I recently read an article by Dena L. Moore where she addressed the difference between ‘safe’ love and ‘dangerous’ love’. It was thought provoking in its points made.
As I continue to develop my intentional life and work with others doing the same, the area of romantic love comes up often, as this is a vital part of all of our lives and our perceptions of ourselves. Past or present, romantic relationships can color the world in which we live. This can be colored positive and smooth, or it can be negative, painful and dramatic. It is often hard to distinguish between what is real and what is not, hard to identify that which is positive and that which is negative especially in the beginning of a relationship.
Too often ‘love’ becomes a battle ground for old emotions and traumas from our past, from childhood to the present. These can even be left over from past lives. Most of us have felt the burn of dangerous love and if you are like many you assume that you or the other person are broken in some way if this ‘love’ did not find success or completion. In reading that statement do not assume I mean the fairy tale happily ever after scenario as the only successful means of completion.
In this context I mean completion to be that the souls understood and went through the contract that they set up between lives. These contracts are always about understanding the self and expanding your capacity for love and compassion to greater degrees. There are times when the individuals contract is to stay together ‘till death do us part’, and at other times it means the end of the relationship with both individuals better for the experience. It ends with both being fulfilled, feeling honored and they are rewarded by being able to look forward for more experiences of love and the next honorable contract that they have ‘scheduled’.
Mature, evolving souls can together end a relationship because it has played out, both knowing the contract has been fulfilled and it is time to move on. This life and the individual souls were enriched for having gone where they went together. This is done with gratitude not drama which is the signature of an prematurely ended contract. Drama means the contract was not completed and it has to be done with that individual in another lifetime, and the remainder of this lifetime is often a variation or echo of the contract not finished. (As seen by having the same relationship over and over with different partners.) The contract is unable to be finish because the person it was with is not the one in front of them. Note that the difference between a lesson and a contract is that a lesson can be learned along the way, it is not absolute in its application. A contract is between two individual souls for a specific outcome for them both.
Think of any contract you have ever entered into. When it was over you either got paid for a service rendered, or received a service for your money. When the contract was successfully completed both sides shook hands and walked away feeling satisfied and complete with the transaction. If one party or the other did not feel these things then the contract was not completed as outlined and there is left over issues that remain dangling causing both of them grief or guilt to some degree or another. This happens because one or the other did not fulfill their part of the contract, and usually has plenty of excuses as to why. Most all of them blaming the other party or how they were the victim of some outside force.
Hard to think of love in these terms is it not? But that is the way it is with everyone we meet. We do have contracts with them, from long term to brief encounter. Between lives we set up opportunities to learn and grow into our greatest spiritual capacity. These lifetimes are simply exercises to grow stronger into our God Selves, emulating the Great I AM with the goal being to bring our individual vibrations back up to that level. The level which we once were before we chose to come play on planet earth. Or it could be more accurately said that we use these exercises (lifetimes) to help us remember that we are that vibration, everything else is background noise and distraction. Remembering that we are the total essence of Love and Compassion as is the Divine Source, this is the purpose of each life.
In love relationships, as in all relationships, it is a time for us to live what we are in our core. We define our boundaries and expand our horizons at the same time. ‘Safe’ love relationships give us that place to be and feel love while continuing on with other aspects of our spiritual growth that we wish to exercise and expand in this lifetime. (Every lifetime has one primary lesson to learn with many other mini, or elective lessons to learn if we choose. There are countless contracts.) ‘Dangerous’ love relationships are Karmic in their origins and powerful opportunities to learn about us and honor another soul. Note I do not reference Dangerous Love as those that can be physically dangerous or abusive, but it is used here as a relationship that is dangerous because of the passions and intensity that it inspires in the individuals involved.
These relationships, these contracts, are to discover where we are in our lessons of self. It is often the yardstick that measures our personal development, which is why they are so vitally important. These types of love relationships are also excellent in the mini lessons department because it shows where one is as related to truth, integrity and trustworthiness or any number of other core traits. If these are weak in the life application then they will surely cause great bumps in the Dangerous relationships because they can become ‘outs’ that one can spin ‘out on’ to keep themselves from directly addressing the core issue, which is love and the Karmic tie or contract with another.
Dangerous loves are strong and binding contracts. Many relationships are not dangerous love relationships but we want to pretend they are to keep us from having to truly work through a real one. We set up the stage for drama and negative passion and call it love. We take the easy out. It is all wrapping paper and no gift. This is soul sabotage that will always cripple other areas of the life, which is a great indicator that you have taken an out and it was only a pop quiz that you turned it into an essay question to avoid something important. What should have taken five minutes takes much longer to get through and often becomes very tangled indeed. It is something the ego created to keep you busy and away from your soul’s real purpose in this lifetime.
Dena Moore gives an excellent definition of Dangerous Love. When trying to determine if a relationship is or was a dangerous love relationship one thing to “consider is the importance of the person in your life and your soul’s quest. If you have spent many lives with another person, both positively and negatively, you will feel familiar with that soul. So we have many different types of love in our lives and many souls we know and remember on some level. A passionate, dangerous love develops when two souls love each other and have for centuries. There is usually some tragedy that occurred in a past life that severed the relationship in a very unusual or painful manner–often one of the partners died a dramatic death. In subsequent lives, the two souls avoid each other (choosing not to incarnate at the same time, or one soul simply refuses to come back to this plane for a very long time), thus setting up a karmic tug of war between them. They want to be together, long to be together, yet the pain is powerfully strong and often guilt is a major issue that keeps them apart. Buried past life memories invade the subconscious when the two souls are together and makes one or both partners feel as if they will die if they stay in the relationship or die if they stay out of it–the ego feels it is safer to sever the ties that bind rather than work through it. Anger can become a factor of this, as repressed fear often escapes in such a manner. These relationships and how a person handles them are very important turning points in a person’s life–for one thing, you will not have been confronted with this type of relationship if you are not ready to heal and move beyond this point in your past .”
In other words there are those who are truly part of our life path and soul’s development, and then there are others who are really are just a pop quiz, or a detour. They are part of our soul family but not part of our soul in the way that helps us develop greater awareness of our God Self and more deeply define our capacity to love. They just give us opportunities to more deeply define drama or assist us in self-sabotage. Ultimately they do not assist us in any way other than giving us a distraction when the going gets rough and it is time to get real. We take what should have been a weekend retreat and convince ourselves to turn it into a way of life. A way that will lead us nowhere, or at least nowhere the soul truly desires to go or benefits in going. These individuals love us (on a soul level) enough to give us an out even when it is in our best interest to dig deeper into ourselves and finish the contract we originally set so we can achieve that soul satisfaction and feeling of completeness. They allow us to escape when our higher good would have been served by discovering what it is that keeps us from the Great I AM within. Thus generating more karma to clean up in future lifetimes.
Look deeply at your life and your growth when in or reviewing past love relationships. When gathering our keys for intentional living we must remember to remain clear in our purpose and intent. Make peace with yourself if you turned a pop quiz into an essay question and you feel like you wasted valuable time. Forgive yourself and move on. Take it as a lesson and take it to heart never to repeat it again. Identify what you learned about yourself and the world, and be thankful for the opportunity.
Alternately, commit to finish out the contract you may be in or have run away from. These unfinished love relationships too often have cords that are attached to our day to day life that makes it impossible to move forward with ease and grace for these cords act like elastic bands and keep drawing us back. These cords can show up as day dreams, psychic connections or dreams of the individual at night. They can also show up as locks, or blockages in your day to day life. Clear these contracts, live out the karma and then you can move on. When you clear these old contracts you will find the keys to unlock the blockages in your life.
Which ever you discover follow through intentionally not reactionary this time and you will be amazed at how that area of your life cleans up and you find yourself genuinely excited about all aspects of today and all the days of your future. All the weight will be gone from your heart and you’ll once again find yourself excited about love-for all the right reasons. No danger there.
Nov. 2004