The Myth
There’s a kind of new age myth that afflicts people who awaken to a personal spiritual path. It catches many who are desperate for a relationship where they feel loved, seen and heard. It goes a bit like this …
You meet someone new and feel a strong connection that cannot be explained in the regular manner of simply finding each other attractive. The attraction will be enigmatic. It will not fit into conventional patterns. Being “spiritual” and open you do the hugging thing that everyone else does, and your energy systems start to chime together. Then you find you can share your spirituality in ways that you’ve been dreaming about.
And it feels so intense. What can it mean?
We must have been lovers in a previous life. We’re soul-mates. You, or maybe your new found friend, find a spiritual website and read an article about twin souls and twin flames. Could that be it, possibly from a lifetime in Egypt … or Atlantis … or Lemuria? You check out other internet articles and that’s it! That’s what you are: you’re twin souls; you’re twin flames. It’s unbelievable; such a fantastic blessing that you’ve found each other. Wow! We have to honour this: let’s go to bed and do it.
Loneliness
Like most new age concepts, terms such as “twin souls”, “twin flames” and “soul mates” need to be treated with caution. They’re loaded with expectation, judgement, new age delusion … and potential for misery.
People will often fall into a relationship based on an idea that they’ve met their twin flame, or soul-mate. It doesn’t matter much what you call it. What isn’t realised is that there can be many reasons for the intense sense of connection. One of the most routine is that finding someone to share your spiritual awakening with can seem like the solution to an intense loneliness you’ve felt throughout your life, especially if you have the experience of knowing that you don’t really fit in anywhere – even though you may have made it look as if you do.
If that deep loneliness is the underlying driver then what’s really happening is that the person you opened up to is actually facilitating a deep opening to yourself. What you’re as likely to be feeling as anything else, is the love for yourself that you’ve denied yourself over the years and which you’re now projecting onto someone else.
Co-dependency and the Mysteries of Karma
Through the convolutions of the mind, that opening then becomes dependent on the other and infused with monumental fears of loss, rejection and abandonment. And that will lead you into giving yourself over totally to the control of the other, without you realising what’s happening. Result: wretchedness (intense co-dependency).
The kind of energetic connection that led to this situation may very well be from other lifetimes or forms of existence. But it’s not necessarily a good foundation for an intimate relationship. You could indeed be old friends, but without any other attachment and certainly no need to create one. You might be old enemies, or there might be some form of karmic agreement that needs to be played out to help you come into balance with yourself.
Karma is not easy to figure. It’s an alien concept in mainstream western cultures. However, once you accept that we are all multi-dimensional eternal beings it starts to make sense that we’ve interacted with each other in many ways. It’s then quite reasonable to accept that we can set up situations to provide us with scope to evolve our awareness through challenges to the ego identities we inhabit in a human time-space reality over several lifetimes. At that level there are no real enemies. We are simply part of All There Is exploring the realm of consciousness through the extremes of separation and individuation. But …
The Delusion
There are connections that go way beyond the physical and manifest in epic human relationships. These are very special and perhaps qualify as twin-soul or twin-flame connections. Although I personally don’t trust those terms because of the baggage of expectation, I recognise that I exist in a relationship of that kind with my partner of over 20 years. We wear matching wedding rings with an inscription that means Soul Friend, and I can’t imagine being without her.
And here’s the thing. This kind of relationship is not easy. It’s not a fairy tale trip of endless bliss. The closeness and intimacy we experience is sustained by a commitment to ourselves rather than to each other. That commitment is that we each continue to evolve into optimal versions of ourselves and deal with any issues that arise in the process. It may be underwritten by a deep soul connection, but the human aspect of it still requires attention. The flow of love between us pushes against anything in its way. That’s how we grow. Whenever we run into a reaction to each other, the distance it creates in our togetherness is very painful until we transform it. Furthermore, neither of us would have been able for the power of this kind of relationship had we not already cleared much of the basic mess of loneliness and neediness that haunts nearly all relationships based on a “happy-ever-after” kind of idealism.
That concept of fairy tale bliss is delusional. It’s a misreading of the allegory for the revelation of the true self and the inner harmony of balanced masculine and feminine principles. This blissful existence can only be found outside yourself as you recognise and achieve it within – your external reality reflects your inner landscape.