Improving your Relationships -- Relationship Dynamics From a Spiritual Perspective – Part 4

(Excerpted from "Invisible Blueprints")

"Love alone
can unite living beings
so as to complete and fulfill them,
for it alone joins them by what is deepest in themselves."
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Of all the themes of literature written over the ages, love has probably served as the perennially dominant theme. When many of us contemplate that blissful condition of romantic love, our minds turn to the prospect of a soul mate, that perfect partner who mirrors or complements us perfectly?and we aspire to be in a soul-mated relationship. What is the "soul mate" connection? How do we find our soul mate?

First of all, I'm not sure that there is only one answer to either question. As I have looked at soul mate relationships, I have gotten widely divergent information as to the feel of the relationship. One consistent characteristic I have gotten with many soul mate relationships is a strong sense of partnering, whether in the work they were doing together or in a general sense of their being partners in life. Another quality I have gotten is comfortableness, two people feeling very at ease with each other.

Often I get that the relationship itself is easy—that it doesn’t have to be continually worked at. I have also seen soul mate relationships in which the partners feel completely understood by each other. Some soul mates really spark and stimulate each other's energy, so that they both feel "charged up" and activated. I've also gotten with some soul mates that they "have danced together before." The phrase "dancing together" appears to be a metaphor for how their souls interact, as there's always the sense of a higher and quite beautiful connection.

Another phrase I’ve gotten is "children in the garden." This phrase always conveys a beautiful quality to the connection, as if it was the innocence deep within them that resonated, so that there was a very pure quality to their connection. Hence, two "children in the garden" in a very pure and innocent state of relating to each other, protected by their innocence and unsullied prior to any "fall"? often creating their own lovely, untarnished world together.
In still others, there's a sense of feeling more complete when together, as if their energies had something similar with which to resonate or the deepest parts of their essences could now be expressed, understood, and welcomed by the other. I have also seen an equality of energies in many soul mate connections.

In many relationships there is a hierarchy, whether expressed through power in the dynamics of the relationship or whether denoting a higher level of personal development. In many soul mate relationships, however, there is equality both in interaction and in personal development, with no question of one person wielding more power over the other. And, as mentioned above, the two partners may be stimulating each other's growth, but the sense of partnering outweighs and transcends any difficulty stemming from a learning aspect.

On a soul level, I have gotten various expressions of connectedness ?from soul mates who felt like twins, to two halves of the same whole. I've seen others who complement each other's energies completely. I've seen still others whose connection feels vertical and high, as if they fit together completely on several levels. In some, there is a feeling of huge energy together and in others, a complete fit.

One consistent theme is that of complete resonance, but not a resonance of the inauthentic stuff. Instead, it is a resonance of each one’s essence, the true selves resonating harmoniously and completely. This attribute has implications for how we find our soul mate.

I have seen some consistent things with regard to finding one's partner. The first has to do with lessons learned through learning relationships. You'll recall that learning relationships are those that teach us lessons in growth. One lesson from learning relationships I've seen consistently has to do with discernment ? in knowing what we want in a relationship and in our partner (separate from any superficial considerations of appearance, income, etc.) — e.g., how we want to feel in a relationship and what internal qualities we want the other person to have. Conversely, this discernment also allows us to know what we don't want, whether external habits (substance abuse or inconsideration, for example) or internal attributes (e.g., emotionally closed off or self-absorbed). Difficult learning relationships can often — and sometimes rather emphatically — teach us what we don't want in a partner.
So discernment can be an important factor in finding a soul mate; until we are clear about what we want and do not want, we will usually settle for what presents itself.

I have seen instances of people wanting to be in a relationship so badly that when they met someone they were attracted to, they disregarded the problematic qualities of the person or the problem areas of the relationship. Wanting badly to be in a relationship can lead us to be in a state of denial about any red flags we see – those undesirable or inappropriate qualities of the object of our affections. As a result, the relationship will often not be terribly pleasant. However, it may simply be a necessary learning relationship, to teach us about discernment or finding peace and fulfillment in being alone.

The advantage of going through a series of such learning relationships is that we'll often get to the point where we're so burned out from the relationship problems that we'll resolve not to get into another one unless it feels totally right. This enables us to move past our "relationship at any cost" stance to the more desirable position of knowing what we want — and what we don't want. Thus, these lessons in discernment move us closer to being ready to connect with our true partner with whom we can truly and purely resonate, while we also strengthen enough in ourselves to find the peace and ease in being alone when need be.

I have gotten the information consistently that some clients will be ready for their true partner only after they have recognized, claimed, and embraced their true selves. We've all heard the maxim that "you can't really love someone else until you learn to love yourself." Put another way, we can't be truly open to someone else until we're completely open to ourselves. And this is often a prerequisite to being able to belong with our soul mate. Our soul mate often appears for some of us only after we have cleared some of our stuff and are more in touch with what our true essence is.

For others, the prerequisite to finding their soul mate may lie in external, rather than internal, change, in that their true partner may appear when they cease trying to do what others expect of them and start living their lives in a way that reflects who they really are and what they really want. I will often see this latter aspect expressed in the area of work or career. For these people it is frequently only after they have allowed themselves to do work that expresses both who they are and what their interests are that their soul mate appears. One of the reasons this is so is that even if they know who they truly are but are doing work that doesn't express their true self, they are still living somewhat inauthentically. The soul mate often appears when their lives are more authentic and reflective of true self. In addition, expressing who we are through our activities can have the effect of strengthening us even further in who we innately are. This said, however, it is not always true that we must find a career completely resonant with our essence in order to find our soul mate.

I've seen cases in which the true soul mate appears before some of the primary inauthentic stuff is cleared — and I've seen two ways in which the client and relationship are affected as a result. I've seen some lovely situations in which the soul mate relationship was so positive, supportive, and healing that it actually served to stimulate the healing of one person's emotional stuff (e.g., low self-esteem). In these instances, clearing the inauthentic stuff was not a prerequisite for finding the soul mate.
I've also seen clients who had found their partners, but the relationships were not going well or there were blocks to their being together, because one or both people had stuff to work through before the relationship could succeed, or even before they could be together. If there is a large amount of inauthentic "stuff" on the part of one of the partners that hasn't yet been cleared, it may serve as an impediment to the relationship moving forward — even if the two are soul mates — and/or there may be problems in the relationship.

I've seen several cases of soul mates who were not yet together because one or both had personal issues to work on, and, interestingly, it is frequently the man who had issues to clear. This is perhaps so because of the general disparity between where men and women are in their lives and in clearing their inauthentic stuff. Because of the women's movement, women have, generally speaking, worked on some of their stuff in the past twenty to thirty years — empowering themselves, becoming aware of and clearing their stuff, and becoming overall clearer in their vision. Men, in contrast, have largely not done as much personal work on themselves. This has created a real disparity between where men and women are on their respective paths. This disparity in growth has bled through to the area of romantic relationships. Fortunately, the fairly recent phenomenon of the men's movement has started the process for men to begin to catch up.

Interestingly, I've also learned that we may often have an energetic rapprochement on some level before someone very significant comes into our lives. Not infrequently before two partners meet, they may communicate with each other on some level, whether consciously or unconsciously. I've known clients who started dreaming of their partners prior to their actually meeting physically. And I've known other clients who didn't just dream of their partner, but were communicating with their partner in the dream state prior to meeting.
Two people who are strongly and closely connected, especially soul mates, will often start to move into each other's energy fields before physically meeting. This will often happen shortly before they. Intuitives who can see or sense the aura or energy field will often pick up on this and see or sense the other person's presence there.

A very little-known manifestation of this will be communication on the sexual level prior to two soul mates physically meeting. This can be experienced as strong and rather intense sexual feelings, coming seemingly out of the blue with either a sense of urgency or a sense that they're coming from someone else "out there." Time and distance are no impediments to this happening and the two soul mates could be states or continents apart. This sexual communication will often be experienced as a precursor to the people directly communicating or even knowing that the other person actually exists. This is a very real phenomenon — and often perplexing to experience if you haven't already heard about the possibility of such things occurring.

This preknowledge of the soul mate or significant partner coming in, whether in dreams, telepathy, or sexual communication, would appear to happen outside of our conscious volition. It may be initiated on other levels of our consciousness or may be the universe trying awaken us to the possibility, perhaps as preparation for actually meeting and interacting with our soul mate. I sometimes smile and consider "Cupid's arrow" as causing the sexual communication, as it happens without either person trying to initiate it and would appear to be initiated by an outside agent. On the other hand, interestingly enough, this sexual phenomenon does not necessarily imply that the two people are indeed soul mates or are meant to be together either in person or throughout their lives. These phenomena may be heralding the arrival in our lives of someone who will simply affect us deeply for our own unfolding process.

There are other ways in which we may have knowledge aforehand, frequently quite unconsciously, of our soul mate, often expressed as foreknowledge of the attributes our soul mate will have, of the situation we'll encounter with him/her, etc. We may find ourselves consistently drawn to various people who may all have one particular attribute in common; for instance, we may find ourselves in a pattern of being drawn to writers over and over again. Whereas patterns in our relationships may often signal an unhealthy pattern, herald issues we need to work on in ourselves, or simply represent a familiar pattern from childhood, this is not always the case. We may be continually attracted to writers, for example, because we've always had an unconscious intuitive awareness that our soul mate would be a writer.

Some people have an unconscious awareness of what their soul mate will be like or what situation may surround their relationship. This unconscious awareness can exist, I feel, because we choose our lives before we come into them. Although we tend to have a general amnesia about what we are to encounter and experience (so that we may indeed go through learning and growing experiences freshly), some people will retain some artifacts of awareness, on the unconscious level, of what the script for their lives will be — a scene, for example, or a face, a characteristic, or a career that will be connected to their soul mate.

We may feel that a soul mate relationship must feel a certain way. Interestingly, however, people who find their soul mates will often have varying subjective experiences of what the connection feels like. In some relationships people may feel more whole, engaged, or truly alive.

I have also gotten information about soul mate connections counter to what I had previously thought was true. I used to feel that we have only one soul mate and that this was the person we have been with from one lifetime to the next as our soul mate. What I have seen instead is that there are often several possible soul mates in existence and that we may be with one in some lifetimes and with others in other lifetimes.