Welcome . . .

With so many books on the shelf dealing with marriage and relationships, it is refreshing to read a humble book with a big message: the key to a happy marriage is found in the willingness to change yourself - not your partner. In The True Marriage: A Guidebook for a Lifelong Journey, Locke Rush, Ph.D., provides the benefit of many years of personal spiritual development as it relates to the marriage relationship.

"I learned more about myself in the first year of marriage than I did during my year in the Zen monastery," Dr. Rush says in his Introduction. "I was convinced my wife was the problem." One day when Dr. Rush was sitting at the feet of a wise man, a list of his wife's faults in his pocket, the wise man leaned forward and said, "My child, you wrote the wrong list. You should have written down all of your own faults instead of your wife's."

It was a transformative encounter for Dr. Rush, who took the words to heart and began to apply them not only in his own marriage but in the work he was doing with a support group for the wives of alcoholics. "It worked!" he says with wonder. "Not only did my own marriage begin to transform as I focused my efforts on improving my own qualities, but all of the women in the support group were able to sustain their marriages by working on their own issues instead of the issues of the alcoholic partner."

What sets this book apart from other books on marriage is twofold: first, it is refreshing to hear a man's point of view on how man can better understand and attend to the needs of their wives; second, the book writes of marriage as an arena for spiritual development, specifically the cultivation of good qualities such as restraint, compassion, peacefulness, and selfless love. "Most marriages are struggles," he says. "They are fought out in the arena of daily life, family, children, and work. We 'put up with' things, we are passive aggressive, we stuff our emotions, or, perhaps worse, we act on them, hurting our partner while telling ourselves we are only asserting our rightful authority. Hence our lives continue - we don't make any real progress, we just age and get used to the way things are. It doesn't have to be that way. An ancient and very wise saying puts it this way: 'Marriage is half the work of getting into heaven.' "

With chapters such as, "Getting What We Want Is the Wrong Peace," "Doing is Understanding," and "Recipes for the True Marriage," the reader will find many useful insights for both marital and spiritual transformation.

Dr. Rush has been engaged in a lifelong pursuit of personal transformation, including such varied pursuits as studying Jungian dream analysis in the Black Forest, a year as a monk in a Zen monastery in Japan and three more years there as a student of Zen, pioneering work in the fields of transpersonal psychology and addiction treatment, and many years as the student of an extraordinary Sufi master. He lives quietly in the Pennsylvania countryside, counsels individuals and couples, hosts a half-hour radio interview program, and focuses on his relationship to God and the development of good qualities.