SoulTending.com

An excerpt of the book “Soul Mates” by Thomas Moore

A soulful relationship offers two difficult challenges: one, to come to know oneself – the ancient oracle of Apollo; and two, to get to know the deep, often subtle richness in the soul of the other. As you get to know the other deeply, you will discover much about yourself. Especially in moments of conflict and maybe even despair, being open to the demands of a relationship can provide an extraordinary opportunity for self-knowledge. It provides an occasion to glimpse your own soul and notice its longings and its fears. And as you get to know yourself, you can be more accepting and understanding of the other’s depth of soul.
It isn’t easy to expose your soul to another, to risk such vulnerability, hoping that the other person will be able to tolerate your own irrationality. It may also be difficult, no matter how open-minded you are, to be receptive as another reveals her soul to you. Yet this mutual vulnerability is one of the great gifts of love: giving the other sufficient emotional space in which to live and express her soul, with its reasonable and unreasonable ways, and then to risk revealing your own soul, complete with its own absurdities.
The idea of a soulful relationship is not a sentimental one, nor is it easy to put into practice. The courage required to open one’s soul to express itself or to receive another is infinitely more demanding than the effort we put into avoidance of intimacy. The stretching of the soul is like the painful opening of the body in birth. It is so painful in the doing that we often will attempt to avoid it, even though such opening is ultimately full of pleasure and reward.
What I am suggesting about intimacy in relationship here is a particular aspect of the general need to respect the soul’s wide range of mood, fantasy, emotion, and behavior. Most of us contain ourselves fairly well, but eventually some type of irrationality may come to the surface. We all have skeletons in our closets and monsters in our hearts. It can be taken as an axiom: the person who displays his or her sanity and morality most dramatically is likely to be the very person who finds it difficult to be sane and moral.
Being in a soulful relationship is to some extent frightening because by nature such a relationship asks that we show our soul, complete with its fears and follies. In “In Praise of Folly”, the Renaissance humanist Erasmus says that it is precisely in their foolishness that people can become friends and intimates. “For that the greatest part of mankind are fools,… and friendship, you know, is seldom made but amongst equals.” The soul, as our dreams reveal, is not terribly lofty. We may present a high-minded image to the world, but the soul finds its fertility in its irrationalities. Maybe this is a hint as to why great artists appear mad, or at least eccentric, and why, in times of strong emotion and difficult decision-making, we so often act foolishly. More than one person in therapy has confessed to me that the most difficult part of an intense episode of jealousy was the fear of being made a fool by their partner – a sign to me that soul was trying hard to enter their lives in the dress of the fool.
Oddly, then, the most intimate relationships may be the very ones that appear foolish. The couple madly in love are “fools for love”. The most unpredictable couplings sometimes make the best marriages. A person who appears quite ordered and logical at work may engage in outrageously irrational behavior at home. Some of the most tightly knit families don’t hide their battles and jealousies. In short, when a relationship is soulful, the soul’s irrationality will be revealed for all to see.

The following is a description of a talk
that will be held at the Sufi Conference in California
on October 19th 2008 by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

When your heart sees Reality,
Then every atom of creation is a window of His house.

The mystical path is a journey into the unknown. Through the grace of the tradition we give ourselves to this mystery: we welcome both the darkness and the light, and learn to live with the vulnerability of the heart. And from the depths of the unknown, the beauty and power of the divine is born within ourselves and within the world.

The following excerpt is by Gabrielle Roth from her book “Connections”:

When you are not resisting, when you simply relax into the flow of your energy, you short-circuit your ego and create a space for your soul to emerge from the dark mysterious quiet within. However, if your surface persona is anxious, tightly wound, or filled with turbulence, your soul will retreat and remain in hiding, leaving the field wide open for an ego invasion.

The ego is the force that gets us into global messes as well as personal ones. It sees the world in black and white, good and evil, left and right. It has to be pro or con. It can never be with. It has to be for or against. It can never be part of it all. It can never just be. It always has to create tension and conflict. It can never let you relax and let go.

… You need a way to access the part of you that is connected to the whole, to find a proactive way to create peace in your piece of the world. You can’t have one part of you struggling against the rest of you or the many parts of you struggling against each other if you want to be fluid and free. Freedom comes when you are receptive to the voices of the oppressed, whether they be your hip, your mother, or downtrodden people. Through deep listening comes right action.