🔐 A Course in Messiness: Using Relationships as a Path for Growth (for when sitting in a cave by yourself is not how you want to go about your spiritual growth)

A 6-part video series that explores an alternative to the spiritual path of the ascetic: the path of the householder. Because you don't have to choose between your relationships and your realization.

Hi beautiful soul,

The intersection between relationships and spirituality is such a fascinating topic, and it’s an area that can be extremely challenging (and messy)!

As Ram Dass put it: “If you think you are enlightened, go spend a weekend with your family.” The same could be said for sharing a life with a romantic partner.

Relationships of any kind can bring up a lot of stuff.

I often joke that it’s no wonder that so many spiritual teachers an off to chase their enlightenment by themselves. It’s just a lot easier to experience yourself as consciousness when you don’t have a distraught toddler (or spouse) requiring your attention.

The path of the householder: let’s play this game of enlightenment on the extra-hard setting

For most of us, taking the “Buddha”-route and leaving our primary relationships behind (even temporary) is out of the question… even if it might be appealing at times.

We are pursuing our realization is the midst of all the messiness and busyness of everyday life.

In other words, we’re playing this whole game of enlightenment on the extra-hard setting. It’s not always easy, but it’s sure worth it. And there’s so much to say about it.

That’s why my husband and I decided to teach a course on spirituality and relationships a few years ago.

It was a transformative experience where we met for 6 weeks with a small group of people.

While the course is over and while we have no plans of repeating it, I wanted to give you access to the teachings we shared with participants.

I have turned them into a mini-course you can go through on your own (in a cave or in an office cubicle or wherever you can get some decent internet connection…).

About the mini-course

What’s included in this

This mini-course contains the “dharma talks” we shared with participants when we originally went through the Spiritual Relationships course with them.

To protect the privacy of participants, this mini-course doesn’t contain any personal sharing from anyone else. (We have plenty of personal sharing, though.)

What qualifies us to teach this material

My husband Elijah and I are both extremely passionate and dedicated to our spiritual growth, and it is a core component of our relationship.

Independently of each other, we both experienced an embodied, non-dual awakening about ~ 15 years ago. We only met (and eventually got married) after we had this shift in consciousness that got confirmed by senior teachers in our lineage.

So, we know what it’s like to have an awakening while being single, while dating, and while being in a committed relationship to each other.

Elijah went on to become a spiritual teacher in this tradition and then left after becoming a parent so he could spend more time with his kid. (Which I guess makes him an anti-Buddha?)

While my husband is a Ph.D.-level scientist, I used to be a lawyer and academic and am now an entrepreneur. So, we are pursuing our spiritual growth in the midst of everyday life, not separate from it.

A messy course about a messy topic

❗ Just a heads-up: while the live recordings contain insightful material, they are pretty raw in terms of audio/video quality. 

The recordings are as messy as relationships. There is nothing professional about them!

Please let me know if you want or need a transcript for these classes, and I will get that set up for you. 

Here’s the thing: being a human is messy. Being with another human is messy. Therefore, human relationships are inherently messy. They don’t look anything like what we see in movies or on Social Media (or on photoshopped wedding day pictures).

That’s why I cheekily called this “A Course in Messiness.” And messiness is what you will get in this course, such as:

• a video where I’m (deliberately) halfway off the screen,

• a video with an unmade hotel room in the back, and

• a video that’s not even a video (just a screenshot).

You can find the videos of these teachings below. Each video is between 2 and 18 minutes long. Altogether, they run for about 66 minutes.

Topics

• Part 1: Spirituality and Relationships

• Part 2: What Even Is Spirituality? (Left-Handed vs. Right-Handed Path)

• Part 3: How to Deal With (Your and Other People’s) Limits in Relationship

• Part 4: How to Deal With Intense Emotions in Relationships

• Part 5: Mutuality: How to Deal with “Hot Button” Topics

• Part 6: How to Deal With Unacknowledged Emotional Labor in Relationships & Course Wrap-Up

As a paid subscriber, you can message me with questions you have about the content of this class. 🤗

Part 1: Spirituality and relationships

To give you an idea of what this course covers, the first recording in this series is openly available.