Soul Mates: What Do You Need to Know?

July 15, 2016
 

I’ve written previously about soul mates and past life connections. But I’d like to cover more deeply the characteristics, dynamics and flavor brought to us through the recognition of our past connections. I‘d also like to clarify a major misconception about what soul mates are and how best to recognize them. Whether you believe in reincarnation or not is not as important as the effect these kinds of feelings and connections may have on you regardless of your beliefs about it let alone dealing with the dynamics of any type of recognition.
 

Before I begin it would be prudent to give you my take on what a soul mate is as distinguished from a simple past life connection. A soul mate is a past life connection with whom we’ve had a profound experience. It could be as lovers, enemies, parents, children, mentors or anyone with whom the experience shaped our lives and attitudes in an important way. Upon meeting in this life there is a depth of “knowing” them with a strong sense of familiarity as if we’ve known each other for years usually including unexplained feelings of safety, comfort or trust. They often come into our life during a crisis period giving us grounding and support and then leave when the worst is over. Yet, our arch enemy will also fit the bill but with an unexplained sense of danger, discomfort and a distrust of their actions and intentions. Simple past life connections are similar but without the profundity, intensity or unexplained qualities that are elicited when meeting our soul mates. There is simply recognition of having an indescribable feeling of familiarity as if we should have something in common through the connection but being more nebulous and much less defined in terms of our personal feelings and intuition. Past life connections may also be family members other than nuclear, personal associations and connections coming mostly from peripheral past life experiences.
 

The most common misnomer is that soul mates are impassioned lovers that reconnect in a current life and that once found all aspects of the new relationship will progress without incident. This is a frequent belief held among westerners in that our mindset sees life as a series of challenges needing resolution and that once these challenges have been met, difficulties will cease and the rest of life will end as in a fairy tale. But we must remember that life is a process and not a destination and that if our life continues, there are bound to be more challenges simply by virtue of the fact that we all continue to grow and evolve.
 

Although soul mates can be returning lovers, this is not as often the case as we might think. The intense connection felt by the impassioned lovers can also be felt between arch enemies. In this we need to understand that arch enemies are just as tuned in to each other as impassioned lovers are. This tuning in occurs through intensely, even obsessively, directing an abundant amount of our attention to our lover or our enemy. Energy builds just like money in a growing investment. It must also be realized that if our attention occurs within a setting of emotional immaturity, the lovers can shift to being arch enemies on a dime and vice versa. The soul mate connection is one of energy and feeling not of circumstance. Yet, circumstances are simply the medium for the energy to express itself through. The recognition we sense between people is through our feelings and can range between tsunamically overwhelming feelings or simple impressions that are brought to the surface of our awareness. And those feelings are usually triggered through a simple act or circumstance.
 

It’s common knowledge that if we have an immediate reaction to someone upon meeting them that our feelings will always give us an accurate measure as to how good or bad they will be for us in the long run. We’ve all, at one time or another, found ourselves saying “I have a good (or bad) feeling about this.” From that point, and if our mind believes that our original assessment might be in error or that it threatens our personal image or security, the mind will come up with any number of rationalizations to either confirm or deny the validity of those first impressions. In this case and more often than not, when we let the mind have the final say and it disagrees with our first impression, we almost always end up regretting our final decision. But here, we’re not too concerned with how good or bad they are for us but if the impression triggers a past life connection. The biggest difficulty for most people is in separating animal magnetism from past life recognition. Most people assume that the magnetism is somehow a past life connection. This usually occurs with people who are not subtly tuned. But, if we’ve done sufficient work on ourselves and have learned to discriminate the coarser vibrations from the subtler ones, we usually can tell the difference.
 

In lieu of the fact that so many levels of information are presented on our first meeting with someone, I think it’s safe to say that it’s easier to determine past life connections after the initial acquaintance has taken place and the relationship has had a little time to become comfortable and familiar with both people. Once this occurs it becomes easier to discriminate subtler differences in the impressions and feelings we pick up while relating. Essentially, the more intense and often overwhelming energies have settled and an emotional equilibrium has returned putting the discrimination of feelings on a much more refined basis. This sets the stage for the actual dynamic that occurs triggering past life reflections. I use reflections instead of the word memories since memory usually refers to the storage of mentally assessed experiences. Spontaneous past life reflections happen in the much more subtle and intangible field of intuition while sometimes coupled with a feeling. Because of the subtlety of the connection, our combined physical senses, which usually determine if an experience is real for us or not, are not involved in the recognition of past life experiences resulting in our wondering whether we are simply making up what we perceive or if it had actually occurred. Past life recognition usually occurs through only one sense at a time. This enables clarity. The key to working with these impressions is to prevent the mind’s involvement and its tendency to combine our physical senses, thereby, reading only our intuitive and feeling perceptions through one sense. Once the mind becomes involved in the process we tend toward “fleshing out” the impression with what we think the meaning or experience must be according to our standards for assessing physical reality.
 

When working with a hypnotherapist and regression, keeping us free from embellishing what we recognize is one of their jobs. This way the image remains true to the original impression. Linear thinking is antithetical to intuition and feeling. Yet, the human mind will always struggle to put what we know and what we perceive into linear terms so it will be able to use it in the processing of our physical world. This now leaves us only with the possible avenues for triggering past life impressions and feelings.
 

The dynamic is simple. The link occurs between our current relaxed awareness, often in an alpha state, with the past experience. It can and usually comes by way of one sense like a touch, a word (vibration), a phrase, a scent, a sound, a tune or any other perceived stimulus that somehow resonates with circumstances encountered in the past life experience. This is often perceived as what many call déjà vu. But déjà vu usually arrives through a combined sensory trigger.  The past life reflection usually occurs only through one sense. The trigger works the same way a memory is triggered but with the mind out of the picture, deeper impressions are more able to come to the surface. For example, if one person is caressing another and a very relaxed state is induced for one or both, an impression may come to the surface of either one or both the caresser and person being caressed. The act of caressing reverberates or echoes the past life experience and a resonance between this life and the past is enabled through the caressing. In the same way that a combination of flavors may bring us back to memorable times in our childhood, that same combination of flavors may also enable the surfacing of a past life experience attached to those same flavors provided our mind is briefly “out of commission.”
 

Any singular sensory experience may be enough to trigger a past life impression but we must be in a state where the mind and our current world doesn’t intrude or overshadow the impression with earthly qualifications and mental rationalizations. Similarly, it is like being in a crowded room with everyone loudly talking making it virtually impossible to hear a whisper. But if everybody is whispering, it is much easier to perceive more subtle sounds.
 

So, in assessing soul mate potential, we must be careful in our discrimination so we don’t fool ourselves or talk ourselves into believing that any feeling of familiarity is an indication of a soul mate when perhaps it is simply a past life connection. As with anything else, clear and concise discrimination is the key to our inner awareness.