You are making progress with your spiritual journey and you are feeling like this is exactly what you are meant to be doing. You are rediscovering who you are and what you love. You are starting to feel whole again. And you are having some insanely incredible spiritual experiences and encounters which are filling you with so much joy!

But what happens when that special someone you are sharing your life with isn’t into spirituality and thinks it’s all complete nonsense?

Should you abandon your new-found spirituality and slide back into old habits and mindsets that made you feel miserable, or should you dig deep and keep going?

It is bloody hard embarking on a spiritual awakening at the best of times – you are taking a big leap of faith into the unknown, you have no idea what you’re doing, and some of the things you are learning are kind of freaking you out. So when the one person who you love and care about the most in this world thinks you have gone completely nutty, suddenly it’s not so easy to keep going.

Doubts start to creep in. What if they’re right? Are you wasting your time? What if it drives them away? And sometimes resentment and blame can soon follow. But it doesn’t have to be this way!

Here are my top tips for sharing your life with a loved one who isn’t on the same spiritual path as you:

Know that your partner is on their own journey

Try to remind yourself that although your partner isn’t spiritual, they are still having life experiences that are shaping and changing and teaching them. They are still experiencing growth, and insight, and many lessons. These are many of the foundations of living a spiritual life – the only difference is that you may be better-equipped to handle the lessons and can see deeper into the ‘why’ of life. Maybe. But not necessarily. Being spiritual doesn’t give anyone an entitlement to know more, or be wiser or smarter – it is simply a way of life.

If your partner isn’t spiritual, it doesn’t mean they are unhappy or are feeling unfulfilled with their life. They may be perfectly happy with their life, just the way it is!

Try and stay in your own lane, as much as you possibly can. You can 100% travel through life side by side, as two completely different journeys unfold for each of you. You can love and support one another and still be true to yourself, while being respectful of each other’s beliefs and dreams. Being independent within the relationship can bring you closer together.

Don’t try to change your partner

On the other hand, one of the fastest ways to make your partner run for the hills screaming, is to try and force change on them or to transform them just because it’s a better fit for you. Even if your intentions are good and you do truly think this is the best thing for them, it’s still not a good idea. I repeat: you can not make someone change, and it isn’t your responsibility to do so either. It is amazing that you have become curious about spirituality and esoteric practices or beliefs and you are seeing and feeling the benefits from it, but this doesn’t mean your partner is going to be into it.

The saying goes: you can’t (and shouldn’t!) help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. But, on top of this, you can’t help someone who isn’t quite ready yet either (or perhaps never will be). I firmly believe that we are all solely responsible for our own health and happiness – yes, you can get help and support along the way from others but if you hand the full responsibility of your life over to another person, you have lost your power. And that has the potential to cause a whole host of other problems for you, not the least including feeling controlled and helpless. Sound fun? Not really. And it wouldn’t be any fun for your partner either.

Live your best life

If your partner is unhappy or feels stuck or lost, rather than telling your loved one how to change or why they must change, let them witness the change in you as you embrace your own spiritual journey. People are inspired and motivated when they see other people’s transformations.

I honestly believe this is one of the best ways we can help others – by living our own best lives and being the change we want to see in the world.

Focus on you and your journey, and be supportive of your partner on their journey, and if / when the time is right and your partner feels ready they will come to you for help. Or they may even seek the help of a friend or someone else they trust! They will start asking questions. They will show more interest. It will all be their doing, but you will have played your part because they have witnessed you living your best life and have seen how happy it makes you.

And even if your loved one never ‘sees the light’ so to speak, if you are both happy within yourselves and happy together and supportive of each other, it really doesn’t matter whether they embrace a spiritual life or not. If you find that it does matter to you, do some soul-searching to ask yourself why – try to find the root cause of this discomfort because the chances are it has very little to do with your partner and a whole lot to do with you and your own spiritual growth. (Discomfort most often indicates a healing opportunity!)

Trust your journey

Here’s a little story for you… Years ago, I was smack bang in the middle of my own spiritual awakening and it was the happiest I had ever been in a very long time. I was living in my own little bubble of spiritual bliss, and hadn’t noticed my husband’s increasing frustration over the changes he was seeing in me.

One night, he blurted out that I wasn’t the woman he had married all those years ago. He said he didn’t know who I was any more, and that I was not much fun for him to be around (eg I was deep and spiritual all the time). This confession was like a slap in the face for me – it was so unexpected and it yanked me out of my spiritual bubble with a thud.

He was happy living his life exactly the way it was, it was familiar and comfortable and he didn’t want anything to change. I, on the other hand, desperately wanted to change because I felt empty inside – I loved him so much but I didn’t love myself so I was actively bringing lots of change into my life while exploring what spirituality could do for me.

What were we going to do?

We could have said our goodbyes and gone our separate ways because we had grown apart and were going in totally different directions. But we chose to stay together and try to work through it. I was completely terrified that my spiritual journey was going to tear us apart, and there were times when I considered dropping all of it and just going back to (what I felt was) my 2D life just so we could stay together.

One particular night I was in pretty bad shape over the whole thing, when my Spirit Guide delivered a clear, firm message: “Trust your journey and keep following your heart. If you two are meant to be together, it will work out somehow. And if you aren’t, you will part ways. Regardless of the outcome, you will both be okay!”

Those words stuck, and I’ve lived my life by them ever since.

My marriage not only survived, it has thrived! But it truly could have gone either way. It is bloody scary, but if you can take a deep breath and put your faith in the bigger picture and in your own journey, everything will work out! Does this mean you and your loved one will stay together? No-one can answer that question for you. So try to take a leap of faith and keep following your heart, even if it frightens you, and then see what the future has in store for you.

Get yourself a spiritual side-kick

My husband is a motor mechanic and cars are his passion. Now if he wanted to talk to me about cars and engines all day and night, I would lose my mind. Same goes for spirituality – if someone who really isn’t in to this kind of thing has story after story after story shared with them, it will get very old very quickly. Even if you mean well and your stories are the most mind-blowingly amazing things you’ve ever encountered, it can bore the pants off someone who just isn’t into spiritual stuff.

This doesn’t mean you have to live separate lives and never have a juicy or meaningful conversation ever again. Relationships are about give and take – being respectful and supportive of one another. So share your stories with your partner, just be mindful that you aren’t drowning them in spiritual talk!

To make sure that you do have a sounding-board for your spiritual tales and woes, because this is such an important part of the journey – find yourself a like-minded friend who you can have those long, deep and fantastical spiritual conversations with. You’ll be happy because you can keep unloading all your incredible experiences and stories, and your loved one will be happy because they don’t have to be constantly fake-interested in something that does nothing for them. It’s a win win!

Another suggestion is to write it all down – get yourself a journal or notepad and start jotting those thoughts and experiences down on paper. This is also a wonderful thing to do because it documents your journey, so months or years down the track it can make for some very entertaining and enlightening reading for you!

It’s a balancing act

It can often boil down to something as simple as having balance in your life.

Do you want to abandon absolutely everything you have ever been interested in, and live and breath a spiritual lifestyle? Or do you want to implement some spiritual practices and beliefs into your current everyday life?

If you want to give your entire life an overhaul, then you must expect that your partner will be rattled by this! Because you are radically changing – and even if it’s good change, it is still different and unfamiliar to your partner. If you do want to upend your whole life and start fresh, do you want your partner to come on that journey with you? If so, you must find a balance – a medium somewhere in the middle where your two worlds can meet – because it is unfair (and unspiritual!) to expect them to drop everything and upend their whole life for you. Perhaps they will do that! But you can’t ask or expect that of them – remember, you can’t take away the power they have over their own life.

And my final tip, which isn’t really a spiritual tip, but more of a life-lived and lessons-learned kind of tip: keep the communication lines open, always. The more you can have open and honest conversations with your loved one, so you both know exactly where you stand and where you are at within your relationship and within your own life journeys, the stronger your relationship will be. Communication breakdown is brutal and it’s lonely. It’s confusing for everyone and it’s often when imaginations tend to run wild and speculate.

Be kind, be humble, be supportive, listen carefully, speak your truths openly, and trust that your relationship is a part of your spiritual journey – there will be many lessons learned, many healing moments, so much growth, changes in perspective. It’s all part of it!

What do you struggle with the most due to your partner not being a spiritual person?

Or, how have you made it work?

Please share with me in the comments below!

Jo x