Marriage Conflict The Key to True Love l'Annunciazione, by Simone Martini, 1333 CE. Q: Is it "Carved in Stone"? A: Yes, but only in the beginning. Letter to a Client exhibiting Shani & Rahu Conflict Patterns in 1/7 Radix and Navamsha lagna How to Appreciate & Accept Marriage Conflict Patterns in Navamsha     Q:  Dear Barbara, It is quit worrisome to hear about the possible spouse. It sounds like the marriage/relationship aspect of my life could be difficult. I am currently single but am dating one man I like very much. Interestingly, he does fit some of your navamsha & radix-chart descriptions of the spouse, from profiles of house-7 and the navamsha lagna's axis.  I have no interest in marriage conflict.  I think marriage should be a sanctuary, and that after we fall in love we should stay in love.  Love and conflict are not compatible - are they?  I want a peaceful, happy marriage. Doesn't everyone? Are all of these predictions set in stone?  I do not want to get divorced in my life or have a difficult marriage.  How can I avoid this trouble? Thank you, again, Athena A:  Namaste Athena, Is it carved in stone?  Yes, this "trouble" in the navamsha 1/7 axis and the implications of Shani being your 7th lord-in-8th - it is destined to be your spiritual starting point in marriage.   Spiritual sleepwalkers (most of earth's population, unfortunately!) will unfortunately remain locked in unconscious repeating marital conflicts for the rest of their lives.   Yuck.   But *you* can change the defaults through consciousness. Here's the view: Everyone has marriage stress.  Everyone.  Marriage is socially comfortable but psychically demanding, because marriage demands awareness and conscious change in response to the partner's needs.  That's the way it is!  That's the way it's supposed to be.  The good news is that we marry people who have the "keys" to our own spiritual growth.  Therefore even when relationships aren't easy, they are purposeful & productive.  Marriage is the single most powerful spiritual path there is. All marriage stress is valuable, and it can all be handled intelligently - turned into compost for the most amazing growth.  The spouse is a mirror onto our soul.  If we don't like what we see in the mirror, that's the time to get serious about change.  Luckily in our culture there are many ways to get safe, supported, affordable change.  Marital counseling with a spiritually aware facilitator is a wonderful way.  I know people who have been in marital counseling for 30 years - they use their marriage as the healing center of their lives.  One concept to leave behind is the idea that any two people can do it alone.  We can't.  Marriage is part of an extended family network, often also a business & professional network, and it is interlinked with spiritual & cultural communities.  All of the people we know play a role in our marriage! So don't worry about predicted bumps in the marital road.  Deal with them as you encounter them.  The tragedy of divorce is when people don't deal with the problems - they just run.  This is sad, and a function of low consciousness.  Once we're in a marriage we need to stay in and do the work.  That's the point of marriage, to do the work. Marriage has always been a fundamentally spiritual relationship.  Vows of matrimony are sacred vows, just like vows of baptism, confession, communion, religious confirmation, and monastic life. Unfortunately for many people the survival realities of joint labor, child-raising, social approval, & keeping food on the table have overshadowed the deeper purpose.  Now that our (first world) society is wealthier & almost all of us have shelter & enough to eat, we don't need a spouse for survival.  We need a spouse for meaning, completion, spiritual growth, self-knowledge, and constant psychotherapy!   The social benefits of marriage are nice but the social-approval aspect of marriage is not the real work.  The real work happens *inside* each partner. Often folks believe that if they are having problems there is something fundamentally wrong with the marriage.  Not so!  It is fundamentally *right* for a every marriage to have problems.   We *should* have violent emotional reactions to spouses who remind us of bad parts of our parents (one of the major healing functions of marriage is to heal childhood wounds) and we *should* learn how to find the middle path of peace by constantly negotiating with a partner *who is a completely different person* than ourselves.   Really, deeply, committedly dealing with another adult is the hardest work any of us will ever do.   Not tuning them out, boxing them into some social role, or escaping through work or other distractions.  But really dealing.  It's way hard. In answer to your question, yes, all marriages have conflict, and the fundamental outline of the conflict is "set in stone".   That is, the conflict starts in this life where it left off in past lives.  The person you marry knows you very well, from past lives.  Falling in love is an intensely subconscious attraction the essence of which is a powerful feeling that we "know" this person.  And we do!! Having reconnected "where we left off" we can from the present-life start point, consciously, start to make progress again.  Each marital conflict is a step up in self knowledge. Each conflict is the next lesson in finding agreement, building trust, healing old wounds, and learning how to love.  We can only follow the spiritual path of marriage if we have a spouse to work with *and* usually a neutral 3rd-party guide such as a counselor or older married parents.  If we embrace each conflict as a blessing and work hard to understand how we got into it and how we can get out of it, we will make huge spiritual progress and in the next life we will graduate to a whole new level of wisdom. We do start out at the "carved in stone" level (as shown in navamsha & 7th radix) but as soon as the marriage partners start resolving conflict consciously, they are not "stuck" in the old patterns any more.  Rather they move ahead with increasing skill. Your spouse is your spiritual guide, and you are his spiritual guide.  That doesn't mean you have more authority than him or you are supposed to tell him what to do.  Quite the opposite.  We guide each other through the vale of strong emotion: conflict, love, attraction, repulsion, frustration, delight.  At each point of conflict, the two partners reach opposite points, then they heal each other back to the center.  As each conflict along the way is resolved, the couple become more skillful.  By the end of life they value their marriage partner more than anyone else on earth, except perhaps their children.   We think we know what "love" is at the beginning of marriage - but the "love" we feel at the beginning is really just a profound subconscious attraction to a partner who has both the good & bad traits of our parents.   (Typically s/he strongly resembles our opposite-gender parent, but a stronger rule is that s/he resembles the parent we had the most trouble with!) We don't really understand "love" until the end of marriage, after we have resolved hundreds of intense conflicts, and learned the path of tolerance, acceptance, compassion, & trust in the Divine.  So, that's why marriage must have conflict and lots of it!!  Everyone has the specific marriage conflict which they uniquely need to work on, to use as "grist for the mill" to build those compassionate, loving, tolerant, spiritually aware conflict-resolution skills. Everyone gets the partner they have asked for.  Everyone gets the partner they deserve!! The key to *enjoying* the conflicts is to appreciate that only conflict carried through to resolution can build *conscious* peace.  We have to pay attention while we're engaged in conflict resolution, pay attention to what I am doing and much less what He is doing - since he (my spouse) is only mirroring me.  Get out of blaming & into responsibility - then we see the serious growth!!  We can gets unconscious peace through denial or suppression.  That's always an option but spiritually it's a waste of a lifetime. Many of us were raised to believe that conflict in marriage is wrong; that everything should be peaceful & in agreement all the time.  That's actually impossible, given the deeper purpose of marriage.  The only way to get that ideal, numb, perfect harmony all the time is suppression & denial.  Eventually of course those repressive strategies blow up in our face as the subconscious mandate to grow & change overwhelms our efforts to suppress the problems.   So, be smart.  If you want to avoid conflict, stay single.   If you want to do the most meaningful spiritual work of your life, get married and work consciously through each conflict, as it arises.   Marriage starts with passionate attraction.  If it's handled properly, it will end with true love. Hope this is helpful, Sincerely, Barbara P.S. One of the best toolkits for using marriage & child-raising as divine therapy to heal childhood wounds is the "getting the love you want" & "keeping the love you find" methods from Harville Hendrix group, called "Imago".  Hendrix graduated from the University of Chicago Divinity School where I also did my graduate work.  I totally recommend Imago for skillfully turning marriage into a major lifetime healing.
	updated: 27 August 2008   Copyright © 1994-2015 by Barbara Pijan Lama - Contact - Sitemap - How to Request a Jyotisha Reading - www.barbarapijan.com - Barbara Pijan Lama Jyotisha Jyotish Vedic Astrology Horoscope Readings Surya Sun Chandra Moon Mangala Mars Budha Mercury Guru Jupiter Shukra Venus Shani Saturn Rahu Ketu Graha Planets Dasha Timeline Nakshatra Navamsha Marriage Children Wealth Career Spiritual Wisdom Death