In this episode of Living Dharma, co-hosts Tsunma Kunsang Palmo and Justin Kelley welcome Nico and Devon Hase, husband-and-wife Buddhist teachers and authors who write about what happens when lofty ideals meet the rub of ordinary life. Their answer begins with getting real. The beautiful ideals of the Dharma, bodhicitta, compassion, stability of mind, have to come alive in exactly the places where we are pushed up against a wall.

Drawing on their books How Not to Be a Hot Mess and This Messy Gorgeous Love, and on the three-year retreat they completed together, Nico and Devon explore relationship as a genuine path of awakening. They talk about the ideal and the real as two ends of a rubber band, about making the inevitable rub of any relationship into practice, and about the conflict styles they call volcanoes, diplomats, and dodgers.

The conversation widens into some of the deeper questions facing modern practitioners. What is the difference between the worldview of Western psychology and the worldview of the Dharma, and which is the foundation? What does an honest, responsible syncretism look like when so many of us are weaving traditions together? And why might the best yogis not be the best teachers. Candid, funny, and unafraid of the tender places, this is a conversation about letting our humanness become more human as we practice, and growing sturdy and vulnerable at once, like small flowers on a high alpine ridge.