Guest blog by Rachael Pace, a relationship expert and featured writer for Marriage.com.
Learning to meditate as a couple will help you be fully present and engaged in whatever you are doing. This will deepen your connection, increase communication, and help you read your spouse in a way you never could before.
Meditating is a fantastic way to strengthen your relationship. One of the reasons it’s such a great tool for couples is because meditation is extremely varied. Depending on your hobbies and interests, you can meditate during quiet time, prayer, study, and even by doing yoga together.
Do you want to live more mindfully with your spouse? How about learning to live in the moment or clearing your mind? If so, here are 6 ways that both couples meditation and marriage courses can help you strengthen your relationship for life.
1. Set Goals Together
If you’ve ever taken a marriage course or attended couple’s counseling, you know that setting goals are a key component of growing closer.
When you share goals with your partner, such as meditating regularly and living a more mindful life together, you learn to work as a team. You also help establish communication and trust. Plus, it gives you an excellent reason to celebrate as a couple – which has been closely linked to relationship satisfaction.
2. Increase Couple Engagement
Often when we come home from a long day of work, one of the first things we do with our spouse is plop down in front of the television or computer and start watching something. While this is an entertaining way to unwind together, it doesn’t create the bonding experience needed to maintain a healthy relationship.
The same goes for playing on your phone while you’re having a date night. In a marital study that surveyed 243 adults, results found that ignoring your partner in favor of your smartphone is a significant risk factor in depression and can undermine marital satisfaction.
Any marriage course will tell you that communication is essential for building a strong partnership. The fewer distractions you have in your life, the more quality time you will have to devote to your spouse.
3. Reduce Stress as a Couple
Stress is all around us. It’s at work, in our health, our marriage, and the list goes on. This stress and anxiety can wreak havoc on our romantic relationships and cause us to lash out at our partner in ways we otherwise wouldn’t if we were in a calmer state of mind. It can also be detrimental to our health.
One way to get closer to your spouse while reducing stress is by practicing mindful meditation.
Meditating can help center you and give you a clear mind and a firmer hold on what’s going on in your life. In fact, the International Journal of Preventive Medicine found that women showed a significant decrease in symptoms of depression, stress, and anxiety after doing 12 sessions of yoga.
4. Build Accountability
Not all of us are built with the natural inclination to meditate. Because of this, it takes effort and practice to create a regular routine with your spouse.
When you can trust and rely on your partner, you feel safe and secure in your relationship. You know that you have become allies as lovers and friends.
You can build accountability with your spouse by initiating or showing up (physically or emotionally) to your meditation session. This helps build much-needed trust and reliability that will strengthen your marriage.
5. Bond Over Something New
When was the last time you and your partner did something that was not only new and exciting but truly meaningful together?
SAGE Journals randomly assigned married participants to engage in a 10-week course where they engaged in shared activities with their spouse. The activities were either categorized as exciting or pleasant. Results showed that couples who spent time doing exciting activities showed increase marital satisfaction compared to the couples who were assigned the pleasant activities.
This research highlights the importance of bonding over something new as a couple. Shared activities, such as meditating, promote happiness and satisfaction in a marriage.
6. It’s Cheaper than Couple’s Therapy
Meditating is like your own personal therapy. It helps couples learn compassion, deepens intimacy, creates a sense of tradition, and expands your understanding of what it means to be connected.
It also helps partners become more attuned with their own needs and desires, spiritually, physically, and otherwise. This can be a great help in couple’s communication.
Tips for Beneficial Meditation
If you want to meditate with your spouse and reap the full rewards of doing so, it’s important that you have a strategy in mind. Here are some simple tips to make your path to mindfulness that much more satisfying.
Choose the right time. Meditation is best practiced when you have enough time to devote to your thoughts and actions, not when you are in a rush.
Find a guide you enjoy. All couples are different. Some may get the most out of meditating with others in a class environment while others would prefer to use yoga as a method of mediation. Find whatever works for you both.
Make contact with your spouse. Meditation with your partner is about connecting with your spouse on a deeper level. Studies show that eye-contact can heighten emotional intimacy and create a healthy sense of self-awareness.
Finding the right place. When sitting down to meditate, choose a quiet place where you can be alone with your thoughts. You may choose to do it outside in the tranquility of your backyard or garden or to sit in a sunny room in your house.
Take advantage of your free time by doing yoga with your spouse. Couple’s meditation can help deepen and strengthen your relationship. It also has many benefits for your emotional, mental, and physical health. Mix your couples’ meditation with a marriage course and you will be well on your way to setting healthy goals for both your body and your relationship.
Rachael Pace is a relationship expert with years of experience in training and helping couples. She has helped countless individuals and organizations around the world, offering effective and efficient solutions for healthy and successful relationships. She is a featured writer for Marriage.com, a reliable resource to support healthy happy marriages.
Rachel Shimon says
Hi,
Amazing post, this really helps me and my partner to be closer to each other and this also helped me in reducing the differences that we had.
Thank you for this post. Please, share some more tips on this topic.
Keep sharing:)