Love Advice : Understanding Karmic Relationship Lessons

In spiritual circles, it’s pretty well accepted that our most important lessons come through our relationships with others including karmic ones. This most specifically applies to romantic and familial relationships, but a business partnership or your connection with your best friend certainly qualifies as well.

Advice is, that some relationships will impose very “heavy” karmic relationship lessons and are often intertwined. Examples of these are:

• Illness
• Addiction
• Criminality
• Death
• Betrayal

None of us can make it through life without experiencing one or more of these lessons through a relationship. Some of us may experience more of these than others, or may live through an intensely concentrated time period of having a lot of this. Inevitably though, if we look for spiritual guidance to deal with the matter, we will come back to the point that we had something important to learn from the experience.

We may be either on the giving or receiving end of these experiences, and there will be a lesson offered both ways. Obviously, the more potent lessons seem to occur when these activities are visited “upon us” by the person we’re in relationship with.

The lesson cannot be considered to be fully learnt however, until we can see how we helped to arrange matters. In other words, what did we do to set it up? This isn’t a matter of blame, but of reality. It is axiomatic in metaphysics that it takes two to tango. Even if all that we did was to allow a nasty situation to occur, then that indeed, is what we did. Usually though, there’s more to it than that.

Here are a couple of examples:

Young girl is walking down the street, is pulled into an alleyway and raped. This is a relationship between strangers, right? Probably not. If we were to do a past-life regression on her, we would very likely find that she has attracted this particular person into her life to help her to “snap out of” a dangerous naivete’, an “innocence” which kept her in denial. Even more likely is the idea that these two have exchanged such karmic “favors” for eons, with one or the other delivering the “cosmic 2×4” to wake each other up from some sort of spacey delusional state.

Middle-aged mother is periodically used as a punching bag by her teen-aged daughter. This is a long term relationship, and the mother has supposedly had a hand in molding the character of said daughter, right? Maybe not in the way that it appears. Mother could be unconsciously “egging on” her daughter through a passive-aggressive approach, telepathically “asking” for punishment in order to feel “right” in her martyred guilt. Daughter obliges mother based on a long-term agreement between the two of them to deny the higher and deeper love that exists and that neither is ready to acknowledge.

Both examples are about love. Maybe this isn’t the sort of love that you or I would like to admit is healthy or life-affirming, but love it is. Each person in the relationship is giving the other what he/she wants or needs. Until we can look beyond the pain in a relationship and get past the ego needs which are actually holding us back, these patterns will continue to be repeated. Actually, we will continue to sow the seeds that create the negative karma we so much abhore.

This is an aspect of metaphysics that seems to set a lot of people back. In relationships we are so accustomed to a Newtonian sort of cause and effect condition, i.e., “You hit me first!” that the concept of our giving the other guy the bat and pointing to our own head, is a bit hard to swallow. We aren’t dealing with Newtonian physics though, this is metaphysics where we don’t accept that we are powerless or a victim of anything. We know that everything that happens to us, is drawn to us through the power of our own thought, consciously or unconsciously.

When we try to assert our victimhood, we are trying to keep ourselves down. We may be tired or confused and this is perfectly understandable. It is important to remember though that we’ll feel better when we let ourselves feel better. We don’t have to hold onto the pain to prove that it exists, we needn’t continue to manifest evidence of the “wrongness” of the person we’ve related to. We can take responsibility for our part of the lesson and move on, knowing that it was always for love, and that we’ll all do anything for it. This is what makes us human and this is where we share with the Divine.

So in matters of the heart, if you goes through some relationship bumps in the road it may be an opportunity to learn some karmic relationship lessons to help you on the road to lasting love.