Mysticism & Relationship Advice
After twenty years sitting with people in my counselling practice, couples who can't stop fighting, individuals who can't stop choosing the wrong partners, people who love each other deeply and have somehow still managed to make a complete mess of things etc., I have become quietly convinced that the most useful relationship advice is very old. Not the self-help-book kind of old. Ancient. The kind of old that has been sitting in Sufi poetry and Stoic letters and Taoist texts for centuries, waiting for someone to notice that it applies just as much to the argument you had in the kitchen this morning as it did to the spiritual struggles of people who lived two thousand years ago.
Here are five pieces of wisdom from ancient mystics that I have found myself returning to, again and again, in my practice. I'm giving them to you not as abstractions but as practical tools, because that's how I use them, as actual things you can do, or stop doing, in your actual relationships.
1. Rumi: The wound is where the light enters
The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi is probably the most widely read mystical poet in the world right now, and the line most people know, "the wound is where the light enters you", is often quoted decoratively, like a nice idea. In my work I use it as a diagnostic tool. When a couple comes in and one person says "she always does this thing that makes me feel like I'm invisible," I'm not immediately looking at the behaviour being complained about. I'm looking at the wound underneath the complaint. Because Rumi's insight is that the places where we are most easily hurt in our closest relationships are not accidental, they are the precise locations of our deepest unhealed material.
The tip: when something your partner does sends you from zero to a hundred in a way that feels disproportionate, stop and ask yourself what old wound that reaction is living in. The anger or the hurt is real. But it usually has an address that predates the current relationship. Doing this work, locating the old wound rather than simply reacting from it, is some of the most important work any of us can do, and Rumi understood it eight hundred years ago.
2. Lao Tzu: The usefulness of emptiness
The Tao Te Ching, attributed to the sage Lao Tzu and written around the sixth century BCE, contains a passage that stops people in my office when I read it aloud: a wheel works because of the empty space at its hub; a pot is useful because of the space inside it. The usefulness of something is often in its emptiness.
In relationship terms, I translate this as: you have to create space for the other person to exist. This sounds obvious until you see how many relationships are suffering from a complete absence of it. Partners who fill every silence with talking. Partners who can't allow the other person to have a mood without immediately trying to fix it. Partners who interpret their lover's need for time alone as a referendum on the relationship. The Taoist understanding is that space is not a threat, it is the condition that makes the thing work. A relationship with no emptiness in it is like a wheel with no hub: it cannot turn.
The tip: practice giving your partner genuine, unhurried space, not the sulky, pointed kind of space, but real space, offered without expectation of immediate return. Notice what happens to the intimacy between you when you stop trying to fill every gap.
3. Epictetus: You cannot control what you do not control
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was born a slave in ancient Rome and died a free man who ran a philosophical school in Greece. His central teaching, that we suffer not from what happens to us but from our judgements about what happens to us, is the founding insight of cognitive behavioural therapy, as it happens, so I am professionally indebted to him even beyond the mystical dimension.
In relationships, the Epictetan insight I return to most often is this: you cannot control your partner. This seems obvious. It is not obvious. An enormous proportion of relationship suffering comes from people attempting, in a thousand creative ways, to control what their partner thinks, feels, does, says, or becomes. Criticism is often an attempt at control. Withdrawal is often an attempt at control. Even excessive worry about your partner can be a form of attempted control, a magical-thinking effort to manage outcomes that are genuinely outside your jurisdiction.
The tip: make a list, honest, private, for yourself only, of the things you are currently trying to change or control in your partner. Then ask yourself: what would I need to work on in myself if I accepted that those things are genuinely not mine to control? The answer to that question is usually where the real work is.
4. Julian of Norwich: All shall be well
Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century English mystic who, during a serious illness, received a series of visions she spent the rest of her life writing about. Her most famous phrase, "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well", is not a naive reassurance. It is a hard-won conviction, arrived at through genuine darkness, that the ground of reality is fundamentally benevolent.
In my practice I use this with couples in a very specific way. When a relationship is going through a genuinely difficult passage, a betrayal, a loss, a season of disconnection, the tendency is for one or both partners to conclude that this difficulty is the truth of the relationship, that the pain they are in now is definitive. Julian's wisdom is that suffering is real and does not need to be minimised, but that it is not the deepest thing. The deepest thing, in her understanding, is love, and love has a tendency to persist and resurface in ways that difficulty can obscure but not permanently extinguish.
The tip: when you are in the hardest passage of a relationship you genuinely want to keep, try to hold the difficulty and the faith simultaneously rather than letting one cancel the other. The difficulty is real. So is the well.
5. Rumi again: Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment
I'm coming back to Rumi for the fifth tip because this particular line of his, "sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment", is the piece of ancient wisdom I find myself reaching for most often in couples work, and I can't find a better version of it anywhere else.
Cleverness, in a relationship, looks like this: knowing exactly what your partner is going to say before they finish saying it. Having an airtight explanation for why the problem is their fault. Being right. Being right is extraordinarily expensive in intimate relationships. The moment you are certain you understand your partner, certain enough that you stop genuinely listening, stop being curious, stop being capable of surprise, you have replaced the actual person with a mental model of them that is always at least a little bit wrong.
Bewilderment, in Rumi's sense, is not confusion. It is wonder. It is the willingness to be genuinely surprised by the person across from you, to approach them as a mystery that you have not yet fully read, because you haven't. You never will. The people who have been together for forty years and still find each other interesting are not the ones who figured each other out. They are the ones who stayed curious.
The tip: the next time you catch yourself finishing your partner's sentences, in your head or out loud, stop. Ask a question instead. A real one, that you don't already know the answer to. Bewilderment, it turns out, is a relationship skill. Rumi knew this in the thirteenth century. It is still true this morning.