Mirror of my soul – Stories of you, me, the world and eternity

Whether we understand “Twin Souls” as being two souls eternally bound together or one soul inhabiting two bodies, unmistakably it feels like this person is the One created for us and with us, to help us awaken and to remind us of the love that we are, as well as our path back to God. The love between the beloveds is so potent and so strong that even if we are unaware of our immortal nature as infinite souls, meeting them awakens within us the knowledge that we have known them since the beginning of time.

Our soul, which contains the universe within itself, has the power in a single instant to recognize its true counterpart. While the timing of this life-changing event may be less than ideal from a human point of view, it is nevertheless predestined. When we meet this soul in the fish soup of humanity, memories of REAL, unbridled love come rushing back to us, leaving us in awe and amazement of this wondrous person. We are simply swept away by feelings of recognition, belonging, and remembrance, of unconditional love, intimacy, friendship and passion. These feelings originate in the soul and spread like wild fire to the rest of the body. They are like the Sun appearing after a long, hard winter, warming up all the unloved, hidden parts of our heart and soul, covered by eternal ice, never to be rediscovered, always to be kept from the Light. Not only do they melt the ice from around parts of us that even we ourselves can no longer reach, but they breathe new life into a barren landscape and something flourishes. Every moment as we recognize the power of our closeness with them, not to mention its depth and beauty, we find ourselves blossoming like never before.

The overwhelming feelings that they ignite in us knock us into another dimension. It seems as if the whole Universe, God, has conspired to bring us together. All our feelings of not belonging dissolve in an instant in the most profound home-coming that we have ever known. We wonder at the magic of their touch, at how our minds seem to flow from one source and how somehow we know we are bound to this person, to this soul, eternally. They fill up our senses, and every day is a blessing and every moment spent together a moment of freedom, completion and joy, where our heart and soul can finally rest and breathe.

This ignition of the soul is as scary and confusing as much as it is amazing and expanding. Our beloved is oftentimes the first and only person to ever have accepted and validated us completely; to the darkest corners of our soul – they “get us” at a level no one ever has, or ever will. Our endless soul searching stops as we find ourselves being reflected back by the mirror of their soul. Driven by an internal confidence and trust, we share with them our darkest secrets, our deepest dreams and our silliest hopes, and they absorb and reaffirm everything we say with unconditional love.

It is the purpose of the “twin” is to awaken in us to the remembrance of our own wholeness and true nature. They are here to help awaken the love within us, and to set us on the path to becoming an expression of our soul so that when we return to God, our purpose in life is revealed to us. As our love for them cracks our heart wide open and the light of our eternal soul shines through, we cannot help but recognise our own infinite beauty and light being reflected back at us in their eyes; leaving us at awe and in love with them and with our own self; for the first time in our lives.

The come-down

Unfortunately more often than not, after an intense stage of togetherness, sometimes referred to as “bubble love”, lasting anything from days, to a couple of weeks or months, our “normal” life seems to catch up with us, perhaps in the form of a relationship we had hoped to leave, pressure from our families, our own need to contain the connection within the rigid definitions of a friend, lover, future husband etc. As we seek to balance this SPIRITUAL  connection with our conditioned physical reality and previous experiences with what we thought love is, we start to see a widening gap between the two.

The reason for this is that in the opening of our hearts we have come so close to God that only true Love can withstand the intensity – and by contrast all that is not purified within us rises to the surface to be healed. We often find that we are simply not emotionally mature enough to deal with the divine stream of light which our beloved unintentionally shines on us, bringing all our deepest secrets and fears onto the surface of our consciousness. This would require us to meet everything that arises with LOVE ONLY, and we can only do this once we have found our wholeness and connected with a higher power.

We catch glimpses of just how deep an integrity and how radical a trust we are being asked to show to truly be in alignment with who we really are, but because it is all new to us, we feel fear and doubts creep in. Our mind, which holds onto memories and pain, has a very hard time comprehending these feelings, or how to deal with them. As the Love calls all that which is unacknowledged and unloved within us to come forth, we remember the first time love hurt, and just like the fast signal from the brain to the hand to remove your hand from a hot plate, we react by pulling ourselves away.

We want to shut these feelings off because we remember that when we loved in the past we got hurt, whether it was by our parents, siblings or previous lovers. We remember the pain and hopelessness of rejection and abandonment, and suddenly we seek excuses to convince ourselves that this wonderful person is not “our type”, or that somehow they don’t have the “full package”. We doubt their genuine feelings for us, distrust the fact that they seem to love us so much so soon and suspect that they, God or even Satan may be playing a trick on us. We start to feel like perhaps we are safer in the old paradigm, in our soul numbing but predictable, passable and safe existence.

Sometimes it is the actions of our beloved which give us the excuse not to deal with the source of the actual pain. So, instead of seeing another person in pain trying to deal to the best of their ability with all that rises to the surface, JUST LIKE US, we think they are doing something to hurt, confuse or ignore us. We drive ourselves mad ruminating their conflicting statements and behaviour, and how they seem to have changed overnight. We know this distant, cold person is not the REAL them. The more we try to get answers from them, or to make sense of it all, the more we either feel rejected, or go on a crusade to “fix them” by chasing them, thinking that if they only let us in, we would help them “deal with” it.

Unfortunately, we cannot look to the other for our own wholeness, just as we cannot fix or fill any lack that comes from our beloved’s denial of love for himself. We become runners when the heart expansion ignited by our love for our beloved exposes all our innocence and vulnerability, and the pain that we have been hiding inside since our earliest childhood rushes to the gates of our heart to be acknowledged and EMBRACED.  Here it is no longer the pain caused by our love for our beloved which surfaces, but the pain we felt as a child, for example when our mother ignored us, or when our father slapped us for misbehaving, at a time when we simply lacked the emotional maturity to deal with it. If we had been allowed to feel and acknowledge our emotions without fearing that this would attract more pain or that love would be withdrawn from us, we would know that there is nothing that can arise in us that we cannot face.

However, to be able to do this would have required us to have parents that encouraged us to express our emotions; who helped us name and identify them; and who guided us through them. If instead of emotionally oppressing us they had helped us acknowledge our emotions while reassuring us that no matter how we feel or act, we are still GOOD and UNCONDITIONALLY LOVED, then we would not be in so much pain. We would be secure in our knowing that even if our beloved acts up or denies us their love, we are still to the very core of us LOVE. Their behavior and words are not reflective of who we are – and neither are they reflective of who they are at the core, no matter how they are seem to behave.

Unfortunately when meeting our beloved brings all this to surface, often subconsciously, we do not know what to do with all this pain and instead, we think our suffering is being caused by the beloved or our own inbred “badness”, unworthiness etc. So we do the only thing we know: we categorize, downplay, ignore and project our feelings and then in an ultimate hara-kiri motion, deny OUR SELF the acknowledgement of that pain, and ultimately that love.

We seek any distraction under the sun to not feel that pain anymore, and we “hide” it under a mountain of doing. If we find that we cannot hide from the pain, then we hide from the one whom so acutely, without wanting to, reminds us of it by just being him/ herself, because they reflect what is WITHIN US right back at us. This leads to us avoiding contact with the ONE and ONLY person who has seen and loved us for our true self because this requires us to be just that: OUR TRUE SELF. It requires us to look at ALL that we are: the good, the bad and the ugly, and to LOVE AND ACKNOWLEDGE it all.

As the infinite love that we are, our natural state of being is that of unconditional love, acceptance, compassion, forgiveness, gratefulness and patience, but as humans living by our egos, we are made of identities and thoughts of the past. These ego-produced thoughts tell us: think before you act, be afraid, protect yourself, lie, manipulate, plan for your future security – and the list goes on, and every excuse and every plan is based on fear. All those fearful thoughts and feelings are not ours. They are not real. Nevertheless when we identify with this part of our Self and meet a person who invites us to snap out of it and be authentic, we set up barriers to protect ourselves from feelings, we feel threat where there is opportunity; we feel danger where there is liberation and we see expectations where there is unconditional love & freedom.

So, rather than embracing what arises, we suppress even more, and bury our feelings for our beloved deep inside. In reality, all we are really doing is denying ourselves the very love that we crave – and for an instant thought we had found in someone. The truth is, we did find that love and it is REAL and true, but it is not until we can stay centred in it, treating EVERYTHING that arises with unconditional love and acceptance, no matter what, with or without our beloved, that we can ever hope to truly give and receive that love. If we were able to do that to start with, we wouldn’t have any issue with giving our beloved our love in any shape or form appropriate, including giving them the time or distance they need to face their own demons, because we would know that the only reason they act out and the only reason they avoid us is that they are still working on loving themselves fully. They are yet to acknowledge their pain as being valid, and part of the divine will, there to help them transform and welcome more LOVE into their hearts and lives.

The simple rule here is: if we do not love ourselves unconditionally and see our self as worthy of receiving this love and know how to receive this love, then we cannot accept that kind of love from anyone else, and certainly not from our beloved. There is nothing the chaser can say or do to make the runner see this; it’s an internal process. The only guarantee is that true love never leaves us, and continues to grow even in separation. The eternal lovers are each other’s perfect energetic mirrors and if one is running, then on some level the other one is also. Even if they don’t seem to be running and may even chase; they are running from something within them that is causing them to act in an unbalanced way. When we chase our beloved in order to fix them, then there is something that needs fixing inside us. When we accuse them of denying their feelings for us; what feelings are we denying ourselves? When we claim that they are not being true to themselves; in which ways are we not being true to ourselves? This is not just the ultimate cliché but the truth: it is NEVER about them and always about YOU.

♥

How and why I became the runner

Like they say, the course of true love never did run smooth, and my own experience, spanning 13 years, is no exception. I have been both a “runner” and a “chaser”, so can identify with and understand both. When I first ran within months of meeting him, my beloved and I were both trying to leave long-term relationships – or that’s at least what we had told each other. He had left his marital home just before meeting me pushed by his spiritual awakening and followed by emotional blackmail and suicide threats from his wife, whereas I was trying to leave my abusive boyfriend for good. The old fears and faces of our co-dependent lives soon caught up with us as his wife announced her visit, causing him to distance himself from me. Suddenly this man, who hung on every word I said, who looked at me like a blind man staring at the sun and who until then could not get enough of me gave me speech about his duties and obligations towards her. When I, in pain and confused, asked where I stood in all this, he told me that we were only ever meant to be friends, and how he valued my friendship and never wanted to lose it; and that the rest was “just a bonus”. He alternated between treating me like the lover I always was to him; and friend-zoning me and accusing me of expecting something off him when it happened.

At the same time my ex was harassing me; often refusing to leave my flat and being physically and mentally abusive in the process. With my beloved, we remained in our bubble for as long we could: spending nights talking about all the dreams we shared. One night he turned to me and said “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could both wave a magic wand and resolve each other’s problems?”, and boy if it had only been so simple! But how to do this when we were so afraid; of being hurt by our ex-lovers or of them hurting themselves; of all the things within our conditioned existence which screamed at us to come back to our senses, to return to “normality” – how to find the strength under so much pressure?

As his estranged wife arrived in town, I found being his “dearest friend” increasingly difficult. His words about this most passionate, expansive, beautiful love being just a “bonus” span in my head and ate away at me. I felt pushed aside and deeply rejected, as the newly discovered “me” now lay on the ground in tatters, feeling utterly confused and unloved. Rising from my heart was the most intense pain, an awareness of him now sharing the very bed, where our souls had only a few nights ago entwined and melded in an explosion of galaxies in the presence of God almighty, with his wife.

I knew that I loved him and wanted him to be happy, and I certainly did not want to be a home wrecker or ruin any chance of him returning to the woman he himself told me he had been hoping to spend the rest of his life with. I knew he wasn’t happy with her but I admitted to myself that perhaps he would always keep running back to her. It dawned on me that he wasn’t as available as he had led me to believe. Maybe I was just a past-time while they were going through a rough patch? I felt like SUCH A FOOL to have believed him; but more than anything I was mad at myself for having believed that this kind of love existed for me.

During her visit we continued to work together. It was a bittersweet time where at nights we would take the long way home and sit in the bus with our legs resting against each other. When his wife extended her stay and as our project together was coming to an end, instead of joining me on a trip we had planned to go and visit my family, he decided to travel somewhere else. This just reinforced my idea that he was not serious and that in fact I had just been the “flavour of the month”, always at risk of being tossed aside, never knowing when he would run back to his poor, long-suffering wife. While I was still away he called me and told me he missed me but this did nothing to dispel my fears: I was convinced that since we no longer worked together, I would only ever get crumbs of his time now. I dreaded the moment I would return home and spend 24/7 anticipating his call, only to find him busy with everything and everyone else.

The few weeks that we did not see each other due to being out of town were enough to send me deep into the abyss where all my insecurities surfaced and I found myself with no solid ground to stand on. The divine light and love I had seen in him had flipped my reality upside down, and undeniably for me, this love was the ONLY thing that was REAL in this world of illusion. I couldn’t see how I could live without him, since without him there was no life, no love, no me. Who am I if this man who perfectly reflects me is rejects me? Am I so unlovable that even the very reflection of me abandons me? If only I had known that it wasn’t him denying me that love; it was me denying it from myself.

Underneath all the pain that arose were also more noble feelings. I felt like he was not doing right by his soul – and very strongly felt like I could not just watch him choose more suffering without trying to change him. I wanted him to find peace in his heart. If it meant he needed to be with her or someone else, so be it. I did not want to be there trying to affect the outcome – and I knew if I stayed I would have always hoped he would “see the light”. I knew that he had to figure it out himself. So many things went through my mind: rejection and my own feelings of unworthiness being the main things. What hurt perhaps the most was that I was being tormented by the intense emotional pressure, physical violence and threats from my ex-boyfriend and I simply wanted my beloved’s friendship and support. But I didn’t get that. This man, who had insisted he would do anything for our friendship simply wasn’t there. If he really did care about me like he said, if he was really such a “close friend”, then where was he? What was stopping him from being there?

If only I had known that he could not be there for me because he was also in pain; because he was under that same pressure; also fearing rejection as well as my expectations (even when I insisted I didn’t have any), and more than anything, he could not be there for me because he was not there for himself. He distracted himself with travel, projected feelings onto me – and ran, emotionally. It made me want to run to the opposite direction, but faster, and farther. What I didn’t realise was that we weren’t really running from each other, but from the pain and from the issues that arose.

Blocking my beloved

Returning from my holiday, I wish I could say that I gracefully “let go” of him, but by then I was so deep in my own pain, thinking he didn’t care about me, that all I now wanted to do was to erase him from my life. I hadn’t stopped caring about him and of course I wish I had been more mature about it but I didn’t know what I was doing. More than anything I bolted out of the connection to be freed of the pain; of all the demons I knew I would have to face to be able to love him freely, regardless of whether he loved me back or not. It had nothing to do with him or what he was doing, I see that now. But at the time it was fight or flight; and I flew out of there like a bat out of hell with a 180 degree speed turn. I put him in a corner of my heart, closed the door and threw the keys away. I had nothing to remind me of him; no e-mails, no objects. The one picture I had I shred. I deleted his number from my mobile phone and his e-mail address from my contact list. I even went as far as blocking incoming e-mails from him.

When he soon caught onto the fact that I was avoiding him, he desperately tried to call me, leaving me, in his own words “5,000 messages”. When I’d hear his voice on my voicemail, I erased the messages without listening. I stopped using my mobile phone, the very same phone I had bought just so that he could call me, and changed numbers. When he managed to get through to me on the landline, I did not know what to say. I’d make an excuse and promise to call him back, knowing very well that I wouldn’t. When mutual friends and work colleagues said he was asking about me and wanted to speak to me, I refused to listen. I forbade them from even mentioning his name because it brought up too many emotions I couldn’t deal with. I ended up leaving my job since this was where we had met, because everything reminded me of him and I feared running into him.

To be honest, it didn’t even cross my mind that he could be hurting too. The distance he had put between us, his words about us being just friends, the way I was cast aside when his wife arrived in town were was proof to me that he didn’t care. In fact, I thought I was doing both of us a favour. I couldn’t understand what he wanted from me if I was just a friend, except to play with my feelings and then accuse me of having expectations and run back to his wife. I knew he was trying to reach me but I had no idea just how much since I was blocking any incoming communications from him. I even left my landline unplugged for days at a time just so I didn’t have to keep filtering my calls and go through the stress of hearing his voice. I wanted to see him but felt like for my sanity I couldn’t. When he did get hold of me I told him that I was back with my boyfriend (which I wasn’t – yet).

What does the runner feel

Feeling the intensity of that connection pull away left me feeling like my soul had left my body and the void that appeared within me started to engulf me. I thought that if I just ignored it, it would go away but instead, it threw me into the darkest, most agonising figurative hell, where lost souls whither in agony and pain, where the eternal flames of regret and abandonment lick their burning flesh, and where only God hears them. All the feelings that taunted me, of being unloved, rejected, ashamed, insane and worthless filled my mind. I cried, pleaded with God and sat in darkness as I felt my heart break in every possible way. Until I met him I had not even believed in God, but I prayed to God like there was no tomorrow; and really for me, there wasn’t. There was only an eternal agony; a never-ending hell where I would burn for all eternity because when I opened myself up to love, all I did was to cause myself and others more pain. I prayed that God would grant me the relief of being able to forget about my beloved, to erase him from my mind completely.

Every attempt he made to contact me only served as a reminder to me that it had all been just a terrible MISTAKE. If this all-consuming, powerful love had not been able to free me from my conditioned, codependent existence, then no other love would ever do this. We had only ever happened by some cosmic error, which God had not hesitated to rectify as soon as he realised His mistake. The height from which I had fallen face first onto the proverbial ground caused me to vow to myself that I would never again try to reach so high, because if love with which nothing seemed impossible could not set me free, then NOTHING in God’s creation could. I so wanted to reach back at him but I felt that this would be just another mistake, on top of the original cruel mistake.

Minutes turned into hours, days, weeks and then months. Little by little, I started living again. Meeting my beloved had undeniably changed me and I realised I could not live the life I had before. I was living from a more authentic place, doing all those things I had always wanted to but had never dared to, fuelled by the dreams me and twin had shared. Eventually I took my boyfriend back, finding comfort in the thought that at least he needed me, had been miserable for weeks, and kept begging me to take him back. He was not perfect but we had a lot of history, and the irony was that he had been a great support to me during my darkest days feeling the loss of my beloved. I reasoned with myself that this is what love is: attachment, taking care of each other, needing each other, compromise. I was happy to see the whole dynamics of my relationship with my boyfriend change. We embarked on the spiritual path together travelling around the world and he was behaving in a much nicer way towards me because I no longer allowed myself to be bullied. I resigned to the fact that this was my place in life; and that I had been a fool to believe that I could meet someone and instantly love them and that it could be something that lasts forever. Such love was only ever a dream.

It was only a couple of years later that I found out that my beloved had left the country about 15 months after I cut contact with him. Little did I know, on that very same month that he left the country I also decided to do the same, after nearly a decade there. Without knowing anything about each other’s whereabouts or movements, we both set off to travel the world at the same time. One morning as I logged onto my emails at a beach café in Thailand, out of the blue waiting for me was an email from him. We were both travelling through the same region. I opened his email and without reading it fully, scrolled all the way down. I went on forever; speaking about our love, of our souls together, of his feelings for me… But it was like a message from another dimension that I couldn’t quite decipher or get my head around. I was hit by a momentary panic, of feeling my intense feelings for him stir somewhere deep inside, and then remembering that I was back with my boyfriend and we had come a long way: things were going really well and I had just started to feel like myself again. We were planning a new life in a new country. So in a panic, I deleted his email, without ever reading it or replying to it. Little did I know that as we both started our new lives with our old partners in the new country, we had both moved to within less than an hour’s drive from each other.

♥

Conclusion

I ran for nearly 3 years until a series of events culminated in our 2005 reunion in NY. During our separation, I did everything to push him out of my mind and I recall being extremely conflicted about what actually happened that summer and whether any of it was even real. As I returned to him, I learned that he had loved me all along, regardless of his personal circumstances or demons. He had also gone through his own slice of turmoil when I disappeared. It was however only years later that I realised that we had BOTH contributed to the imbalance between us – and I finally took full ownership of my own refusal to love and acknowledge whatever arose from the pain our connection brought up in me.

One thing that all runners share is that they are IN PAIN which they do not acknowledge, and although they do not mean to hurt anyone, they do not know how to change their behaviour. The runner runs; not because they cannot face you but because they refuse to look at themselves. The runner thinks that by avoiding you he won’t have to face his issues, but no matter how long or far they run, they don’t have a choice. You can’t fight yourself: what we resist persists. Furthermore, True love is protected and ordained by a higher will, continuing to consume the two lovers in separation until eventually they are driven back together. What was once whole will never stop wanting to be whole, and the soul will never stop trying to reunite no matter how the ego pushes against it.

The runner did not suddenly stop loving you and become another person. More likely, their love for you remains as strong as ever; it’s just that they are still working on loving themselves fully. Both twins must find the LOVE WITHIN before they can give it to each other. You have to love yourself first, or a relationship between you in the human sense will never work, because you will always keep triggering each other into a vicious circle of pushing and pulling. So, whether they seem to have returned to a life of 3D distractions and other relationships, or cut of all contact with you, or if they are pushing & pulling, the love within them will nevertheless have been ignited. The separation is necessary and often unavoidable, since the physical union – if such is intended for you – takes place through self -love and surrender to God.

In time, every runner must face a choice: of either living in pain, or returning and facing the deep love, working though the fears of possible rejection and feelings of unworthiness. In the meantime, we must accept that the runner is on a personal journey; and we cannot blame them or make them responsible for what we feel inside. The reasons they have abandoned us most likely have nothing to do with us. Let’s not deny our loved ones the space they need to heal or face their demons, and let’s not judge or point out their flaws & weaknesses or to try to control the outcomes.

Instead, let’s see the twin’s love as an invitation to get to know & love our Self and God, to find our own wholeness and to recognize ourselves as a part of the equation. The focus therefore must be internal. Rather than chasing the Runner, let’s work towards our own spiritual growth, keeping our heart space open for our twin but living full lives, with or without them. When we truly love, we LOVE and ACCEPT our beloved just the way they are, without seeking to change them, but rather loving EVERYTHING about them.

God has set up the balance between the beloveds and both must turn to Him in order to shed all that which is no longer required. This is done through a complete surrender to God, to the all-consuming love,  only bringing unconditional love to the table, no matter what. If the two lovers release the past and anything living inside of them that is not authentic, then certainly they will reach the perfect balance between them, starting with the internal and reflecting outwards. It is only by both of them setting themselves in correct relation to God that they can find peace.

Where there is REAL love, there is no room for fear; there is ONLY room for love.

♥