Marriage Difficulties
During a stay in Hong Kong, Rinpoche was hosted by a woman who was experiencing excessive strain in her marriage. According to her, the primary condition for the escalating tension between her and her husband seemed to be the financial difficulties her husband’s business was encountering.
My very dear one,
Thank you very much for all your nectar lunches, dinners, and money offerings, and all the other offerings you made.
In answer to your question about your marriage, since it is not working well, maybe you should marry the buddhas and the deities. What do you think about that? I guess you can still argue with the deity, but that means you have to see the deity first.
The best is when you become the deity. That is the best marriage. Then it is goodbye to all sufferings and defilements.
Anyway, in the meantime, until that happens, while you are with your husband, just change your mind when problems arise. This means accepting the experience in the opposite way. Label it differently, by saying, “This is fantastic, this is great.” Why is it so fantastic? Because you can experience these problems on behalf of all sentient beings who have relationship problems, whose problems are 100,000 times worse than yours. You can experience these problems on behalf of all those who will experience relationship problems in the future, as well as those experiencing them now. Think, “I take all their relationship problems on myself and experience them myself.”
There is a very powerful way to do that, to give everything to the ego, to absorb your problems into the ego, which is what is giving you all those problems. Extinguish the ego like an enemy that is destroyed by a bomb, destroyed to pieces and scattered everywhere. The ego becomes non-existent. It doesn’t exist at all.
It is very good to think this from time to time. Practice the visualization of taking on the sufferings of others and giving your happiness and your past, present, and future merits to all the beings of the six realms, as well as to the beings in the intermediate state. The rest of the time, when these relationship problems or other problems arise for you, think immediately, “I am experiencing this on behalf of all sentient beings.”
Each time you do this, you are collecting vast amounts of merit and good luck. This is the best cause for achieving enlightenment, to liberate numberless sentient beings from suffering and its causes, and to bring them all to enlightenment, including your husband.
This is how to enjoy your life and experience its problems with happiness. You are achieving the best result and profiting from this experience. Then, when you perform this practice, you will really appreciate your husband, and you will feel his kindness in the depths of your heart. You will see that he is very precious in your life. When you see the benefits of this practice and you come to like performing this practice, you will want to achieve this result. The reason we like money is because of what we can do with money. In the same way, you can achieve so much benefit by experiencing these problems. Without him, this would not be possible. He is giving you this opportunity.
Thank you very much and please enjoy this advice. When you practice this, you will feel like you are of this earth. You'll be flying with Bodhicitta Airways—not with Lufthansa or British Airways. These other airlines have a possibility of crashing, but with Bodhicitta Airways, there is no such possibility. It is the opposite. Bodhicitta Airways is the safest airline.