Soul Mate

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

By Helena Echlin

If we examine our romantic desires and suspect that they take the form of unhealthy longing for completion, we need to create our ideal life so we aren’t looking for someone else to do it for us. Nourishing the unsatisfied parts of ourselves, as Jenni did, is the key to becoming whole. Epstein, the psychotherapist, says that a regular meditation practice or therapy can help identify the patterns you’re stuck in. “If you expose the samskara to awareness, there’s a natural healing,” he says.

The reason meditation is so effective at rooting out these patterns, says Spirit Rock’s Douglas, is that when you have no distractions, you can’t avoid noticing your suffering. “Meditation brings to the surface what’s not working in your life,” she says. And when you stay with the sensations of suffering, you begin to see what’s causing the suffering—bringing awareness to your thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors. Like asana, meditation can also help you stop reacting to situations out of habit and can pull you out of a bad rut. “Before doing something you might regret, you learn to pause and reflect,” Douglas says.

Slow Down

To begin searching your soul, you don’t need to retreat to a monastery. You can simply start a practice in which you commit to having compassion for yourself and to learning to sit with and observe your feelings. “With many feelings, the impulse to turn it into a behavior is so strong that you’re already in the action before you’ve even reflected on the feeling,” Epstein says. “By deliberately not acting it out, you’re forced to be with the feeling.”

Taking things slowly can be helpful, too. Stephen Cope, author of The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker’s Guide to Extraordinary Living, suggests being mindful after getting involved with someone new. “With relationships, when we’re unclear, a very good practice is to slow things down,” he says. Take time to reflect before accepting a date, or get to know someone as a friend before letting romance develop. A time-out allows us to better see the true nature of our desire for another, adds Cope.

Once you’ve found wholeness within, you’ll see many more possible soul mates. Spirit Rock teacher Douglas says: “I once told my therapist, complaining about my boyfriend, ‘I don’t think he’s the right one.’ She said one of the most helpful things a therapist has ever told me: ‘Of course not. There is no right one.’”

In fact, you may just want to ditch the idea of a soul mate altogether. The very term “suggests there is another half who is going to complete you,” says Douglas. “But on coming into spiritual maturity, the thing that is most important to you is to be free and to love others, not to be looking for love.”

When you feel content without a soul mate, that’s when you may find it easiest to meet one. That’s what happened to Rosemary. Nine months after splitting up with her fiancé, she wasn’t looking for a new boyfriend. She just wanted to have a good time with her friends and joined them at a dance party one night. It happened that one of them knew Robert.

As he approached Rosemary’s group, she was struck by the way he looked at her: “We were in a crowd of people at a huge club, and he was looking directly at me. I thought, ‘If I start dancing with this man, there’s no end to it.’”

Rosemary decided to go for it. “The rest of the room dissolved. We didn’t look at anyone else, and we danced together for two or three hours.” Rosemary tore herself away only because she had a morning yoga class to teach. “When you let go of the desire for someone to complete you,” she says, “only then can you be truly open to what’s right for you.”

Helena Echlin is a writer in San Francisco.

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