I remember going to the fancy Riverside Mall in New Jersey as a teenager and noticing women glamorously dressed. They were wearing perfect hairstyles and make-up and walking with a seductive gaze. Amused and curious, I asked the cashier, “Why are all these women so dolled up?” She winked and replied, “You never know where and when you will meet ‘the one’.” As I became more aware of this notion of “finding a soulmate”, I noticed this fantasy lived in many minds and hearts.
Many of us were conditioned in our childhood through movies, fairy tales and romance novels to believe that “a soulmate” existed out there, who could ‘sweep us off our feet’ and give us our happily ever after.
Through this idea, we learnt to believe that an external person could provide us with everything we didn’t have and make us happy.
Unable to find a connection with ourselves we learnt to chase externally for “the one”, who we thought was a higher version of ourselves. We anticipated them to fill our holes, heal our wounds and make us happy and peaceful. Unaware that we have what we seek as the source of love and abundance, we floundered, moving from relationship to relationship in search of someone to make us whole. What we think we want is not what we really want. We were just sold to external voices telling us what we should desire. We were programmed to expect a flawless soulmate, who would love us unconditionally and satisfy our needs.
No one taught us to journey within and fall madly in love with ourselves. We are not encouraged to be authentic or in sync with ourselves, so we learnt to model our relationships after business transactions. We went in expecting and wanting to extract love, attention and respect, and craved for them to fulfil our needs. This made us takers who are greedy, needy, plotting and weak. It takes wisdom and courage to be authentic, to journey within and align with oneself. Only when we anchor within can we get to know who we are and what we stand for. It is then that we have a reference point to draw from and something of value to offer anyone.
Are you ready to do the inner work to understand yourself and raise your standards? Are you prepared to lose your fantasy that another person can make you whole? Are you ready to become your selfmate before you look outside for a soulmate? Are you ready to learn to love, forgive and better yourself?
Let’s dive in and learn some foundational truths.
We must connect with our soul before we can recognize our soulmate. Inner before outer.
We have heard the expression, “It takes one to know one,” so how can we know who our soulmate is when we haven’t met our soul? Our relationship with ourselves is fundamental. Have we romanced ourselves, created intimacy and understood what makes our soul burst with happiness? Being authentic about our truths defines us and gives us value. As psychologist, author and international speaker Dr Shefali Tsabary says, “We don’t even know ourselves. The initial processes involve a lot of talking to a coach, or writing in a journal, and then asking whose voice is this? Is this my voice in the present or is this somebody else’s voice? Typically, it’s so identical to your mom your dad or somebody in your early life that you’ll be able to identify it.”
It requires awareness, wisdom of self and self-reflection time to get acquainted with who we are. We need to know our likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. Then we must look inwards to face our shadow side. This process can be very uncomfortable, but unless we take time to confront our demons and experience the feelings that trouble us, we will never be free of them. By participating in silence and meditation courses, personal coaching sessions and breathwork practices, we can begin to journey within to embrace our pain and wounds from the past and release them.
Wisdom helps us to see that nothing can destroy our souls and that no event is bigger than us. We are bigger than anything that happens to us. Understanding this helps us to release pain and suffering. We need to remind ourselves that the Creator loves us the way we are, with all our flaws and deficiencies, and we are an intrinsic part of this creation. Imbibing this, we can strive to be more compassionate with ourselves, letting go of our self-loathing tendencies, and moving towards love and acceptance of ourselves.
Knowing and understanding ourselves gives us a reference point like a GPS pin, allowing us to gauge where we stand with others.
Knowledge armours us with awareness and helps to foster intimacy with ourselves. It helps us to understand what we value so we can create our parameters and boundaries. Once we have our references, we can gauge if another resonates with them and is a highvalue partner for us. Without this inner GPS, we walk unconsciously like zombies with an insatiable list of all the ‘should haves’, ‘must haves’, qualities, traits and characteristics we want from a soulmate.
Let’s look at three common examples of the mindset of people who search for soulmates:
The one with the insatiable list
The one with the agenda
The one who is socially pressured
When my clients tell me they want a soulmate, I ask them what qualities they seek from a soulmate.
Unsurprisingly, a long list often pops out. I recall Shivika, who had many failed relationships, was still insistent on finding her perfect soulmate. She wanted someone who could juggle all the parts of being a passionate lover and best friend, and was understanding, intelligent, rich, good-looking, sincere, reliable, honest, forgiving, sensitive, patient, humorous and accommodating.
When I asked her how many of the qualities she desired from “the one” did she embody herself, there was a long pause. In our sessions, it was painful for her to turn inwards and face her true self to see the gap between fantasy and reality. She unconsciously searched for a fantasy version of herself in another without doing the inner work. Instead, she wanted her needs to be met and was looking for the solutions the other could provide her.
Shivika understood through our sessions that she was in a self-sabotaging pattern. If she didn’t take time off from relationships to create intimacy with herself first, she would keep attracting unhealed, “broken” partners, leading to similar failed outcomes. Now, willing to endure the pain of confronting her shadow side, she worked on making more conscious choices. First, she shifted her focus from her external needs to discover what nourished her soul. She signed up for dance classes, began meditating, took nature walks and spent time with friends who loved her for who she was. As she continued to take steps towards self-love and self-discovery, she was able to get acquainted with the most important person in the universe: herself. In doing this work, she raised her vibrations and enjoyed the small wins that brought her closer to her true soulmate – Shivika.
Creating awareness was the first step for Shivika to identify her triggers and needs, and then she could begin to break down the fantasy. As she learnt to love and accept herself, she created healthy boundaries and standards to show up for herself 100 per cent. She put herself in the number one position and moved out of the survival pattern into one that made her thrive. The exercises she practised gave her structure, like two walls that channel a river, giving it direction and force to flow. Otherwise, it becomes nothing more than a wasteful flood
Excerpted with permission from Anchor Within: Life Lessons and Techniques for Inner Confidence, Resilience and Happiness, Leena Gupta, Penguin India.
