Soul Mate

Sometimes you have to find yourself in order to find your soul mate.

By Helena Echlin

Pattern Recognition

Our culture and traditions school us to believe the opposite: that someday our prince (or princess) will come, that a relationship has the potential to solve problems like loneliness, that the right partner will make us feel whole. Popular romantic movies propagate the myth of another person completing us.

On the face of it, the idea of being “completed” by another seems deeply romantic. But it’s a fantasy that can weigh down a relationship with impossible expectations. The truth is that while your partner can offer many things, he or she can’t “complete” you. The only person who can give you a sense of security and an unshakable love of you is you. And though you may “know” this with your mind, sometimes feelings of unworthiness, insecurity, and incompleteness are so deeply buried that you aren’t even aware of them or of how they influence your behavior.

Rosemary eventually realized that the unresolved pain of her parents’ separation had fueled a stream of difficult relationships, including her engagement. “I was so hungry for partnership and love,” she says, “that I would reason my way into staying in relationships that didn’t work.” The root of Rosemary’s unsatisfying relationships might be explained by the yogic concept of samskara—a pattern deeply ingrained in our subconscious that causes us to act out variations on the same theme again and again. “Sam means ‘complete or joined together,’ and kara means ‘action, cause, or doing,’ so samskaras are the individual actions, ideas, or thoughts. Together, they constitute our patterns,” explains Forbes. You can also think of a samskara in psychodynamic terms, as an unconscious groove that gets laid down early in your life and continues to be played again and again.

In relationships, these grooves keep you choosing partners for the same, often misguided, reasons. Maybe you look for somebody just like you (a mirror); maybe you choose partners who have some quality you wish you had (someone who is outgoing if you’re shy, or someone with a big, happy family if yours suffered through a messy divorce); or maybe you unconsciously try to recreate or correct the dynamics of your parents’ relationship.

“The definition of one of these patterns is that you’re not aware of it when you’re in it,” says psychotherapist Mark Epstein, author of Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught. “Usually you don’t recognize it until it’s ruined some part of your life.”

Feel and Heal

Such was the case for Simon (not his real name), 47, who repeatedly hooked up with depressed, angry, and unstable women who treated him badly. “These women did not wear a sign on their foreheads saying, ‘I’m a mess,’ but my radar would just pick up on that,” he says. He sought counseling and realized he was continually pushing his feelings aside to take care of his partners, who tended to require a lot of emotional energy. He was drawn to people with “more obvious and bigger baggage than my own, like actual clinical disorders,” he says. “So the focus ended up being on their problems, and I didn’t have to look at my own.”

Doing yoga and working with his therapist, Simon gradually learned to pay attention to his feelings. That changed his behavior. Last summer, for example, he pinched a nerve playing softball and was laid up in bed. His then-girlfriend raged at him for ruining her summer. In the past, Simon might have accepted this treatment. But his new awareness enabled him to feel his anger and hurt—and to express himself. His gut told him to end the relationship. Now that he’s aware of his own emotional and behavioral patterns, he’s able to keep himself from falling back into his habitual behavior. He finds that he no longer gravitates to women who mistreat him. He’s not in a serious relationship now, but he knows that when a connection clicks, he’ll be ready.

Completing ... Yourself

Jenni Noetzli, 32, spent her 20s chasing creative, unstable musicians. She had a degree in biochemistry and was interested in becoming a doctor or lab researcher, even as she succumbed to intense infatuations with “emotionally unreachable” guys—many of whom were into drugs and lived the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.

Forbes says: “If we come into a relationship from a place of lacking contentment, we end up looking for someone to fill us up to make those feelings go away.” It’s important to try to address our missing pieces on our own.

Jenni did. She took a break from dating and got serious about her yoga practice. After a while, she realized she had been squelching her own creative impulses, which kept manifesting in the guise of attraction to wild artists. Doing some soul-searching, she decided her true passion was not conventional medicine but acupuncture. She pursued it as a career and now practices in Minneapolis. Lo and behold: As soon as she began to find creative fulfillment in her own work, she stopped lusting after musicians. She is happily married to a fellow acupuncturist, and yoga is part of her daily life. “I no longer feel my partner is an extension of my creativity,” she says. Jenni and her soul mate are distinct individuals, complete on their own, who respect and admire each other.

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