In a small spiritual community nestled in the California foothills, two souls discovered that the greatest love story isn’t just between two people—it’s between all of creation and the Divine. Jyotish and Devi, celebrating their golden anniversary, shared the secrets they’d learned about love as a spiritual practice, weaving together the intimate threads of their relationship with the cosmic tapestry of existence itself.
The couple emphasizes four essential principles for maintaining healthy relationships that mirror our relationship with the Divine: staying in touch through constant communication and appreciation; staying centered in oneself rather than allowing external circumstances to destabilize our inner peace; staying positive regardless of challenges; and staying in love—not just personal affection, but the divine love that flows through us to all beings.
Jyotish and Devi’s 50-year journey together illuminates a profound truth: successful relationships—whether romantic partnerships, friendships, or community bonds—serve as practice grounds for the ultimate relationship with God. They began with the understanding that life is like the Earth’s orbit around the Sun—a dance between the gravitational pull of Unity and the centrifugal force of separation. God creates the appearance of separation, they explained, not out of loneliness but out of joy’s very nature to share itself. Without the illusion of “other,” there can be no sharing, no giving, no receiving. Their marriage became a microcosm of this cosmic dance, where two people could either reinforce their separateness through ego and demands, or consciously work toward unity through love and service.
Before they even knew they belonged together, both spent years in the wilderness—she in a treehouse, he in a tent that leaked with every rainstorm. They lived simply, meditating daily, serving their community, learning to center themselves in something larger than personal wants and needs. When their spiritual teacher suggested they marry after Jyotish’s innocent inquiry about taking Devi on a date, they discovered that the foundation they’d built individually became the bedrock of their union. Three weeks later they were married, having never had that date—a detail Devi still playfully reminds him about.
Their journey took them through the furnace of ordinary life made extraordinary by spiritual purpose. A house fire consumed everything they owned except a shoebox of sacred items grabbed in haste and two delicate cups given by their teacher—teaching them that what survives disasters are love and the relationship with the Divine. Parenthood challenged Devi’s ability to meditate, but taught her more about ego-transcendence than any formal practice, as she learned to put another’s needs consistently before her own. Years in Italy, sleeping in an unheated villa with a washing machine they nicknamed “Mad Max” that shrank their wool sweaters to doll-size, became adventures in staying positive no matter what circumstances arose.
Through it all, they discovered four principles that made their relationship a reflection of divine love: staying in touch through communication both silly and serious (they once hid acorns in each other’s belongings as tiny love notes), staying centered in themselves so neither would lose their individual connection to God, staying positive through disasters both large and small, and staying in love—not just with each other but with life itself, extending that love to everyone they met, from the Swiss man at the plant nursery to the confused guest wandering in the rain wearing fuzzy slippers.
Their secret, revealed after fifty years together, was deceptively simple: give your life to God first, and everything else follows. They learned that human relationships are “little dollhouses” where we practice the same dynamics we need for our relationship with the Divine—communication, loyalty, forgiveness, and seeing the God in each other even during difficult periods. Their love story became inseparable from their service to their community, their travels around the world establishing spiritual centers, and their weathering of a decade-long lawsuit that threatened everything they’d built.
As they spoke to their spiritual family on this anniversary weekend, sharing stories that made their audience laugh and cry, they embodied the truth they’d discovered: that a life given to God first creates the conditions for the deepest human love. Their marriage was simultaneously a spiritual practice, an adventure story, and a testament to the idea that when two people align their wills with the Divine will, even the most ordinary moments—cleaning applesauce from broken shelves after meditation, finding lavender bushes that remind them of Italy, watching their teacher pack for one last journey—become threads in a tapestry of love that extends far beyond the personal into the universal.
Devi shares, “For Jyotish and me, our commitment to one another is one of the central pillars of our life, because in essence it is a commitment to God. Though we lead busy, demanding lives in our service to Ananda, we never neglect to enjoy the great gift of each other’s company. Joy, too, is a quality of God, and how beautifully it can be expressed in a smile, an unexpected act of kindness, shared enjoyment of beauty in nature, or a bit of humor. By keeping God at the center of our life, we’ve experienced so many divine qualities in our marriage: love, joy, peace, wisdom, and more. The marriage vows that Swami Kriyananda wrote for Ananda’s Wedding Ceremony conclude with these words: ‘May our love grow ever deeper, purer, more expansive, until, in our perfected love, we find the perfect love of God.’”
The wisdom they shared was not just about marriage but about the art of living: that life presents us with exactly what we need for growth, that challenges are invitations to transcend limitations, and that the ultimate relationship is always with God, of which all human love is a beautiful reflection. Their story reminds us that the deepest intimacy comes not from losing oneself in another, but from two whole people choosing again and again to bridge the space between separate selves with love, service, and devotion to something greater than either could be alone.
Light Being ॐ 
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