The traditional stages of love explained via spiritual evolution and consciousness expansion
The Euphoria Stage- The quintessential “Romantic Love” phase.
What it feels like: The other person is the center of your life. You are distracted from the other day to day parts of life as they become mundane. You tend to look the other way often and forgive most everything. The other person has faults, and you see them, but you have blinders or “rose colored glasses” on that tell you the faults don’t matter. There is suspension of negative mental judgement towards your partner. From a spiritual perspective, the fear-based and fragmented egoic mind is overridden by this temporary altered state of consciousness and unity with another and we are able to live in our heart. We are experiencing temporary and false enlightenment. It is false because we mistakenly believe the other person is the cause of it and because it is only held temporarily by the chemicals being produced in our brain. It is overriding or suspending the fragments in our egoic personality for a short time.
From a consciousness perspective, a neurochemical state of euphoria or “altered consciousness” is created (it is actually temporarily expanded consciousness not altered) in order to actually get you into a relationship for healing. If we never felt this phase we would not be able to couple at all with our wounded egos driving our lives.
This “love effect” is the same effect of psycho-effective drugs. They temporarily alter the state of consciousness to experience euphoric states (which can cause addiction and seeking behavior for the return of this state, hence the term “love addiction”). It is a temporary or false enlightenment.
Psychoactive plant medicines will also, if used with intention, take you right from the altered state into the healing stages, just like the relationship will in later stages. The plant medicines are an accelerated, fast tracked experience, but they are temporary and partial in their effect. These chemically induced temporary states, or glimpses of enlightenment consciousness, are the divine’s way of opening a window into higher consciousness if we can stay with the process.
There are different pathways for awakening. A Yogi, Mystic or Buddhist would use yogic science, devotional prayer and meditation to travel this pathway by gradually altering and raising their state of consciousness until the higher state is the steady state.
The use of any altered state inducing substance or experience, like falling in love or taking state altering drugs, is temporarily raising the chemical cocktail in the body/brain complex to match the “felt experience” of higher states of consciousness that traditional spiritual technologies produce through repetitive practice. In a person who develops and expands their consciousness, it is no longer an altered state, it becomes a steady state of consciousness. This person no longer requires an outside source to “feel” themselves in a state of harmony, bliss or ecstasy. They can produce this state internally and do not need to seek an external source to trigger the experience. This is why many enlightened beings do not feel a need to seek a relationship with another. They have found the pathway using other spiritual technologies and feel complete and full of bliss and ecstasy within themselves. They can produce this state at will.
For others, a sacred relationship is their spiritual path. I call this the Path of the Beloved. So the advice goes for love as a spiritual path, to find your beloved, become your own beloved. Raise your consciousness.
The Co-dependent Attachment Stage
What it feels like: We see the early inner child wounds and attachment fragments rise here. The wounded fear based ego is revealed and a power struggle begins to get its needs and demands met via control and hidden manipulation. Judgement begins to return as the temporarily suspended prefrontal cortex launches back into action in full force. The conditioned mind with its false beliefs and fragments, the wounds of the unfulfilled and unloved child, and imbalanced emotional states rule the relationship dynamic now. It is not so pleasant and the blinders are falling off quickly. There is a re-creation of the attachment wound coping mechanisms of fight, flight, or freeze and this becomes the underlying pattern of the relationship. For the relationship to survive without chaos, one person or both must begin shutting themselves off or down and disconnecting from the relationship while maintaining the outward “together but separate” state.
A disconnected relationship with low intimacy develops based on the childhood attachment wounding. This is triggered by a co-dependency survival instinct to maintain security and safety via “conditioned love”. This creates an unfulfilling and disconnected “false” peace until a crisis state begins to develop.
If a crisis state does not evolve and they stay together in an unhappy co-dependence, a suppression of true self and disconnect from the other establishes itself to allow a continued long-term commitment. This is the standard unfulfilling long-term relationship we saw in our parents and that we see in most of society today. These suppressed and disconnected relationships can exist for a long time. Part of the personality is turned off to maintain the relationship and there is just unfulfilled coping. The person can no longer grow in this state and begins to shrink and contract themselves into a “workable compromise” to keep the peace and must disconnect from self and the partner to do so. This is the old paradigm marriage contract of staying together in an unhappy marriage for a lifetime or several decades This is the model most often received from our parents in generations where people stayed together for a lifetime but were not very happy or content in their relationships. Most of us are working off this old outdated paradigm, unconsciously recreating it in our current relationships with poor results.
The Crisis/Ego-Battle Stage
What it feels like: the ego rises its highest defenses to avoid surrender and is in deep judgment and pain, resisting union at all costs and trying to break the relationship so the ego can survive and/or the personality/soul can grow again. The status quo is broken, there is high emotion and drama, and the relationship often breaks apart. It requires a certain level of ego acceptance, awareness and death to move to the next stage.
Self-Actualized Relationship/ Mature Secure Attachment Stage
What it feels like: each person has expanded and grown and is able to live in more fullness and awareness of their being without suppressing parts of self to allow the relationship to continue. They generally accept one another as they are and stop needing to battle to get their needs met. Here we see two mature developed people who have mostly harmonized their beings and are navigating and co-creating their experience together. There is still negotiation and ego battle on certain issues, but there is a consistent harmony and peace together and they have the ability to stay connected through differences and to grow together as individuals and as a couple. The joint goal is to create a happy, fulfilling life together.
Divine Union
What is it? Two ascended/ascending beings that have merged/are merging with their Higher Divine Selves, and are committed to attaining Christ Consciousness and individual mastery. They are harmonizing as a partnership of unconditional love at all levels to create a united Christ Consciousness. They serve one another and all life via a joint mission to humanity.
What it feels like: Your divine coupling is the center of life and your harmonious unconditional love radiates out to all around you. You are connected to and merged (depending on the level of ascension) with each of your Higher Selves and embodying their wisdom, energy and mastery to the highest degree possible. You hold a high state of unity consciousness. You forgive everything quickly, or fail to find fault in the first place. A sense that there is nothing to forgive is present. The other person has faults and human imperfections, and you see them, but the faults don’t matter as much because you feel quite self fulfilled and understand the purpose of your own and your partner’s human faults for further growth. There is no need for perfection and tolerance is very high. Agreements and truthful communication are easily navigated and reached. There is suspension of negative mental judgement towards your partner, towards yourself and towards others. From a spiritual perspective, the fear-based and fragmented egoic mind has been mostly overridden by a permanent state of unity consciousness with self, your partner and all life. You are able to live primarily in your heart consciousness and the mind serves the heart. You are experiencing enlightenment and unity as a normal steady state of being. You are awake and know who you are as a spiritual being having a physical embodiment and can view your divine counterpart in the same light and understanding. You understand the cause of your peace, harmony and sometimes bliss and euphoria is your internal state of consciousness which is enhanced in joy and playfulness by the union and co-creation with your Beloved. Your individual and joint goal is to serve life.
The Twin Flame/High Soulmate Journey to Divine Union
The uniqueness in the twin journey is that all stages up to the highest potentials of divine union are preprogrammed into the relationship. This is not the case in other relationships. One twin is not awake yet, but is mirroring the ego fragments perfectly of the more awake twin. As the more awakened twin clears the blockages of fragmented self and attachment wounding it affects the other and triggers awakening as that mirror is no longer required. As the awake twin resolves the fragmentation and clears their karma and the ego death occurs, the other twin will respond based on their spiritual connection by beginning to resolve their own fragmented patterns. The unawakened twin will eventually begin naturally transforming and beginning to awaken into their growth and evolution process, however, this may not occur instantaneously. Each twin will have their own karma and soul contracts they must complete prior to coming into full time union with their twin. In some twin life-plan agreements this can take years or decades. Now the awake twin will hold the mirror of the unconditional loving pattern that will heal the later twin. This cycle will continue through as many separation and reunion cycles as are needed until both are healed and whole again and they can harmonize into union, or they do not reach this goal and fail to unite and ascend together in that lifetime.
For the twin flame with a union lifeplan there is a completion potential of dual awakening and divine union built in as a relationship blueprint. Their journey is tied together and mirrored perfectly because they are holding the same soul blueprint. For a soulmate, we may only hold a piece of their awakening/healing path preparing us for twin reunion, or one twin is not ready to ascend and the other finds a soulmate/soulmates to heal instead of meeting the twin without ever reaching ascension stages and divine union. Hence we may need several soulmates to hold different parts, or if we are ascending we can have a contract with a high soulmate for a full path to defragmenting one another and ego death if the twin is not ready, available or in embodiment. Each person will have their own predetermined soul contracts.
So the faster the awakened twin heals their fragmented patterns and surrenders the ego, the faster it will trigger the less awakened twin to shift and awaken if that is their lifeplan. Twins also take on major separation distortions of age, language, culture, distance, family, education, economic status and any other earthly device of separation to demonstrate that divine love defies all human differences and appearances of separation. This can make the twin journey especially challenging and requires a great deal of mastery of self and commitment to navigate to achieve divine union.
Each twin soul has the ability/potential to awaken and ascend or the twins would not be meeting in an ascension lifetime. This is why twins are so important as the earth ascends. They hold the complete divine pattern of healing the masculine and feminine split that has caused duality to become the lived reality. The more twins mirror completion as divine union, the faster the earth will ascend and the collective of humanity. They come together on this intense and difficult journey for this service to humanity.
The Tantric Path-The Path of the Beloved
The original tantric paths were intended to produce this experience by using sexual tantric practice in combination with other spiritual technologies to gradually raise the consciousness and go through these stages with dedication to growth and healing with a tantric partner. Sex releases the same biochemical cocktail to create the euphoric state of divine love and the lovers had to travel through the stages of ego death to ascend their consciousness beyond attachment and conditioned love and into unattached unconditional love, bliss and ecstasy as the consciousness expanded and merged back into the unity of oneness with all of Creation beyond any sense of separation from self or other or anything. We ascend into our divine unity with all life or Christic Consciousness. It was also called the Path of Bliss. This was the original twin flame path to return to divine union. I call this HEART CENTERED TANTRA, a departure from much of the neo-tantra paths that are taught today which focus primarily on exciting the lower centers.
If you feel called to the Path of the Beloved, or to sacred relationship as your spiritual path, learn more about my mentorship program
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Blessings on your journey back to love!
Elaine Marie Rose
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