Why Love Gets Uncomfortable & How That’s Not a Failure | Susan Piver [Best Of]

The deeper the love, the more uncomfortable it gets, and learning how to work with that truth may change the way you relate forever. If you’ve ever wondered why love sometimes feels harder over time, why irritation replaces ease, or why closeness can feel strangely destabilizing, this conversation offers a grounded and deeply wise and kind perspective. Rather than trying to fix or escape discomfort, you’ll learn how meeting it together can actually deepen intimacy and connection. In this Best of episode, Jonathan sits down with writer and meditation teacher Susan Piver, New York Times bestselling author of The Four Noble Truths of Love: Buddhist Wisdom for Modern Relationships https://amzn.to/2laMDxV. Susan has studied Buddhism for more than 30 years and founded The Open Heart Project, an online dharma community with nearly 20,000 members. In this conversation, you’ll discover: A simple reframe that explains why love feels hardest with the people we care about mostHow discomfort can become a doorway to deeper intimacy rather than a sign that something’s wrongThe subtle way self-criticism quietly shapes how we treat our partnersA powerful alternative to blame that changes how conflict unfoldsWhy intimacy can deepen even when romance naturally fades Love isn’t meant to be comfortable or predictable. It’s meant to be alive. Press play to learn how to stay open, connected, and compassionate when relationships feel hardest. You can find Susan Piver at: Website http://susanpiver.com/ | Instagram https://www.instagram.com/susan.piver/ | Episode Transcript https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/why-love-gets-uncomfortable-how-thats-not-a-failure-susan-piver-best-of Next week, be sure to tune in for my conversation with Lisa Mosconi about women’s brain health, menopause, and what it all means for long-term cognitive wellbeing. Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel https://jonathanfields.substack.com/aboutVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sponsors/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Jonathan Fields?

  So, love has a way of humbling us, especially the longer we're in it. What once felt effortless, it can start to feel uncomfortable, confusing, even painful. And when that happens, a lot of us just assume that, you know, something's gone wrong. But what if that discomfort isn't love walking out the door, or even failure in any way? What if it's actually pointing us towards deeper intimacy, deeper love? Today, I'm sharing a powerful conversation with Susan Piver. Susan is a longtime Buddhist practitioner, meditation teacher, and the author of The Four Noble Truths of Love. She's also a dear friend and someone I turn to for guidance, really about anything involving the heart. And what she offers here, it's both deeply wise and radically practical.

• 0:42Jonathan Fields?

  We explore why relationships never really stabilize, even decades into them, and how that's actually okay. Why closeness can actually amplify irritation and what to do about it, and how the way we treat ourselves individually quietly shapes how we show up with the people that we love the most. And Susan also introduces a really refreshing alternative to blame and explains how meeting discomfort together can strengthen connection over time. This isn't about fixing your partner or yourself. It's about learning how to stay open and kind and present when love feels hardest. So excited to share this best of conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

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• 3:20Jonathan Fields?

  One of the things that I've always loved about our conversations and about the stuff that you create is you toe this really interesting line between deep wisdom, deep ancient, traditional wisdom, and practical, on-the-ground. Okay, so how does this work if you don't want to live in a monastery? And how is this going to actually help me? Is that intentional for you? Is that translation part of what you feel your work is?

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Well, I kind of want to say yes, because it would make me sound really smart.

• 3:52Jonathan Fields?

  Well, yes, it is.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Absolutely. It's been my plan all along. But no, it's, you know, I've been a Buddhist for a long time. And one of the things that I just love about being a Buddhist practitioner, not that anyone has to become a Buddhist. And the thing that surprised me is how practical it is. It's not just like, how do you transcend to another realm to become like a god-like human being, which obviously you don't need. It's how do you live your life on planet Earth as a human being with a completely open heart, a totally sharp mind, and a great and vast willingness to be of benefit to others? I mean, who doesn't want that?

• 4:31Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I want that.

• 4:32Speaker 04

  Me too.

• 4:34Jonathan Fields?

  So you've written, what book is this, seven?

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Hmm, it's like nine.

• 4:40Jonathan Fields?

  Nine?

• 4:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you count the three I edited, but otherwise it's six.

• 4:43Jonathan Fields?

  So you've written a lot of books and touched on a lot of different areas of life. And you have a book now which focuses on love. And you've spent years sort of thinking about this and deconstructing. I know we've talked about like bits and pieces and snippets of this over the years. Why this conversation and why now?

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, as a longtime Buddhist practitioner and a longtime wife, I will have been a Buddhist for like 22 years and a wife for like 20 years, basically, as of right now. But as a longtime Buddhist practitioner, where there are millions of teachings on wisdom and loving kindness and how to be a good person, I just noticed in many people, including myself, it all sort of falls apart when you go home and look into the eyes of the person you're in a relationship with.

• 5:30Jonathan Fields?

  Like, we're Buddhist, except for right now.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Exactly. Except for when you drop all your crap all over the floor, then I'm really, you know, it's weird how your big mind sort of devolves into little petty hissy fits. And, you know, why is that? Why is it actually the hardest to love the person that you love? Is a question that I've always been interested in. And also, I wanted to be happy in my own relationship. I want to be a good partner and I want to be happy in, in my own relationship. So, but, you know, we go through phases, you probably have no idea what this is like, where we just don't like each other. Where it's like, who are you again? And why am I sitting here talking to you?

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Because everything you do irritates me and nothing you say makes any sense. It's like, suddenly, you find yourself in this place where you're very distant from each other. And one time Duncan, my husband and I, were in one of those places for a long time, like months. I mean, I think I wrote in the book, we fought about everything. And once, we even fought about what time it was.

• 6:39Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I remember reading that. I'm like, how do you do that?

• 6:42Speaker 04

  How long do you have to go to make that a point of contention? So I was really upset and I didn't know what to do.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  Nothing that we tried worked. And one day I was literally sitting at my desk crying, thinking, I don't even know how to begin fixing this.

• 7:01Jonathan Fields?

  And it sounded like also the way you described sort of like that window, that it wasn't where you could point to something and say, oh, this is what it's about. This is what it's about. It's almost like it's this nonspecific sustained thing.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  That is so right. That is so right. There's like, everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. There's these little slights, little slights. You know, you blow by that one. You put that one under the rug. You forget about this one. You explain that one away. Because they're explainable, outweighable. They're small. No, you didn't look at me. Or, you know, I asked you how you were, but you didn't ask me how I was. I mean, these teeny tiny things that don't mean anything accrue. And then suddenly shit like breaks loose. And it just blows up. And then because it's so weird, you just struggle to find some exploits

• 7:58Speaker 04

  because you did this or I did that. But at least for me, I don't think that that, that there is such an explanation. There's more like the weird irritation of trying to be close to someone else every single day creates this weird tension. And then like this, I heard myself say, I hesitate to say I heard a voice because there was nobody there but me. But something inside me said, begin at the beginning. At the beginning are four noble truths. I kid you not. And to me, as a longtime practitioner, that meant something because the entire Buddhist path is built around something called the four noble truths,

• 8:42Speaker 04

  which I'm sure you know. And I'd never thought that they had anything to do with relationships. Life is suffering. Grasping creates suffering. It's possible to stop suffering. There's an eightfold path for doing so. Right view, right intention, and so on. Didn't think it had anything to do with my love life. But then, in this moment, it's like those teachings kindly reformed themselves in my mind to apply to my relationship. So I wrote them down. It just never occurred to me. I think probably because most of the teachings, whether teachings, teachers are modern or ancient, are from monastics. You know, people that did not live in apartments and have to take the subway and go to the grocery store. They had a different kind of life.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  So for whatever reason, I just thought, well, they don't know what I'm going through. But incorrect, they did know what I was going through. And the teachings are profoundly illuminating. And P.S., not just to me, but also to my partner, who is not a Buddhist, not a meditator, not into any of that. But, you know, it was useful for both of us. That's what really gave me a lot of heart.

• 9:47Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I love that. Let's, I know you kind of like went through really quickly the four noble truths. Talk to me about each one of them a little bit more just before, because I know those became the foundation for then what you then developed, sort of like the next iteration of that specifically as it applies to this domain of love. But tell me more about just the basics of these four noble truths.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  Sure, happily. So when the Buddha attained enlightenment more than 2,500 years ago, and he went back to his, you know, practicing posse, not sure what they called themselves, and he was apparently enlightened, they could tell. They said, what did you learn? What did you see? He said, I saw four things. Number one, life is suffering, which is really easy to interpret as life sucks or life is awful. But upon great investigation, I conclude that that is not what he meant. He meant that everything changes. There's nothing to hold on to. And everything we do to create stability or ground with this relationship or that home

• 10:53Speaker 04

  or this degree or this amount of money, it's all going to dissolve, and it's very painful. So that's the first noble truth. Life is suffering, AKA, everything changes. The second noble truth is the cause of suffering, which is called grasping, which basically means not wanting the first noble truth to be true or pretending that it isn't. Well, okay, maybe that's true for you, but I am going to construct this fortress for myself that is inviolate and so forth. So you hold on to what you think will make you happy and try to push away the things that you think won't. And that's called grasping. And that is actually the cause of suffering, not the suffering itself, not the loss, not the dissolution.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  Painful though it may be, the real cause is holding on. The third noble truth is called the cessation of suffering, which means, oh, you can stop. Now you know the cause, you also know the cure. Stop grasping. Of course, much easier said than done, but just mathematically, that's the answer to how you stop suffering. And then the fourth noble truth is called the eightfold path, which is how you actually do that. How do you stop grasping? And I don't know if I can say them all, but right intention, right view, right speech, right livelihood, right action, right effort, right mindfulness, right wisdom. All those rights have a vast canon of knowledge around them

• 12:21Speaker 04

  and you could study one for your whole life. And if you do those eight things, just like the Buddha, you got the same trick bag. You too could attain liberation from suffering. So it's the whole path right there. It's a crazy ride in all cases, but it's a crazy ride with meaning and joy if you can let go, to any degree, of imagining that you are permanent.

• 12:52Jonathan Fields?

  The other thing that I really struggled with, with these basic truths wrapped around the same concept is the idea, the second truth of the notion of grasping as essentially the cause of suffering. When I start to think about the people who are closest to me, my family, my sister, my parents, my wife, my daughter.

• 13:17Jonathan Fields?

  The notion of not grasping onto those relationships is almost inconceivable to me.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  I know. I totally understand what you're saying. And people mistake, I believe, grasping for caring or loving. It means I shouldn't love you so much. It means I shouldn't need you. I shouldn't appreciate you. I shouldn't be so attached. That is, makes me really mad. Because often when people have said to me, "You shouldn't be so attached." What they really mean is, "You shouldn't care about something I don't give a crap about."

• 13:58Speaker 04

  And I don't like that. So, anyway, one of the things that helped me get my mind around grasping, because me too, I love so many things and people and my life and things I feel very attached to.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  What helped me is to recognize that

• 14:18Speaker 04

  attachment itself, non-attachment itself, is an attachment.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  You can be attached to non-attachment. I know, it may sound

• 14:28Jonathan Fields?

  Very meta.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Very meta, exactly. So, but non-attachment doesn't mean holding back and it doesn't mean converting all phenomena into an equal tone. You know, where you have this very narrow range of, where pain doesn't hurt you and pleasure doesn't make you too happy. It doesn't mean that at all. It means the opposite, actually.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  Non-attachment means not attached to keeping things the way they were or preventing them from becoming what they will. Rather, to dive into what you are experiencing fully, without attachment to hope or fear, which is a very powerful capacity. Should one ever be able to do that? So, when you feel joy, you just completely feel it without being attached to, "What does it mean or where will it end?" And when you feel, you know, utter death-defying grief.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  You don't fault yourself for caring so much. You just feel it completely and it itself begins to dissolve. And when it does, you don't try to stop it. So the non-attachment is, means just going on the ride completely as a total human being without holding back. It's the opposite of constantly chill.

• 15:49Jonathan Fields?

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• 18:54Jonathan Fields?

  So you go from saying, okay, so I don't know which way is up with my loving partner. Somebody give me an answer. You go back to the beginning, the four noble truths come to you. But you take that and then create this additional overlay so that they become, it feels like much more relevant to the context of relationships.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, it really helped me to look at them this way. So the four noble truths have a kind of sequencing. There's a truth, the cause of the truth, the cessation of the suffering connected to the truth, and how to do it. The truth, the cause, the cure, and how. So when I took those into my marriage, what they looked like was the truth. Relationships are uncomfortable.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Period. You know, if you, of course, we were just talking about the ordinary irritation of just living with someone. You've been in a relationship for 20 plus years. You're like, why are you doing that thing again that you said you would never do? Why are we having this argument again?

• 20:03Speaker 04

  It's just this discomfort, this everyday and beyond everyday discomfort. But if you haven't even ever met the person, like you're going on a blind date, there's already discomfort. What if they don't like me? What if they do like me? And so on and so forth. So in every phase of relationship, there's discomfort. That's the truth. That's the first truth. Relationships are uncomfortable.

• 20:27Jonathan Fields?

  Really? Relationships are uncomfortable?

• 20:29Speaker 04

  Well.

• 20:31Jonathan Fields?

  There is, there's something that you wrote about this, about this phase, about this first noble truth, that when I read it, I was just like, oh, wow. With your permission, I'll, I'll, I'll read a couple of lines. Here's what I read. "Very few individuals are naturally convinced of their inherent worthiness. In fact, in Buddhist thought, to possess such conviction is considered a corollary of full enlightenment. It's more likely that we are caught in cycles of self-denigration and self-aggrandizement, both of which are forms of aggression.

• 21:11Jonathan Fields?

  We are so hard on ourselves, so unremittingly unkind in the way we consider ourselves. The opposite, insisting that we are in fact awesome, is simply the flip side of that thought pattern." I was like, huh. And what popped into my head when I read that is, we bring so much to the way that we interact with other people. And it's that, it's sort of like this is, it's that old saying, if we treated ourselves... The way we treat some other people, or if we treat other people the way we treat ourselves. Sometimes you would have disastrous relationships just all the time, all day, every day. But then you add to this, and this is where I kind of really like my heart went, wow.

• 21:56Jonathan Fields?

  Reading again from you. "When it comes to love, this unkindness to self begins to mix with the relationship. As you become emotionally intertwined, the energetic space between you begins to close up. As it tightens, your ability to see your partner as separate from your own mindstream diminishes. The closer you get, the less able you are to actually see each other. What happens at this point is that because you cannot discern who is who, you begin to treat your beloved the way you treat your own mind. The kindness or unkindness you extend towards them is a reflection of the way you treat yourself.

• 22:36Jonathan Fields?

  Generosity of spirit, so powerful in the early stages of a relationship, begins to contract." Tell me more about this, because I think so many people will sort of like hear that and be like, oh.

• 22:52Speaker 04

  Well, thank you so much for reading it. It made me feel so happy to hear you read it. It gave me great delight. Thank you so much. So, and I would love to hear what it evoked in you. It's always been kind of curious, why does it become harder to love this other person the longer we know each other? And it's, this is not my, I did not make this up. This is a teaching of the Bodhisattva path, the awakened being path. The Bodhisattva being one who is here to be of benefit to others. This is a classical Buddhist teaching.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  And it also gives dimension to the cliche, which also happens to be true, that in order to love someone else, you have to love yourself, which I always thought meant, oh, I have to like myself, or I have to think I'm awesome, and my self-esteem has to be perfect, and then I'll be able, but that's not what it means. It means that your self-talk and the way you actually think of yourself.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Could be riddled with gentleness and acceptance and spaciousness. As opposed to, I'm an awesome person, which is very constricting. I'm an awesome person sometimes, and I'm also a crazy person other times, and a cruel person, and a beautiful person, and silly. To make room for all of that, to hold that in a kind of gentle space with complete authenticity and accuracy is what is meant, I think, by self-love. And that when you can do that for yourself, bring this spaciousness and this courage and gentleness, then you can do it for someone else.

• 24:43Speaker 04

  But until then, you know, these weird neurotic, I guess you'd say, mind streams just mix and wreak havoc.

• 24:52Jonathan Fields?

  I think this landed so powerfully for me because you, the way you laid it out, it's like, okay, so you start as you and this other person. And in the beginning, you've got your own, you know, you're basically, you're diminishing and demeaning yourself. So many people have trouble with their own self-worth, as you say. So, and you think to yourself, it's okay for me to take myself down, but this other person, I love and I'm gonna hold them up and they're awesome and they're great and all this, and I'll be gentle with them. And the visual of, as you get deeper into the relationship, the space between the two of you, closing and closing, closing, closing, until essentially, you know, like, there's no space anymore.

• 25:37Jonathan Fields?

  And whatever feelings you held just and applied to you, now without space between the two people, becomes the feeling that you apply to the relationship and to that other person. Well, if you're torturing yourself and demeaning and diminishing yourself every day, and now you've reached a depth of relationship, a length of time, where now you effectively, there is no space between you, and you start to feel that, that starts to translate into them, then how could that not be toxic? And that's where it landed for me. I was like, for the first time, I was like, okay, I get, with that description, I really better understood why.

• 26:22Jonathan Fields?

  Doing that work yourself is so important to your ability to truly see the kindness and generosity and love in that other person.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  So I don't mean to be your fake therapist here, but let me ask you, how did that make you feel? How did it make you feel when you saw that? How did it make you feel towards yourself? How did it make you feel, make you feel towards your wife?

• 26:47Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, and it made me feel good. I'm, I'm not somebody that, that tends to have a lot of negative self-talk. For me, maybe it's, you know, that there had been times in my life where I have. I feel like I'm in a moment where I'm pretty okay with who I am and, and how I feel about myself. And, and so for me, it was, it was a reason to continue to revisit the idea as my relationship evolves over time. You know, because 21 years in now, you know, five years from now, 10 years from now, we are going to grow individually, or the nature of our relationship is going to grow.

• 27:29Jonathan Fields?

  The space will become lesser and lesser and lesser and lesser and lesser. So as that space continues to shrink over the next five, 10, 20, 30, 40, God willing, you know, it gave me a reason to keep revisiting the idea of how am I speaking to and treating myself in the context of my ability to continue to cultivate a healthy, nourishing, loving relationship.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  That's awesome. That you're, the way you talk to yourself could actually comprise a loving gesture to her, which is, makes everything workable, useful, inspiring. Because when I think, well, I just have to work on myself. I just get kind of bored. You know, I find it cholesterophobic and unpleasant, but when I think, oh, I'm doing this for us. For me, that creates more space. I feel, I feel more inspired to do the work. And P.S., as you were talking, I was thinking

• 28:35Speaker 04

  that one of the reasons this is so hard to do, I didn't write about this, but is because the closer you get, and as you were talking, I was just, I was having the visual of just two people's lives mixing, their energy mixing, their, their whatever, their lives becoming one, as it were. That's terrifying. That's terrifying. For, for ordinary reasons, like you don't want to be overwhelmed, you don't want to lose your independence and so on, but that's not the real reason. The real reason is because someday you're gonna have to part. That is unthinkable. That is unthinkable. For some reason, all relationships will end. Sorry, first noble truth, we gotta come back to you.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  But the more you love and the more you open, the more that truth becomes visceral, whether you think about it or not. And in my opinion, armchair analyst here, that's one of the reasons why many relationships don't cease to progress, is because it's easier to hold the arm's length, to think that, oh, you're not this enough, or you're too that, as opposed to, I'm gonna love you so fully and give my heart so completely, knowing I'm gonna make myself cry. That someday this will end, that's untenable. So we throw all sorts of roadblocks in the way.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  That's my working theory.

• 30:05Jonathan Fields?

  To avoid the deeper pain of it ending by experiencing some form of ending now, that's not quite as invested.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 30:15Jonathan Fields?

  Okay. Second noble truth of love.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Thinking that relationships should be comfortable is what makes them uncomfortable. So, of course, I hope everyone's relationship makes them happy and comfortable and so on, and I want to be comfortable and happy and all that, but I don't think that that's necessarily the job of deep, romantic, intimate love.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  However, when most of us say we're looking for love, we don't normally mean that. According to my anecdotal observation, we're looking for safety. We're looking for someone to make us feel that everything's okay. Or someone with whom we can sort of turn our back on certain trials and tribulations and make a cocoon.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  And okay, those things are great.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  But if there's one thing I have learned about love and that I can say with great certainty about love is that it is not safe. There's no way to make it safe. And the minute you try to make it safe, it ceases to be love. It starts to look more like some sort of a transaction. I will do this and you will do that and so forth and so on. And I don't know what that's called. I just don't think it's called love. So we think, well, if only it was comfortable. If only you didn't have this behavior. If only I could make that amount of money or we lived in this house or you stopped jiggling your foot every time you talk to me or whatever, whatever crazy things which you are not doing, by the way. Whatever crazy things people do.

• 31:50Jonathan Fields?

  Looking down at my foot right now.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  I look down at it too.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  No jiggling here. Then we would be fine. Sure, okay, work on your problems, your foot jiggling and your money problems. Work on those things. I hope you solve them all. But thinking that when you do, everything will be cool. That's where the problem comes in because the weirdest thing that I ever learned about a relationship, and I'm fixing to tell you what it is right now. This drove me crazy. They never stabilize. They never stabilize. So I thought, well, we'll be in this relationship. We'll get to know each other. We'll have these kinks, we'll work them out. And then at some point, it's going to be fine. And at some points, it is fine until it is not.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  And I can't predict how, what weather fronts are going to blow through this now close to 25 year relationship with someone I know really well and who knows me really well. I still can't predict. I could be really nice and kind and sweet and sort of get a blank stare.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  I can be a complete ass and just see him looking at me with the eyes of love. There's no telling. It doesn't stabilize. It never does because it's alive. So trying to get it to stabilize, like, let's make it perfect and then hold, actually is what creates the discomfort. The discomfort's not the problem. Thinking it should be comfortable is. Does that make sense?

• 33:18Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Are you buying? Are you picking up what I'm putting down?

• 33:21Jonathan Fields?

  I'm picking up what you're putting down. And it makes sense also to me on a different level, which is that if you operate on the assumption that for a relationship to grow and remain healthy, the individuals in the relationship must also honor their own need to grow as individuals and remain healthy as individuals, then unless there is some freakish level of similarity in the timing and the nature of the way that each individual grows, where it is just for a really long time identical, which I don't think happens, it can't be always just, you know, lockdownable.

• 34:05Jonathan Fields?

  So it makes sense to me. And yet, that's what we want. And it's not, I think it's not just in, you know, like loving relationships. It's in everything in life. But this just happens to land in the context of, okay, so when will I just know that everything will be okay? You talk about something called romantic materialism. Tell me more about this concept. This is from what I recall, it's kind of under the window of the Second Noble Truth.

• 34:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate you bringing it up. I made it up, so I'm happy to have a chance.

• 34:36Jonathan Fields?

  I love made up terms. I do it all the time.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  The Buddha did not say this.

• 34:42Speaker 04

  But the great Tibetan meditation master, who you know I love, and I know that you also have great respect for, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, named something called the Three Lords of Materialism. And these are three lords, three things we try to put our attention into with the aim of being safe and steady and making the Four Noble Truths not be true. And they're tricks. The first lord is called the Lord of Form. And it's like, if I have, I'll be safe if I have this house and this amount of money and this degree and so on. Okay. The second lord is the Lord of

• 35:23Speaker 04

  I can't remember what it's called, but it's the emotional Lord. It's the Lord that says, "If you can only figure out why you are the way you are, and why I am the way I am, we can solve all our problems and be happy." So, the second Lord is saying, "If you have the right theory, the right system, if you do the right studies, you can solve all these problems." And you can solve a lot of problems. There are certain problems, AKA, the problem of being a human being who lives and dies. You're not gonna solve that one. The third Lord is called the Lord of Spiritual Materialism, which is a very, you know, insidious Lord. And that's the Lord that says, "Well, if you're a meditator, if you really perfect mindfulness,

• 36:08Speaker 04

  if you get your spiritual cred, like, way up there, you can be exempt from suffering, and actually, you'll be better than other people." That makes me wanna vomit. I don't like that one. Probably because that's the one I'm most likely to fall victim to. But the Lord of Spiritual Materialism says, "Mindfulness will save you." It won't. It won't. It's an amazing tool. Powerful. The Lord of Romantic Materialism, that's the one I coined, says, "If you can only find the 'one', in quotation marks, you will be liberated from suffering. If you can only find the person who's meant for you,

• 36:53Speaker 04

  maybe there's more than one, but just find one of them. If you can only make that relationship, if you can only solve all your childhood wounds so that you will attract, quote-unquote, 'the right person' into your life, your problems will be solved." That is a materialistic view of relationships. I think it's, again, just using the word transactional, it's a transactional view. So, if you're sitting there making lists of the person you wanna be in a relationship with, which, great, it's good to have something clear in your head. And if you're thinking, "Well, I attract..." This makes me very mad, actually. "I keep attracting the same thing into my life so that I can solve it,

• 37:37Speaker 04

  and until I do, I'll keep attracting bozos and losers." I really, highly suggest ceasing to do that.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  It's useful to explore your problems and figure out who you are and why you are. Great, super great.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  But to escape even the trials and tribulations of true love, which are vast and powerful and wonderful and crazy making, it will not help you. So just, love is real, totally real. And you don't know when it's going to arise. And there's nothing you can do to make it be there. These are certain things in our world we can't game. Meaning, we can't make them be there when they're not, and we can't make them go away when they are. Love is one of them.

• 38:27Jonathan Fields?

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• 38:31Jonathan Fields?

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• 39:14Jonathan Fields?

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• 41:05Jonathan Fields?

  The other thing that this, that this sort of like concept brought up for me is, is this kind of idea that in the beginning of a relationship, we want the fire, we want the instability. We call that, you know, like passion, we call that romance, we call that, we want the breathlessness, the, oh my gosh, do they, don't they? And, and this is what gives it energy, what gives it fire, what gives it momentum. And then over time, we start to say, we want comfort, we want safety, we want stability. But then if we get it, there's a yearning for what? For that breathlessness, for that edge, for that fire that we've lost. And so it's sort of like, we keep telling ourselves that we want what we don't have

• 41:48Jonathan Fields?

  and, and trying to make adjustments to get it, rather than just saying, this thing is hard, it is ever changing, and let me just be in it.

• 41:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, that's a really good relationship strategy, by the way. This thing is really hard, it keeps changing, and let me just be in it. That's like the best relationship advice possible. Yeah, in our Western culture especially, maybe unless you're from France or something, there's this idea that

• 42:16Speaker 04

  I want a love affair and then I want the love affair to be a relationship. And both of those are great things. I think that feeling of just falling madly in love and being everything heightened and just transported, and I think that's totally real. And I get upset when people say it's some weird illusion that you have to get past so you can get into the weird housekeeping weeds of a real relationship. BS, BS, BS. That is a real relationship too. It's great.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  It's a love affair. Love affairs, yes. But love affairs and relationships are two different things. In our, in our world, for whatever reason, we think that all our love affairs should somehow turn into relationships and all our relationships should remain love affairs. And the truth is, that's very rare. They're two different animals. And, you know, well, I won't get into many details about my personal life, but, you know, I've had both. And I've also had like love affairs that have been super hot, super amazing. And then I'm like, but I don't really want to introduce you to my friends. Well, okay, that's a relationship part.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  It's really helpful, I think, to look at those two things as different. And maybe if you're really lucky, you'll find one that could be both. And, but in a long-term relationship, that falling in love only happens once. I mean, it keeps deepening in this funny way and then it disappears and then it deepens and then you remember it. It's never with that intensity. So, you know, with my, in my relationship, and I will not probe you to ask you, but I, yeah, that falling in love part was like, what planet is this? I'm very happy to be visiting here. It's amazing. I felt like I woke up in a different world. It was truly extraordinary experience.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  And now what I feel is, that, that had sharp peaks, highs and lows that were very intense and I happened to like that. Now what I feel is more like a, an ambient quality of love.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  It's this, I look at him and I'm like, I adore him. And he drives me crazy. And I find him amazing and completely strange. And somehow, what I feel for him is not particularly the focal point of our relationship anymore. Because our relationship has kind of become a container for love. And that's where we live. Sometimes it feels good, sometimes it really doesn't. But every time we come back and sort of stretch to reconnect with each other, that container is reinforced. And so when I look around, I see, oh, love is everywhere.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  Sometimes it's in my heart, sometimes it's not. But it's a structure that we created. It does not arise in a love affair. It arises over time, you know, if you're lucky. I don't know, does that sound resonant to you?

• 45:32Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, no, that totally resonates with me. Yeah, and I don't think there's a way to accelerate that either.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  Mm-mm. No, you're right.

• 45:38Jonathan Fields?

  I think it's just, it is time invested, time and presence. Third noble truth of love.

• 45:43Speaker 04

  Third noble truth of love. Remember, in the Buddhist sense, it's the cure. Meeting the discomfort together is love. That's the third noble truth. So normally, we look, so there's a problem. I look at you, I go, this is your fault. Or it's my fault, I'm really sorry. Let's dispel this discomfort by assigning blame. And once we assign the blame, we're like 90% on the way to solving the problem.

• 46:12Jonathan Fields?

  It's like, all right, now that we've cleared that up.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  Okay, problem solved.

• 46:15Jonathan Fields?

  Let's have dinner, what do you want?

• 46:17Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 46:17Jonathan Fields?

  Next fight.

• 46:20Speaker 04

  Exactly, it's so hilarious.

• 46:21Jonathan Fields?

  How could you possibly eat that?

• 46:23Speaker 04

  We have been there a billion times.

• 46:27Speaker 04

  But if a great partner in my mind is not someone who will blame you or take blame, but one who will sort of stop looking at you and turn, my visual is you turn and you put shoulder to shoulder and you look at the problem and you meet it together. And you see, oh, now we really love each other. Or now I really love you, but you don't seem to be that interested in me. Now we don't like each other. Now we seem to be in love again. Now we just want to be apart. There's these incredible waves that royal and roll through the relationship on a daily basis, a minute to minute basis, certainly a yearly basis. And to ride that together,

• 47:11Speaker 04

  to me, that's the ultimate love. We're on this ride together. And I'm feeling this way about it and you're feeling that way about it. And now it's beautiful and now it's not. That's, to me, that's, that's an incredibly loving partner. That's a beautiful thing to do. That's a companion.

• 47:29Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, couldn't agree with you more. And I think that's the place also where, you know, when you are in it long enough, you will, you'll go through all the day to day things that we're talking about, but you will also go through major things that, that happen from the outside in that you have no control over, a major loss to health, to people that you love, you know, to family and stuff like this. And it's been my sense that you're willing to necessarily be in this thing together and respect and open. And when those things happen from the outside in, the really big things that have the ability to either really tear apart or deepen, you know, like get you on the ride even more together.

• 48:13Jonathan Fields?

  That's when I think this commitment sort of like really shows its face. At least that's been my experience.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  I dig your voodoo right now. And how lucky is a person to sort of stumble into such a situation where there's someone who's like with you and who will continually deepen with you. It's very, very fortunate and wonderful. And I would like to throw down a caveat here that the kinds of things we're talking about, tolerating discomfort and meeting discomfort together, does not include things like

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Oh, one of us is addicted to something, one of us is abusive, one of us emotionally abusive. Physi- no, those things are not included, beyond the pale.

• 48:59Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, those don't come under the, oh, tolerate it.

• 49:02Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 49:02Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. Take us to the fourth.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Fourth noble truth is the path. There's a way to work with it, and it's not an eightfold path, although I do apply the eightfold path stages to relationships, like what is right view in relationship and so on. But the three, there's a threefold path that, to me, as a meditation teacher,

• 49:30Speaker 04

  mirrors actually the practice of meditation, which has three particular qualities,

• 49:38Speaker 04

  which I will just mention briefly. The first is meditation is precise. You're a meditator, I know you know this. You place attention on the object of your meditation, which in most cases is the breath, or it could be a mantra or an image.

• 49:52Jonathan Fields?

  Sound of a car horn in the background.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  Sound of a car horn in the background, exactly.

• 49:56Jonathan Fields?

  That's my New York City mantra.

• 49:57Speaker 04

  Which is a beautiful thing. I'm amazed, it's the first time we've ever heard one.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  So it's very one-pointed. You place your attention on the breath or the mantra, whatever it is, and if you stray into anything, it's considered thinking, so you come back, phoom, super precise, one-pointed.

• 50:19Speaker 04

  From that, oddly, something interesting happens.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  You sit there being one-pointed, allowing yourself to be exactly as you are. You like yourself, you don't like yourself, you're distracted, you're not distracted, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter, because to meditate, you don't have to stop thinking. Please, if you think that, stop thinking that. You just sit there with yourself as you are. You open. And from this precision, the ability to open.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  Arises magically. Meditation is famously associated with insight, sometimes called the practice of insight. So from this one pointedness, this openness of mind happens. Insight arises. It's quite expensive. The third quality is called letting go. Because you put your attention on the breath, you let yourself be as you are, then you notice you're distracted. That's awesome. You just woke up. The instruction is let go. Letting go is very profound. Because then you let go and you're in space for a moment, till you come back to your object, breath or mantra. Letting go is the lesson of being human. Letting go, letting go, letting go.

• 51:33Speaker 04

  So precise, open, letting go. In a relationship, what do these things mean? So the precision is the foundation of meditation. The foundation of a relationship, in my mind, is very simple. It starts with good manners. They sound really cheesy. Yeah, because good manners are profound. It's not just, do I use this fork or not? It's, am I actually thinking of you? And what you are experiencing? And how I might be kind to you? Am I noticing you? Good manners are profound form of thoughtfulness. And you actually think about the person. It's radical. If you don't have that, it's very hard

• 52:17Speaker 04

  to establish the foundation of a relationship.

• 52:19Jonathan Fields?

  So it's like the focused awareness in a very directed way.

• 52:22Speaker 04

  Exactly. Without an agenda. And also to be honest. Like to say the truth when you know it and to say it skillfully, not blurtingly. Those are the precise, that's the precise piece of this pack. Good manners, truth telling. The second quality, openness. I'm laughing because I was quite taken aback when I realized how this came into play, which was to imagine that the person you're in a relationship with is of at least equal importance to yourself. Shocking. Oh, you're there. Yeah. I'm going to be open to you.

• 53:05Speaker 04

  I'm going to be open to you. And the third step, and the book has more suggestions than this, is letting go.

• 53:16Speaker 04

  I find this very interesting personally, that as we were talking about romance ends, just us, sorry.

• 53:25Speaker 04

  But intimacy has no end. The letting go piece in a relationship is letting go constantly of how you think it ought to have gone, to be with what is, in such a way that everything you encounter, wonderful experiences, detrimental experiences, loss, boredom, confusion, everything that you encounter together can actually be used to deepen intimacy, which has no end and that you can commit to for a lifetime. You can't commit to romance, you can't commit to any feeling, but you can commit to deepening intimacy. That made me very happy when I

• 54:06Speaker 04

  realized that, like that, I could do that, honestly. I can't honestly say, yeah, I'll always love you, but I will always try to act lovingly towards you, or see you, or be with you, or stay near you as you go through what you go through and we and I go through things. That I can commit to. So that to me was very, was very hopeful. So precise, open, let go.

• 54:29Jonathan Fields?

  This all emerged out of your own seeking to try and understand which way was up in your own relationship and trying to figure out, how do I understand this? How do I navigate it? How do I be in it or not be in it? But how do I at least figure out how to be okay with this person in this moment and maybe in another, another, another, another? And wow, when I go back to the beginning, this, you know, whole idea kind of jumps out at you. You start to apply it in the context of your own relationship. And like you said also, Duncan is not a Buddhist.

• 55:06Jonathan Fields?

  Were you sort of, were you actively and openly saying, okay, I am now sort of engaging in the four noble truths of love in the relationship and sharing with him what you were doing and how you were doing it and say, come, come do this with me? Or was this just, huh, here's a bit of wisdom. Let me try it on for size in the relationship and maybe he'll pick up on what's happening and not. And if he wants to engage in any of these reciprocally, awesome. And if not, that's fine, too. What, how did this then turn around and unfold in the context of your relationship?

• 55:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I appreciate you asking that. There's actually a great benefit to being married to a non-practitioner, quote unquote, when you are a practitioner of something, in my case Buddhism. And the great value is that you cannot bullshit them with Dharma notions. You cannot unload some Dharma stuff on them and think that it will mean anything. You have to be those things. So I didn't say, hey, baby, I've discovered the four noble truths of love. Let me tell you what they are. Instead, I started acting like discomfort was part of the deal. And looking at it together was loving.

• 56:20Speaker 04

  And meeting it together could deepen our intimacy. Started sort of doing those things. Luckily, he is, I'm not saying this to be humble. He is much more loving naturally than I am. He's more relational. He's more naturally attuned to the dynamics of a relationship than I am. So I didn't have to convince him of anything, but it was more the way I showed up. And of course, the way you show up has much more impact on the way someone else shows up than any charts and graphs that you can unroll about this is my theory of relationships, which is basically useless. It's useless, the theory. The practice is the only thing that matters.

• 57:05Speaker 04

  So all I had to do, which is not a small thing, I'm not trying to minimize it. All I had to do was just try to do these things. And it changed things for us.

• 57:16Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. And there's another lesson in there, which is that, I know you're asked this very often. I've been asked it very often too, which is, I've discovered this amazing body of knowledge or idea or practice. How do I, quote, get my significant other?

• 57:33Jonathan Fields?

  To do it too, and to see how important and transformational it is.

• 57:36Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 57:37Jonathan Fields?

  The answer is what you were just saying, which is you don't. You just live it, you just be it. And the quality of you living and being in the context of a relationship will or will not affect that other person in a way where they want to in some way stand in a similar energy or not. And that is all you can do.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  And it is the best thing you can do. But I agree, I hear that too. I want to be loving in this way. I want to think relationships shouldn't be comfortable and so on. How do I get this other person to do that? Well, just as you're saying, just show up and be that way.

• 58:11Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. I love the idea of the Four Noble Truths applied to the context of love. And I'm actually really excited to start kind of dancing with them, exploring them, sharing them.

• 58:25Jonathan Fields?

  So as we kind of come full circle together, if I offer the phrase to you to live a good life, what comes up?

• 58:35Speaker 04

  To live a good life is to be unafraid, to be as brilliant and luminous and ridiculous and loving as you actually really are. No shame.

• 58:51Jonathan Fields?

  Thank you.

• 58:53Speaker 04

  Thank you. I love talking to you.

• 58:56Jonathan Fields?

  Hey, before you leave, be sure to tune in next week for our conversation with Lisa Moscone about women's brain health, menopause, and what it means for long-term cognitive wellbeing. Be sure to follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app so you don't miss it. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did, because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a second favor, share it with just one person.

• 59:41Jonathan Fields?

  I mean, if you want to share. With more that's awesome, too. But just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered, to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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