By Caroline Myss

Best-selling Author of

ANATOMY OF THE SPIRIT

Excerpted, by permission of the author, from Chapter One, "What Is A Sacred Contract?" (pages 41-42)

Sacred Contracts and Human Relationships

Bill and Sharon clearly had a contract with each other. The Turks might call it kismet-one’s destiny or lot in life-and the Jews, be’shert-Yiddish for "destined to be your beloved." They were not meant to be together merely romantically, although that’s certainly part of it. Above all they were meant to work together on issues and problems that went beyond their personal lives. In their development of transpersonal qualities, they would be led to achieve a kind of spiritual transformation. That kind of work can be intimate and loving, but at times it can also require blunt honesty. In his lovely book Anan Cara (a Gaelic phrase meaning "soul companion"), John O’Donohue talks about the Buddhist tradition of the kalyana-mitra, or "noble friend." Your noble friend, he says, "will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness. No one can see life totally. As there is a blind spot in the retina of the human eye, there is also in the soul a blind side where you are not able to see. Therefore you must depend on the one you love to see for you what you cannot see yourself."

Because life is complex and there is so much to "see"-about ourselves, the world, and the Divine-we have Contracts with many people in our lives. Imagine that upon incarnation, each soul splits into countless fragments that move instantly into the exploration of the global soul. You know when you meet people who radiate something that is deeply attractive to you, and you may feel "empty" when they are gone. The popular term soulmate, applied to one’s ideal romantic partner, doesn’t begin to capture this truth; in fact, we all have many soulmates who play very different roles in our life. Perhaps noble friend is a better term. These are the people you are not simply destined but are required to meet. And no matter how many opportunities to meet with them escape you, if you have a Contract you will meet up eventually, perhaps many times, until you complete any unfinished business in the exchange of your souls.

A woman named Jill told me that she had dated a man in college with who she was deeply in love, yet she turned down his marriage proposal because she felt that she had not yet explored life on her own as an adult. She realized that she was sitting, as she said, "dead center in the middle of my heart," loving her boyfriend but also madly in love with her desire to travel and to live her twenties as a free spirit. "Either way, I knew I was going to be hurt and filled with regret, so I chose the path that would empower me the most. I knew that, had I married then, I would have eventually felt as if I had shut down. The choice I made gave me the potential of opening up, so I truly ended up feeling that I had no choice but to say no to marriage."

Although Jill’s former love was never far away from her thoughts, her memories did not cause her the same degree of sadness she might have experienced had she suppressed her desire to travel. Fifteen years after they had parted, however, "destiny or fate or my Contract brought us back together," she recalled. "I was home, the phone rang, and it was Andy. He had run into old friends, asked about me, found out that I had never married and bingo-we began to see each other again. We were obviously meant to be together. We just had to do a few things in between."

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Sacred Contracts