The Community Affairs Office surveyed many Sikh Dharma community members to discover what types of articles you would like us to publish. Marriage was a very popular topic, so here is the first article based upon your request. Please continue to send us articles on your favorite topics to publish in our upcoming newsletter and Prosperity Paths.
Guruka Kaur Khalsa
I don’t know of anything that makes a marriage successful more than keeping up. After 30 years, no matter where you started, it seems that everyone gets to the same place. Some develop their coziness, and some an ever-deeper understanding of the format, depth and dimension of the marriage relationship.
My husband and I had the blessing of coming into this Dharma together. We had a basic friendship and enjoyment of each other’s company but this did not mean that we didn’t have our karmas to pay and our mistakes to make, or acting out from our personal histories.
Although we were fortunate enough to have a strong, basic affection between us, that really wasn’t enough to get us through. It took many years of personal work, sadhana, banis, seva, simran and the like. Each one of us had to grow into who we are and leave our pasts behind. It wasn’t always easy, and the blessing of our spiritual teacher in our lives may have been what saved us from ourselves. When our visions of each other became limited, our teacher always opened each of us to who the other person was. He took positions that to this day I do not understand, but I trusted his vision.
Now I look at our marriage completely differently. I no longer perceive it as merely a personal relationship. I see it much more as our base: The environment we create together, from which we live and serve the mission. I have learned to value that environment and to keep it sacred and pure, so that our children and we can flourish and fulfill our destinies. I no longer
think that being right is so important; I think it’s much more important to be loving and supportive and see the greatness in my husband. (And as our teacher has always told us: ‘seeing it certainly supports making it so’, although his greatness exists with or without me.) I am more grateful now than ever for the path of marriage in my life.
The Siri Singh Sahib Yogi Bhajan once said that everyone runs into their past live’s karmas and when you do, don’t redo it. I think we made that mistake in our lives together. When we reached the point that we had gone through so much of the karma of it, I finally just wanted my marriage to come up and match my own identity and caliber. I wanted all the joy of it, without all the heaviness that still was there and which didn’t really reflect either one of our identities. One day I found it had changed. Our marriage had evolved to reflect who we had become. Now, we live in so much sweetness.
If there is one piece of advice that I always give people when they talk to me about their marriage concerns, it is to recognize and understand the sacred space of your marriage. If you use your marriage as a dumping ground, then you are living in a dump. If you use your marriage as a divine place where you go to rejuvenate yourself so that you can to keep up in your work, it will become that sacred support in all the aspects of your life. Once you build that habit, it will serve you with Infinite Sweetness.
Do I think that keeping up works? Thinking has nothing to do with it - I know that it does!