Dear Soul Arcanum:
I have been working on psychic and energy healing skills for a few years now, and it has been an amazing journey. Some time ago, I met and fell in love with someone. While I feel strongly drawn to him and am very happy in this relationship, he seems to interfere with my conscious connection to Spirit! We broke up for about three weeks once, and during that time, I felt Spirit move back into my life. When we got back together again, however, I lost that sense of connection. I’m getting worried that this relationship may somehow be bad for my spiritual growth. Do you think that this romance could be bad for me spiritually?
– Michelle
Dear Michelle:
Please rest assured that no one feels deeply connected spiritually all the time. After we awaken, we’re not awake 24/7: we all frequently take what we might call spiritual naps. These are usually short little catnaps throughout the day, but sometimes we take longer naps that may last for weeks, months or even years. These “naps” are periods when we’re less focused on spiritual growth and more focused on worldly matters like our careers, families, love affairs, and just having fun. It is entirely normal to go through periods when you feel more and less consciously connected to Spirit.
I also think it’s important to realize that when a relationship affects us in a negative way, the other person is not doing something to us; how we relate to them is the problem. Ultimately, our experience of a relationship is all about us, as it arises from our interpretation of events. We should never blame anyone or anything outside of us for the quality of our relationship with Spirit, for there is nothing more personal in the Universe.
I also don’t see any demarcation between “spiritual” matters and anything else in life – everything (and every relationship) is ultimately spiritual. Our task is to find the deeper meaning in whatever we manifest in life, and relationships of all kinds can be wonderful catalysts for personal spiritual growth.
That said, I do believe that romance can indeed derail us from a conscious spiritual path. Where a conscious spiritual path is all about looking deeply into the nature of our experiences and cutting through illusions, romance is all about reveling in illusion. To keep romance going, we have to allow ourselves to get caught up in fantasy and avoid looking beneath the surface. So a conscious spiritual path and a great romance are fundamentally at odds with each other.
Please note that I’m not saying that “true love” is illusionary. True love is what one feels for one’s child, and hopefully, what one grows to feel for one’s partner. True love is constant and comforting; it’s an enduring, solid foundation that supports our well-being and personal growth. Real love is expansive and enriching; it doesn’t detract from anything good in our lives, but rather adds to it.
By contrast, romance is like standing in the middle of a teeter totter. It’s fun, exhilarating and challenging, and it often leads to someone getting hurt. Instead of adding to our lives on every level, it distracts us from everything else that is important to us. How can we do anything with focus and power when we’re constantly struggling just to maintain our balance?
Here’s what basically happens when “spiritual” people like you and me fall in love and fall off a conscious spiritual path. (Please note again that we are never truly off our path at all, for we’re doing just what we need to be doing in order to learn what we most need to learn.):
As we’re falling in love, we spend a lot of psychic energy fantasizing. We wonder about our lover and how they feel about us all the time. We daydream about the future endlessly. We begin to create a fantasy world in our heads of a life where all our dreams have come true. Our lover becomes our hero or heroine, our god or goddess. As we feel cherished and adored, we also become extraordinarily wonderful in our own eyes. We build a beautiful dream world in our minds, and that’s where we live most of the time.
At the same time, our outer routines usually change markedly. We all know the stereotype of the person who is so madly in love that he can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t focus on his work, never sees his friends anymore, etc. Well, you can bet he isn’t spending a lot of time communing with the Divine via meditation or other spiritual practices either.
We may change a lot of little habits as well. We may rush through meditation in order to get ready for a date, or skip church in order to sleep in with our sweetheart on Sunday morning. We may acquire a whole new group of friends – our partner’s pals. In order to be “nice,” we may go see a violent action adventure flick with him instead of the thought-provoking independent film we’d normally choose.
Sometimes we even put aside our most sacred spiritual pursuits in order to “protect” an important relationship. Lovers can feel threatened by a strong spiritual path, perhaps because they sense that this is truly eternal and far more powerful than anything they have to offer. If we become afraid for the relationship, we may put our spiritual interests aside in order to reassure our lover that he is number one. This is not a long-term solution, of course, because one who has awakened cannot nap forever.
These things are natural, but they tend to derail spiritual journeys, for the energy and attention that we flow into the relationship is energy and attention we’re not consciously channeling into spiritual growth.
On top of all of this, we have to actually stifle our conscious awareness in order to maintain the illusion of blissful perfection. Some part of us is aware of both our lover’s flaws and the emotional foolishness of putting anyone or anything of this world on such a high pedestal, but when we’re in love, we do NOT want to hear about it! So we ignore those intuitions, insights, and inner knowings. We want to believe that this love is magical and will lead us to live happily ever after. We are in denial about the full nature of this relationship, the other person, and even ourselves, and we want to STAY THERE.
By pushing away all but what we want to see and hear about our love, we effectively turn off our own higher awareness. When we tell it to shut up and go away, our conscious connection to divine guidance goes underground.
What’s more, when we believe we have this rare, precious love, we naturally feel very attached to it, and this generates big fear about the possibility of losing it, along with all sorts of issues from the past (and past lives) related to self-esteem, abandonment, vulnerability, intimacy, freedom, security, etc. This launches us into lots of emotional drama, which wreaks havoc with our overall vibration – and we all know that to have a clear conscious connection with Spirit, we must have a high vibration. We might thus say that any relationship that is passionate and/or full of drama is “bad” for our spiritual growth. (Again, however, if we are IN it, there is a good reason we’re there.)
It is possible to maintain both romance and a strong spiritual path, but to do so, we have to remain conscious that we are caught up in illusion when we are feeling “in love.” This is sort of like living in the world but not of it, except in this case, we are living “in love,” but romance is not the whole point of our existence. Some might think this would take a lot of the pleasure out of romance, but I think the opposite is true: it makes romance a much lighter, easier endeavor. When we know that romance is just about having fun, and that ultimately, our happiness and well-being do NOT depend on the state of any human relationship, we can enjoy it a lot more.
– Soul Arcanum
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