I’m gonna try to make this brief, though once my creative juices get flowing, God only knows where I’m gonna land. Hang onto your hats, m’dears.
There is no such thing as a “soulmate,” at least in the way this childish concept is held and promoted by popular belief. There are a lot of wonderful people on this planet who surely deserve to find their “Happily Ever After” with another, yet never do. Sadly, this kind of outcome engenders thoughts and emotions in us humans that can feel disquieting and despairing. “Why CAN’T I find my forever partner~ is there something wrong with me, that I can’t??” many might question for decades.
I’ve given a lotta thought and philosophical meanderings to this query over the lengthy time I’ve been around. I’ve always done this, when I encounter life questions that seem unanswerable. It’s led me to some outstanding theories and insights.
I feel lucky that the desire for a ‘special person’ to spend the rest of my life with was never a priority. The fact is, I was way too busy forging a friendly, supportive, nourishing relationship bond with Me, which was my full-time job for many years.
Here’s what I think about Soulmates, and I’ll explain why. Our Soul continues growing, healing and evolving (with any luck) till the day we die. Sometimes it gets stuck in a behavioral pattern or two (or ten) that doesn’t serve our Higher Self, but we keep making the same choices and mistakes over and over again that harm us~ or at the very least, have us neglecting to take better care of our precious Self.
When we marry, we typically believe we’ve found our Soulmate! But what happens to this belief when 3 - 7 years later, there’ve been so many tiny emotional betrayals and ruptures piled up between us, we end up hating each other?! How do we reconcile having loved someone so much on our wedding day, we assumed we’d be entwined for a lifetime, and now we can barely stand being in the same room with our “significant other?!”
In my view, even painful relationship dynamics are here to nudge us out of our comfort zone, force us to reflect more deeply on how we might have contributed to those ruptures or setbacks, and learn what NOT to keep doing. This is growth.
It takes only one person to alter a relationship dynamic, and two to keep it exactly the same. I’m not talking about saving a relationship or marriage here. That requires a sturdy commitment from both parties to work together toward reinstating harmony in their bond.
A soul-mate (whether romantic or platonic) may be in our life only for a very brief time! If they make us a little uncomfortable, it’s usually because they have a gift to impart that’s meant to teach us more about ourselves and where we need to grow, heal and/or evolve, in order to become joyful, self-actualized beings.
I believe The Universe keeps nudging and bumping up against us when we require significant inner change. The same frustrations, setbacks and challenges repeatedly occur until we are willing to shift our paradigm and start handling our life and the people in it, far more effectively than we previously have. This is growth.
In truth, humans never change until what we’ve been doing doesn’t work for us anymore~ or we’re in enough pain and torment to force us out of our comfort zone, even if it’s just finally surrendering our lifelong passivity and NOT allowing others to take advantage of or use us as a doormat! If this is you, ya learned this orientation as a young child, due to myriad conditions that existed for you at that time. Might it be time to work on outgrowing this obstacle to happiness and contentment?
90% of us are terrified of our anger and rage. We harshly judge it as bad or wrong, only because this is how our parental units related to our fierce upset when we were little kids. Some will tell you, “my anger exhausts me, and that’s why I won’t let myself go there.”
Anger and rage are not exhausting emotions~ but suppressing them surely is! Anger is the most activating, enlivening, energizing, passionate feeling we have in our emotional repertoire! It’s why men sometimes put their fist thru walls, if their frustration level rises high enough! Anger and rage are healthy, normal, human emotions, and we all came into this lifetime with ‘em!
I’ve had many clients who resort to crying, when they get frustrated or angry. They were programmed during childhood never to express these feelings, so they shame themselves for observing ‘em whenever they arise. What intense emotion CAN we express when we need to, if we’ve been taught that our anger is “unacceptable”?? Only disempowerment and despair, my friends.
I use only a handful of ‘power tools’ in my healing practice, because that’s all we really need to grow ourselves and turn our life completely around. My Anger tools are an essential part of every client’s recovery from inner pain. Do you remember the show, The Sopranos? Do yo recall the session where Dr. Melfi tells Anthony Soprano that “anger turned inward, becomes depression”?? It’s unequivocally true.
Depression, extreme fatigue (related to depression), Anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder traits are merely byproducts of emotional suppression. So are pain and disease in our body, if we’ve grown up dissociating/disconnecting from various important emotions like rage, due to certain feelings not having been permitted in our home of origin.
Oncology nurses and doctors will tell you that their cancer patients are the sweetest, kindest people you’d ever wanna meet. But what we know today, is that long held resentment and suppressed rage starts eating up the body from the inside-out. In short, emotional repression can easily manifest as cancer.
Cancer is nothing more than normal, healthy cells replicating at an abnormal rate of speed. It seems to me, that if we won’t express our emotions outwardly, they express themselves inwardly~ and keep growing until we simply cannot ignore ‘em anymore.
In my view, nobody should be setting themselves up for this health risk. Give me a call if you’d like to explore this topic s’more. In the meantime, here’s a video I made years ago, that could be of benefit to you:
I once knew, and almost dated, a woman who was in recovery (from alcohol, IIRC) who told me about The Romantic Myth.
She recited it so quickly… I’ve tried to find it in print… there is so much of it that I don’t remember…
But it starts with “There is one person somewhere in this world who is your soulmate” and ends with “and you will both die at the same time in each other’s arms.”
Letting go of that myth was one of the most difficult parts of my own journey.
I believe in soul mates, I don't believe in your one and only. With seven billion people on this planet, it's absurd to believe you could be limited to connecting to only one.