What is that familiar feeling we get sometimes when we meet someone? What does karma have to do with our relationships?
Karma in our relationships could be described as the soul connection we share with others along our life path. We have either shared past lives with them, or we share a similar trajectory along our life story. This can happen several different ways. We either recognize them from past lives, we resonate with their life path, we share "soul family," or a combination of all of the above.
When we recognize people from other lifetimes, it will usually be an unconscious recognition. It will feel like a subtle familiarity and a sense of kinship, though we may not be able to grasp why. It can show up in many ways, as if it is seeking to help us remember. Sometimes there is a sense of “unfinished business,” where we are drawn together to start a relationship. These can manifest in our friendships as well as our romantic partners, and we usually play out the karma or unfinished business with them.
Sometimes it is only meant to be temporary; once we have relived at a higher vibration the dynamics surrounding the other person, we often naturally move on. This can play out, however, as the same issues coming up and the higher tone can remain unmanifested. These lessons will continue to resurface for us until, at some level, we glean the information necessary to heal and move to a higher resonance, because that is the goal. The people who we do this with are what I refer to as “soul mates,” or those whom we have soul contracts with to learn lessons and finish energetic integrations with. It's an honor to participate in this dynamic, and we usually have several of them! When we decide to spend a majority of our lifetime with a particular soul mate, they are known as a "twin flame." This person can feel like our "other half" because they help us become a more whole person over a long period of time. I will get into this more in another post.
Sometimes we feel a kinship with someone because we have a sense of being on the same track. We may not share past lives with them, but we came in with similar lessons to learn along similar paths. We may share a soul archetype, or represent the same karmic achievements from the past, even if we don’t share the same lifetimes. For example, natural healers will often be drawn to others with similarly strong energy. We are also usually drawn to OR strongly repelled by others that display the same issues we still hold in our energy. (But that’s for another post too!)
Feeling familiarity could also mean we come from the same soul family, or Oversoul. This means that our original energy at a very high level close to source is the same, and therefore our paths of expression have been similar and feel familiar. There are many branches to our original energy and it's not a linear process, so it can take time to understand. Part of our journey is to slowly gain the self-awareness to make sense of ourselves at this level and "trace our way back to Source," so to speak. This is not necessarily a conscious process, but it can be. We get in touch with this aspect of ourselves by merging with our Higher Selves, and we access this level of self-awareness by doing the inner work necessary to peel away the layers to our true core. All of our Source energy is ultimately the same, as we are all One. We have chosen to participate in self-expression by branching off into different essences in the game of knowing ourselves in all our many facets of being. As we exist and grow in our ability to know ourselves, we see ourselves in others and grow in our relationships, and they get easier and full of more joy. We can use our relationships to help us dig into the path we’ve set for ourselves with a growing awareness of our inner world and our karma. This is the ultimate goal of the exercises I’ve been giving you in previous posts!
My next post(s) will be on furthering your inner work in relationships, and how to deal with relationship issues from a spiritual perspective.