in early family traumas. Without a mutual commitment to explore these projections, a couple is prone to get bogged down in bitterness and blame.
Recognizing poisonous projections can be difficult for two reasons: First, the roots may run so deep that our partner’s behavior appears to be the real cause of our chronic negativity. Second, reclaiming projections means taking full responsibility for the negativity we’ve projected, which can be very painful indeed.
Kathlyn Hendricks has learned that established projections are often guarded by anger. “That’s how we know when we’ve pinpointed someone’s projection accurately; the person gets really mad,” she says. She cites the recent case of a woman who complained that her husband wasn’t giving her enough space. “She wanted to have her own time and felt that he smothered her. When we got to the roots of her feeling, however, it turned out that this was actually a prenatal and birth issue for her. Her mother smoked and drank while she was in utero, and the environment was so toxic that she withdrew into herself. From the very beginning of her life she’d felt that she had no space. That irritation didn’t begin with her husband, but he presented her with a similar trigger; every time he wanted to be closer, she’d get irritated. When I pointed out how she was responding to closeness, she got very indignant—which let me know we were on the right track.”
According to the Hendrickses, the deep roots of projections can be uncovered by a process they call “telling the microscopic truth.” This requires that couples set aside some time, either in counseling or at home, to communicate to each other the minute details of their moment-by-moment experience—starting with bodily sensations. In the case just described, Kathlyn Hendricks asked the woman to communicate her bodily experience at the moment she became angry. “As she got in touch with what was happening in her body,” Hendricks recalls, “she began to realize that this was a very old pattern for her.”
“Releasing projected patterns most often has to do with continuing to tell the microscopic truth about them,” Hendricks remarks. “That process is very healing in itself, which is something people don’t realize. We have truth so connected to getting a reward or avoiding punishment that we don’t realize truth-telling is very healing to the nervous system. Eventually you can clear negative projections out of your system, so that what you have left is free energy.”
Another key to transforming projections is to keep their positive potential in mind.
As Welwood writes in Journey of the Heart, couples struggling with their mutual projections “have a choice. They can insist that their fearful imaginings are reality, in which case these projections will become solid barriers between them. Or else they can bring awareness to their exaggerated reactions and use these projections as signposts to point to disowned parts of themselves they need to integrate.”
At all times during this enormous step into conscious relationship, both patience and shared appreciation may be needed to ease the process. Almost everyone is addicted to some degree of withdrawal and self-deception, and thus most relationships actually rely in part on secrecy and mutual misunderstanding for their stability. “It’s pretty scary to realize that over 90 percent of your interactions with someone are total illusions,” says Kathlyn Hendricks. Adds her husband, Gay: “It’s a big shock when people realize how they’ve been projecting onto each other. For each of them to drop back and take 100 percent responsibility for creating the situation as it is, is a very radical piece of work. It never fails to move me when people are able to do it.
Steps 2 and 3: End Codependent Bargaining and Trade in Stasis for Growth
Another commonplace of relationships is the process of codependent bargaining, an unconscious attempt to balance tensions and energies by making deals that delay the maturing process for one or both members of a couple. A popular form of codependent bargaining can be expressed as follows: “I won’t make you confront your alcoholism (or drug addiction, workaholism, or other similar problem) if you won’t make me confront my fear of self-assertion.” Such bargains are seldom made deliberately; rather, they become established between people through a series of micro-decisions and evasive maneuvers over time. These decisions and maneuvers represent attempts to protect the relationship from various truths that seem to threaten it. In fact, bargaining serves to obscure people’s real natures from each other and prevents them from working together consciously on the necessary challenges of changing.
Kathlyn Hendricks feels that codependency often arises because people fear “the process of death and rebirth that occurs all the time in a close relationship. False personas and old beliefs that no longer serve us have to be let go of, and the letting go is experienced by the self as a death.” When couples are attached to the idea of staying together as the people they were when they met, the possibilities of who they could become together are foreclosed.
Says Gay Hendricks: “A couple’s basic allegiance must be to certain meta-processes, such as staying congruent with your feelings, telling the truth, and keeping your agreements. If the relationship can’t honor those processes, then it would have to go.” This perspective sheds new light on the old notion of “irreconcilable differences” arising within couples. If one partner wants to grow and the other one could care less,” comments John Welwood, “that might be an irreconcilable difference, since they don’t share the same vision or purpose. But if two people have a strong connection and are willing to return to the basic commitment to keep opening up and growing-no matter how hard that is—-then there are no irreconcilable differences.
“People really need to consider what they most want from a relationship,” Welwood adds. “The old pattern is to seek a comfortable security and then not rock the boat. If that’s your view, then you’re going to resent all the inevitable difficulties and resent your partner. It will probably take a whole generation for us to grasp the idea of relationship as a conscious path of facing difficulties together.”
Step 4: See Through Surface Problems
To take on difficulties without being overwhelmed by them, couples must keep two principles in mind: The most vexing and recurrent problems in relationship are seldom the real problems, and the real problems arise from the basic conditions of human consciousness. Because of the latter truth, some kind of awareness discipline becomes essential to conscious relationship at this step.
“No matter what problem a couple comes into counseling with,” observes Welwood, “it’s never the real problem. Couples get into classic arguments that go on for years, and the argument is always a displacement. There’s always something deeper that has to do with how they relate to themselves as individuals, or with an inability to be fully present with each other.”
Stephen Levine, the well-known meditation teacher and consultant on dying who leads relationship workshops with his wife, Ondrea, suggests that many people may not be ready to see their displacements until they’ve reached a certain point of exasperation. “Maybe you have to get to the point where you realize, ‘Between my selfishness and hers, we can hardly sit down and look at each other over breakfast.’ The absurdity of two minds bent on self-protection while trying to relate finally becomes evident.”
The transformation of a battleground into a meeting ground requires an embrace of the basic flaws and negative feelings that previously kept two people apart. For instance, “you really can’t be in relationship if you don’t have room for resentment,” suggests Levine. “All relationship breeds resentment in humans—including the relationships with your parents, your children, your guru. We have to open to resentment so that we don’t conclude that the relationship isn’t working every time this feeling arises. And if you take it lightly, you can watch for it coming—you get the opportunity to see that all the stuff that has been separating us for so long is involuntary, uninvited, and not us.”
Levine, Welwood, and the Hendrickses all agree that some kind of self-awareness discipline is necessary to the development of such insight. Welwood, who leads workshops with his wife, Jennifer, notes they tell their participants, “You can only be intimate with another if you’re intimate with yourself. And you can’t be intimate with yourself unless you can be intimate, first of all. So we practice meditation as the ground for having people learn how to be in the moment, without taking sides in their experience.
When you can accept all of what you experience without closing off or defending against certain aspects of it, that capacity naturally extends to your relationships.” Ultimately, every problem in intimacy is connected to a fundamental lack of presence by one or both partners—and that basic problem illustrates the spiritual purpose of joining in the first place. “Desire brings people together, of course,” remarks Levine.
“But it’s the same deep desire that drives us toward incarnation: to satisfy the homesickness for God that’s in our hearts. We take incarnation one more time in order to investigate our separateness, and we get into relationship for the same reason.”
Hence, the solution to our deepest problems is within the problems, not outside them. Says Levine, “Somebody asked me one day, ‘How did you become loving?’ I heard myself reply, ‘By watching how unloving I am.’ Relationship helps us watch how unloving we are—just as confidence arises from investigating doubt, and courage arises from investigating fear. When you’re in relationship, it’s so clear how valuable wisdom and mercy are. How much clearer a lesson do we need?”
Steps 5 and 6: Make Problem-Solving a Collaborative Process and Grow Out of Problem-Solving
In most relationships, problems arise as the initial glow of romance, which is always propelled by an exchange of positive projections, begins to fade. Soon, says John Welwood, “we’re constantly coming up against the fact that our partner is not perfect, and we’re not perfect, and we don’t perfectly meet each other’s needs. That’s just the plain truth that people think is too painful to admit. There are always parts of us that are unconscious, undeveloped, or closed-off; those parts are going to hurt the other person and create disillusionment.”
But disillusionment, Welwood suggests, can serve as the beginning of the conscious relationship. In his book he quotes artist Carla Needleman’s description of disillusionment as a “sacred state … [that] has the effect of bringing about in my whole organism a quiet and seriousness that unite me as nothing else has the power to. Only then the mind is receptive and can experience a moment of more precise knowledge.”
Hence, the couple who can acknowledge their disillusionment, respecting its power to lead them to a “more precise knowledge” of each other, will take a quantum leap into a collaborative approach to problem-solving. Since most surface problems arise from the deeper challenge of maintaining an aware and mutual presence, the commitment to solve problems together goes a long way toward solving them.
With that commitment in place, the next step in conscious relationship may be surprising to some: to trade problem-solving for an increasingly painless and positive process of mutual evolution. That evolution eventually leads to the notion of relationship as service a spiritual potential that is far beyond the ken of most pop psychology approaches to “keeping your love alive.”
In Conscious Loving, the Hendrickses suggest that couples can trade in all their problems for what they call the “upper-limits problem” —that is, the recognition that people tend to create distance between themselves because they’re afraid of being close, and afraid of happiness as well. To describe the upper-limits problem in workshops, says Kathlyn Hendricks, “we use the analogy of a thermostat that each couple unconsciously sets for how much closeness, intimacy, and positive energy they can handle.
When that gets tripped by becoming too close, people bring themselves back down in a way unique to each couple.
“Common reactions include having an argument, getting sick, or having an accident. There are also more subtle ones, like having vague worry thoughts or even thinking that ‘my partner is holding back my spiritual evolution.’ But in every case, the upper-limits problem presents an opportunity to take a look at our resistance to intimacy.”
When couples learn to use this opportunity, the classic power struggles of relationship begin to subside—and all other struggles as well. “We see that couples are much more familiar with the idea that relationships are endless hard work than with the idea that relationships are an opportunity for an incredibly inventive dance,” says Kathlyn.
“When people remove their energy from conflict and struggle, there follows a period of great surprise, almost shock, as they confront the question, ‘Now what do we do?’ It’s very tempting to jump back and create new problems so they can continue. Resisting that temptation, adds Gay, “changes the focus of relationships from problems to creativity. Then the question becomes, ‘How can we express ourselves? What kind of service can we offer to the world together?” Their attention turns away from a face-off to facing the world together.”
But as the Hendrickses admit in their book, the realm of joyous, giving relationship is still a distant territory for most. “We have been with people as they sobbed or raged for an hour,” they write, “but we have seldom seen anyone stay in bliss for longer than a few minutes… A great deal of careful work is needed to resurrect the ability to live in a state of positive energy. We all know how to feel bad, and we all know how to feel neutral. What we need to learn is how to feel good.”
Step 7: Accept and Develop a Spiritual Purpose
Every journey must be going somewhere; in the new journey of conscious relationship, the destination is a vital, ever-evolving, and inspired state of being and growing together. Unlike the altered state of early romance, this spiritual condition embraces both the low and high tides of feeling. It’s not that every mundane experience is turned into an ecstatic one. Instead, there develops a mutual awareness that daily, ordinary experience can always be explored for the mystery and revelation hidden within it.
Couples who have learned to use meditative awareness and “telling the microscopic truth” to gain a deeper knowledge of each other paradoxically discover how little they know—and how tiny is the human knowledge of reality. To allow and refine this state of awed innocence is to practice “beginner’s mind” in relationship—an essential facility for renewing the known world of habits and limitations with the great unknown of pure, unfettered creativity. It is also the key to maintaining a loving appreciation of a partner’s uniqueness and growth.
Thus, the spiritual journey of love replaces religious commandments and cultural proscriptions with a carefully developed capacity for openness, humility, and awareness. Instead of being certain they know “the way to God,” couples on the conscious path of relationship collaborate to create a way of being that keeps them inspired with a whole and transcendent energy.
While the world’s religions have traditionally reserved the mystic path for solo ascetics, there is a growing awareness that intimate relationship may actually provide a faster and more challenging route to “God-realization.”
“If you’re looking for an unknown radio source with a single receiver,” suggests Stephen Levine, “you’ll be able to find its direction but not its distance. You need two receivers in order to triangulate the source and locate it. The quality of being collaborateurs in relationship requires a partner who’s willing to work with you on forming a triangle with God.”
An important advantage of using relationship for spiritual realization, add the Hendrickses, is that the surest way to the light is through our own shadows. “If you want something to reveal your shadow so you get a chance to achieve a lasting transcendence,” says Gay Hendricks, “then relationships are really the only way to go. You’d have to sit in a cave in Tibet for a long time to face as much shadow material as can emerge in one minute in a close relationship.”
Perils of the Spiritual Path
The conscious journey of intimacy presents its own perils, of course. “One danger of relationship-as-path is that we can work it to death,” notes John Welwood. “People may process everything in a very serious, exhausting way that’s too work-oriented.” A way to counteract this tendency is to remember when moving through unexplored territory that there’s no one “right way” to do it. “We have to give ourselves lots of room to try things out,” Welwood remarks. “That’s why beginner’s mind is so important. Perhaps at first we work too hard on the relationship and then realize we have to give our problems more space. Later we may realize we’ve gone too far in that direction and just spaced out—then we can come back toward the middle. I think that’s how learning works-through trial and error.”
Another peril lies in the misuse of spiritual methods that should serve mutual awareness. “We work with people all the time who use spiritual techniques as a way of avoiding conflict,” comments Gay Hendricks. “When something comes up that they need to look at or feel, they will meditate instead. We both meditate every day and find it absolutely essential. But you want to make very sure that you’re not using meditation as avoidance, or using a witness consciousness as a way of getting out of the body and away from feelings. We feel very strongly that the ultimate transcendence must occur in the body, and come through your feelings, revealing your essence within.”
A related problem lies in the tendency to use the idea of God to avoid the Earth-level challenges of relationship. Stephen Levine recalls that a woman once told him she was so in love with God that she could no longer talk to her husband or care for her children properly. “She said, “All I can think of is God. What should I do?’ We said to her, ‘Make breakfast, get back to the ground, and find God right where you are.”’
The Heart’s New Territory
There is no map to the realm of conscious relationship, except the one that dedicated lovers make for themselves along the way. But establishing a spiritual direction for intimacy does provide a unified context for the work and play of relationship—and a means to look at daily experience from a higher vantage point when it’s needed.
As a glance at popular beliefs about relationship will quickly confirm, a vital spiritual overview of love and commitment is sorely needed in our society. People who have outgrown traditional religious and cultural guidelines for relationship may find themselves left with the advice of pop psychology, which generally amounts to a set of strategies for the mutual care and feeding of egos. Such strategies are not only insufficient for a path of collaborative growth; they can’t even hold people together.
As Stephen Levine says, “the reasons people get together end up being the reasons they leave. They’re together for companionship, economic security, and sexual or even aesthetic co-mingling. But who we really are is so much more enormous than those reasons that they’re just not satisfactory for a relationship of awakening.”
To grow beyond those common motivations is to enter the heart’s new territory. Even the best of guides can’t predict everything couples will find there, but intuition suggests that the ecstatic spark of romance is meant to lead lovers well beyond themselves. At the close of Journey of the Heart, John Welwood sums up the potential of conscious relationship this way:
“The more deeply and passionately two people love each other, the more concern they will feel for the state of the world in which they live. They will feel their connection with the Earth and a dedication to care for this world and all sentient beings who need their care. Radiating out to the whole of creation is the farthest reach of love and its fullest expression, which grounds and enriches the life of the couple. This is the great love and the great way, which leads to the heart of the universe.”




