nico and devon hase: Buddhist Volcanoes In Love

nico hase: If I look back from my deathbed, I’m going to say yes, I’m so glad that I stayed committed to my life partner.

devon hase: It’s like things get really clear and your priorities come into focus when you realize we don’t know how long we have. I would much rather love them and express that and let the petty resentments go.

Tami Simon: Welcome, friends. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guests are nico and devon hase. They are married Buddhist teachers who have each done a considerable amount of solitary meditation practice. They help couples face and blossom in the truth about long-term relationships. nico lived in a monastery for six years before earning a PhD in counseling psychology and becoming a full-time insight meditation teacher. devon has practiced intensively in the insight and Tibetan traditions of meditation, and she teaches at IMS, Spirit Rock, and more.

They are co-authors of a previous book, How Not to Be a Hot Mess, and a new Sounds True book, This Messy, Gorgeous Love: A Buddhist Guide to Lasting Partnership. nico and devon, welcome.

devon hase: Thank you so much for having us, Tami. It’s such a delight to be here.

Tami Simon: This conversation is important to me personally because bringing full heart and deep spiritual life into love—and having my loving relationship of now 25 years be the center of my life—is probably the single most important thing to me. So I want to start right with a question that I keep noodling on. In my ceremony, which was just me and my wife on a beach by ourselves with the sky and ocean and some birds as witness, I said, “I’m going to put our marriage as the number one priority in my life.” And since that time, I’ve had some second thoughts about it. Was that really a vow I wanted to take on? Is that my number one priority? I wanted to ask this of two people who have deep commitments to spiritual practice—how you hold that as a priority in your life, and what you think of that as a marriage vow.

nico hase: I think it’s such a beautiful aspiration. My first reaction is that these vows we take together are like how we orient ourselves to each other and to the world. It reminds me of the vows that devon and I took in our wedding ceremony—we vowed to be in awakening together. That has been really orienting for us both in times where things are easy and also in times when things are rough. We talk about this again and again in the book: there are just going to be times when relationships are rough, when they rub you, when they push you, when you feel like you don’t know if you can continue going in the way that you’re going together.

That vow to put the relationship first really calls to me a principle we talk about in the book—autonomy versus connection. There is always going to be some very real and very human tension between these fields. Autonomy being my spiritual practice, my inner work, and my ability to express myself as myself in the world. Connection with another—an equally important value. I want to be together, threaded and wedded together in this relationship.

In my own experience, devon and I go through periods where we’re leaning much more into connection and being together, and then we go through periods where each of us is needing more space and more autonomy. For example, we do a lot of teaching together, where we’re in each other’s presence 24 hours a day for 6, 7, 10 days at a time. And then there are times where we are in solitary retreat for a month or two or three months—we don’t see each other at all. For our marriage, we’re always weaving in and out. We’re always dancing between prioritizing the relationship over individual needs and prioritizing individual needs over the relationship. I would probably land on fluidity—it’s a dynamic we’re always dancing in together, with moments of real and genuine tension in that dance.

devon hase: Let me tell a story to illustrate what nico is saying. When we first met, he was a monk living in a Zen monastery, and I had just moved to a Tibetan retreat center to serve as their program manager. We were both so embedded in our spiritual communities. I think I was maybe 26 or 27; nico was 30. Our first conversation really was about how neither of us was dating material. nico said, “I sometimes think I should wear a sign that says ‘run’ to any potential date, because I’m so committed to my sangha here that I’m just giving my whole life to this community.” And I said, “Well, me neither—I am not dating material because I don’t take refuge in relationships. I take refuge in the Triple Gem.”

In that very first conversation, there was a spark of interest precisely because there were already the seeds of autonomy—the sense that we were going to put our spiritual path at the center of this thing. So your question, Tami, is kind of a koan: this impossibility of how do we be together in this co-regulatory, threaded connection, prioritizing each other, while also maintaining the kind of autonomy and space that’s healthy for a spiritual life.

Tami Simon: You use the metaphor in the book of walking a tightrope. And imagining a tightrope, you’re going to fall off quite a lot.

nico hase: That metaphor comes from Philippe Petit—one of my heroes. Many of you probably know that Philippe Petit was an acrobat who, I think in 1974, threaded a steel cable from one World Trade Center tower to the other. He was 1,300 feet above the street during morning rush hour, and he walked out on this cable for 40 minutes—walked across, walked back, then danced on the cable, laid down on the cable. It was an expression of his artistry.

What was really interesting to me about Philippe Petit was two things. First, the extraordinary amount of training it took for him to do this. And second, in a documentary I watched about him, he talked about how he never found his balance—he was always finding his balance. It was always micro-moments of finding his balance, finding his balance, finding his balance. There was never a final point of real and true balance.

That is how I feel in relationship all the time. I’m finding my balance, I’m falling out of balance. We are finding each other and then losing each other again and finding each other again. What’s necessary to maintain the connection and the autonomy is probably a kind of training that our culture doesn’t really offer us. We have to be so intentional about training ourselves to be in relationship together—the same way that somebody like Philippe Petit was training himself to walk the high wire a thousand feet above the ground.

Tami Simon: What’s the essence of the training? I can imagine someone asking—what are you actually talking about?

devon hase: So many things to say about the essence of the training. The very first chapter of our book is called “Relationships Are Rough,” and there’s a kind of training, I think, in coming to terms with the inherently stressful nature of being human. We can apply this to relationships, to aging, to work and family. Life is inherently unreliable.

You might recognize this as the first noble truth—that life is unsatisfying. The Pali word dukkha literally refers to a wheel that doesn’t fit right. So if you think about wobbliness: each of us is a wobbly wheel, and then you’ve got two wobbly wheels trying to come together. It’s going to inherently be hard. That’s actually counter-cultural, because in weddings we often have fairy tales—this language of “happily ever after, we found our person, it should be good.” So already there’s a kind of reckoning with that challenge when we commit to another.

Tami Simon: Let’s stop there, because I think there is this fantasy—at least for me—that the wheel is going to be smooth and it’s going to fit. And then of course my partner and I are going to be wheeling together. There’ll be occasional rough spots, sure. But it sounds to me like in This Messy, Gorgeous Love, you want to start with a bucket of cold water on that idea.

nico hase: That’s what we do. We’re saying: what a relief to get that cold bucket of water in your face and realize that there is something about intimate relationship that is inherently a rub—that it is actually going to continue to rub. And if you can really allow the rub to touch you, it can be transformative. It’s the fighting the rub, the trying to manage the rub or get it better or have it always be smooth, that interferes with making it a spiritual practice. If we can allow that our partnership is going to make us a little crazy a lot of the time, then we can ask: how do I make this transformative for me and for us? How do I use this as a mirror to see all of these habit patterns that are keeping me stuck in other areas of my life?

Tami Simon: What about the person who’s listening who says, “If I had a different partner, or if I could find someone who was really highly compatible with me—that’s really the issue”? And they want a relationship that’s truly harmonious, 90-some percent of the time.

devon hase: Well, it could be that you’re not matched well—that’s also part of the reality of relationships. And yet if we take these basic principles of impermanence and change and unreliability—what’s the likelihood that we’re even going to be 50% well matched? Think about all of our foibles and our humanity, and then the complications and foibles of another person. Even all of our friendships and family relationships are inherently complex.

This is part of the second training we talk about—we call it deep listening, which is really another term for mindfulness. In the Satipatthana Sutta, the foundations of mindfulness, the Buddha again and again invites us to have three forms of mindfulness: be mindful internally, be mindful externally, and be mindful both internally and externally.

So this deep listening—when we can really listen to what’s going on inside ourselves first, we’re probably going to have more clarity about what we want and need in a partner. Then listening externally means really taking full stock of who this other person is—their strengths, their weaknesses, the ways they match you, the ways they don’t. And then the third listening, internally and externally at once—we call it a third space, listening to the relationship itself. What’s the context? What’s the situation at any given moment?

When we’re doing all three of these together, we at least have a lot more information about whether the situation is workable. How much are we actually able to adapt? How much is the other person able to adapt? One former version of our subtitle had this formula: lasting partnership without fixing the other person and also without losing yourself.

Tami Simon: In This Messy, Gorgeous Love, you share a lot of your own challenges and conflicts—a lot of your own fights. It was a page-turner. I kept going to the next chapter to hear about the next great fight between these two Buddhist teachers. When you’re doing this deep listening with each other and you notice internally that something is arising that’s more than you can articulate and navigate skillfully in the moment—what do you do?

nico hase: Well, usually I do something really unskillful—that’s my approach. We talk about conflict styles in the book, and I tend to be what we call volcanic. So in those moments, I often have the wisdom to know that this wouldn’t be the right time to say a particular thing—and often I blow right through that. I say the thing, and then we’re in a spiraling, sticky mess, dragging up past hurts and resentments and woundings, and then somehow we have to find our way out of the mess I’ve just created.

That’s a big part of why we wrote our own fights into this book—especially in Buddhist communities, there is such a rigid and impossible standard about who you’re supposed to be. You are supposed to be always calm, always kind, always peaceful. I don’t know who that person is. I’m friends with many senior teachers in our Buddhist communities, and they are wonderful and they have something beautiful to offer the world—and when they get into it with their most intimate relationships, they flip their lid just like everybody else. Being forgiving of ourselves and our partner who just lost their cool, and being able to come back from that, is even more essential than trying to get it right the first time every single time. It doesn’t mean we don’t have the intention to speak with kindness and clarity and care—it just means that when we slip up, we give ourselves some grace and, hopefully, give the other person some grace too.

Tami Simon: You talk about these different conflict styles, and I thought this was a really interesting part of the book. So here we have our volcano of a Buddhist teacher—and you’re both volcanoes, as it turns out. You also write about breaking out of the “trance of niceness,” which I really appreciated. What about the other two styles: the diplomats and the dodgers?

devon hase: Sure. And I should say this really comes from the work of John and Julie Gottman and all the research they’ve done in their lab—they observed these patterns arising in conflict.

Diplomats are very diplomatic. They know how to use all the right communication skills—maybe they’ve done Nonviolent Communication or Insight Dialogue—so they’re happy to use “I statements” and state their needs and wants, and they can negotiate in conversation for a long time. These are real skills. But we have friends who are both diplomats and have been negotiating their separation for years—more conversation, more layers, more angles. It can try your patience.

The third style is the dodger. Dodgers avoid conflict—they’d much rather let things simmer under the surface. They’d prefer to go out for a walk if things get heated. You just feel this energetic recoil; they seem to turn invisible. Like, where did you go?

These conflict styles are like any structure—messier in reality. The most interesting thing is that we can be different styles in different relationships. I’m volcanic with nico—we can both be kind of explosive—but in most other relationships, I’m more of a diplomat or even a dodger. So we can look at what the context brings out in us and know that yes, we all have all three. The key is really just self-knowledge: understanding what your tendency is in a particular situation, and then how to work with it skillfully.

nico hase: It’s also very common to have different styles at different phases of a primary relationship, or even within the same relationship depending on the situation. What’s true is that most of us lean more in one direction, and it’s helpful to know which way we tend to lean. But even if you express all three styles, it’s helpful to ask: what style am I expressing right now? What are the advantages, and what are the disadvantages?

The advantage of a volcano, for example, is that you always know what’s on their mind—nothing’s hidden. You don’t have to worry or guess, even if it sometimes comes in a loud voice. The disadvantage is that it creates rupture. So if you are a volcano, you need to be really skilled at repair—rupture and repair. Devon and I have learned to find ourselves together again after a big blowout fight. We also have agreements about things you just don’t say—we’re not tearing each other apart, attacking character, saying things we can never take back, going for the jugular. It’s loud and expressive, but it’s not deeply damaging to the connection.

Tami Simon: What would you say to that person who’s listening and thinking: “Okay, I’ve got these two Buddhist teachers who sit on their cushions and seem so calm—and behind closed doors they’re having volcanic eruptions with each other. I’m losing confidence in the practice.”?

devon hase: I think it depends on what our intention is for the practice. For me, overcoming the perfectionism ideal was a huge practice for many years. Like, if I meditate, I’m just going to be this perfect person—calm and harmonious and at peace all the time. And recognizing that isn’t even the goal. One frame we could use is that meditation makes us more human—it opens us to allow even more of the mess. I think that’s why we love that word. But within that, there can be a lot of skill and a lot of learning—insight and growth that comes out of that compost pile.

Part of our transparency is wanting to dismantle some of the myths about meditation: that it’s going to make you perfect or give you this shiny, polished life. In the mindfulness community, there’s a strong adjacency to the optimization wellness culture. People meditate because it’s good for you, it will lower your blood pressure, it pairs with the right diet and exercise. But in Buddhism, the first message is: you’re never going to optimize. You might as well give up that perfectionism, because as soon as you’re born, you’re already dying. Things are coming apart under our fingertips. When we meditate to get in alignment with that truth, there’s so much more potential for intimacy and learning. As Carl Rogers said, “The curious paradox is that when I can accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” We want to show up fully human so that other people can see it’s possible for them.

Tami Simon: Let’s address the person who objects: “I don’t want relationships to be this much work.”

nico hase: I also don’t want relationships to be this much work. And I would have to say to that person: I am so sorry, but they do seem to be this much work. It’s a little like—now that I’m in middle age, I’m taking my health more seriously, and it’s so much work. I go to the gym and do cardio for 40 minutes and weightlifting for 20 minutes and think, my gosh, keeping my body healthy and strong through middle age, because I want to be someone who’s hiking when I’m 80, is taking a lot of intention and attention. I almost want to apologize. But it’s probably the same for partnership. If you want a thriving connection with deep intimacy and aliveness and realness, it’s going to take something from you. It’s going to take attention and intention—time set aside to be together in authentic flow.

And the benefit is huge. What you get is not only a really deep connection with another human being and all the support that comes from that—you get a partnership that is actually a spiritual practice. You get deep, sustaining meaning. You get actual transformative potential. So yes, it requires work, and if you’re willing to put that work in, what it gives back is so, so good.

Tami Simon: You’ve each done a three-year solitary retreat—which is quite unusual for contemporary people in our society. I want to hear more about how you did it, and also if you could share one aha about intimate relationships that came to you while you were by yourself in retreat.

devon hase: Our three-year retreat goes way back to meeting my first teachers when I was 19. They were fresh out of their own three-year retreat—Western lamas in the Kagyu tradition—and I just thought, I want to be like them. That was part of that very first conversation nico and I had too. I said, I’m also going to do a three-year retreat. And his response—this was very skillful—was: “Great, I’ll do that with you.” Like, I’m not going to get in the way of your dreams. It took us about 15 years to figure out the money and logistics and family, but in 2019 we spoke with Mingyur Rinpoche, our Tibetan teacher. We told him our retreat plans and asked for his advice about a traditional three-year retreat. We thought he was going to offer us beautiful, esoteric depth teachings about how to enter an extended retreat period. But he knew us pretty well at that point, and he had seen all of our ambition. He looked at us and said: “Great—thumbs up, do your long retreat—but my advice to you: save for retirement.” It was a mic-drop moment. He sees so many Westerners who give it all to the spiritual path and end up being irresponsible financially and health-wise. We came out reeling. Save for retirement. That was the lama’s advice.

nico hase: We completely restructured the retreat. We found a retreat master who was willing to transmit an entire Tibetan lineage to us in the traditional way, but we spent about half our time in really deep, cloistered retreat in the mountains, and the other half in a temple apartment—an apartment above a Tibetan Buddhist temple in Ashland, Oregon, where we knew people well and were deeply supported by community. When we were in town, we would do our Dharma teaching work about 15 to 20 hours a week and meditate about 40 hours a week. Otherwise we were completely in retreat—virtually no social life, almost no contact with anyone.

COVID was so many horrifying things, but it turned out to be extremely supportive for us, because everybody else was also kind of in retreat for most of the time we were in retreat. It was a full three years and about eight months—cabins in the mountains, then the temple in town, back and forth—earning enough money to cover our basic needs and our health insurance, and maxing out our IRAs.

In the midst of all of that, there was one period where we had a big mutual aha about relationships. We were so dedicated to the practice—doing these tremendously esoteric, deep, complex Tibetan yogic practices, separately. Devon was living in a cabin; I was living in a tent outside through the winter in the mountains, covered in snow in a giant yellow puffy snowsuit. We were doing practices that work with the energies moving through the body, and they are hugely energizing. We both went off balance in our own particular ways. Devon had panic attacks with no content—nothing she was afraid of—just wild things happening in the subtle body due to these practices. My imbalance was that I essentially had a two- or three-week manic episode. As a trained psychologist, I was literally ticking through the DSM list: okay, this qualifies as a manic episode because of this, this, and this—yep, I am definitely having a manic episode.

At some point we realized we needed each other. It was well and good and beautiful to do these solitary practices that were so transformative and intense, but we actually had to come back together in order to integrate this depth practice. So we started doing check-ins. We would come together once a day for half an hour and just check in. One person would speak for five or ten minutes—everything going on for them—and then be quiet while the other person spoke. No commentary on what the other had said, just listening. And what we found was co-regulation—coming together in this way settled everything down. The practices remained just as powerful and transformative, but they had a much more stable container when we integrated together. We bring this into our everyday lives now: if we can find a way to do practice together—a check-in practice—then all of the disparate, wild things going on can get grounded. It’s a depth practice that we do together.

devon hase: And I would add that the check-in was the big insight we took from the retreat in terms of relational practice—and it’s deceptively simple. It can take 10 to 15 minutes of your day. Even once a week can be powerful. It’s a kind of relationship hygiene. You stay calibrated together and you’re better equipped to navigate when conflict arises.

Tami Simon: When I first heard you describe the check-in, I thought, come on—this is easy, everybody knows how to do this. And then when I actually went to practice it, I realized it’s as deceptively simple as you say. When I checked in with my wife about how I was checking in, she had quite a lot of feedback for me.

nico hase: Yes!

Tami Simon: Something I want to pick up on, devon—this notion of listening inwardly, listening outwardly, and then this third kind of listening to the relationship itself, almost as if the relationship were its own kind of being. Can you say more about that?

devon hase: It’s a piece we’re adding to the Buddhist teaching, and I’m genuinely curious about what it’s like to be aware of the relationship as a being itself. An example: nico and I have taught together now for about 15 years. In the beginning, we would have tension—this kind of energetic stress building up before teaching. We’d maybe be in the middle of an argument and then have to go on stage and be these poised meditation teachers, then go off stage and have to resolve whatever had come up. We were also giving each other feedback in ways that weren’t careful enough—we were both vulnerable after teaching, and we’d just go straight in and give it straight. It took us some years to realize that what wasn’t getting our attention was the context. The relationship itself was in this really stressful teaching situation where we were partners but also colleagues, responsible for holding a container for people. We were both nervous, both on edge, both wanting the other person to do things our way.

When we brought that third listening—the relationship as co-teachers—there was a lot more intentionality about how we wanted to be with each other leading into teaching and how to offer feedback. We’ve had to use a formula to give honest feedback in ways that care for each other and also care for the relational space. We often talk about this third space in terms of being aware of the context, the time, the situation, what’s happening in the wider world.

Tami Simon: I do have this sense that together my wife and I have formed like a mythological creature—some being with two heads but eight legs and all these arms—and that’s part of our love: this new being that is out there. We’re not just in our separate bodies anymore; there’s a shared body we inhabit together.

To your point, though, devon—about listening to the context—it was very interesting to me in reading This Messy, Gorgeous Love when you talked about seeing how often, when you were most reactive, you noticed you were tired. That’s such a simple observation and so important. I notice often that things get chaotic when either one of us—or especially both of us—are under a lot of stress and deadlines and pressure. There’s not the normal elasticity to work with things.

nico hase: Absolutely, and I think that’s true for devon and me and for all the partnerships we’re familiar with. If you’re not getting enough rest, if you’re overworked, overstretched—young children in the house, a demanding career, a difficult boss, a mortgage to pay, a house to care for—there can be this feeling of being dispersed and exhausted. Those are the moments where it’s really hard to keep a level head and maintain connection.

A couple of things help. One is to ask: how can I take care of myself here? Because the greatest gift to the relationship and to the family system is that I care for this nervous system. My kids are going to do a lot better if I can get enough sleep, enough rest, eat well, maybe meditate for five minutes. That’s a practical altruism—taking care of myself so that others will be okay. The other piece is that often we don’t have control over the situation. We know we’re just going to rub against each other for a while. The thing to do in those circumstances is to up the forgiveness quotient. I’m going to be kind of a jerk and irritable, you’re going to be kind of a jerk and irritable, and we’re going to get through it, get to the other side, apologize, and find each other again. We’re not expecting perfection—basic positive regard would be nice, but not perfection.

Tami Simon: You mentioned this notion of collective or evolutionary purpose—dare I say a beneficial purpose for others—and how you view that and how it motivates you in your marriage.

devon hase: We have a story that responds exactly to that. In the second year of our relationship, we were just starting to live together—very rocky, very stressful, trying to figure out if we were actually going to last. I went to my Tibetan teacher at the time—she was very wise and had also been married for a long time—and she said, “One metric I use for any intimate relationship, any friendship, is: is this relationship growing your bodhichitta?” Meaning awakened heart, awakened mind—the sense of service. If bodhichitta is enhanced through this partnership, then yes, good to go.

When I looked at our relationship through that lens, I was a hundred percent certain that bodhichitta was increasing because of our connection. We use that image in the last chapter of the book—the sense of standing side by side but facing out into the world. If our connection is actually growing our sense of service, our capacity to engage in the world, to bring positive qualities to everybody we meet—then yes, a hundred percent, that is what we’re in it for. That can be a good question for anyone looking at any relationship: is it growing your goodness? Is it growing your capacity, your availability, and your engagement?

Tami Simon: I appreciated so much when you wrote about your heightened energetic experiences during solitary retreat, devon—especially when you shared about your own sexual discoveries. You had what I’d call a three-part revelation, and I liked all three parts. The first was that you said everybody has body shame. I knew I had body shame and I figured some other people probably did too, but I didn’t realize it was so universal. I noticed I really relaxed when I read that. Can you comment on that?

devon hase: It’s a big statement. When you’re alone in silence for days and weeks and months, there is a real sense of reckoning with the human condition. Body shame was a huge part of my own childhood and young adulthood—even now, it still takes up real estate in my psychology. Even in solitude in the woods, with no mirrors, nobody looking at my body, I was very aware of all of this internalized monologue around what I should eat, how I should be. Because there’s less distraction, you come face to face with all of that noise. You can start to see the objectification in our culture, the consumerism, the sexism—and given all of these conditions, I think I can say pretty confidently that we’re all going to have some measure of body shame or neurosis around this. That was such a sense of relief when I could allow this as part of the human condition, or at least our cultural conditioning. I could see it in nico, I could see it in all kinds of different folks from different locations I know. It’s a little bit like starting with “relationships are rough”—let’s just know that we’re bringing this very vulnerable, very raw material to the table when we’re talking about physical intimacy. Rather than trying to bypass or ignore it, it was really helpful for me to name it for myself and then share some of that process with nico. And it was actually surprising to me when he said, “Well yeah, I have it in this way too—here’s my particular version of it.” That was very healing.

Tami Simon: And then briefly—the second and third observations you made: sexuality is always changing, and desire is not politically correct. Both of these were big permissions for me.

devon hase: The first 12 months of our retreat, we were celibate—which I have to say was so freeing. Not to have that pressure, not to need sex, not to want it, not to think about it. Given all that space, I became more curious: just as we talk about relationships being an awakening path, what if sexuality could also be in service to our spiritual awakening? What would that be like? We were in this Tibetan tantric tradition where there’s a lot of creativity and different approaches to working with the subtle energies in the body.

And the third one—desire is not politically correct—was also such a relief in retreat. As we were doing this mystical, esoteric work—breathing exercises, yogic exercises, visualization practices where we were taking the shape of deities, sometimes even playing with gender, experiencing the sense of both male and female expressions in union in one body—there was this permission to be an alive being expressing itself in all these different ways, without the trappings of assumption, politics, or gender roles.

So if we can play with sexual energy—not just as about the act of sex, but as about eros, or aliveness, or these energies that learn how to run through our bodies differently—then there’s so much more creativity and permission. We don’t have to follow the regular scripts of our culture. We don’t have to be politically correct; we don’t have to take gender roles seriously. There were more questions than answers, but those are pretty healthy conditions in which to explore a different relationship to sexuality.

Tami Simon: And thank you for writing about them, because they’re bringing waves of benefit—I can tell you that. And nico, I wanted to ask you one final question. As I was reading toward the end of the book, you shared about how, when you were 30 years old, you had a death recognition moment. I want you to share what that was and how it has stayed with you—how you keep that knowing that we could die at any moment present in your life.

nico hase: I started practicing pretty intensively at 16 or 17 years old in a tradition where my teacher was very focused on contemplating death and impermanence. My first teacher used to send me out on the country roads of upstate New York to find roadkill—which sounds incredibly weird because it is—to find a corpse to contemplate. In the Buddhist tradition that’s actually very classical. I’ve been doing this contemplation from a young age: just as that was a living being who has now passed away, I too am a living being that will pass away. When I moved into the Zen monastery, I continued that kind of practice. It’s very central to Zen to think about the fact that you have no idea how long you have left, so every moment gets imbued with poignancy and preciousness and aliveness.

That’s how I practiced with it. And then I thought, yeah, I kind of understand what all this is about. And then I turned 30. I woke up on my 30th birthday, and it wasn’t just a thought—it punctured me. It’s probably because all of those 12 or 13 years of practice had been doing their work. I felt it in my bones: I don’t know how much time I have. If I’m lucky, I’m one third of the way through my life—but time is speeding up every day. It put me into a state of crisis. For days I walked around unable to think about anything else, and it set off a life review where I really took a hard look at everything going on in my life at that time.

Luckily, I was mostly satisfied. I loved being a monastic, I loved my community. But I had the feeling that I was blocked from commitment—that I wasn’t able to fully commit to the most important things in my life. I was always one foot out the door at the monastery. I really couldn’t settle into a long-term partnership—I dated and dated but it never landed. That completely shifted. It was like the heat, the fear, the intensity of that crisis melted all that resistance and all those old calcifications. What came of it was this burning need to commit to things in my life—to dharma practice, and to wanting to be in a long-term, committed relationship that would cost me something, that would really give me something. And devon walked in the door about six months later, at exactly the right time.

Tami Simon: And how do you keep that awareness fresh in your mind and in your relationship?

nico hase: I contemplate it every day. There is never a day that goes by when I don’t think about: I don’t know how much time I have. Am I using my energy wisely? That doesn’t mean I have to be serious about everything all the time—one of my things right now is I’m really into fun. It means: can I feel what’s expressing itself here, and listen to it, and orient in a way that if I look back from my deathbed, I’m going to say, yes, I’m so glad I committed to that every day. I’m so glad I stayed committed to my life partner.

devon hase: And I think it also helps us repair well. We have a section in the book called “Rupture Like a Pro.” If we’re contemplating our own death and the mortality of our loved ones, we can’t stay mad for that long. We give ourselves permission to explode, but then—we actually want to go to bed having made some peace and having practiced forgiveness. nico and I contemplate death a lot. We recently made a little reel for Instagram: “Are you annoyed at your partner because they didn’t wash the dishes or they folded the laundry wrong? Contemplate the fact that they’re going to die.” Things get really clear and your priorities come into focus when you realize we don’t know how long we have. I would much rather love them and express that and let the petty resentments go, because each moment is made more precious by our impermanence.

Tami Simon: I’ve been speaking with devon and nico hase, two beautiful Buddhist teachers who are the authors of a new book, This Messy, Gorgeous Love: A Buddhist Guide to Lasting Partnership. I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you both—and I think I’m going to go do a check-in with my wife right about now. Thank you both very, very much.

nico hase: Yeah.

devon hase: Thank you. What a pleasure.

Tami Simon: Thanks, friends.