The Gift of the Soulmate

First Came the Grief and the Pain 

The pain of the grief is intense.  That I could not make it work.   And that is the operative energy at play.  To make something happens implies force. And force isn’t what love is about.

Love is something that simply brings people together.  Love is, after all, patient, strong, kind.

I’m not sure why this feeling has been so strong in me.  There was nothing I could do, no matter what I tried. You cannot change another person.  You can only change your self.  Maybe trying isn’t good enough.

Oh yeah, that’s because you can only be who you are.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Any inauthentic aspect of the self drops away, rings tin, over time, in a way that is awfully noticeable.

It’s All About Expectation

I think the grief is not about the other person.  It is about my personal expectation.  It is about losing the dream I had created for myself.  It is about losing what I actually never had.  I had dreams and expectations.  For a long while, working on these together was fun.

If I had to be honest with myself, at some point, what we had did not feel like love.  It did not feel outwardly loving.  But, it was the best we could each do in the moment.

This is why I wrote soulmate, up above in the title.

I think that the concept of soulmates is very personal.  This is because, literally, I feel that the person is a gift from your soul, for exactly what you require in the moment for your greatest good and highest purposes.  And this is very individual, very specific to each person.

Soulmates and the Opposites of Attraction

For me, the soulmate relationship is very magnetic.  When we were feeling deep love for each other, this love had a very magnetic quality:  I hid from what I feared – he protected me.  He needed assistance – I believed in him confidently.  There was always a balance.  A balance of the opposites of attraction.

When I wished to change the basic nature of the relationship, because I wished to change the basic nature of how I was inside myself, this magnetism turned into a repelling force.  A repelling force that gave me exactly what I wanted, in a way that was firm.  I did not like the delivery of what I wanted.  If I’m honest, this represented what my Soul truly desired for me.

My Soul desired for me to break out of the magnetism of a love that says I am not whole – that I need my missing pieces from another.  The inner whispers of my Soul said that I could be whole on my own.  And I really, really wanted to go for it.  Because it seemed like becoming whole, inside – it seemed like healing my inner pain – is what would help me achieve my dreams.

And your soulmate is there to help you achieve the dreams of your Soul.  But this can happen in ways that are unexpected.  Because the soulmate, consciously or unconsciously, puts the request at a Soul level as being of utmost importance.  Even if the human being is saying ‘no I’ll compromise’, the soulmate stands firm in honoring the wishes of Soul.

So when I moved to wanting a different kind of relationship, within myself, first of all.  I wanted to feel love inside, to live from heart-centeredness.

For a long time, I didn’t have any idea of how to do that, and my soulmate responded.  He responded by changing his attitudes in ways that were completely honoring of my Soul’s intentions for me.  But for my human self, this was only evident in hindsight.  From a human perspective, my soulmate wasn’t going with me on this journey.   His heart was taking him elsewhere.  And I didn’t like this one bit.

Once I decided at a deep heart level, to shift into wholeness, my soulmate presented a sort of strong back stop that says “No”.  No, you can’t get this piece of your missing self from me.  No, you won’t find what you are looking for, that you have to create inside to really be authentic, no you can’t get that from me – I cannot supply it.

This was a tough transition.

Saying No Out of Love

I was doing spiritual study years ago, and I read a sentence that said something like, “the teacher doesn’t always say yes to the student; sometimes the teacher says no, and this is in the student’s best interests”.

I’m not sure why my relationship with my soulmate became a mix of complete opposites.  It became the case that in every way, in every matter, I found that we were at entirely opposing ends of opinions, ways of doing things, how we wanted to act on something, what we each wanted day to day.

This is the opposite of attraction, in a magnetic soulmate relationship.

This is repelling force.

It’s almost the strongest message you can have that says:  I don’t want to be with you, any longer.  The words being spoken aren’t these words.  The human being may not even consciously be able to express what is happening.  But, maybe, just maybe, there is a Soul level choice there by the other person also.  Maybe his Soul wanted a new opportunity, also, in whatever way that means for him.

It’s just not the one that I was choosing, for myself.  And that is okay.  We were together for 25 years, which is a pretty darn long time.  That’s something to write home about, something to feel accomplishment over.

The Honoring of the Soul – Lifetimes Together

What assists me in gaining a greater understanding of my relationship is our past lifetimes together.  Over the years of our relationship, I had many dreams where I saw bits of our past lifetimes together.

These included full lifetimes and chance meetings: as a soldier in the French Revolution and his lover, as a young maiden in ancient times and her love, in ancient times as a teacher traveling to a new town asking a young man for directions, as a soldier protecting an important woman trapped behind enemy lines during a great battle.

What I was shown in my dreams of our lifetimes together was how we had come to Earth in incarnation so many times, each of us in so many different roles related to relationship.  When we had lifetimes in relationships together, we lived through all variations of possible outcomes, such as:  a chance meeting, a romantic interlude, a lovers’ relationship, getting married, being married, breaking apart.  In many of the lifetimes he was a soldier protecting me in various ways.

One night, I saw a vision of a particularly interesting “past life”.  But in this vision, the mechanism of entering the past life was also revealed.  What I saw was a mechanism that was like a roller coaster, coming into and out of the Earth realm.

What I saw was that in each set of lifetimes, we made a choice about how to be together.  We were learning about all aspects of a male and female relationship.  What surprised me the most, was that sometimes we would only come in for a part of a lifetime, together.  In these instances, we would dip in, and then dip out of the scenarios of that lifetime.  It’s like, we only wanted to experience a part of the circumstances, together.

Relief in the Understanding

I’m so grateful that I followed the impulse to include the past life aspect in the writing of this article.  Because I just had a major realization.

When I had the vision of my soulmate and I on the roller coaster, I thought it applied to lifetimes in the past.  My soulmate and I were together and I didn’t see that a break up might happen at that time.

Now that I am writing this with the benefit of hindsight, and the history of having broken apart, what I can see, is that this vision was a message for me, for now.

What I can see now, is that the message of that vision, is that this is one of the lifetimes when he and I chose to dip in to an experience – the experience of relationship, and being married – and then dip out.  I’m talking about understanding at a higher, spiritual level.  I don’t believe that it’s what either of us consciously wanted to happen.  But this vision, in hindsight, brings me some relief and some understanding.

It’s not an explanation that brings easy human understanding.  It is an explanation that takes a higher view on things.  It is an explanation that says that there are reasons that this is in my highest good, and in his highest good, from a Soul level perspective.

When I think about it, the personal growth I have gone through in this process has been off the charts.  The pain of what I went through in my relationship with my soulmate, something I had enjoyed and cared about for so long, has caused me to make incredible changes.

The choice to meet the pain with personal development has caused me to expand my life, deepen my spiritual nature, learn how to unconditionally love myself and others, and adopt an attitude of loving acceptance.

The Truth of Your Soul

If the ultimate purpose of a soulmate is to bring us closer into resonance with our own Soul, then as I think about it, in the moment, this tall order has been delivered.

The ultimate gift of any relationship is love.  If this love connects us with who we are, if this love delivers us to our own Soul, what an incredible outcome.

Access to the essence of who we are.  That divine, childlike quality.  The inner child.  The guidance of higher self.  This opens the gate to the pathway our dreams have been leading us to.  Ultimately, this is the pathway home – to Soul, to our eternal home.  To walk to the doors of this gateway takes incredible love for all we have been through.  Our own love and compassion for ourselves is what supports us on this journey.

This is the pathway of a new creation, a new dream; one of connecting with our Soul, one of expressing our true essence while in human form.

And if a relationship brings us into deeper resonance with our own self, if a relationship can even bring us to find sweet and compassionate love for ourselves in relationship with another, then I’d say, the relationship was a successful one.  No matter how messy things look to us as human beings, on the outside.

Like having a baby, the physical pain of birth is forgotten when the child appears.  Birthing a new connection with the Soul can spring from great pain in human relationship; pain that is born from the higher purpose of love, at a higher level, for each other.

This is the gift of the soulmate.

It is the opportunity for reconnection with one’s own Soul.

~ Susan V. Lacerra

Please click and sign up to receive my Susan Lacerra Newsletter along with special messages and content!

© 2017 Susan Lacerra. All Rights Reserved. Permission is given to share this article on other blogs and websites as long as the text is posted in its entirety without alteration and with the accompanying photos, and with the author’s credit, copyright and live website links included in the article. Check out the blog and more photographs at www.SusanLacerra.com.