What I Committed To (And Didn't Know)

My Hindu wedding ceremony lasted several hours.

I sat beside my husband in front of a sacred fire, dressed in the most elaborate outfit I had ever worn. I was surrounded by family on both sides, and I did everything the priest told me to do. I stood when he said stand. I sat when he said sit. I repeated phrases in Sanskrit that I did not understand. I threw things into the fire: flower petals, grains of rice, offerings whose significance I could not have explained to anyone who asked. My husband and I walked around the fire four times, each circumambulation a vow; each vow spoken in an ancient language that neither of us had been taught.

I smiled throughout. I had to.

The truth is I was not deeply happy that day. I was stressed in a way I had never been stressed before. My husband's family had not been fully supportive of our marriage — resistance, obstacles, begrudging consent — and I could feel all of it in that room. 

As I sat on the stage facing the audience I could see the front rows on both sides filled with his family. I could see the frowns. I could not see my own family behind me and that absence felt enormous. A panic rose in me, underneath the ceremony, underneath the smile. I sat there in front of the sacred fire and thought: should we be getting married? I had absolutely no idea what I was committing to. 

And here is the thing, almost no one did. Not my husband. Not most of the guests. Not the generations of Indian couples who had sat in front of that same fire before us, in the same elaborate outfits, throwing the same things into the same flames, smiling the same smile of people who are doing something sacred and meaningful and entirely opaque.

It was only years later, when Hindu priests began translating the ceremonies into English, that I started to understand what had actually happened in that room. I would sit with my husband and listen and look at him and say: is that what we committed to? 

I wish someone had explained this to me before my wedding. I wish I had walked into that ceremony knowing what I was walking into.

———————————————————————————

Dharma: The First Fire

The first circumambulation is for Dharma.

Dharma is often translated as duty, or righteousness, or right action, but none of those words fully captures it. Dharma is closer to: the way of living that is in alignment with your deepest nature, your responsibilities to others, and the larger order of the world you inhabit.

In a marriage, the vow of Dharma is a commitment to live conscientiously — with integrity, with ethical awareness, with a genuine understanding of your duties to each other, to your families, to your community, and to society at large. It is the agreement to be, at your foundation, a good person trying to do the right thing, not just for yourself but for everyone your life touches.

This is the deepest question of compatibility, and it is almost never the one we ask when we are deciding whether to marry someone. We ask where they went to school. We ask about their career and their family and their hobbies. We ask whether we find them attractive and whether they make us laugh. These things matter. But they are surface. 

The Dharma question goes much deeper: what do you believe your purpose is? What are your non-negotiable values? How do you treat people who cannot do anything for you? What kind of person are you trying to become, and is that aligned with the person I am trying to become?

Two people who are misaligned on Dharma — who have fundamentally different answers to these questions, whether they know it or not — will eventually find that the surface compatibility is not enough to hold them. They will arrive at a crossroads where their deepest values pull in different directions and realize, often with great pain, that they were never really traveling the same road.

My husband and I never had this conversation before we got married. We had no framework for it. Nobody had given us the vocabulary or the structure to ask each other: what is your Dharma?

———————————————————————————

Artha: The Second Fire

The second circumambulation is for Artha.

Artha means prosperity, security, the material means to live well. 

In the context of a marriage vow it is the commitment to build a stable life together — to earn and manage resources in a way that is both sufficient and ethical. To take care of each other materially, to provide for your family, to create the conditions in which everything else becomes possible.

Notice that Artha comes second, after Dharma. This is deliberate and important. The ancient teachers understood that prosperity without ethical grounding is hollow, at best, and destructive at worst. Artha pursued in alignment with Dharma — earned honestly, shared generously, used in service of a life well lived — is a source of genuine security and freedom. Artha pursued at the expense of Dharma is something else entirely.

In a marriage, the Artha conversation is one that couples often find uncomfortable to have before they commit. Who earns what? Who manages what? What does financial security mean to you? What are you (not) willing to do to acquire it? Will one person's career take precedence over another's? For how long? 

My husband didn't want to have this conversation. And because we didn't have it, the assumptions we each brought into the marriage operated invisibly for years — shaping decisions, creating resentments, generating conflicts that always seemed to be about something else but were really about this. 

Money is one of the most common sources of conflict in long-term relationships not because it is inherently divisive but because we bring so many unexamined beliefs and fears and family patterns to it. 

The Artha vow asks you to look at all of that clearly, together, before you need to. 

We did not.

———————————————————————————

Kama: The Third Fire

The third circumambulation is for Kama.

Before I go further I want to be clear about what Kama actually means, because it is often reduced entirely to sexuality. Kama is pleasure in the fullest sense. It is joy. It is beauty. It is the delight of art, music, fashion, food, nature, creativity and every form of sensory and aesthetic richness that makes a human life worth living. Sex is one expression of Kama. It is not the whole of it.

Kama is your hobby pursued with genuine absorption. It is the painting on the wall that moves you every time you look at it. It is the meal prepared with love and eaten without guilt. It is music that changes the temperature of a room. It is the sari chosen because it is beautiful, the jewelry worn because it brings joy, the garden tended because something in you needs to watch things grow.

And here is what the ancient teachers understood that we have somehow forgotten: pleasure is not a distraction from a serious life. It is one of the four pillars of a complete one. It is enshrined in the structure of the marriage ceremony itself. It is walked around the sacred fire.

So why do so many of us — and I include myself in this — carry such complicated feelings about enjoyment? 

Why does spending money on something beautiful feel indulgent? 

Why does prioritizing pleasure feel selfish?

The Kama vow is an invitation to remember what we were before shame arrived. 

To tend to joy consciously. 

To understand that a marriage in which pleasure has been extinguished — in which beauty, delight, fun and intimacy have been crowded out by duty and obligation and the relentless forward motion of a busy life — is one that has lost one of its four walls.

———————————————————————————

Moksha: The Fourth Fire

The fourth circumambulation is for Moksha.

Moksha means liberation. Spiritual freedom. The ultimate release from the cycle of ego and attachment and suffering. And it is a vow made at a wedding — the very institution that most of us associate with attachment, with binding, with the intertwining of two lives into one.

What does liberation have to do with marriage?

Everything, as it turns out. But not in the way you might expect.

Moksha is not something you arrive at by denying yourself the other three purusharthas. It is not achieved by skipping Dharma, Artha and Kama and going straight to renunciation. 

The Dharmic path to Moksha is the opposite. You get there by living fully. By burning through your desires rather than suppressing them.

Here is what this means in practice. You pursue your Dharma with complete sincerity and discover what it actually costs. You build your Artha and find out whether the security you were chasing gives you what you thought it would. You experience Kama — the joy, the beauty, the pleasure, the intimacy — fully enough to understand, from the inside, what it delivers and what it cannot.  And then, gradually, through the living of it — not through the avoiding of it — you begin to feel the roller coaster for what it is. You begin to ask, not from despair but from genuine curiosity: is there something more stable than this? Something that doesn't depend on whether this particular desire gets satisfied or this particular loss gets recovered from?

These questions are Moksha beginning to call you.

You do not choose Moksha because you are supposed to. You do not choose it because you will be punished if you don't, or rewarded in an afterlife if you do. You choose it because you have lived enough of the other stages to genuinely want it. Because the roller coaster has taught you, through direct experience, what it actually is. And you are ready, finally, for the ground.

Moksha asks you to move through without clutching so tightly that you cannot move forward. To love fully and hold with an open hand. To understand that the goal of everything, including the most profound human love, is ultimately the freedom that comes when you have lived and loved and lost and learned enough to want something beyond the cycle.

You cannot achieve Moksha for someone else. No partner, no matter how devoted, can do this work for you. It is the one journey that is entirely and irreducibly your own. 

And that is precisely why it is the fourth circumambulation, because everything that comes before it is preparing you for the moment when you are finally ready to want it.

———————————————————————————

I think about the two people who sat in front of that fire making these vows without understanding them. 

I think about how different everything might have been — not necessarily easier, but more intentional — if we had known what we were promising each other.

If we had understood that our compatibility needed to be tested not just at the surface but at the level of Dharma. If we had spoken honestly about Artha, before we needed to. If we had understood that Kama was not a phase that would take care of itself but a practice that required tending. And if we had known about Moksha from the beginning, how might we have loved differently?

These are the questions I write about in Lucky Charm. Not because I have answers that will work for everyone but because I believe that asking them — really asking them — with honesty, and without the softening that makes hard questions easier to ignore, is where a genuine partnership begins.

The fire is still burning. 

It has always been burning.

Now you know what you were walking around.

Welcome to the Gurukul. The door is open.