The Energies of Love

by Donna Eden

  From the start of the interview, it became clear that conventional concepts are too limiting to permit an accurate understanding of the way Alberto and Marcela experience their partnership. For instance, they described their wedding as having not only the familiar features of family and such, but as establishing a contract for being together not just during this lifetime but a “marrying of our souls.” They were making a commitment to a journey that is beyond the physical body, “which takes us into conversations of where we want to live when we leave this body.” Not just “till death do us part” for Alberto and Marcela! “While the physical body changes and dies, we are connecting to one another’s essence, so we do practices that will help us find one another on the other side.” One of the practices we found to be the most remarkable is that they have cultivated the art of “lucid dreaming” and are sometimes able to find the other and enter his or her dreams. During lucid dreams, people are aware they are dreaming and are able to exert a degree of control over the experience, exploring or directing the way the dream unfolds. This is well documented and is an ability that many people have naturally or have developed. Entering one another’s dreams takes lucid dreaming into yet another dimension. In the morning, when they describe their adventures together in the night, they find that their stories match!

  We were curious about their contract, “the marrying of our souls.” Does this mean that they are now and forever after soulmates, traveling to the other side together, and reincarnating back into this world together, having made a perpetual contract into eternity? This was the first place it became clear that conventional concepts are not adequate for understanding Alberto and Marcela’s spiritual partnership. The mind-bending answer was that “in the invisible realm, which is spiritually even more real than the visible realm, there is no time. So it is a contract written in timelessness. It’s not till tomorrow, till you die, till I get bored. It’s not forever. It simply means that it’s established in timelessness. And we share spiritual practices so that we spend a lot of our lives together in that timelessness, in the invisible realm, in the dream realm. Because we do this consciously, we are able to see that this physical world is actually the dream we are dreaming together. It is very real in clock time. But then we close our eyes and enter infinity, clockless time. That’s where the essence we see in one another resides, and we find each other there.” Having trouble with these concepts? Both shamanism and quantum physics—take your pick—come to the same counterintuitive conclusion that time is an illusion.

  As the conversation went on, two of their core commitments were discussed: (1) dedication to one another’s spiritual development and (2) dedication to being of service. “We live in both the world of clock time and the world of clockless time. So we see each other in the morning and our mood might be, ‘Namaste, I salute your divine essence. And I’m pissed at you!’ Our lives have this dual manifestation. What is not negotiable is that our relationship never gets put on the table. It never becomes a bargaining chip. That’s because it is not only about fulfilling one another’s emotional needs; it’s also about furthering one another’s spiritual growth.” As they spoke of the way they hold their relationship as a commitment “to be in service to life, to the world,” they made an interesting observation. They said that it is as if there is “something that understands that Alberto and Marcela together are so much more than Alberto and Marcela alone, and it is as if the universe colludes to support our service to the world. The opportunities that come our way are remarkably harmonious. Synchronicities happen in amazing ways when you’re in tune at a deep level and committed to service.”

  The largest part of our discussion focused on Alberto and Marcela’s shared spiritual practices. One that is readily available to any couple is that they routinely take the time to share and reflect on their dreams. This has them regularly returning to sacred space in one another’s presence. Because of the depth of their backgrounds in shamanism and other spiritual traditions, it would be overly simplistic and misleading to try to convey here in just a couple of pages the quality of their shared practices. For instance, saying that they meditate and pray together is easy enough to grasp, but their prayers are more than that. They are spontaneous ceremonies of gratitude and blessing informed by traditional practices using elements like fire and earth and honoring the earth’s four directions. These practices keep their consciousness at the edge of the larger spiritual story that for them is the real story of their relationship.

  Are All Long-Term Relationships Spiritual Partnerships?

  Alberto and Marcela are attuned to a truth that eludes many people who were bred in Western technological cultures. Daily life is part of a larger story than our senses can detect. At the interpersonal level, when you build a life with another person, your energies merge to form a new field that is unique to your relationship. This field carries the deeper patterns inherent in each of your personal stories and blends them into a shared adventure that is influenced by forces that usually transcend your conscious awareness. Glimpses into this larger interpersonal story and beyond shed a light on the earthly story of your day-to-day experiences. Touching into this perspective has several times kept us on track when our entire relationship might have derailed.

  When Donna first saw David, before he had even looked her way, she distinctly heard words that told of a deep and profound love, including—and she remembers this verbatim—“This man will spend the rest of his life with you.” That it took David some seven years of tumultuous on-again, off-again romance and tension to fully grasp that there “may have been something to that” reflects a great deal about the interplay of the earthly realm and the forces beyond it (not to mention what it reveals about the dynamics between us). The realm of the senses is the reality that stares us in the face every day. Recognizing the invisible forces influencing that reality requires a different kind of perception and consciousness, and these can be cultivated, as you will see later in the chapter. When you cultivate them in collaboration with your partner, your relationship can enter spaces that your rational minds could not have conceived.

  Body and Soul

  The familiar world of your physical body is connected to the ethereal and mysterious realm of your soul through layers of invisible energy. Some of these energies have been scientifically mapped (for instance, neural pathways that are electrochemically activated during a moment of inspiration have been identified) while others remain as unfathomable as the forces that designed Creation itself. A remarkable historical fact is that a coherent explanation of the relationship between body and soul, or even body and mind, has eluded science, philosophy, and religion. By what mechanism can an ethereal soul or mind move a physical body (the “mind-body” problem3)? How does a physical brain produce subjective experience (the “hard problem of consciousness”4)? Answers to these questions may rest with increasing understanding of multilayered energies connecting body and soul, but deeper mysteries about soul and spirit will remain.

  Soul and Spirit

  What can we know of the invisible orders of soul and spirit? Our ancient ancestors needed a word to describe the animating force or vital principle they observed in all of life. The English word spirit traces to the Latin spiritus, which referred to the movement of air—the mysteries of the wind over the earth and the breath through the body. The ethereal realm was not conveyed through concrete metaphors like the wind or breath, but in a way that invites the mind to ponder the sources of the earth’s wind and the body’s breath. Spirit has now come to mean the animating force in all living creatures and, when capitalized, refers to the all-pervasive, intelligent energy of Creation. Whether you think in terms of God, the natural forces that put the bang into the Big Bang, an invisible unimaginable power, or the ordering principle behind the design of all we can see, something is going on beyond that which meets the eye. We will refer to that something, the force that is responsible for the consistent laws and order of the universe, as Spirit.<
br />
  Soul, meanwhile, is the manifestation of Spirit at the personal level. In this rendition, widely shared by the world’s mystical traditions, your conscious identity is but a sliver of all who you are. Your soul is not only the knowing, observing, experiencing, living essence that sees through your eyes and registers your thoughts. With its direct connection to Spirit, the underlying creative force in the universe, it is much more than what your mind can comprehend. Spiritual sages would have an initiate study the vastness of the night sky as a metaphor for the vastness within.5 It is an illuminating exercise. While your personality does reflect your soul, it was also formed by your genetics, upbringing, and circumstances. It is the limited outer shell of your essence, and it may actually have little resemblance to your soul, which is at the core of your being. As we mature and gain wisdom, however, the ways of the soul often become more prominent and discernible in our daily lives. Nonetheless, Spirit and soul are the unfathomable, vital mysteries of our existence. Any attempt, such as this, to capture them in words is merely to point rather than describe.

  Soulmates?

  Reflecting on Spirit and soul raises two questions that have puzzled humanity throughout history: afterlife and fate. Are there soulmates who have traveled together in previous lifetimes and are somehow fated to continue their shared journey in this lifetime? Did Donna’s hearing “This man will spend the rest of his life with you” establish us as soulmates? Was it the fulfillment of the promise that “some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger . . . across a crowded room”? Popular literature about soulmates suggests that “your soulmate makes you feel entirely whole, healed and intact, like no piece is missing from the puzzle,” punctuated with flashbacks to past lives together, a profound wordless understanding of one another, easy acceptance of one another’s flaws, and a reliable sense of security in one another’s presence.6 That’s not, we must confess, quite how it happened for us (or anyone else we know, for that matter). We in fact marvel at our early years together and how it seemed we had to fight for every last shred of compatibility.

  • THE ENERGY DIMENSION •

  Spirit (Big S)

  We have been using the term Spirit to describe the primal energy of the universe—the incomprehensible, eternal Source of all that is. While it cannot be understood, it can be and often has been experienced in direct mystical apprehension as a transcendent force that is orchestrating the universe and all within it.

  Soul

  We have called “soul” a manifestation of this primal energy. Soul registers experience and evolves with experience. This evolution is marked by expanding consciousness. Soul sits on a continuum of energies between the incomprehensible realm of Spirit and the more tangible energy that you know as your personal spirit.

  spirit (little s)

  In the way that “big S” Spirit spawns your soul, your soul spawns your spirit, and your spirit animates your body (economists might call this the “trickle-down effect” of universal energy). I (Donna) experience soul as a deep velvety energy that is highly stable—it evolves very slowly. I know spirit as the dynamic energy coming from deep within a person that interacts with the world. It is profoundly intelligent and courageous, doing your soul’s bidding as you navigate your way through this world of matter, the densest known energy. Your spirit is in continual interaction with your body’s physical energies—those on the electromagnetic spectrum as well as the more subtle dimensions of your aura, meridians, chakras, and radiant circuits—and it needs their support to thrive. A way to understand the distinction between the spirit and the body’s other energies is that spirit leaves the body upon death while the aura, chakras, meridians, and electromagnetic energies slowly fade. The spirit of a young child is relatively pure, but the challenges of life transfigures it. One way to measure your success is in the degree to which you have maintained or recovered your natural strength of spirit.

  Nonetheless, there does seem to be a fated quality to our partnership. Once, after we had completely ended our relationship, we were living hundreds of miles apart from one another, and Donna had just gotten to the other side of a painful grieving process about our relationship. She was finally feeling free in her heart to welcome whatever was to be next in her life. She spent some time on a mountain in Oregon savoring the feeling. As she was driving down the mountain, feeling joyful and triumphant, she heard the same voice that she heard on the night we met, as clear as if it were coming out of the radio in her car, say, “Despite appearances, you will marry the man.” Having just gone through the agonies of getting “the man” out of her system, she was furious and started to argue. She was living in Ashland, Oregon, and David was still in San Diego, where we had met. There was no likely way we were going to be running into one another. It was over, and she mentally but emphatically stated this fact! “You will be spending the summer in San Diego,” said the voice. “That’s ridiculous!” Donna’s mind replied. “Besides, how would I support myself and the girls?” Undaunted, the voice replied, “Jobs will be coming!” That week Donna received in the mail offers to teach seven separate classes in San Diego during the following summer. Meanwhile, one of her closest friends in San Diego called her and said, “I’d love to spend the summer in Ashland. Would you like to come back to San Diego for a while? We could swap houses.”

  So Donna called David to inform him that she was going to be spending the summer in San Diego. She courteously told him that she wanted him to learn about this directly from her rather than through the grapevine, and she wanted to assure him that she was not coming back to reconnect with him in any way. Weeks went by after Donna returned to San Diego without us seeing one another. David had already become involved in another relationship. Then on June 21, 1981, in San Diego, four years to the day of our having met, David pulled into a gas station. As he stepped out of his car, who was there pumping gas into her car but Donna Eden! When our eyes met, there was an electricity that we both still remember. David almost screamed at her, “No! We can’t do this. I’m practically married.” His protests were, however, no match for the energies that were magnetically drawing us toward one another. After half an hour of talking, our relationship was firmly, irrevocably reestablished. When David got home, the woman who had just started to live with him was packing her stuff. She prophetically said, “I don’t know what is going on, but I think you need some space.” Incidentally, when David had pulled into the gas station, he was returning from a visit with his parents. As he was leaving, his father said, “I have a book for you. It’s one that shaped a lot of my thinking about health back in the forties, and I just found an extra copy that I must have picked up somewhere along the way.” The name of the book was Back to Eden.

  Before all of that, while trying to reconcile the deep connection we felt with how damn hard it was to be together, David brought our birth information to an astrologer. The astrologer told him, in essence, to find somebody else; there was no way this relationship could flourish. Feeling quite silly about resorting to something with as unscientific a reputation as astrology,7 he at least wanted to see if there was agreement among different astrologers. He took the same birth information to two other astrologers, who came to virtually the same conclusions. Donna was already living in Ashland at the time, and David decided to make one last visit to be sure that it was really unworkable. Meanwhile, Donna had befriended a woman, Kate Maloney, who had a local reputation as being a remarkably gifted astrologer with profound spiritual depth, and Donna arranged for us to have a reading with her. On the appointed day, however, Kate called Donna and told her that she had been sick and had not been able to do the joint chart. David was on his way back to San Diego the next day, so we never had that reading. While our time together in Ashland was actually quite profound, David decided that our history had been filled with so much strife, combined with the negative portents of the three astrologers, that it just wasn’t the right path for him to pick up and move to Ashland.
He ended our relationship with a phone call that was agonizing for both of us.

  A few days later, Kate called Donna and told her she had completed the chart. Donna told her it was too late. She didn’t want to see all that she sensed was right about the relationship now that it was over. The next morning, Kate called again and said she had just had a dream that she believed was telling her that Donna should come in for the reading. Donna still wasn’t interested. A couple of days later, Kate called yet again and said that her “guides” were on her case to get the information to Donna. Donna still wasn’t interested. About that time, we had a phone conversation to tie up some loose ends and Donna mentioned the astrologer’s persistent attempts to share her interpretation of our joint chart. David, believing that the reading would corroborate the strikingly similar conclusions of the other three astrologers and thus make it easier for Donna to let go of our relationship, encouraged her to make the appointment.

  When Donna went in, Kate described a profound harmony that was more important than the surface incompatibilities that were the themes reported by the other three astrologers. While Kate also saw what the others were focusing on, she felt there was a deeper story. She said, “You will not be having children together (we were both still in our thirties at the time), but your family will be the ‘family of man.’” While we had no sense back then that we would ever work together, the shared journey that has emerged for us has involved offering healing services not just for the individuals whom we might have seen had we continued our work independently. Nearly a thousand energy healing practitioners who have completed our two-year certification program are giving sessions to many thousands of people at any point in time and teaching hundreds of classes all over the world. We had no ambition back then to expand beyond our own individual practices, yet providing healing for “the family of man” has since become the defining purpose of our lives.