Tag: soulmates

A Letter from Eros

A Letter from Eros

Dear one,

When you awoke, clear eyed, though with some of the pain not yet washed away by your tears, you asked me, “Why?” I replied, “There’s nothing like love to help you find your eros.” Then I winked and flew out the window. Your heart knew what I meant, but your mind was still confused, so I’ll explain:

I needed you to remember.

You came to your world perfect and whole, knowing your path, purpose, dharma, or contract—whatever you’d prefer to call it—and knowing that you are love. Then life happened and you forgot. You knew beforehand that this would happen, so you made an agreement with another—one who loves you beyond anything words can describe—that you would help each other remember that perfection, wholeness, purpose, and love. You sought my help in this as well, and as love is my domain, I was happy to oblige, even though I knew what it would feel like for you. I’ve seen it countless times, in infinite iterations across the eons, and while it’s always different, it’s also always the same.

The myths and stories paint me as mischievous and a bit of a troublemaker, which I don’t deny. But everything I do is done from a place of the purest love. So if you heard me laughing as I aimed my bow and arrow at your chest, it was only to keep from crying, because I knew what awaited you once I’d hit my mark.

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And I never miss. My arrow struck you square in the heart and you fell hard in love with someone you wouldn’t have expected to. A beautiful Other, the most fascinating person you’ve ever met, Divine perfection in human form: the Beloved. Suddenly, all of myths and fairy tales became real to you. You finally understood the love the poets and singers described. Life made sense in a way that it didn’t before.

Until it all came crashing down. The Beloved ran away from you, ignored you, persisted in some other relationship, wouldn’t believe you when you told them what you felt for them, or did any number of other things that broke your heart. You felt completely rejected, and more alone than ever.

But you always knew that love was real, even when everything about the situation led you to believe otherwise. Even when you were caught up in the stories your ego spun for you, your friends’ advice to “just find someone else,” and the seemingly endless confusion over how something that seemed so right could so utterly shatter you. That even from the depths of your despair, when you asked yourself, “Why this person?” you still loved them, and they still loved you. You’ve learned that only love is real—the rest is just illusion.

You know now that I never left you. Even though you didn’t see me, I was always there: In the way you felt when you held your Beloved in your arms, in the way you felt lighter and happier any time you talked to or heard from them, in the joy and completeness you felt at finally having found the “missing piece” of your soul. In your joy, you couldn’t hear me whisper that there never was a “missing piece,” but I didn’t expect you to.

I was also there in the darkness: The nights you spent crying, the days where everything hurt so much you wanted to die, the moments you felt so lonely that life didn’t seem worth living. In your suffering, you heard me suggest that your Beloved was reflecting qualities within your own soul that you simply hadn’t claimed yet—that all of those wonderful things you love and admire in that beautiful Other are in you as well, treasures waiting for you to find them. However, you didn’t believe me. That’s ok, I didn’t expect you to. I could have appeared to you, wings unfurled, bow and arrow in hand and told you, “The Beloved is a mirror, and you are in love with your own reflection,” and it’s likely that you still would not have believed me. That’s ok. I’m patient.

I knew you would eventually seek my help, and you did. You called to me, using one of the many names I answer to, and I responded. You looked more closely at your Beloved, finally seeing in them all of those qualities you’d not yet recognized in yourself. It has been my joy to watch you claim and integrate them, to cheer you on as you’ve become the best, strongest, truest, most authentic version of yourself. This is what I needed you to do, because you’ll need that open-hearted authenticity and strength to do what you came here to do. The world needs you to live your true purpose.

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So this was your initiation—the wound where the light came in. I’m sorry that it hurt so much, but I needed you to remember.

I needed you to remember what the circumstances of your life made you forget—the passion and joy that the pressures of daily life had beaten out of you, the gifts and talents dropped by the wayside in order to conform to societal expectations—these are keys to your purpose, and the qualities you admire in your Beloved were meant to wake you up to that, to help you find all that within yourself again. My arrow to your heart was the most efficient, effective means I had to redirect you to the path you chose before you came here.

Through loving this beautiful Other, you’ve learned to love yourself—in both your light and your shadows, learning to claim all the qualities within yourself that you will need to fully live your purpose. Now that you’ve done this, do you think I would let you walk alone? Through the unconditional love you’ve learned for yourself, you’re now better able to love the Other. You’re free now to love them as you love yourself: as one who is whole and perfect even in imperfection, whose light and shadow combine to make a beautiful work of art in progress, always in motion as you create the next adventure.

Just as I never left you, neither did your Beloved. This person was and is always with you. Together, you are greater than the sum of your individual lives. Instead of two, you are three—I am and always have been the third, the holder of the tension of opposites, the transpersonal love to guide you forward on your path.

My arrow to your heart is your exit wound, freeing you from all that no longer served you, all that kept you chained to an identity that conflicted with the truth of your soul. You saw me first in your Beloved, and then in yourself. And I, Eros, am simply one aspect, or facet of the the Divine. By seeing me in your Beloved and now in yourself, you are seeing the infinite Divinity and love that is within you and all others. This is what we needed you to remember.

With love always,
Eros

Interview: Thomas Moore on Soul Mates

Interview: Thomas Moore on Soul Mates

It was wonderful to interview Thomas Moore for the Jung Society of Utah blog. He is a truly kind, intelligent, and soulful person.

 

“I found [my soul] again only through the soul of the woman.”
– C.G. Jung

Carl Jung wrote in The Red Book about coming to know his own soul through relationship with an other. According to author Thomas Moore, our deepest connections with others often teach us the most about ourselves and lead to our greatest development as individuals.

What is a soul mate?

“All of our relationships may be soulful to various degrees,” Moore said. “So you may have a friend that is very close to you, and you could call them a soul mate, even though they’re not a lover.” In his extensive study on the history of the soul, including what it is and how it’s been written about, Moore found that “when you look at Western history, in almost all the books, every spokesperson for soul has written about friendship as being the best model for a soulful relationship. So even if you’re lovers or spouses, the friendship dimension is probably the most soulful aspect.”

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“A soulmate is someone to whom we feel profoundly connected, as though the communicating and communing that take place between us were not the product of intentional efforts, but rather a divine grace.” – Thomas Moore

“I understand that when people use the term “soul mate” they mean something very special and specific,” Moore said. “I like the idea that people begin to think in more mystical ways about relationship when they think of soul mates. So when you think of a relationship as being destined from eternity, I think it’s really good to shroud your relationship with that.” However, Moore also noted the importance of looking beyond the mystical to face aspects of relationship which can be difficult. “That doesn’t mean that it’s not a human relationship too. If the time comes that you need to end the relationship, you have to be able to do it; you can’t stay with the romantic mysticism of the soul mate idea. So there’s a side to soul that’s very challenging and has a lot of shadow. It takes a lot of work and courage to stick with it.”

One reason for this, Moore said, is because “a soul mate is not the same as compatibility. I don’t think those two things necessarily go together. There may be all kinds of things in ordinary life where you’re not compatible at all.” Some reasons one may feel incompatible a soul mate include poor timing, or an inability to reconcile the relationship with the details of life, such as career and children. “Sometimes the conditions just aren’t right,” Moore said. However, it is often possible to work out the demands of life so that “the deeper values carry over and are stronger, so there is something in common.”

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Our soul mate relationships can help us become our most authentic selves.

This process of “maturing the relationship and getting beyond the initial attraction” is important to the experience because it contributes to the growth of the people involved. “I think we expect relationships to be easy, but the fact is that we are bringing two individuals with unique lives together and it takes a very special vision, a special way of being together where you’re not expecting the other person to be a carbon copy of you,” Moore said. “We tend to think that the other person will have the same psychological makeup we have. They don’t. They also don’t have the same destiny or the same values. And yet we can share the process. We can enjoy watching and being with the other person as they emerge into their own individual nature. And we can hope that they become more of an individual because of our relationship.”

Daimonic invitations

“When we talk about soul mates we have to understand that part of that sense of destiny is also daimonic,” Moore said. “We haven’t just rationally said, ‘There’s someone who looks like my type or looks like we could probably share a life together pretty well.’ You just get struck and you want to get to know that person. You may know nothing about them, yet still you’re drawn and you don’t know why.”

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Each person is said to have a daimon that guides their destiny, possibly drawing them into soul mate connections.

While it is necessary to sort out the details and “see if that passion can create a life or not,” Moore said “the daimonic aspect is there to bring people together and to keep a person in that place where you’re not living too rationally all the time. It’s a different way of living. You respond to the passions you feel that pass through you. You are not responsible so much as you are responsive. You respond to the invitations that are daimonic.”

Why does the daimon invite us into these soul mate connections? “The material of our psyche or soul is raw at first,” Moore said, describing the prima materia of passions and desires we might not know what to do with. “One of the purposes of relationship is to create an alchemical vessel in which that raw stuff can be cooked and sorted out. So you sort out the raw material that is in you, and in a way you’re also helping your partner sort out his or her material,” Moore said, and pointed out the difficulties this can cause. “When you have a deep soul connection like that, it’s not easy to be the partner of someone who is pursuing their own deep life, which is always changing.”

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We can be transformed through the alchemy of relationship.

However, having such a connection is “a deep, profound, dynamic, mysterious source of identity that is wonderful because it traditionally is what makes you feel alive,” Moore said. “It makes you feel an individual. Those are wonderful gifts to have. But at the same time it means that the challenges are very strong and very deep.”

The eternal in the temporal

Even though dealing with such constant change can be difficult, the process provides “a possibility of great depth and joy because if it’s really a relationship that is full of soul then, it’s very deep and there’s a lot of mystery in it,” Moore said. “If you have a relationship where you feel that you are soul mates, it is a very deep, ritualistic way of honoring the fact that there’s some connection there that is mysterious and mystical, which I think is the essence of what the soul mate idea is. Having that can give everything you do a dimension that is very profound, and gives you the sense that the eternal is part of the temporality of your relationship. That can hold you together more effectively than the temporal side.”