The Energies of Love

by Donna Eden

  Does this mean that we were destined to be together to carry out this work? It has seemed a number of times that the universe went to quite a bit of trouble to keep us together or to reunite us, such as getting Donna to San Diego in the summer of 1981 to head David off from most likely marrying another. We’ve always considered the appearance of the Back to Eden book a particularly nice touch on the universe’s part. But most of the time, our lives are like everyone else’s. There are no flashing lights in the sky spelling out our joint destiny. We still get irritated with one another and miss one another’s signals in ways that can be inconvenient if not hurtful. So are we soulmates with a clear destiny together or just another couple inching our way forward day by day?

  Our sense is that some of each is involved. After long careers in helping people live in greater alignment with their highest possibilities—what Abraham Lincoln referred to as “the better angels of our nature”—we believe that human destiny is determined by three essential factors: choice, fate, and chance. The choices you make every day are the most decisive ways you shape your future. The role of fate in your destiny is most obvious in your genetic inheritance. Your height, natural aptitudes, and vulnerability to certain illnesses—while they may each be mediated by your choices and your circumstances—are, to a considerable degree, determined by fate. Fate also selects your family and the conditions that shape your identity and personality. Beyond simple genetic inheritance and family and culture of origin, the concept of fate also implies that certain other circumstances in your life are also predestined. How might that work? Just as the structure of a maturing body is inherent in the energies that surround the embryo, as persuasively demonstrated by Harold Burr (here), each of us carries an energy that may influence key events in predetermined ways. Even occurrences that appear to happen by chance may be orchestrated by the invisible hand of fate. Some things, however, appear to be the products of pure chance, such as when people are injured in an earthquake or other mass disaster. On the positive and creative side, the universe uses chance, down to random genetic mutations, as the engine of evolution and expansion.

  We believe all three—choice, fate, and chance—play a hand in all people’s lives. Whatever combination of choice, fate, and chance brought you together, your relationship is a journey of your souls, a meeting of the deepest sources of your being. As the saying goes, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience but rather spiritual beings having a human experience.”8 In this sense, the term soulmates is useful as a constant reminder that more is going on between you than what is obvious and at the surface. The term is not useful, however, if you take soulmate to mean that in order for your relationship to be spiritually valid it somehow has to embody the qualities of ease and sense of destiny mentioned earlier. That concept does not provide a realistic set of standards against which your relationship can be measured. When you come together, your souls are mutually creating a new story on earth that is influenced by the older stories that propel each of you forward. The choice is not whether your relationship is a journey of your souls but how much you let that dimension of your partnership into your consciousness and mindfully foster it.

  The Ways of the Soul

  Why is it important for your relationship that you know about the invisible realms of Spirit and soul? Thomas Moore, author of the New York Times best-selling books Care of the Soul and Soul Mates, does not oversimplify, or glorify, his topic. Marriage, which he refers to as the “weaving together of many different strands of soul,” is “filled with paradoxical feelings, far-flung fantasies, profound despair, blissful epiphanies, and bitter struggles, all signs of the active presence of soul.”9 Nor does he limit his sights to the psychological and romantic aspects of love:

  Marriage has less to do with conscious intention and will than with deeper levels of soul. In order to gain insight into marriage and its problems, we have to dig deeper than the familiar therapeutic investigation into parental influences, childhood trauma, and the illusions of romantic love. The soul always reaches deeper than we expect, especially in marriage, which lies far beneath matters of communication and even interpersonal relationship, touching areas of absolute importance to a meaningful and soulful life.10

  The soul loves to be in relationship with other souls via intimate partnerships, family, friendships, and community. Relationships call us into the realm of the sacred as we encounter “infinite and mysterious depths” in ourselves and one another.11

  The overriding theme running through Moore’s writing is that the ways of the soul are distinctly different from and often at odds with the ways of the mind. As captured in Blaise Pascal’s penetrating observation, “The heart has reasons of which reason does not know.” The soul is not captivated by ideals and aspirations. It is not interested in making life predictable and orderly. It is not on a quest to find the structures that will most efficiently advance your career or keep your marriage neat and tidy. It is not dedicated to perfection. Instead, the soul is wild and unpredictable, transcending rational understanding. It is a “mystery” rather than “a puzzle that can be solved.”12 The instrument of the soul is neither mind nor body but imagination, and love is its deepest expression.

  • THE ENERGY DIMENSION •

  The Energies of Love

  Love has gotten good press: “God is love.” “Love is the highest expression of the human spirit.” “Love is the pinnacle of evolution.” But just what, beyond the poetry, is the energy of love? Asked to describe love energetically, Donna said: “There are many kinds of love, and each has its own energy. Let me try to find some common denominators. What is shared, for instance, by romantic love and the love of a grandparent for a grandchild? A radiant energy swells out from the Heart Chakra and, with a rolling motion, actively seeks the aura of the lover or grandchild. The energy coming out the eyes looks to me like what beautiful music would look like if you could see the sounds. When I look deeper at mature love, it is as real a force as gravity. It pulls two souls together with stunning power or even a whole family or community.”

  Soul brings your awareness to the heart of a matter, seeing right through your intellect’s take on the situation. Rather than being remote or ascetic, soul is oriented toward life and engagement with the world—it loves getting involved with “places, ideas, times, historical figures and periods, things, words, sounds, and settings.”13 At the same time, the soul requires “regular excursions into enchantment [just as] the body needs food and the mind needs thought.”14 Enchantment is “an ascendancy of the soul”15 that allows us to connect intimately with the world and other people with direct appreciation of the sacred in every aspect of life. The soul “needs to live in a world of both facts and holy imagination.”16 To live a more soulful life is to discern the ways of the soul and to set about resolving their conflicts with the ways of the mind, beginning by recognizing and respecting the value in each.

  Opening to the Ways of the Soul

  In cultures all around the world and throughout history, enchantment is cultivated for the individual and the community through festivals, rituals, ceremonies, and celebrations. Practices that speak to the soul and its mysterious depths open us to “transcendent visions, experiences that swell the heart and stretch the limits of belief and understanding.”17 Of course no one is always in a state of rapture, “but we do have frequent, even daily opportunities to enter” levels of experience that elevate us.18 These “daily opportunities” often have two shared properties: a sense of joy or delight and seeing the familiar with new eyes. Nature reinforces you for taking the time to let the realm of soul touch your consciousness. Even amid great suffering, observed the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, a modicum of pleasure lets a deeper order reveal itself and sustain us.19 A gentle sense of joy can accompany something as simple as taking in anew the lavender bush you see through your window every day. Discovering for the first time what has always been there or in other ways enco
untering your partner and your world at a new level is usually pleasing and can be exhilarating. In our healing work, we may readily be transported into an elevated space. Known in clinical circles as “psychotherapeutic resonance”20 or the “meld experience,”21 many healers report a momentary merging of the boundary between themselves and a client that, in its intensity, exceeds empathy and rapport, including immediate nonverbal understanding of the feelings and even the physical sensations of the other. Couples can also enter this space with one another.

  Entering Sacred Space

  While this resonance occurs spontaneously, you can invoke the experience by dedicating protected time and directing your attention in specific ways, such as those described shortly. The more you call forth the sacred into everyday life, the more that being in sacred space becomes familiar and habitual. Because being in that zone is deeply nourishing, you will begin to look for additional opportunities, and you will find them in nature, people, behaviors, and events, as well as in an increased awareness of synchronicities, the meaningful coincidences that reveal the workings of a larger plan.

  Recall the advice in chapter 8 for keeping sexual passion in your relationship: “First say ‘yes,’ then create the wanting!” You can also first say “yes” to entering sacred space together, and then create the pathway. Following are some structured ways that you can use your will and intention for creating pathways that move you both into the spiritual realm.

  Shared Excursions of Your Souls—Easier Than You Might Think

  Great music, poetry, drama, literature, sacred texts, paintings, choreography, and appreciation of nature speak to the soul. They can also be shared entries with your partner into the soul’s realm. This can be as simple as watching a DVD of an uplifting or deeply poignant movie together. While there are many ways to watch a movie, even “passive” entertainment can be active and soulful. We sit next to each other, bodies touching in one manner or another, being transparent with our emotions and responsive to the other’s experience. We’ll also take time to share and reflect on our feelings afterward or even during, using the pause button. Art and nature offer doorways that you can enter together for nurturing the soul, and they are readily accessible. Uniting in creative expression, as we have been privileged to do in our joint writing and teaching, can add extra dimension to the shared journey of your souls, but anything that gets your energies flowing together in new ways may strengthen your soul connection. Taking our five-year-old grandson for an outing to the zoo or beach or a park is among our favorite ways of being carried into the world of imagination and soul.

  Energies Mingle in the Shadows as Well as the Light

  In addition to using art and nature as gateways for together touching into the domains of soul and Spirit, you are in each other’s lives as catalysts for one another’s growth and evolution. Your disharmonies are as vital to your relationship as your harmonies. As you push against the outer shells of one another’s personalities, it may be painful, it may cause cracks, but it is sometimes through these cracks that your soul can find your partner’s heart. The pain you cause one another and how you deal with that pain are ways your souls touch and intertwine. Recognize that those difficult times are as much part of your soul’s alchemy and journey together as the high times. The poet John O’Donohue offers beautiful counsel for the hard times, while they’re not as easy to welcome or embrace:

  FOR LOVE IN A TIME OF CONFLICT22

  When the gentleness between you hardens

  And you fall out of your belonging with each other,

  May the depths you have reached hold you still.

  When no true word can be said, or heard,

  And you mirror each other in the script of hurt,

  When even the silence has become raw and torn,

  May you hear again an echo of your first music.

  When the weave of affection starts to unravel

  And anger begins to sear the ground between you,

  Before this weather of grief invites

  The black seed of bitterness to find root,

  May your souls come to kiss.

  Now is the time for one of you to be gracious,

  To allow a kindness beyond thought and hurt,

  Reach out with sure hands

  To take the chalice of your love,

  And carry it carefully through this echoless waste

  Until this winter pilgrimage leads you

  Toward the gateway to spring.

  • THE ENERGY DIMENSION •

  When Your Energies Mingle in a Creative Activity

  When you are creatively involved with one another, the energies of your auras overlap. In the area of overlap, a new energy with vital qualities from both your auras is temporarily created. This energy may actually grow and become a separate field of energy that surrounds you both, keeping you in sync and on a creative edge. Within this field, specific chakras may also reach toward one another, spark one another, and enhance creativity in the area or theme governed by that chakra. In addition, sometimes you can both be catapulted onto another frequency that is quite distinct from either of your separate energies. This frequency may be part of the “morphic field” of the topic you are mutually delving into, whether the courage shown in a movie, the farther reaches of human potential seen in an athletic event, or the inspiring handiwork that permeates nature. All of these mingling energies dissolve boundaries until your souls may be recognizing one another in a raw encounter that alchemically changes each.

  When Your Energies Mingle in a Tense Activity

  When there is a rift with the one you love, an urgent and overwhelming energy shoots out like a bullet, often blindly trying to right what suddenly feels so wrong. It may follow entrenched patterns like blame or self-blame, judgment or self-pity, aggression or withdrawal, shame or depression. Its deeper impulse, however, is for you to be seen by your partner at the soul level and to reconnect at that level. Even amid the static of unskillful responses such as blame or self-deprecation, however, the encounter with one another makes the field that surrounds you larger and more powerful. But unlike the field supporting creativity, this field can feel like bondage. An outside force comes into this field and holds you in the conflict with incredible intensity, but for a holy purpose. That purpose is to break through and reach your partner’s soul. When you do break through and reconnect (that’s what the Pact presented in chapter 3 is all about), your soul bond deepens with joy, relief, safety, and a sense of having come home.

  A Daily Ritual

  When we decided in 1999 to give up our comfortable practices in Ashland, Oregon, to embark on a life of travel and teaching, David promised Donna that he would give her an energy balancing each morning. The energy balancing has evolved into a daily ritual we both look forward to. While the energy techniques we use vary somewhat from day to day, they generally include many of the basic methods presented in chapter 3.

  Here is an example from this morning. We have a massage table permanently set up in our bedroom (making things a bit crowded, but definitely worth it—when we are traveling we use the bed in the hotel room, which is workable but less comfortable for the one giving the balancing). This morning Donna was the first to receive, lying facedown with her head hanging over the edge of the table as David directed the full weight of his body into his thumbs to give her a deep Spinal Flush (here). Then he did the Crossover Shoulder Pull (here) on her back, but rather than stopping at her hips, he extended the pull all the way down her leg and off her foot. Then her other leg and foot. This often brings energy into the feet that can get caught there, so each foot received a quick but firm massage, ending with the energies being whisked off her feet, and finally pulled off each toe. Donna was already in a state of semibliss, which was accelerated with a thorough scratching of her back. The sounds coming out of Donna’s mouth by this point were very reinforcing, but David finally backed off
, indicating that it was time for her to turn over.

  Now with Donna lying on her back, David started with the Four Taps (here), though he massaged rather than tapped the points this time. He then stood at her head, placed his middle fingers in the indent in the middle of her neck where it meets the base of the skull (known in energy medicine as the Power Point), pushed in, and leaned back so he was pulling the point toward himself, stretching her neck and opening the connection between head and body for about half a minute. He then moved his middle fingers to the sides about an inch each (these are known as the Electric Points), pushed in, and again leaned back so he was pulling the points toward himself for about half a minute. Next, he did a Crown Pull (here) and ended it with the Stress Release Hold (here). Then he did another Crossover Shoulder Pull, this time over the front of her body, again off her legs and feet, and followed with a brief foot massage.

  Next he gave her a Belt Flow, one of Donna’s favorites. Standing at her side, he placed his hands under her back on the side of her body that was away from him and began pulling toward himself with pressure, with his hands going around her waist and then up and over her stomach, one hand at a time. As each hand completed this movement, he brought it back to under her back and repeated the pull, so that in twenty or thirty seconds he had done the motion a dozen times, ending again by pulling the energies down her legs and off her feet. Then he moved to the other side. Since the Spleen Meridian is a vulnerability for Donna, he traced her Spleen Meridian (with one hand on the inside of each foot at the big toe, he moved slowly up the inside of each leg with the flats of his hands, flaring out at the hips, going up the sides of her rib cage, and then down to the bottom of her rib cage).