Difficulty is the very ground on which love deepens.

Learn when to stop trying to fix your partner and when real feedback helps.

Who better to mirror you than your beloved life partner who is there with you day in and day out?

Devon and Nico Hase are an extraordinary couple whose work combines ancient Buddhist wisdom with psychological practices in an irreverent, no-nonsense style that sets them apart on the mindfulness scene. As life partners and meditation teachers, they're the authors of two books, How Not to Be a Hot Mess: A Buddhist Survival Guide for Modern Life, and another to be published this month, This Messy Gorgeous Love: A Buddhist Guide to Lasting Partnership. Nico, who has a PhD in counseling psychology and has studied extensively in the Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Devon is a graduate of the Insight Meditation Society's Teacher Training Program, has practiced meditation rigorously for the past 25 years, and teaches internationally. I wanted to speak to them about their new book and how mindfulness impacts coupling and love, a topic they are deeply familiar with.

Mark Matousek: Why did you write this book about love, at this particular time in the world? Devon Hase: We wrote it because we kept seeing the same thing everywhere we taught. People are trying desperately to fix, optimize, or escape their way out of relationship difficulty — and suffering more for the effort. Social media has made this worse! We're surrounded by images of perfect partnerships while quietly drowning in our own ordinary struggles. What if the difficulty isn't a sign that something's wrong, but the very ground on which love deepens? We're both longtime Buddhist teachers, and Buddhist wisdom — especially the principle of dukkha, the inevitable stress woven into all experience — turns out to be one of the most liberating lenses available for understanding why relationships are hard, and what to do about it.MM: Why is this such a liberating lens? How will readers find this useful? Nico Hase: Honestly, the most useful thing in the book might be the simplest: learning when to stop trying to fix your partner and when real feedback actually helps. We offer a number of practices — meditation, journaling, partner exercises — but they all point in the same direction, toward taking responsibility for your own inner life, even as you work through the inevitable difficulties together. We also teach people how to actually listen. Not to respond, not to fix, not to wait for their turn — but to genuinely receive another person. That alone changes everything.

MM: What’s different about having a relationship as a spiritual practice versus just being in the rough and tumble of an emotional connection?

DH: Let me tell you a story. Nico and I met almost 20 years ago, and when we did, I had just moved to a Tibetan retreat center in the high mountains of Colorado, and he was living as a Zen monk, also in the high mountains of Colorado, about a three-hour drive away. We met by happenstance through a friend, but our first conversation was actually about dating, and we both said that neither of us was "dating material" because we were so committed to our paths of meditation and our respective communities. There was this sense for both of us that the relationship wasn’t going to work if it wasn’t going to be part of our path of awakening. Even when we got married, our commitment was about being partners in awakening. We’ve been intentional from the beginning, and I think we really needed our partnership to be more than just romantic love.

NH: Maybe, I’ll just add a real question for readers to ponder: What is your life about? What do you want in life? One version of what Buddhism promises, or what meditation practice promises, is cultivating the beautiful qualities of the heart, beautiful qualities like love, compassion, joy, equanimity, and generosity. If your life is really about cultivating these qualities and then spreading them to everyone you meet, everybody you engage with, then each part of your life would need to be an essential piece in that process of cultivating these qualities of the heart.

What better arena or domain than partnership, which comes with so much heat, right? So much is happening in the moment. If you can use that heat, if you can use the connection you have with this other person, and, in particular, if you can use the inherent challenge of a relationship to grow your capacity for equanimity, for balance, for calm, for joy, then your relationship becomes part of a path. That’s what Devon and I have always been very interested in. When we’re teaching, this is what we’re pointing out to others, inviting them to pay attention to.

MM: There can be a tendency to spiritualize emotions for people on a path of self-realization. To deflect ugly, messy feelings in the belief that "we’re all just One anyway, so why deal with our conflicts? “ How do you instruct folks to work with hard emotions, especially in the context of a relationship?

NH: This is a really common problem. You have an idea of what spirituality is, you have some kind of identity as a spiritual practitioner, and anything that’s not lining up with the experience that you want to be having, or the identity you are attached to, you push to the side. What’s fascinating about spiritual bypassing is that it is completely obvious to everyone around you, even when it is so nuanced and subtle for you. The first way to discern your own spiritual bypassing is to use others as a mirror. And who better to mirror back your weirdest stuff than your beloved life partner? The one who is there with you, day in and day out, and is probably being driven half-crazy by your bad habits? That is the person who can actually point to where you’re stuck.

DH: I think a lot of what Nico and I have learned over the years is that we can be our best accountability partner. In fact, that’s part of the deal. Not only do we call each other out if we do feel this spiritual bypassing happening, but we also really honor our emotions together. We do a bunch of partner practices that we share in our new book, so we have accompaniment through some of our more tangled moments.

NH: In our book, we talk about checking in. It is the simplest thing in the world, and it has been a total game-changer for us. Checking in just means one person is the speaker, and the other person is the listener. For about five minutes, the speaker speaks. For about five minutes, the listener simply listens. The listener can nod, they can give encouragement like, “Yes, I hear you,” but they don't speak, they don't put any of their information into the room. Their only job is to listen with a warm awareness, the kind of attention that we call mindfulness.

Then, after the speaker has spoken for about five minutes, you switch. The speaker becomes the listener, the listener becomes the speaker. What we find, over time, is that, as the speaker, we’re able to access parts of ourselves that are not so easy to access, parts of ourselves that we are not even accessing in the quiet of meditation. There’s something about speaking and inquiring, and being witnessed in the inquiry, that helps us wrap our emotions in awareness and share them in a space that mostly feels pretty safe and supportive. There’s a whole process that’s happening for the speaker. The secondary gain is that the listener really gets to hear what is on their partner’s mind, and what is really in their heart.

MM: You don't have to be a meditator to benefit from this practice?

NH: No. Nor do you have to think og yourself as "spiritual."

MM: You just have to be able to keep your mouth shut.

NH: [laughs] Which is not always easy.

(Part Two of my conversation with the Hases will post tomorrow.)

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