How do I live with someone who will not grow with me? My husband and I have been together for almost six years and those years have been fraught with fights and misunderstandings. It didn’t help that we were both drinking alot. He was a very insecure person to begin with but a year and a half ago he was burned very badly. He was in the hospital for several months, lost his right hand and he almost died. I never left his side, slept in a chair in his room and helped with all his wound care. Something happened to me during this experience and I see things very differently but he is still the same. I don’t drink anymore and I started eating a plant based diet and exercising regularly. I even went back to school, I’ve wanted to for a long time but didn’t out of fear. I don’t seem to have many fears these days, I look at life so differently now, everything is so fresh and wonderful. I’ve also grown as a person, I’ve read about twenty of your books and I love Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. I don’t know how to explain it, I’m just not the same person anymore. Something happened to me and I can’t go back to being who I was and my husband doesn’t understand, he wonders were his wife went. I’m a lot more at peace with myself and life than I’ve ever been and I don’t look at my husband the same way anymore. For the first time I can see him for who he really is and I feel so much love for him, and it doesn’t hinge on whether he’s being nice or not. Sometimes my heart seems like it’s going to explode. The problem is that he hasn’t changed and he’s even more insecure than before. I love and accept him for who he is but he can’t see it and I’m always having to defend myself. He refuses to be any different than he’s always been and he doesn’t know who I am anymore. I thought for sure that he would be changed by his experience as well, especially when he talked to me about seeing a friend that passed away a few years ago and how peaceful he felt there and how he didn’t want to come back. I hadn’t known anything had happened in the operating room but when he came to he was so earnest that I know that he came back for me. He just kept repeating “I came back for you, I came back for you”. I don’t feel like we’re on the same path anymore and I don’t know what to do. I love him with all my heart and all the things about him that used to make me so mad don’t even bother me, I just want the chance to love him and show him how much I love him. How can I do that when he keeps accusing me of things because he’s insecure and always wants to be upset. Please help me I feel were in two different worlds, and I feel like I’m going to lose him when all I want to do is love him.

I have a relationship question in relation to the Law of Least Effort. My husband has a sex addiction and as a result he has repeatedly been unfaithful and has asked for a divorce twice while under the sway of his addiction. He has contacted the last woman in moments of stress and weakness. In both instances I talked him out of leaving me, and he has said that he does not love this woman and does not want to leave me, that his addiction makes him believe these things. He is currently in a 12 step program, is seeing a therapist, and is trying to make amends and overcome his addiction. We have a child together. If we did not have a child I don’t think I would have the strength to try and make it work. It has taken everything in my being to look past what he has done and try to see it objectively as a disease even though the consequences have devastated me personally. My question is this; should I have followed the Law of Least Effort and let him leave even though I felt it was a mistake? Am I resisting the direction that life is trying to lead me? Are we to completely surrender to all events, whether good or bad?

My question (which requires a little background info to set up) concerns a meditative practice involving listening to the “inner sound, “and how this concentrative practice contrasts/relates with the
practice of a silent mantra meditation. I began meditating in 20000, and after practicing this sporadically, learned a practice known as Surat Shabd Yoga, which involves listening to the inner sound (variously known as Nada, or Shabd, Cosmic Hum, etc.)
I believe someone wrote to you on this forum in the past about hearing inner sounds, and you referred to this as the Cosmic Hum, and that it might be best for the writer not to become too attached to this sound. For the most part, this made sense to me.
But I learned this inner sound practice not simply by coming across it during meditation, as a side effect, but as an actual concentrative practice within the context of the Surat Shabd Yoga tradition. I believe that you have some familiarity with this tradition, as you once wrote a forward in one of Rajinder Singh’s books…
The practice involves closing your ears with ear plugs, and listening to an internal sound, from the right side of the head. A high pitched, humming sound. This practice did bring me great peace at times, and if you listen to the sound long enough, it can become very strong- it definitely has an ethereal quality to it, and can often really slow the flow of thoughts. The idea is that eventually, listening to this sound will charm your mind, take you higher and higher, through various planes of existence (astral, causal, etc) and eventually allow you slip into the ultimate.

But does it lead directly to pure awareness, or pure consciousness? Because listening to this sound involves concentration, my impression is that the mind remains on the surface, at least at the beginning, whereas with mantra meditation, the “dive” into consciousness is relatively quick. But I can’t say for sure whether this is an authentic impression of my own, or if I am only parroting things I’ve read.

Perhaps I’m creating divisions where there are none. But this has been a source of confusion for me, and as I have limited time, I cannot practice everything. And because I go round and round in my mind with this, the sense of confusion often inhibits whatever inner peace I might have otherwise gotten from my practice. Some people have told me that this practice of listening to the Nada is a much more “powerful” practice than mantra meditation, others have said the opposite, that the mantra takes you right away to pure consciousness, which is really what you’re aiming for. I don’t know what to think.
At this point, I happen to be practicing mantra meditation again, often with good results, but these questions always linger.

So, to be more concise, my question is: in your long, wide ranging experience, have you come across this inner sound, and have you come to any conclusions regarding it? Is it a valuable, powerful point of focus in meditation, as many traditions such as Nada Yoga and Surat Shabd Yoga would have,
or is it rather a “symptom” of good meditation? Any thoughts on this — this Nada, or Cosmic Hum–what its value is in spiritual practice, or how it might be received, would be greatly appreciated.

My husband of 17 years recently moved out, and it appears we are headed down the path of divorce. I have used this time to work on myself – learning from the experience, accepting and forgiving my responsibilities in the toxicity the marriage had become, growing spiritually, trying to find my way down the path of becoming a better, more enlightened person. I practice primordial meditation twice daily, sometimes using the meditation tools found in Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire (i.e. heart mantra when emotional turmoil sets in). In my list of desires, I don’t have anything listed related to this current marital situation other than my desire to release any negative emotions related to my husband, and my desire to react to him in more positive, encouraging, and helpful manners.

Part of me wants our family back, as this separation is difficult on the kids, and we did have many happy times together. The other part of me thinks of what the marriage had become, and talks myself out of wanting our family back as it had become very unhealthy for both of us. Thus, nothing in my list of desires other than the above!

My questions are:

1) Should I list a desire to have our family back again as a happy familial unit again? I do want the best outcome for all, but I also know going back to the way things were right before the breakup would not be best, and this is where I get confused.

2) How do I know the difference between ‘taking the high road’ to minimize conflict when it arises, vs. ‘I’m going to get burned if I don’t stand up for myself’, especially where property and asset splits are concerned? My intuition tells me he is hiding money and assets from me during this time that I’m trying to provide for my family on my single income, but when I bring it up he gets antagonistic. How do I know when to take further steps, what steps to take, or should I just let it go and hope for the best outcome?

3) He is attempting to force me into making financial decisions, making some of his own and pushing me into accepting them. I do not feel the time is right to make some of these decisions, added to this is I truly do not know WHAT I want in regards to property and asset splits. I feel like I’m getting backed into a corner. My intuition tells me to hold off, not reply, do nothing, but the pressure is increasing, and once he files for divorce then a decision will have to be made, or made for us by the courts. I feel like I should be making my own decisions, but again I just don’t know exactly what I want in order to make any.

I thank you kindly for any guidance and wisdom you have. I enjoy your writing and teachings tremendously!

Hi Deepak, I learned how to meditate two years ago and I have taken to it very well. In two years I have been to silence twice, which I’ve been told is very good going! The strangest thing happened to me 6 months ago over the space of 2 weeks. On four separate occasions, I had a random flood of visually imagery that I could not trace back to a dream, memories from the past etc. In fact the images were nothing I had seen before. They lasted around 8 secs each and then left again, but the strangest thing of all was that once they left, I had no recollection of what they were. What I do recall is that the images weren’t terrifying or worrying, but the experience was. I can only describe this flood of imagery as if someone had opened the top of my head and poured freezing cold water onto my brain, then ran the whole way down the inside of my body and then left through my feet. Towards the end of this two week period, on the Friday, I started to feel really disorientated yet still coherent, and was walking around feeling half drunk. To make matters worse, everything I looked it had deja vu attached to it, even memories. I was so concerned that my mental health was on the rocks that I started to Google ‘schizophrenia’ and psychosis and the like, but I knew deep down that this was not it, but I feared that there was no one I could talk to because I knew that this was something that not no one would understand, or even relate to. I stayed in bed for the weekend, praying for it to go away. The on the Sat night whilst lying in bed, I felt this huge surge of roasting hot energy travel from my stomach to my head, and it kept running back and forth for around 15 mins, it was a beautiful feeling. I started then laughing to myself, almost sensing that I wasn’t going crazy, but maybe sensing that it was a visit from elsewhere. The next day I woke up I was back to normal, thank God. It was an experience that I hope never happens to me again, I felt so alone. What do you think this could have been? My Meditation teacher suggested that my awareness was expanding? Thanks!