Soulmate Skills

“What is this thing called love?”  We’re learning a lot from research about the neurobiology of love–how the brain chemicals dopamine and oxytocin flood our brains during the early stages of love.  In fact, when we’re in love our brains respond naturally in ways similar to an amphetamine or cocaine high.  It might be tempting to conclude that love is merely a biological event.  That conclusion occurs when you limit your world view to a physicalist one; you see all reality as reduced to physical explanations that can be measured and regulated.  Not so.  Because we are not mere physical beings.  If you accept, as we do, that we are also spiritual beings, your world view expands.  Finding a soulmate and living out that love is something that transcends the physical events involved in it.  We are enfolded in and infused with love.

You’d think sex is the bogeyman.  As I read your comments yesterday, I realized that the heart of a lot of the messages we got was, “Don’t be sexual.  It’s bad, wrong, dirty, sinful.”  In fact, my father’s maxim, “Intimacy breeds contempt,” was code for “If you have sex with him, he’ll end up having contempt for you.”  All this points to how important it is to critique, to evaluate what we learned.   And when we do that, we realize sex is not bad.  It’s our Inner Critic that says it is.  And, ask yourself, “Would you have contempt for someone who was sexual with you?”  If your answer is no, then our advice to you is:  Look for your twin–someone who holds sexual intimacy as a delicious way to express the love and valuing you have for your partner.  And then sex becomes what Jim and I have called, “a sexual communion.”

Well, could they?  Is it possible that Mom and Dad and all those other authorities from our childhood were wrong about relationships?  You bet!  I know one of the early things my father said to me was, “Intimacy breeds contempt.”  In other words, if you get too close to somebody, they’ll start devaluing you.  Well, only if they’re judgmental.  And only if they’re lacking in empathy.  So, I’ve had to evaluate what my dad said.  My conclusion?  He was wrong!  And if you’re going to break free from the dysfunctional beliefs you hold about relationships, you’ll have to take those bits of wisdom handed to you by your parents and evaluate them.  What might be wrong about what they said?  And as you do this, you’ll be equipping yourself to recognize your soulmate and to live out your soulmate love.  We’d like to hear from you–what were you told about relationships?

Have you ever turned your back angrily on your partner in bed?  Ever said, “I’m not going to be the first one to make up after this argument?”  There’s a word for that:  Pride.  And pride kills closeness.  You know what cold comfort it is.  What’s the secret to keeping soulmate love alive?  No Pride!  “I’m a fool for love.  A gone goose!”  That’s what Jim wrote to me in 1989.  And that’s how he’s lived.  And taught me to live.  So once we find that twin with whom to create that soulmate love, pride has to go out the window.  So join us in that secret to keeping love alive:  Be a fool for love.

Have you read, “Stop waiting for your soulmate.  Just settle for the first half-decent person you find?”  To assess the wisdom of  that advice, you have to look at the term soulmate.  We define soulmate as someone with whom you can connect emotionally at such a depth level that it’s at the level of your deepest being–your soul.  It’s a high-voltage relationship.  And that’s the heart of the matter.  If you long to communicate in a high-voltage way with your partner, “settling” will be a devil’s bargain.  Yes, you may stave off loneliness, but only to the extent having a rommate would.  And, yes, if your primary goal is to birth or parent children, that might work too.  But if you want someone with whom you can weather the trials of life, whether small daily rainshowers or those tsunamis that life can bring,  it’s a soulmate who will have the power to see you through those times.  And those sunny days–a soulmate will dance with you in the sunshine.  And that’s worth waiting for.

Do you feel tense and nervous whenever you’re in a relationship?  We want to tell you why:  It’s your Inner Critic.  It tells you, “You have to perform–to do tricks to get them to like you.”  Your inner critic is constantly looking over your shoulder criticizing how you’re doing.  Or it’s predicting,  “You’re going to lose your independence” or, on the other hand, “They’re going to leave you.”  As we say in Disarming Your Inner Critic, the key to undermining your nervousness is to get free–to buy out of believing your inner critic’s messages.  One releasing statement you can use is:  I have the right to be open; to be myself; to be a free spirit.  I choose to have people in my life who celebrate who I am and support my freedom.  We wish for you today a day full of pleasure and genuine connectedness.

In order to gain the wisdom your history has to teach you, you’re going to need some concepts.  The first one we want to give you is voltage.  It means the level of closeness you want in a relationship.  If you long for a lot of emotional connection; talking through your feelings about the relationship, then you want high-voltage.  If you’d rather a relationship that stays on a surface level–like roommates, then you prefer low-voltage.  It’s the high-voltage relationship that is a soulmate relationship.  And it’s important that you find someone who wants the same level of voltage that you do.  When you think back on your history, you’ll find that some, or maybe most, of the failed relationships were because of a voltage mismatch.  We’d like to hear from you on this.

We know.  We know.  When you look at your track record of relationships, it looks like a string of shipwrecks, failures, and just plain bad choices.  But in the face of all that , we have one thing to say to you:  Your history is NOT your destiny.  How can we say that?  Because we know that relationships are our grand opportunity for learning.  And for growth.  I didn’t know that before I met Jim.  So, I gave up for a while on finding a good man.  Little did I know that my destiny was on its way.  And it would bring fulfillment beyond my wildest dreams.  Jim and I both believe that our fulfillment was more than a personal one.  We believe we are to be a sign to you and a guide.  We’ll be shining the light of everything we’ve learned to illuminate your future path.

“I need to find a man who can handle me.”  That was spoken to me recently by a soulmate seeker.  And then she clarified, “I want a man who’s not scared of what’s inside me; who knows it’s just stuff.”  Such important words.  They capture a truth about closeness:  It takes courage to be close.  By this we mean the courage to confront inner material that surfaces with intimacy.  Jim taught me this in our first meeting at Asilomar.  I told him, “I love that you can bear with pain and other intense feelings.”  Of course, that takes skill.  And that’s what Anthetic Psychology is all about–the internal and communication skills to bear with stuff as it surfaces and to grow through it.  By “growing through it,” we mean getting free–having enough psychological distance from any given issue to take executive control of it.  It runs both ways–in both partners.  That’s why my wedding vows included the words, “Jim, I commit to working on stuff–to standing with the pain until we get through to the other side.”

I woke up this morning thinking, “Valentine’s Day is less than a month away.”  At first, I felt excited, “Oh, boy, what an opportunity for all of us soulmate questers to celebrate.”  Then I thought, “But for so many people who aren’t in current soulmate relationships, it can be quite painful.”  Perhaps you’ve already begun to feel twinges of longing or pain when you see those racks of hearts in every store.  Our message to you today is, Don’t Be Afraid of Valentine’s Day.  Why?  Because two psychological facts can cast out fear:  1) You have an Executive Self–a part of you that is like the executive of a company who has the power to make things happen and to see that the mission of the company gets accomplished.  And 2) You have a source of love within you that is like an artesian well and can be tapped any time to flow.  This means you can access your Executive Self to get the job done of fulfilling your deepest desires.  Then you can tap the love within you to flow toward others.  So join us in looking forward to a love-filled Valentine’s Day this year.  We’ll create it that way.