12 Ways to Find Your Soul Mate
Get ready for your soul mate with these steps you can take, starting today.
By Rev. Laurie Sue Brockway
Like many of you, I spent a good part of my adult life longing—and looking—for my soul mate. There were two things that helped to eventually bring my beloved and me together: I never gave up my faith that he existed. And I discovered the importance of getting ready for love. Just in time for a fresh start this Valentine's Day, here are a few pearls of wisdom on the topic, culled from my own experience and many years of work on the front lines of love and relationships.
Read the first way to find your soul mate.
Rev. Laurie Sue Brockway is author of Rituals for Love and Romance: Attract Your Soulmate with Ceremony and Self-love (HealingEbooks, May 2009) and the e-course, Find Your Spiritual Soul Mate. She is moderator of The Soulmate Project. This is excerpted by permission from Rituals for Love, all rights reserved. Visit her at www.LaurieSueBrockway.net.
Believe in Your Soul Mate
When you talk about soul mates, leave plenty of room for possibility. True love is a big, deep, mystical topic. I spent years trying to nail down the ultimate soul mate theory. I now know that there is no such thing. My advice instead is to keep an open mind, explore different ways that people describe soul mate love, and begin to create your own personal description.
How to Start: Make a list of what “soul mate” means to you and the qualities you seek in your true love. Embrace your belief and find within yourself a place of trust and knowing that there is someone out there, somewhere, for you. If you can believe in love--even when life does not seem to be taking you in that direction--you are halfway there!
Make Your Life Love-Friendly
There is a magical aspect to finding your true love, a feeling that seems to permeate your very being as he or she comes into your life. But before you get to that point, there is work to do. We can get set in our ways and beliefs, and our lives might become a little too crowded for true love to find its way in. Some of us have healing to do. All of us need to make our lives “love-friendly.”
How to Start: Gently look around your life for ways that you might be preventing love from finding you. Then make a choice to uncover beliefs, behaviors, and stuff that no longer serve you. Clean up what you no longer need, get your life in the best order possible, and you will find yourself getting ready for a great relationship. This will open the doors and the windows to love and begin to truly open your heart as well.
Acknowledge and Slay the Dragons
In the mythology, fairy tales, and Hollywood movies that shape our consciousness about soulful love, epic lovers have a series of challenges to meet and master, and a few dragons to slay, before they can claim the precious prize of everlasting love. The same holds true for modern soul mates. While some people seem lucky in love--as if they were born in a state of readiness for true intimacy and partnership--the rest of us typically have some life lessons to muddle through first.
How to Start: Be brave now and name the things (dragons) that are keeping you from love. Are you immature in love relationships? Demanding? Needy? Obsessive? Do you love too much? Give yourself away too fast? Have a hard time accepting faults in yourself or others? Do you consistently choose the wrong kind of people, with the same kinds of issues? Are you stuck in a relationship with the wrong person? Begin to identify the things that get in your way and have burned you in the past. That is the first step toward healing and adjusting your behavior.
Work on Healing Your Love Wounds
In soul mate relationships, people bring one another something they don’t already have and take each other to a place neither have ever been. In its purest essence, soul mate love brings an end to the sense of separation because it truly is like being reunited with the self. In the process of loving one another, your soul mate will help heal you, but can’t be responsible for fixing you--even if he or she wants to, don’t let ‘em! The healing process must begin inside yourself.
How to Start: Find a forum in which you can work on healing your heart, and stick with it. Do it for you, and love will follow. If healing has not begun or progressed--through therapy, grief work, spiritual practice, and any other form of transformational work--we risk being needy and overly anxious, and jumping into the wrong relationship. So choose to make this year a time to heal and move on.
Gently Say Good-Bye to Non-Soul Mate Love
If you are still romantically connected to someone who is not a soul mate, it’s important to discern when one particular relationship has run its course. Most of us know, but sometimes it is hard to let go. It is difficult to let go of a relationship that offers companionship, sex, fun, or financial security. But when you want a true soul mate, holding on to a relationship that only imitates love keeps us from the very thing we say we desire.
How to Start: Don’t try to replace lost love; grieve for the relationship that you must leave. Give yourself some time before you search for another love. This is key for some of us who tends to jump from relationship to relationship. You will know when it is time to open to love again.
Appreciate the Path You’ve Traveled
Even the difficult aspects of romantic evolution can be considered “time served” in preparation for true love. Many of us get our best training in relationship boot camp. We may beat ourselves up for bad marriages, relationships, and dates--any time that seems wasted on Ms. or Mr. Wrong--but in truth, they are an important, instructive part of the journey. The grand awakening to what soul mate love is comes by discovering firsthand what it is not.
How to Start: Appreciate the relationships that have taught you what you don’t want. Honor those loves. Express gratitude for the lessons you have learned, even the toughest ones. Send a spiritual message to your old flame’s angels saying, “I thank you, I bless you, I release you.”
Clean Your House for Love
As you work hard to clean out your emotional and spiritual House of Love, also clean out your physical house to make room for love. Be honest and begin the process of peeling old love stuff away. Still have a photo on the mantel of you and your high school sweetheart? Are you still sleeping on the same bed you shared with an ex? Do you lounge around the house in an ex’s old shirt? Be gone with them.
How to Start: Clean out closets, drawers, and rooms to begin to physically release things. Toss out old stuff that depletes your energy and keeps you stuck in the past. Liberate yourself from the past by cleaning out one drawer at a time, until you work your way through the pain of divorce and abandonment, the ones that got away, and the ones who left you disappointed in love.
Develop the Capacity to Identify True Love
By the time your soul mate stands before you, eyes searching into your own, heart connected to yours, you will have both done quite a lot of personal and spiritual development work. At any age, we need to work on developing the capacity and maturity to distinguish real love from “hope” created by fantasies you project on someone who has “potential.”
How to Start: In order to recognize true love, you have to have a sense of what love looks like: you must learn to see through your spiritual eyes. Soul connection is tangible; there really is no guessing or wondering when the real thing comes along. There is usually a telltale sign that lets you know when true love has arrived--a deep sense of knowing, a “gut feeling," or even a still, small voice in your head that says this is someone special to you.
Don’t Hate Being Single
Some people hate being single. Some of us imagine that when we finally find “the one,” that’s when we will finally start living. To the contrary, our job is to live fully… that is how your soul mate will know you. If you are traveling a fast lane of life with little time for nurturing the heart or spirit, or if you hide out in a way that isolates you from the flow of life, the window of opportunity could be delayed or missed.
How to Start: Honor the state of not yet having a mate. Enjoy your life, go out with friends, and pursue paths of self improvement. Spend time finetuning skills, nurturing interests, and having adventures. Study, take courses, and do things that help you grow personally, spiritually, and professionally. Work on creating the life you want to be leading--even if there is no one to share it with yet--and in the process, you will create a fuller, richer, and more welcoming life.
Honor the Yearning
Many people find themselves going crazy with yearning, wishing love were by their side. We resist those feelings, and consider them awkward and sad. But the truth is, the time of longing and yearning for love is the most powerful time. It means love is so close that you can feel it...and there is a part of you recognizing that there is something missing. There is something that drives us to want to love deeply and completely, in a relationship we feel is meant to be. Could it be your soul is searching for its other half?
How to Start: Allow the yearning. Make friends with it, because it will lead you to love. In soul mate relationships, lovers meet one another halfway. Your honest yearning for your true love spiritually connects the two of you together.
Get Creative
It is important to consciously create your own soul mate reality. Use any creative tools you are comfortable with. Write, visualize, daydream, and pray your way to a great relationship. Cut out magazine pictures of couples in love, makes lists and write stories about the relationship you choose. Hollywood movies fill our psyches with images of “perfect love.” We also have the power to create our own personal movie-like narratives, love stories based on our own desires and hopes.
How to Start: Focus your energy on calling your true love to you now. For 30 days and 30 nights, take 15 minutes in the morning and 15 before bedtime to play the “movie” of the “Love of My Life” in your head and your heart. See the love you yearn for already there, and feel the good feelings of being in love. Adjust your movie and improve it every day, adding great new scenes.
Open Your Arms to Your True Love
Finding your soul mate requires more than a wish, a hope, and a dream. It often requires us to become bigger and to grow beyond certain limitations; to heal ourselves as best we can; and to be courageous, because opening the heart is not always an easy task. It asks us to be willing to receive love, which for some of us is the hardest part. It takes us on a journey that helps us grow into the kind of person who is truly ready for a real and lasting relationship. You might feel sometimes as if you are getting nowhere, or feel like giving up. Hang in there. Stay open. Love may not be far behind!
How to Start: Imagine the warmth and love in your soul mate’s embrace. Get a sense of what it would feel like to be that open, that loving, and that welcoming to another. When you go to bed at night, open your arms to your love and whisper, “I am here for you.” And when you awake in the morning, open your arms and affirm, “I am ready for you, my love.” Even in moments of doubt and fear, open your arms to love. Know that every step you take in the direction of love will bring your true love closer to you.
Get More Support and Inspiration About Soul Mates
Rev. Laurie Sue Brockway is author of Rituals for Love and Romance: Attract Your Soulmate with Ceremony and Self-love (HealingEbooks, May 2009) and the e-course, Find Your Spiritual Soul Mate. She is moderator of The Soulmate Project on Beliefnet.
