Can Meditation Destroy Your Family and Relationships?

AVAlexander Volchek

Specifically: can meditation break up a family if one partner develops and the other does not? This fundamental question always comes up. I remember when I first encountered the terminology, trips, and everything described as spiritual development or esotericism. The question was always, “Does your wife practice too?” If you are in business, people ask whether your business partners practice, whether your wife—or your husband—does. Do you do it together? Why is this question asked in the first place? To separate the spiritual world from the material world. That is its source: exclusively the division between the spiritual and material worlds. Someone says there is a material world and a spiritual world. You begin practicing and enter the spiritual world, so now you will be in that world. Especially people working on spiritual development tell themselves, “We will be in the spiritual world, and since we will be there, our partner needs to be there with us.

If we are not there together, no development will happen.” That is where the question originates. Then people give it further meaning: someone who practices spiritually becomes more elevated, calmer, more impressive, smarter, or more developed, and consequently their path diverges from their wife's or husband's. But the starting point is exclusively the separation of the material and spiritual worlds. We will come to meditation now: if someone meditates, can questions arise? If we understand that the material world is part of the spiritual world, we do not separate those concepts at all. There is a world; we do not even have to call it spiritual. Life: real, actual, true life. Completely true life. Within it, there is a layer described as material, or presented to a person as material objects around them, or described as their current incarnation. Notice that the current incarnation is not simply the material world. It is a whole complex of everything happening, your same life, within which the concept of the material exists.

Without that separation, when we say someone is working on spiritual development, they are simply doing certain exercises that people in material society have given a label. Just a label. Some people walk a lot. Today you sent me something and said you need to do cardio, for example, and walk a lot. I do walk a lot. Whatever I do each day involves a lot of walking, but not because I went out to exercise. That is important. Not because I am trying to accumulate steps. I even asked my sister, “When people say you should take ten or fifteen thousand steps a day, should we separate the steps I take in ordinary daily life from those supposedly earned through a special physical activity I would call exercise? Should we separate them at all?” I said, “It seems strange. I cannot get through a day without walking ten thousand steps. It feels as though I have done nothing.”

I get ten thousand steps around the house, the property, walking here and there, and with the dog. Going into town, taking the children outside, walking to and from the car. All of that. To avoid walking ten thousand steps, I would have to—I do not know what. Probably be ill. Ill and in bed; then I would get six or eight thousand. She said, “Of course you should not separate them. That is your life, how you move, the large space you live in. You are not in a single ten-square-meter room, sitting in a chair all day without getting up, then taking the subway home and sitting down again. You move.” I do not call that exercise. You could call it exercise, but it is not exercise. The same applies to different practices. As I move around during the day, I observe what is happening in the space around me and try to sense the people I interact with.

I observe the different impulses, the energy around me, what is moving. We could call it meditation and say, “I am doing exercises; I am meditating,” or it could simply be a natural way of being. Here on this channel, I explain that a meditative state is your life, an expansion of your perception. To notice and register everything happening continuously while awake—not to mention while asleep—you need to expand your consciousness considerably, in a sense become an initiate, to reach those states. Now, why else does this problem arise? To answer your question: can being in meditation destroy a relationship? Of course, just like any action. If you meet friends every morning at eight to drink beer, could that destroy a relationship? Yes. If you meet friends every morning at eight to meditate, could meditation destroy the relationship? Of course it could.

I deliberately chose an odd comparison to show that it depends on what bothers whom. If your husband or wife is bothered by your beer drinking, the relationship may break down. Whether they drink with you or not—if it does not bother them and they see it as normal, everything will be fine. I remember a good example from my own life. I used to drink alcohol. Through a combination of circumstances, causes, strength, and energy, I stopped. I have not drunk alcohol for a very long time—exactly fourteen years. I remember a fairly recurring situation in which my wife said, “It would be better if you drank.” I did not choose the beer-and-meditation example for nothing. “It would be better if you drank.” What does that mean? Clearly, it was said in anger, resentment, perhaps a bad mood or some other state. Wishing that your husband drank is a little strange. It is strange.

Why would someone say that? Because when a person drinks alcohol, they narrow their perception. With narrower perception, they become much easier for others to understand. Their perception is narrow, completely narrow. It is much easier to understand the charger lying on my floor, or this microphone, than a person. That matters. It is a very important point. But I want to add something. I gave an example of a relationship breaking down purely as something that could happen with any event in life. That is why I used beer as an example: I do not want this video to create the belief that meditation is a cause. It is not a cause at all. Not a cause at all. That is not the way to look at it. We could examine it separately, but it is a large subject, perhaps for my other channel: does expanding perception and bringing more freedom into your life change the course of a relationship? That is a separate subject. When you expand your perception sufficiently, you reach freedom. I show this in many meditations—

what freedom is, its levels, and what lies beyond it. When you reach freedom, you need to understand that it can lead to completely different actions. If the possibility of a relationship ending is a limit for you—I am not saying ending it is right; I am absolutely not saying that—then it is no longer freedom. You cannot enter a state of freedom or even approach it if you do not allow yourself to consider every possible course of events. Simply allow for them. Even that this balcony could collapse now and I could die. I am sitting on a raised platform, a balcony. That is the essence of freedom. That is the essence of freedom. When people speak about freedom, spiritual freedom, and spiritual development, there is an incredible amount of lying. We can use that word. They deceive; they deceive themselves, because they still surround themselves with numerous limits and things they find unacceptable.

Unacceptable. Completely unacceptable.