Your relationship with your partner, and all your relationships (boss, parents, friends) started when you were in fourth grade, since all the uncomfortable, emotional reactions being stirred in you today were formed unconsciously in the world of your youth.

All that was joyous and unlived, unfulfilled, and unresolved within your parents and ancestors were deposited electromagnetically downstream in you. But your adult self is afraid of this inner kingdom of experiences. So you blame your spouse, boss, friends, kids, and everything else for how you feel and all the challenges you face.

This is why relationships fail! I call it half-syndrome. Your adult attention is oblivious to this other half of yourself. As Robert Monroe reminds us in Far Journey, “We are only partially successful using an incorrect standard of measurement."

Your spouse is just waking up these old bioelectric reaction-patterns stored in your limbic warehouse. Meanwhile, all the answers to the test, everything you need to know to make your marriage work, is stored in the language and intelligence of these old feelings. That is why the work on your relationship has nothing to do with your partner; it is about you.

Allow the friction in the arena of marriage become the mechanism for you to wake up, grow up, and fully complete your life.

Stand in the fire of your anger and joy, and enter the roar of silence by sitting quietly alone to unlock those old feelings. Marriage and meditation are the same thing: Both are designed to break you open, unlock the experience of vulnerability, and change you forever.